"Leviathan in Lousiana" — George F. Will

George F. Will's column in the Sept. 12, 2005, Newsweek is instructive. "Leviathan in Louisiana," about what Hurricane Katrina teaches us, teaches us also what lies at the root of the conservative mentality: namely, "the prudence of pessimism."

For the conservative Will, the keynote of the Katrina experience was the swift "descent from chaos into barbarism" in the wake of the flooding. "Whirl is king, having driven Zeus out," Will echoes from the words of Aristophanes. Katrina exposed for all to see, writes Will, "how always near society's surface are the molten passions that must be checked by force when they cannot be tamed by civilization." And so we saw "the essence of primitivism, howling nature" plastered all over our TV screens.

In other words, Will feels, Katrina ratcheted its victims down into "a Hobbesian state of nature," phraseology based on sentiments proposed in 1651 by political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in "Leviathan." Adapting Hobbes, Will says that in a castastrophe such as Katrina "mankind's natural sociability, if any, is so tenuous that life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'."

Thus are we forced in such circumstances to recall "the fact that the first business of government, on which everything depends, is security." It is a "brute fact," Will adverts, that politics, the basis of government, "arises from something not distinctively human — from anxiety about security, and fear of violent death."

The government which Will finds indispensible for controlling "the social furies" is not the "big government" which conservatives begrudge the bigness of. It is, rather, the government which "understands how thin and perishable is the crust of civilization" and does something about it. In fact, in the course of his discourse Will takes a slap at conservatives who are not "thoughtful." Thoughtful conservatives are, in Will's estimation, "those whose conservatism arises from reflections deeper than an aversion to high marginal tax rates."

In short, it's the city against the beast, here. Modern cities, per Will, are "such marvels," inasmuch as they are made from "the specializations and divisions of labor that sustain myriad webs of dependencies." That sophisticated complexity is what Will thinks "makes them fragile." And so the Katrina event has not launched just a "liberal hour" in America, "in that it illustrates the indispensability, and dignity, of the public sector." It has also triggered "a conservative hour, dramatizing the prudence of pessimism."


Thus, the pessimistic view of Katrina. The view I take, as oldstyleliberal, is distinctly more optimistic.

Where there is complexity, there is fragility, it is true enough. But also where there is complexity, there is the uncanny ability to fight one's way out of chaos, to struggle back to the so-called edge of chaos where wonderful things happen.

There are scientists today who believe there exists a fecund regime of evolutionary change wherein the dynamics are just right for novelty to emerge. Mathematically, this regime is positioned in between stable order and chaos. When stable order disintegrates into chaos, a counterdynamic — often, not always — is set up whereby the system returns itself to the edge of chaos, at which point new order is generated "for free." That is, the order comes from within the system; it is not imposed on the system from without.

This is not to say that Washington shouldn't spend the requisite billions that are needed to rebuild New Orleans. All edge-of-chaos systems consume "food" and "energy"; we can think of the D.C. gigabucks in that way. No, it simply means that the essential dynamics of reconstruction need to come from the people and institutions in the region itself.


But that's not really my point here. My point is rather that George Will has put his finger on the quintessential difference between him as a conservative and oldstyleliberal as an anti-conservative. Specifically, oldstyleliberal is an optimist about the trajectory of human affairs and Mr. Will is not.

I, in fact, believe in something like the perfectability of the human experience. Now, such a bald statement immediately needs a raft of qualification. Utopian schemes such as Karl Marx's doctrine of socialism originally was are simply not on. There is no ideological "quick fix" to all our woes. In fact, I'm not saying a completely woeless day will ever come.

What I'm really talking about is a religious conviction that the "kingdom of heaven" is a slam dunk. It is destined to arrive — it will transpire here on earth — given enough time. God's kingdom will emerge when enough people in the world have sufficient faith that human solidarity and compassion can, for all time, trump George Will's "howling nature."

And, oldstyleliberal would add, it is out of such solidarity, compassion, and hope that this and every "liberal hour" proceed.

Gunpoint Solidarity in Iraq?

What does Christian teaching have to tell us about the rightness or wrongness of the ongoing war in Iraq?

"Jesus was not a pacifist in principle, he was a pacifist in practice," Albert Nolan writes in Jesus before Christianity (p. 152). This book is an eloquent argument that Jesus preached, above all, compassion for all humans and solidarity among all humans. His "kingdom" was one of "total liberation for all people."

The "kingdom of God" Jesus spoke of could be enabled by faith alone ... faith in the redemptive and restorative power of human compassion and solidarity:

The "kingdom" of total liberation for all people cannot be established by violence. Faith alone can enable the "kingdom" to come.

If the "kingdom of heaven" comes through faith alone — faith in universal brotherhood and sisterhood, faith in compassion and solidarity — then can there ever be a justification for using arms? Yes, answers Nolan:

... we can surmise that if there had been no other way ot defending the poor and the oppressed and if there had been no danger of an escalation of violence, [Jesus'] unlimited compassion might have overflowed temporarily into violent indignation. He did tell his disciples to carry swords to defend themselves and he did clear the Temple courtyard with some measure of violence. However, even in such cases, violence would be a temporary measure with no other purpose than the prevention of some more serious violence.

How does this apply to Iraq?

Our armed forces are ostensibly in Iraq now — never mind the original rationales — to quell the post-invasion insurgency and foster national solidarity under a new, democratic constitution.

If this were indeed "a temporary measure with no other purpose than the prevention of some more serious violence," as we have been, in effect, told that it is, then Jesus might approve.

But we've been quelling and fostering and preventing for over two years now. Our leaders keep backing away from predictions that our troops will start coming home later this year or in 2006. The mounting body count shows no sign of abating. If anything, the pace of the killing is growing.

The main indigenous source of the ongoing Iraqi resistance, the Sunni Muslims, have distanced themselves from the draft constitution to be voted on soon. Even if the constitution happens to be ratified in that vote, the projected December elections look to be anything but an exercise in burgeoning national solidarity, because of ongoing Sunni suspicions of Kurdish and Shi'ite semi-autonomy.

The Iraq war has long since ceased to be anything like a "temporary" use of violent force.

And you can't forge solidarity at the point of a gun.

So you don't have to be an in-principle pacifist to believe the troops should come home. It's good non-pacifist Christian teaching that tells us to get out of Iraq now.