European Riots and the Vision of Thomas Hobbes

The rioting we have recently seen in Great Britain, Greece, Sweden, France and parts of Germany (not to mention the emergence of American "flash mobs") gives us a window into the future.  A future that will surely come if the West persists in its determination to commit cultural suicide. The violence of mobs also invites us to look at the past, and, indeed at most of the world around us today.

Of the several points to be covered here I want to place special emphasis on this one: most of us in the West have lived so well for so long that we do not appreciate how fortunate we are. And we don't recognize than we are a tiny island in a vast sea of human predators who understand only existential conflict and brutality.  They exist in established states which attempt to conceal murders, starvation, slave prisons and the near-total loss of liberty, and they exist openly in the killing fields of Rwanda and other African states.  What good people know in these places we do not -- what it means to live in constant fear of other human beings.


Thomas Hobbes' characterization of human nature was correct.  At least partially.  When societies decide to organize themselves in general conformity the principles of civil society they can achieve a secure and peaceful prosperity not dreamt of by Hobbes, who believed that our baser instincts could only be moderated by a totalitarian state.  He could not have imagined a minimalist government (the Founders' ideal, if not present reality) based on the rule of law in which the balancing distribution of power was mandated by constitutional design.

About the baser instincts of human nature, wanting good governance and virtue [1], Hobbes was correct.  But it is a fact that lawlessness and cruelty of tyrannical governments and mobs has never been far away in time or place.  While we enjoy the great benefits of Western Civilization, we no longer notice (if we ever did) the elemental terror that prevails in most of the world.  Indeed, we are so inured to the "good life" that we cannot -- or will not -- see what is everywhere around us. We are dismissive at best or in denial at worst about what we know, factually,  but cannot comprehend, let alone understand at a visceral level.

Coercive Governments
Citing only modern and contemporary times [2], the list is a long one, and I'm confident the reader can round out those I have not included.  Since it is close by, and because it is rapidly moving towards hard tyranny, I think of Venezuela.  Two decades ago that country was stable, prosperous and relatively free.  Under Hugo Chavez it has seen rapid dissolution.  Government there has seized either coercive control or outright ownership of key businesses, and even given its oil wealth, can hardly feed its people nor provide potable water and electric power.  The courts are packed and personal liberty is all but lost.  The press is an organ of the state.  Venezuela is following the model of Cuba.  What is happening there illustrates just how fragile liberal governments can be.
Next, I think of Zimbabwe; it shows us the end-state of radical socialist government.  The former Rhodesia  was once considered the bread basket of Africa.  Now, under Robert Mugabe, it imports food and relies on international aid to hold together its economy.  Liberty -- excepting among the ruling class -- no longer exists.  Citizens are fearful about what they say and how they vote.  Their once-strong currency is all but worthless.
In the Middle East we think of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Syria under Bashar al Assad, Iran under Ayatollah Khameini, where there is arguably more torture, rape, imprisonment and murder than in the former two countries.  And we mustn't forged Saudi Arabia. 
On the grand scale one has to think of the former USSR, which was responsible for millions of deaths and still more imprisoned, enslaved and starved in the gulags.  The model for starving its citizens was established long ago in Ukraine.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union -- after a few years of social and economic chaos -- things improved.  But Putin, who never abandoned the methods of the old KGB, is bent on returning Russia to tyrannical rule.
One can hardly forget Pol Pot's murder of millions in Cambodia nor the worse treatment of the Chinese under Chairman Mao.
For reasons I cannot fully understand Hitler's Germany, with its persecution of the Jews (and many Gentiles) is usually cited as the outstanding example of government violence; horrible as it was it pales in comparison to communist atrocities.  Atrocities that historians of the West have chosen to airbrush away.
As with Pol Pot, governments often murder, not only their own, but others.  In 1937 Japanese invaders in China brutally, deliberately, slowly and joyfully killed thousands in the infamous Rape of Nanking. [3]  There soldiers entered into competition to determine which could take the most heads with the sword.
Finally, on the topic of government coercion, I think of Romania under Caucescu.  For me it has the most resonance, because. from a former citizen, I took my first real sense of the experience of human misery under a totalitarian regime.  A friend and co-worker told me of his escape to the West.  Risking his life he swam across a heavily patrolled river with his covered in a plastic bag hoping to be mistaken for floating garbage.  Had he been found out he would have been summarily executed.  He succeeded, and was able to make his way to free Europe.
When I inquired about his life under Caucescu, he went into some detail.  A couple of examples follow.
As in other Soviet states, long bread lines were the rule.  One might stand in these lines for the better part of a day only to find, finally reaching the front of the queue, that nothing remained.  To those foolish enough to complain about government incompetence, it often happened that they were removed from the line (by persons who might or might not be in uniform) and were not seen again.  Romanians were often afraid to speak against government or Caucescu even to relatives.  The state was so intrusive and controlling that they were able, by instilling fear, to pit one friend or family member against another.  For example the police might go to a man's sister and instruct her to criticize, at a specified day and time, the regime in the presence of her brother.  The law required that all citizens report any such criticism to police immediately.  If the brother did not report, he was subject to seizure of property, imprisonment or death.  Why wouldn't the sister explain the circumstances to her brother?  He might have been told to report that.  In our lives that level of primal fear and intimidation is almost unimaginable.

As I suggested, the list is anything but complete.  The point I want to emphasize by enumeration is that the West in the great exception in human history. 

What is most common today, as it has been historically, is that in the absence of good government, [4] men will be violent.  Thomas Hobbes described the uncivilized man as living in a State of Nature -- a state in which all war against all.  His words are familiar to most of us:

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The Multicultural Threat
Returning to the context of the violence in Europe that is rapidly becoming routine, and the possible emergence of it in America with the black-racist [5] "flash mobs",  I am passionate in my conviction that we must learn (by un-learning) to appreciate, affirm, support and defend our Western Heritage, and more especially our American Heritage.  It has been built over the course of centuries with intellect and labor at no small cost.  We enjoy liberty and a robust civil society the equal of which is not found anywhere else on earth.  Why are we seemingly willing to let it slip away, ultimately to return to Hobbse's State of Nature?

From at least the 1850's in Europe and the end of the 19th Century in America Marxist intellectual currents and quasi-religious utopianism have combined to undermine the West.  From Rousseau to Karl Marx to Antonio Gramsci to the Frankfort School to the Communist Party to the modern Progressives, Western civil society has been -- and is being -- deliberately undermined.  Conservative paranoia?  A natural process of cultural decline and evolution?  Hardly.  But I will leave that for another essay.  For now, though, I'll cite some references for readers who may be interested. [6]

A parting shot: Apropos this article, let me say (as I believe is borne out above) that the locus of violence (aggressive, as opposed to defensive) is in the collectivist Left. [7]  As far as I can discover, that has been so at least from the French Revolution. [8]  Contrary to the dominant memes -- taught in K12 through university, parroted in facile speech by media and liberal politicians -- Nazi Germany and fascist Italy do not epitomize the extreme Right.  In point of fact they were socialists.  It was Marxists who characterized them as right-wing, only because Hitler and Mussolini opposed them to opt for state socialism instead of world communism.  They were to the right of the Marxists.

The Left is unable or unwilling to see the world as it is; they see it only as they believe it should be.  If that were true of only a few things, I would be greatly relieved, but applies almost universally.  To race and ethnicity, education, economics, foreign policy, the law -- to every area of human activity.  The Left has embraced a quasi-religious, utopian worldview, that endangers us all.  If problems are not seen aright, not only are they insoluble, but they are made worse.
The behavior of the Left is, in a word, suicidal; for them, well and good.  But they want the rest of us along for the ride.

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1.  It is telling that virtue is now generally set off by quotation marks.
2.  For purposes of economy in this essay I set temporal limitations.  But the French Revolution and subsequent Reign of Terror are perfectly instructive regarding suddenly occurring but protracted periods of civic dissolution.  The death toll from the guillotine and other means of dispatch claimed thousands, but if one includes the Napoleonic Wars, which were arguably part and parcel of the revolution, the number grows to millions.  The sheer numbers cited -- here and above -- boggle the mind and numbs the spirit.  Stalin made the point well, saying: "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."
3.  Sometimes knows as the Nanking Massacre.  It seems amazing to me that until 1997 no books had been written about this horrible period.  The Japanese troops meted out the same kind of punishment in the Philippines during WWII.
4.  Forgive me, multiculturalists, if I seem parochial when I define good government as, almost exclusively, being government in the Western Tradition and more particularly the American branch.  That tradition rests on the twin pillars of Greco-Roman civilization and the Judeo-Christian heritage.
5.  Our legacy media have deliberately chosen not to mention black-against-white (and Asian) targeting by flash mobs.  Two good new media articles directly address the matter: one by Thomas Sowell and another by John Bennett.
6. Two of my earlier essays that I hope are instructive can be found here and here.  Some useful videos: political correctness (a history), demoralization and liberal thinking.
7.  There are, of course, notable exceptions.  Responsibility for violence against blacks in the South (and elsewhere) belongs to the Right.  I'm certain there are other examples that will occur to me, but in matters of scale and frequency I maintain my ground in regard to the collectivist, entitlement Left. 
The Japanese might be another exception, though they were certainly behavioral and social, if not economic, collectivists.  Frankly, I haven't yet sorted this one out...
Finally, I think it's fair to say that all men -- regardless of political persuasion -- are capable of joining in collective violence.  An important distinction, in my view, is whether they are provoked to defend themselves or act aggressively in pursuit of power.

8.  Before the French Revolution, ideas of right and left had not acquired their present (individualist/collectivist) meaning.  They had much to do with seating arrangements.  On the Right were those loyal to king; on the left were the loyal (or not) opposition.