What I find curious is that even though most liberals would scoff at such a neoconservative worldview, Hollywood productions such as the Star Trek: Discovery TV series, and the Black Panther movie, both of which are notable for taking some progressive stances on identity politics in other aspects of their productions, still manage to reproduce this Hobbesian myth. In this post I will argue that some of the enduring power of this myth comes from the fact that Hobbes himself was something of a science fiction writer who carefully crafted the myth as a tool to use for political ends. In a followup post I will then explore exactly how the myth is deployed in the above mentioned Hollywood productions. So unless you consider a discussion of Hobbes to be a “spoiler” this post is spoiler free, with all the spoilers saved for part two…

It is said that Doctor Who, which first ran from 1963 to 1989 and has been on again continuously since its revival in 2005 is the longest running TV series of all time, but perhaps that honor should be given to Thomas Hobbes? The Hobbesian myth of the foundational moment of sovereignty—in which a war of all against all is averted only by their surrender to a sovereign—was deliberately designed to scare his fellow citizens into submission. In doing so he hoped to bring peace to a nation beset by civil war.

Hobbes’s myth has two important elements: On the one hand there is the sovereign,¹ depicted as an artificial man made up of the people who are subsumed in this larger identity like the Borg in Star Trek. On the other is the pre-social human who exists in a state of nature, which (for Hobbes) is a state of war. Only the monstrous artificial man can save us from the threat of a life that is ”solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Above is the original front piece of Hobbes’s book. Hobbes spent a lot of time working on it. He had written his earlier, more academic work, De Cive, in Latin, but with Leviathan he hoped to reach a broader audience. For this reason he supplemented his use of logic and “geometric demonstration,” with “myth, imagery and illusion” in order to make a bigger impact.² At a time that England was ravaged by civil war, he hoped that fear of the sovereign would move them to emotionally accept the “imperative of absolute obedience” that his logic demanded but couldn’t be relied upon to compel in his readers.³

Hobbes considered himself to be a scientist before he was a political philosopher, and longed to get back to his work on optics. As part of his research he had amassed a collection of optical instruments, including the “perspective glass” which he picked up in Paris:

The tube’s multifocal beveled lens was projected from a certain point onto an image of apparently unconnected fragments; the sections then came together to form a new arrangement. Hobbes apparently saw a witty example in which Ottoman sultans merge together and, from their fragments, reassemble themselves in the form of the young king of France, thus becoming visually subordinate to him. By optically sacrificing a part of themselves, they form their sovereign.²

Descartes accused Hobbes of having stolen his ideas on optics from him, but there were important differences between the two.⁴

For Descartes and other dualists, whilst they accepted that sensations are caused by motions in the brain, the seat of consciousness is another substance, mind, which is not material, whose essence is thought, in contrast with matter, whose essence is extension. Hobbes’s readers failed to appreciate the importance for Hobbes’s position of this distinction, which was a cause of considerable frustration for him.

This mechanical view of optics is replicated in the monster that graces the cover of Hobbes’ book. ²

If Descartes, in his Discours de la Méthode, presented a complex panorama of connections between bodily movement, the nervous system and the human structure of the brain, in order to compare the various functions of sensory perception, social control, memory and imagination with machines, he nevertheless maintained that machines do not possess reflexive language capabilities, and therefore could never possess intellect or reason. Yet Hobbes in the opening paragraph of Leviathan, takes up precisely this distinction, likening the body politic as a living machine to humans as the ‘rational and most excellent work of Nature’. And insofar as Leviathan as ‘Commonwealth or State’ has the capacity to protect and defend its citizens, it surpasses even human reason.

But it wasn’t enough to have a monster. Hobbes needed his readers to willingly choose obedience to the monster and for that he needed the alternative to be even more terrifying. The opposite of the artificial man was, for Hobbes, the concept of the pre-social other.

He produces an “outside” that is truly horrific in order to cause those “inside” to recognize themselves, to realize their good fortune, what they owe to the state, what the state enables. Without a common power, men are in conflict…⁵

It is here that the “savages of America” make their appearance in Hobbes writing. Drawing on racist accounts by early colonial settlers, he writes:

For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, and concord whereof dependeth on natural lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner

Despite his claims to scientific rationality, there are serious problems with the “logic” of Hobbes two myths. On the one hand the idea that a sovereign will bind people together and bring an end to war ignores the fact that sovereigns are almost always at war with other sovereigns. On the other hand, the idea of a pre-social “savage” falls apart once you accept that these pre-social humans are organized into families. Also, where does language come from? Either we have language in the state of nature, in which case we are already social, or we don’t, in which case it is unclear how the conditions essential for language can emerge? But Hobbes’s myth requires both the artificial man and the state of nature, one part of the story cannot work without the other.

In part II, I will consider how closely the appearance of the Hobbesean myth in Star Trek: Discovery and Black Panther actually fits Hobbes’s own version, and explore what the differences might mean for the contemporary legacy of this sixteenth century work of science fiction.

UPDATE: Part II is now online.

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

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Imagine if, when writing a paper on Donald Trump, you had to start your paper by saying the following:¹

The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast of North America. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, and the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776. The United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century. . .

Now imagine you had to write not just one boring paragraph, but several pages or even a whole chapter like that … every … single … time you wrote about the United States. And imagine every article you read about the United States did the same thing. And in pretty much the exact same words as well. Wouldn’t it begin to drive you up the wall after a while? Well, that is exactly what is it like to be a Taiwan scholar!

I recently quipped about this on Facebook and a number of Taiwan scholars chimed in with experiences of being forced to add such sections to their papers. Others who, like me, work on indigenous issues in Taiwan said that they had to further justify their use of the word “indigenous” to describe those people who on whose behalf a national political movement was waged in the nineties specifically to gain the right to use this term. And still others offered examples from other disciplines or regions where they too had to provide such explanations every time they wrote about their subject matter.

Recently movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #metoo have politicized the act of offering explanations. Both women and people of color are fed up with having to explain racism and sexism to white men, and one can sympathize with the burden of being forced into the role of educator just because you have chosen to speak out against your own oppression. In an age where information is just a Google search away, surely we can expect people to show that they’ve done their homework before they ask to be educated? While having to write a short history of Taiwan for a book or journal article isn’t comparable to the experiences of oppression that are at the center of these movements, engagement with these movements online has had the side effect of making me more aware of how the demand for explanations can be political.

As an academic one often feels it is one’s job to provide explanations whenever they are requested, but now I have begun to wonder if there aren’t times when we should put our foot down and say that certain forms of ignorance are the reader’s responsibility to rectify, not that of the author? I sometimes wish I could just include a link to “Let me Google that for you!” instead of having to predigest Taiwanese history for my audience. But the real problem is that nobody would demand these histories if it wasn’t for the fact that Taiwan’s own government (until the end of Martial Law in 1987) and the government of the People’s Republic of China both had a shared interest in sowing confusion about the history of Taiwan in order to portray Taiwan as part of China.

There is even confusion over the source of confusion with regard to Taiwan’s history. One of the explanations you’ll often see is that Taiwan is a “small” country. But that isn’t true at all. Taiwan’s population is close to that of Australia and more than twice that of Greece or Sweden. Economically, Taiwan is ranked number 22 by GDP, just between Argentina and Sweden. In terms of area Taiwan is larger than Belgium or Haiti. Nobody is expected to explain Greece, Sweden, Argentina, Belgium, or even Haiti in the same way that they are expected to explain Taiwan. Taiwan only seems small because on most maps it generally appears alongside China whose size overshadows Taiwan.

Which brings us back to the politics of explanation. How should we as scholars respond to this disinformation campaign? Should we welcome the opportunity to continually remind people of Taiwan’s unique history? Or should we refuse to explain anything beyond what is absolutely necessary for the specific argument we are making in any given academic publication? Personally, I frequently try to adopt a third approach: explain Taiwan’s history but in a way that challenges even the standard official histories one finds in most publications. The question, “How does Taiwanese history look different when viewed from an indigenous perspective?” is one that has driven much of my academic work. But, as I can attest, this is difficult and time consuming. Many scholars, however, seem to welcome the necessity of constantly having to regurgitate the contents of the Wikipedia page on Taiwan history. The obligation to do so means that many articles on Taiwan have about one fifth to one quarter less original content because so much space is taken up with historical background. For a scholar eager to get out numerous publications in a short amount of time, this can be something of a relief, and I think it explains the cookie cutter feel to much Taiwan scholarship. I can’t help but feel that eliminating these de rigueur histories of Taiwan from our scholarship will lead to a general improvement in the quality of those publications as well.

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

Source