- William Faulkner, 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech
I'll save you the rehashed image of mushroom clouds lingering over Nagasaki and Hiroshima and direct your attention to an everyday, albeit less iconic, image: the plastic watering can. I know, I know, I'm ripping off a Radiohead track, but stay with me. The plastic watering can may represent the repressed anxiety and apparent peace of suburban life, i.e., a retiree watering the flower bed. As the retiree waters his or her flower bed, thoughts are not about atomic war or the state of the world in general; the garden alone is worthy of attention. The garden is something to tend to, to pass the time, until death visits silently on a fated day or night. The plastic watering can, tranquil in its place, would find Faulkner's quote quite foreign to its own nature. The plastic watering can is that vaunted escape from violent death, trading a bayonet blade to the heart for blissful atrophy. "When will I be blown up?" The fear of violent death stays with us, even in the iron bosom of the state.
What Hobbes promised his readers was a diminishment, not an abolition, of the possibility of violent death. We should recall that Hobbes' Leviathan resembles a liberal state; charges of totalitarianism lobbed at Hobbes do not hold water. Any regime that strives for the absolute abolition of the possibility of violent death is by definition totalitarian. It must simulate the omnipotence previously presumed to lie in the hands of God to re-create the world more perfectly than He could ever have. The fatal flaw of creation, naturally, is free will; the possibility of evil. It is free will that leads the world astray from divine form and it is freedom that must be curbed, controlled, or ultimately annihiliated for the sake of an evermore perfect world. Hobbes believes the Leviathan to be a construct enabling individuals to exercise freedom. Hence, he values freedom as much as he does order. But, let us not make an amateurish error and contend that Hobbes believes freedom can exist without order. It is his nominalism, oddly enough, that absolves him from charges of totalitarianism. To put it simply, he in some ways shares Pope's contention that "whatever is, is right". The state, imperfect as it is, constructed through a sort of social agreement is right at least for the time being. The form of the state, i.e. the consolidation of both malevolent and benevolent power (where there is no difference between the two), is not the aim of Hobbes' project; curiously enough, it is human freedom. The general form of the state, as well as its accompanying narrative about the state of nature to civilization, are merely instruments in service of human liberty. Hobbes, far from advocating totalitarianism, would most likely ridicule it for its lack of scientific rigour and naturalism - mechanisms, we must remember, function causally, without the intervention of Providence or such, even though it may be modeled after divine forms.
The totalitarian approach effaces freedom at every turn in order to pursue a 'grand scheme'. This was true of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the United States, specifically but not exclusively during the era of McCarthyism. Some choose to throw this accusation at the current situation in the United States, but let us refrain from subscribing to that view, lest it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The atomic bomb may have "punctuated" a struggle against fascism and totalitarianism, but it opened up, for a lack of a better term, a pandora's box. Faulkner's quote bares the wound that the six decades following his address has tried to conceal, bandage, and eventually forget. The possibility of violent death is not only isolated to myself, my family, my clan, or even my country. It has extended to include the extermination of the entire species; the radical cessation of life, human or otherwise. The atomic bomb humbles us. But the stakes it presents are far too large to be adequately confronted. Alienated, afraid, and alone, people often seek salvation in the plastic watering can or the television (tuned neatly away from the news) or whatever else that leads to death by boredom and atrophy rather than death from above or below. I am not here to judge or prescribe. The prescription, as we can learn from Marx, is not as interesting or useful as the diagnosis. An age of fear is certainly one where threats are amongst us, invisible and clandestine, and 'beyond us', where one wrong move dooms the entirety of mankind. It is mindboggling for politicians, philosophers, journalists, scholars, and the rest to ponder, much less the common man. "When will I be blown up?" may be the question asked by modern man who has reached the limits of existence, who peers over the ridge and sees nothing but an abyss. Can he turn back, as Rousseau likes to think? Or will he plunge into the great primordial unity and fulfil Hegel's prophecy? Or maybe he will sit there looking at the abyss waiting for the photo slide to change? He waits in vain; Providence does not exist. He stares at nothing for eternity, until the very act of spectating melds him with the object of his observation. Modern man thinks of himself as collateral damage of an epic game of chicken between good and evil; when it is his actions that creates and proliferates both throughout the world, with no clear distinction where one starts and the other ends.
What Hobbes promised his readers was a diminishment, not an abolition, of the possibility of violent death. We should recall that Hobbes' Leviathan resembles a liberal state; charges of totalitarianism lobbed at Hobbes do not hold water. Any regime that strives for the absolute abolition of the possibility of violent death is by definition totalitarian. It must simulate the omnipotence previously presumed to lie in the hands of God to re-create the world more perfectly than He could ever have. The fatal flaw of creation, naturally, is free will; the possibility of evil. It is free will that leads the world astray from divine form and it is freedom that must be curbed, controlled, or ultimately annihiliated for the sake of an evermore perfect world. Hobbes believes the Leviathan to be a construct enabling individuals to exercise freedom. Hence, he values freedom as much as he does order. But, let us not make an amateurish error and contend that Hobbes believes freedom can exist without order. It is his nominalism, oddly enough, that absolves him from charges of totalitarianism. To put it simply, he in some ways shares Pope's contention that "whatever is, is right". The state, imperfect as it is, constructed through a sort of social agreement is right at least for the time being. The form of the state, i.e. the consolidation of both malevolent and benevolent power (where there is no difference between the two), is not the aim of Hobbes' project; curiously enough, it is human freedom. The general form of the state, as well as its accompanying narrative about the state of nature to civilization, are merely instruments in service of human liberty. Hobbes, far from advocating totalitarianism, would most likely ridicule it for its lack of scientific rigour and naturalism - mechanisms, we must remember, function causally, without the intervention of Providence or such, even though it may be modeled after divine forms.
The totalitarian approach effaces freedom at every turn in order to pursue a 'grand scheme'. This was true of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the United States, specifically but not exclusively during the era of McCarthyism. Some choose to throw this accusation at the current situation in the United States, but let us refrain from subscribing to that view, lest it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The atomic bomb may have "punctuated" a struggle against fascism and totalitarianism, but it opened up, for a lack of a better term, a pandora's box. Faulkner's quote bares the wound that the six decades following his address has tried to conceal, bandage, and eventually forget. The possibility of violent death is not only isolated to myself, my family, my clan, or even my country. It has extended to include the extermination of the entire species; the radical cessation of life, human or otherwise. The atomic bomb humbles us. But the stakes it presents are far too large to be adequately confronted. Alienated, afraid, and alone, people often seek salvation in the plastic watering can or the television (tuned neatly away from the news) or whatever else that leads to death by boredom and atrophy rather than death from above or below. I am not here to judge or prescribe. The prescription, as we can learn from Marx, is not as interesting or useful as the diagnosis. An age of fear is certainly one where threats are amongst us, invisible and clandestine, and 'beyond us', where one wrong move dooms the entirety of mankind. It is mindboggling for politicians, philosophers, journalists, scholars, and the rest to ponder, much less the common man. "When will I be blown up?" may be the question asked by modern man who has reached the limits of existence, who peers over the ridge and sees nothing but an abyss. Can he turn back, as Rousseau likes to think? Or will he plunge into the great primordial unity and fulfil Hegel's prophecy? Or maybe he will sit there looking at the abyss waiting for the photo slide to change? He waits in vain; Providence does not exist. He stares at nothing for eternity, until the very act of spectating melds him with the object of his observation. Modern man thinks of himself as collateral damage of an epic game of chicken between good and evil; when it is his actions that creates and proliferates both throughout the world, with no clear distinction where one starts and the other ends.
