The Headless Leviathan

                It never occurred to Thomas Hobbes when he was describing the war of all against all that is the state of nature that the primary fact about humans could be anything other than the isolated individual. In fact it hardly ever occurs to anyone. Our experience of being a self is so strong. But our perspective being an individual gives us both the insight no other race from another planet could match into our being and a blindness, like the blindness every individual would have about his own face if not for mirrors. It never occurred to Hobbes that the default state of humanity was the group: the family, the tribe, the “race,” the nation, that we have this in common with ants and bees and elephants and gorillas. Our self is an expression of our role in the social unit at least as much as it is an expression of something innate, something, perhaps, we were born with or that, à la Freud, manifested and set in infancy. The self is fungible. The tyrannical group identity dictates certain roles and selves will always manifest to fill them, like an angel fish changing sex to keep the species going. Every classroom has a clown and a drama queen and a bully. This is why mobs act like mobs. This is why, when law cannot hold them down, every country, every culture has is terrorists.

                Unlike ants and elephants however human societies like human beings are in constant flux. Every classroom and every sports team and every neighborhood and every taste in music, every state and nation and gender and “race,” and church and state of being is at any moment its own organism. Could anything be more absurd than burning cars and killing strangers because your Spartans or your Red Sox won (or lost) the championship? The group organism, the anonymous group self (we can find this self in literature like nowhere else) takes control then. But it’s only the individual who is ever put in jail. We put them in jail because they exercised their part in the same group self that we are all subject to under the right conditions, depending on the moment’s need. (That’s why jails, though we cannot do without them, never solve the problem and aren’t about rehabilitation. They’re about removing the catalyst of past violence, their about taking the burnt candle out of the infinite box of candles.) The group self has no soul. It is a leviathan but not one that we become through reasonable reflection. It is a leviathan we are by default, by instinct the way any animal feels when to hunt and when to flee. A leviathan without a head.

And Another Thing about Guns

This is no one's opinion but a simple fact born out endlessly in study after study: that gun you have in your house is more dangerous to you, to your safety, to the lives and well-being of your children than anything you think you are using it to protect yourself from.

The Government, the Mob, and Guns.

Hobbes was pretty well on track.
If you don't trust government, you trust the mob.
Governments can be pretty bad, pretty untrustworthy.
But they cannot be worse than the mob.
At their worst, they cannot be worse than the mob.
If you distrust the government but you like guns
You are the mob.

God and Salman Rushdie

I recently heard Salman Rushdie assert that believing in God was like believing in a fairy tale and, in the same interview, duck the question of whether people who believe in God are not very bright—and this in the same interview in which he called Carly Fiorina, “the dumbest person with whom I ever shared a stage” (or words to that effect). Clearly, it takes a lot for him to duck a question. He’s probably right about Carly Fiorina. And I have great respect for him in general. I once went to India to give a paper on his work. I once taught a Ph.D. seminar on his writings. I’ve even read Grimus.

The problem with his apparent belief that believers aren’t as bright as nonbelievers is that it is objectively false. Intelligence itself has no bearing on whether or not one believes in God. I don’t think Salman Rushdie or Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins is any more intelligent than Paul Ricoeur, Rene Girard or Owen Barfield. No more needs to be said about that.

His comment about the fairy tale is far more interesting to me.  After all, he said, “we now know how where the universe came from” (or words to that effect).  Do we?

I have great respect for the scientific method. And I am the last person to suggest we confuse a religious text with a text of science. People who read the Old Testament with science or history (in the post Enlightenment meanings of those words) are idiots. Or very badly informed. No thinking (with the exception of trained scientists in the field in their professional capacity) can reject the Big Bang as the most accurate description of the start of the universe because no one but another professional scientist is in a position to do so.

But does the Big Bang Theory tell us more about the origin of the universe than Genesis?

Genesis says, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth…. God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light.’”

The Big Bang Theory says: “Bang. There was light.”

I don’t have any strong need to believe that the author or redactor of Genesis had special knowledge of the start of things here. The coincidence (which my phrasing has exaggerated) that makes “Let there be light” read like as good a description of that moment of the Bang as any needn’t be taken as anything but a coincidence. What is relevant is only this: Genesis provides an explanation of where the universe came from. God made it. God spoke it into existence. The Big Bang theory does not. Right or wrong, we Genesis tells us more of where the universe came from than science does—or can. So the notion that now we know how things happened (whereas before we did not) is nonsense. It may be that Genesis is wrong in telling us that God made the universe. Whether or not that is so, we are no closer to knowing where the universe came from. The start is not the same as the origin.