Life & Culture of Pre-Columbian America

     The Indigenous cultures of pre-Columbian America exemplify Thomas Hobbes’ theories about what life would look like without government. Hobbes was among a few notable European philosophers to look closely into this hypothetical. Other philosophers include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Locke. All of which disagreed about what life without government might look like.

     Pre-Columbian America covers a lot of ground, and includes many Indian tribes. Historians still only have strong theories as to which of the tribes came first. Most believe Clovis peoples to be the oldest. Clovis or potential Pre-Clovis peoples lived somewhere between 33,000 - 8,000 B.C. Among other Indian tribes, there were the American Indian tribes between 5000 - 1000 B.C., and in South America, the Incan Empire, including the Moche and Nazca tribes, lived during the 14th and 15th centuries A.D.

     Pre-Clovis and Clovis peoples were more interested in tools than any agriculture. As historians haven’t found non-tool related evidence for anything like a large settlement, these tribes were hunters and gatherers. However, the American Indian tribes began engaging in agriculture and complex construction, including pyramids. Their art, technology, and construction are comparable to the Bronze Age. This did not stop them from being a violent society; they simply had a more refined hierarchy and better ways to kill each other.

    During the time of the Incan Empire in South America, the culture, society, and state was thriving. Artwork like the Nazca lines, Moche paintings and pottery, and even some evidence of textile artwork can be found. The polytheistic religion of the time was violent and one of many reasons for the traditional human sacrifices. However, more abstract thought was within the culture than ever.

Moche Pottery

     All throughout, no matter the different circumstances, pre-Columbian America was always far more violent than a modern society. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau were philosophers from the 17th - 18th centuries Europe, who contemplated what they thought life could look like without government; these indigenous cultures are a great example of what came of their hypothesis.

Thomas Hobbes

    Hobbes studied more of his own society and what his world might look like without State law than into how individual people worked. According to Thomas Hobbes,  a world without government is a world of everybody for themselves. We are all sociopathic killers, and without the state to stop us, we would kill each other in our sleep.

Jean-Jacque Rousseau

    Hobbes studied more of his own society and what his world might look like without State law than into how individual people worked. According to Thomas Hobbes,  a world without government is a world of everybody for themselves. We are all sociopathic killers, and without the state to stop us, we would kill each other in our sleep.

John Locke

   John Locke would not support this communist idealism at all. However, he did have a little more cautious faith in humanity than Hobbes. Locke believed that through reason, individuals respect others’ property, rights, liberty, and life, and that all individuals are equal and free with duties to one another. Locke believed, if a government failed a people, it was the peoples’ right to tear down said government, and that any government at all should only be to protect citizen’s rights and maintain mutual respect within a society. But for government to interfere with personal rights is to take away the voices of the people and disrupt the order of natural law.

     Like Hobbes, Locke believed that people, in a state of nature, can be violent. But most people in that circumstance were cautious rather than psychopathic. He believed that people naturally evolved civil societies that mitigate the violence, and that if a state was required at all, then it was required only minimally. But civil society was an inevitability for free, non-violent people.

     In the case of the indigenous people, Hobbes was most correct; people were constantly slaughtering each other like sociopaths. This was due to the culture built up over centuries, through their religion, and in the end, the power those at the top of the Incan Empire held over others. In the beginning, the hunters and gatherers did feel it was everyone for themselves. By the end, their hierarchy prevented any resistance from the people during human sacrifices, the form of government they had created was too powerful for people to push back like Locke felt they had a right to, until it was too late for the Empire with the arrival of Spain.