I was reading a bit on the intellectual origins of the notion that mobs, and individuals without civilization, are savage or bestial - the heritage of Hobbes, who was a terrible physicist, by the way. Rebecca Solnit writes
The belief that we have a besial nature refined by the march of civilization was a key tenet of the nineteenth-century European world, anxious to justify colonization...
We've long since accepted (most of us, anyhow) that "savages" aren't very savage. It occured to me, though, that beasts aren't either - few animals in any normal state are randomly destructive, and most lead rather ordered lives. Doesn't leave much for a Hobbesian view of human nature to stand on, but an awful lot of people persist in thinking that way anyway.
