Fish ‘n Chips |

The frontispiece of the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes; engraving by Abraham Bosse.

The King of any Countrey is the Publique Person, or Representative of all his own subjects. And God the King of Israel was the Holy one of Israel. The Nation which is subject to one earthly Soveraign, is the Nation of the Soveraign, that is, of the Publique Person. So the Jews, who were Gods Nation, were called (Exod. 19.6) a Holy Nation. For by Holy, is alwaies understood, either God himself, or that which is Gods in propriety; as by Publique is alwaies meant, either the Person of the Common-wealth it self, or something that is so the Common-wealths, as no private person can claim any propriety therein.

All Pastors, except the Supreme, execute their charges in the Right, that is by the Authority of the Civill Soveraign, that is, Jure Civili. But the King, and every other Soveraign, executeth his Office of Supreme Pastor, by immediate Authority from God, that is to say, in Gods Right, or Jure Divino.

–Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, pages 449 and 570

There are those who say government constricts our freedoms. The solution to this problem, they say, is to shrink government to a size it can be drowned in a bathtub. When we achieve this drowning, we’ll pay a lot less in taxes—exceptions for the mighty military that protects our individual freedoms from envious and evil people elsewhere in the world—and we’ll have guns in every room, just to underscore the point domestically.

Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan was published in England in 1651. Leviathan merged scholastic political philosophy, the Christian religion as Hobbes understood it, and a peculiar kind of imaginative psychology into a grand concentration of sovereign power. The most absolute Sovereign was of course God. The next step down was the King via transmission of divine authority.

Psychology kicks in as Hobbes, recognizing that the king is a mortal man, says divine right pulls all vestiges of sovereignty out of every person inside the political realm and concentrates it in the person of the king, who will then (hopefully, if things don’t go too far wrong) pass that crown down to a loving and ruthless son who will perpetuate the dynastic reign. Everyone—it is God’s will—relinquishes any portion of sovereignty and gives it unconditionally to the king. Even more: the king is entitled to all portions of sovereignty relinquished. Your “gift” of sovereignty is also your required political obedience. The king owns and is in possession of your tiny slice of sovereignty.

Hobbes’ political psychology is an interesting way of thinking about political philosophy. For instance, what happens to this concentrated sovereignty when the citizenry rise up and cut off the king’s head? Where does the divine right of kings go when monarchy is repudiated? The psychological physiology suggests that by destroying the centralized concentration of sovereignty, that concentration flows or trickles down to the citizenry. Every home a castle. Every man a king. That is, once divinely authorized sovereignty is repudiated in the person of the king, a flood of sovereignty particles flows back to its citizenly base. All those on the receiving end of that flow now partake of divine sovereignty. This is also a narrow but powerful definition of contemporary libertarianism. We might think of it as a political eucharist. Here is your individual portion of the king’s sovereignty: take and eat. Every man is now fed and nourished by the dispersal of divine sovereignty. Every home is protected by castle doctrine. Recipients—that is, believers and participants—get a legal dose of kingly sovereignty in their bodies and in their very own homelife.

Even though most believers may never have heard of Thomas Hobbes, his political philosophy is assumed to be psychologically true. It’s this political psychology that, in large part, undergirds the current political Right. The Right may be intentionally opaque about the purpose of its incredible propaganda arm, but God’s will is somewhere buried in the cranial physiology of this belief in sovereignty. Convictions of this sort should come as no surprise because aristocracy and monarchy are built of sovereignty concentration. Those concentrations became institutionalized and normal. The coercive political tools of that concentration are (as Arnold Toynbee so aptly put it) Class and War. The world that Class and War constructs (as Lewis Mumford so aptly put it) is built of traumatic institutions—institutions generated by the power and force of Class and War. To “democratize” the sovereignty of the king is to disperse psychologically the political, psychological, legal, and spiritual concentration formerly held by and concentrated in the king. And since the king defended his sovereignty with a monopoly of armed force and authorized violence, so too that dispersal of authorization generates individual rights backed with weapons and the spiritual will to use them. Somewhat paradoxically, we are to support and sustain a “unitary executive” by means of castle doctrine. We sovereign citizens may have killed the king, but we’re eager to vote for a Caesar who’ll protect us from the multicolored liberal mob that wants to take away our guns.

What is of course missing from this psycho-political tour de force is an analysis and historical perspective that asks where Hobbes’ Leviathan imagery originates? (Hobbes, on pages 397 and 398, says that “To those therefore whose Power is irresistible, the dominion of all men adhaereth naturally by their excellence of Power; and consequently it is from that Power, that the Kingdome over men, and the Right of afflicting men at his pleasure, belongeth Naturally to God Almighty; not as Creator, and Gracious; but as Omnipotent. And though Punishment be due for Sinne onely, because by that word is understood Affliction for Sinne; yet the Right of Afflicting, is not alwayes derived from Sinne, but from Gods Power.” Hobbes goes on to quote from the Book of Job, saying that God doesn’t need reasons to afflict or punish. God’s whim is also his inscrutable rule.

Is this as deep in understanding as we can go in our philosophy of democratic self-government? Do we start with the Old Testament, the Yahweh god, the divine right of kings, and regicide as the twisted template by which we crown ourselves with God’s authorization of sovereignty?

There is of course a major theological rat’s nest here that we seem inclined to gloss over. If God bestowed his blessing on kings, what gave citizens the right to drown those old guys in bathtubs full to the brim with water bloodied by decapitation? When did God give permission for regicide? When or how did God relax the divine right to pick and choose?

Toynbee and Mumford, with deeper historical understanding, show that the king’s sovereignty was attained by millennia of aristocratic violence and institutionalized theft sheltering under the awning of their god’s—that is, God’s—authorization. Meanwhile, the best of contemporary theologians, having bypassed the Christ police and done their best to enter the peasant space of the historical Jesus, are telling us that it was the Powers and Principalities of Roman-occupied Jerusalem that killed Jesus. The reason those Powers killed him—the collusion of Roman overlord and temple authorities—was that Jesus was proposing human life free of the fake “sovereignty” that had institutionalized itself in both temple aristocracy and Roman colonizer, in multigenerational violence and theft. In a world of peasants at the mercy of landlords and aristocrats, whose wealth and privilege depended on enforced economic extraction and political control of the peasantry, Jesus’ proposal was much too politically flammable not to instantly suppress with crucifixion. His message and strategy may have been explicitly nonviolent; but, as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King surely understood, advocacy for nonviolence did not preclude the possibility of assassination.

In other words, Thomas Hobbes may have been a student of the Old Testament and a pupil of St. Augustine (who taught, along with Paul the Apostle, that all kingdoms and empires are given by God); but Jesus was not a disciple of Thomas Hobbes. Nor was he a pupil of Paul the Apostle. Jesus said there’s a spiritual leaven that enables the entire human loaf to rise, a leaven that grows in our bodies and develops in our spiritual consciousness. It grows as we digest the Beatitudes and live them out. It flourishes as we take care of one other in community, including the community that’s become (or is becoming) more and more democratically political. The leaven becomes political as the communal enters politics, as the Beatitudes become public policy.

The Right’s individualistic and sour sovereignty clots in fear and resentment. The coagulating blood of an overthrown and murdered king forms a bloody moat around a crumbling castle. That kind of sovereignty hunkers down behind a second amendment barricade with never enough guns or sufficient ammunition to defend and protect its paranoid delusions and obsessions. The Left’s communal sovereignty—maximized healthy individuality in maximized inclusive community—derives from the yeasty Beatitudes, from the sower of seeds who gently persuaded tightfisted peasants to pull the fish ‘n chips out of their sleeves, pass the food around, and participate in—no, generate—a communal feast. This gentle persuader was then murdered by Class and War representatives eager to preserve and maintain a “Civill Soveraign” that Thomas Hobbes celebrated as God’s will in 1651.

The real question is whether this spiritual leaven, tossed and scattered among all the skeptical and stingy peasants, has, over centuries of slow but steady growth, reached sufficient spiritual maturity to achieve a wholesome political order in which it’s not government that’s drowned in a bloody bathtub, but paranoid violence and reflexive fear that are cleansed and washed away, all the way from our angry faces to our cramped and dirty feet. The overall condition of the world suggests it’s either/or time: either the cooperative and communal yeast is about to top out in a wholesome rising of the entire human loaf or the global bathtub will itself be drowned in a catastrophe of clotted blood and toxic gore.

The post Fish ‘n Chips appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Gilk.

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