Hobbes,
Syria
and
Importance of Stability
the
By Daniel Renwick
Born into a tradition of leftism, Thomas Hobbes never spoke to
me. When I read Leviathan as a student, it was the book of my
enemy, an adversarial text that precluded me from challenging
my sovereign and binding me to a status quo I loathe. I tended
to be drawn to texts that offered a more optimistic picture of
what we as a collective can achieve. Where sympathies lie is
colored by one’s understanding of human nature or, to be more
precise, the nature of the individuals who compose the body
politic, in conditions where general order is removed.
Hobbes painted a picture that was bleak indeed. He, in quasimaterialistic terms, laid out the system of logic that has
governed political science since: people are rational egoists
and it is on the basis of human selfishness that we find
politics, covenants and laws. From Hobbes’ perspective, people
are only as good as they are scared; take away fear, order and
law and watch the avarice of man take center stage.
Hobbes wrote Leviathan in the conditions of civil war and
wrote to state his obedience to any sovereign who could
maintain order (the sovereign of the Front cover of Leviathan
changed from looking like Charles I to Cromwell, after the
war, showing the logic Hobbes employed). Order imposed by
force is legitimate, for force is the predicate of order and
the cosh bends us to the betterment of all, supposedly. Remove
the cosh, remove the state and the policeman at your peril,
for the vacuum will be filled but trust, hope and good will be
lost as order will be – potentially irretrievably – and life
will become “poor, nasty, brutish and short”. For Hobbes, the
sanctity and stability of the state is the primary condition
of a fulfilling life and the basis of all rights. Rights are
not abstract, they are not natural and in a state of nature
cannot exist and will simply wither away, so if we want
rights, we must first defend the principle foundations of the
state.
Hobbes’ logic is prescient and well-received in the English
speaking world. The Hobbist principles that underline
political liberalism cannot be overstated. Hobbes defined the
idea of political freedom (negative liberty, i.e. freedom
from) and began to impose the limits on political power. While
we want political freedoms, what are words if life we exist in
conditions so competitive and aggressive, we cannot live? It
is only when the state offends our right to life that we are
justified in fighting against it – but even when political
revolt is justified by the right of self-preservation, general
order is preferable to general chaos.
The argument employed by Hobbes is cynical, pessimistic and
conservative in its logic, not usually the terrain of a
leftist who is writing in a vein of anti-imperialism. I did
not ever think I would be loading my cannon with the words of
Leviathan, but alas, I am. For, while we accept the Hobbesian
logic in our state and decry anarchy and the unleashing of
avarice, with the contemporary example of the riots to
concretise our arguments, we preach chaos, disorder and civil
war as “revolutionary” in Syria as we did with Libya and Iraq
beforehand.
Unlike many of my ilk, that is white, Western and privileged,
I do not see the Arab Spring as the chance to resuscitate a
defunct ideology. Rather, I see it as dangerous risk for
political freedom in a terrain subject to manipulation by
global powers. I sympathize with my Arab brethren and respect
them for their optimism, I see the terrain they are walking as
treacherous. Globally, we no longer live in Hobbesian times,
the nation state is not the most powerful body in the
political world. We have the imperial state of the USA which
acts militarily to support the supra-state institutions that
determine the world and the Arab street has long been an arena
they have been active in manipulating. Syria, firmly in the
crosshairs of imperialism, is on the verge of falling into a
state of nature, that is, a perpetual state of war, according
to Hobbes.
In the four years proceeding the invasion of Iraq, MIT
predict, there were over 600,000 more deaths that would be
otherwise, where deaths per 1000 went from 5.5/1000 to
13.2/1000. This spike in deaths can be ascribed to the
Rumsfield doctrine, that is, the banning of anybody associated
with the Baath party from holding office, completely hollowing
out the one-party state of any active politicians or civil
servants. The chaos that has engulfed Libya is
incomprehensible, where there is neither the journalistic will
nor public pressure for the retrieval of information that
would hold to account the intervention of NATO to destroy the
sovereign of a country and replace it with a divided council.
Suffice to say, even the “hero” who killed and sodomised the
sovereign was killed by rival factions, united only in their
hatred for the order, not in their agreement and pursuit of a
solution.
In Syria, like in Iraq and Libya, civil war has been stoked,
fuelled and armed, chaos dawns and entrenched sectarianism
means disorder will be the order of the day. Like in Iraq and
Libya before it, a secular Arab nation state will be
destroyed, its state emptied out and decimated; order lost.
Beheadings, justified by hyper-religious fervor and cries of
the greatness of God will project across the world, showing us
the brutality that “political freedom” translates to in the
modern world. On the day Assad is killed, I will not be
celebrating. His regime may be brutal, his dynasty horrific,
but the hope of a new start in the time of US imperial
dominance is naïve to extremities. The world has two examples
of what happens when a strong state is stripped of power and a
rag-tag divided sectarian rebellious leadership of exiles
takes power: chaos.
Faced with the choice between order or chaos, most would
universally choose order. The seemingly inexplicable support
Assad still has in Syria is based on this logic, the Baathist
state is the guarantor of order, the bestower of rights and
the guard against strife. In the conditions of civil war, the
“greatest political text of the English language” was written,
its author if he were alive today and Syrian would be proAssad as would many of the Western liberal supporters of the
“revolution” who have the comfort of their own Leviathan
keeping them safe.
–
Daniel
Renwick
contributed
PalestineChronicle.com.
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