New Leviathans

With great power comes great responsibility -- so it is said

First off, I was completely wrong yesterday to claim that Cowen’s interview with John Gray talks about every except the new book, entitled The New Leviathans. Every topic in that interview plays out in the book. I see that now that I’m getting into it.

The main claim is that there are New Leviathans afoot in the world, meaning new types of states both similar to and different from Hobbes’ envisioned an “unlimited state” that would serve to protect its subjects — but do little more than that.

It turns out that Hobbes was wrong about what kind of states would emerge, since in the centuries following the publication of his book (in 1651), right up through the end of the Cold War, it was not unlimited states that provided protection, at least in the west, but states whose power was limited, both by law and by democracies that held government to account. Liberal government was apparently so much more effective that with the defeat of Nazism and Communism, it seemed for a while that states of the liberal democratic kind would become universal and that the “end of history” was at hand (Fukuyama’s claim).

Now we see that this is hardly the case. New Leviathans (Russia, China) show that liberal civilization, including even in the west, is passing into history. It doesn’t even stop at the workings of the state. Illiberal institutions outside government are also forming new “policing” regimes in academia, in tech corporations, and even in the arts, libraries, and museums (Gray, p. 5; and Parts 2 and 3 of the whole book).

To what end, though? Along with the question of whether a state’s power can be limited there is the question about its purpose in the first place. Is that also limited? Gray argues that the new Leviathans have taken upon themselves completely different goals.

These are not Leviathans Hobbes would recognize. The goals of Hobbes’s Leviathan were strictly limited. Beyond securing its subjects against one another and external enemies, it had no remit. The purposes of the new Leviathans are more far-reaching. In a time when the future seems profoundly uncertain, they aim to secure meaning in life for their subjects. Like the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, the new Leviathans are engineers of souls.

(Source: John Gray, The New Leviathans, p. 4)

The point isn’t just to secure basic physical safety from one another and from external enemy. The new point is to secure meaning in life and to engineer souls. It is to seek out the remaking and perfection of humanity itself. Unlimited in purpose, the new Leviathans have nothing less than an evangelical goal, an aim to achieve nothing less than salvation through the emergence of a new humanity.

Again, this is not something Hobbes would have recognized.

Hobbes’s Leviathan aimed to protect human beings from one another. Twenty-first-century Leviathans go beyond Hobbes in offering a kind of salvation. In Hobbes, Leviathan secures no meaning in life beyond what its subjects make for themselves. The new Leviathans offer meaning in material progress, the security of belonging in imaginary communities and the pleasures of persecution.

Throughout much of the twentieth century unlimited government was the chief enemy of human wellbeing. Totalitarian states were not traditional despotisms. Old-fashioned tyrannies are like clouded leopards, a vanishing breed that kills only to feed itself. The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Maoist China killed in order to perfect humanity, or the part of it they judged fit to survive. Neo-totalitarian states today aim to deliver their subjects from the burdens of freedom.

(Gray, p. 18)

Freedom, to be sure, places a burden on the subjects of a state. They have to make meaning for themselves. They have to seek out their own means and methods and vision of salvation. Their humanity is already given, not something to be re-molded according to someone else’s anthropology, or destroyed if not sufficiently malleable toward someone else’s utopia.

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With power comes great responsibility — so it is said.

Humans have acquired so much scientific, technological, and economic power that we can literally destroy or remake the planet.

With that power, we must take responsibility. To try to be good humans in the Anthropocene we have to, first, think what we are doing; then act. We should think and act in good conscience, with good judgment. Or at least, since outcomes are never entirely predictable or controllable, since there is always uncertainty and risk, we should do the best we can to be judged well by posterity, by future generations.

We should act according to what would be right not only for ourselves, our families and communities, “our people” (our gender, race, class, clan, party, nation, state), but for all humanity, all species, the entire planet.

We must save it!

We need a new vision for a new humanity, a new anthropology for the Anthropocene. We need a new mode of salvation for all.

Don’t we?

Enter the battle of the New Leviathans.

Leviathan. By youriah, Deviant Art.