Vol. 5 No. 8 (December 2006)
The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
http://www.commonwealinstitute
“The truth about [
but only that we, having turned our faces so resolutely away from it,
have never demanded from it what it has to give.”
CONTENTS
Talking Points I:
Wit and Wisdom: Denying the deniers
Talking Points II: Back to the G-7!
Featured Article: “The Tourist Who Influenced
the Terrorists”
Happenings: New CI Fellow; marketing training
Endorsements: Mike Honda
Get Involved: Spread the word; become a
contributor
In recent
months it has become common, even fashionable, to describe the situation in
The
point, clearly, is that the situation in
In his
most influential work, Leviathan (1651), Hobbes famously described the
state of nature as a “war of all against all” and wrote that human life in a
state of nature was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” These
are his two big sound-bites, and together they represent the basic conventional
wisdom regarding Hobbes’s view of the world. But what Hobbes had to say
about human beings and society should be approached very cautiously, for his
premises are not ones we should be repeating and reinforcing, even unwittingly.
Against
the political backdrop of English revolution and civil war, Hobbes – in De Cive (1642) and Elements of Law, Natural and Politic
(1640), as well as Leviathan – developed a systematic, “scientific”
theory of government in which natural human depravity required the imposition
of an overawing central power. In the absence of such a power – the leviathan
– the unbridled pursuit of self-interest will lead, he argued, to a kind of
rapacious free-for-all. While stopping short of outright atheism,
Hobbes’s political philosophy strips the world of any independent moral
framework, reducing questions of good and evil, honor and justice, to matters
of perception and relation (“these words of Good, Evill,
and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so. .
.”). Instead he described a world where individual human beings,
motivated by elemental appetites or desires for security and felicity, seek to
extend the range of their power to satisfy those appetites and wants: “I put
for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire
of Power after power, that ceaseth
onely in Death.”
Hobbes
did posit a rough equality among all human beings, but only as to the basic
features of human life – physical appetites, the desire for longevity, and so forth
– rather than a more fundamental moral or spiritual equality. Moreover,
the equality of individuals runs up against the overriding need for social
order, in the form of contracts, pacts, or covenants enforced by an absolute
sovereign, whose authority must be unquestioned – for if it is questionable
then the whole system breaks down. Even if the law appears unjust, it
must be obeyed, because justice exists not as a transcendent quality but as the
creature of contract: What is lawful is just. Finally, an individual’s
“value” is determined socially: “The Value, or WORTH of a man, is as of
all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the
use of his Power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the
need and judgement of another.”
The
keywords of Hobbesian theory, in short, are pessimism
and absolutism: a pessimism regarding the moral order of nature and an
absolutist belief in the depravity of man and consequent necessity of total
obedience to authority.
And so what? How do these details of Hobbes’s thought
contribute to our understanding of the
Well, first of all, it’s worth pointing out the irony that the closest
More broadly,
however, while the violence and chaos in
People who understand politics understand the power of words
to create reality. We see what we are inclined to see, create what we
expect to find, and respond accordingly. Calling the
President of
Holds New Conference of Holocaust Denial Deniers
“One day after hosting
an international conference devoted to denying that the Holocaust ever
happened, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made headlines again today by holding another
conference to deny that the earlier conference ever happened.
“President Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial conference was a page one
story in newspapers around the world this week, making some observers wonder
why the Iranian leader would hold another conference attempting to deny that
the earlier conference had occurred….
“At the conclusion of
the Holocaust denial deniers conference, Mr. Ahmadinejad
embarked on a tour to promote a new book about his hypothetical hosting of a
Holocaust denial conference, entitled ‘If I Did It.’”
— from
The Borowitz Report
For the past year,
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Western
powers began gradually integrating
Now, under
For the Europeans, in particular, have been
singularly reluctant to confront Russia over any of its growing list of
misdeeds, given their dependency on Russian oil (a dependency, incidentally,
which the elder President Bush sought in vain to warn against), and given their
profound aversion to conflict. The
But there are still options for taking a
principled stand on behalf of important Western values, and sometimes we need
to choose confrontation over conciliation. That doesn’t always have
to mean military action, of course, but it does mean standing up for something
once in a while rather than allowing economic “interests” to lead us around by
the nose. And G-8 membership is a perfectly legitimate issue on which to
hold ground.
A number of Congressmen from both sides of the
aisles – most visibly John McCain and Joe Lieberman, but also quite a few
others from both the Senate and House – have called for the United States to
take a harder line on Russian membership in the G-8. This is not exactly
a “progressive” position, but perhaps it should be, for the big losers under
the Putin regime have been the Russian progressives
themselves.
The following is an excerpt from Rolf Potts’s “The
Tourist Who Influenced the Terrorists,” which appears in the October 2006
issue of The Believer.
“With the global rise of political Islamism, many
pundits have recently begun paying closer attention to the writings of Egyptian
scholar and Muslim Brotherhood publicist Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), whose radical Milestones
and 30-volume In the Shade of the Koran are said to be masterpieces of jihadist thought and persuasion. These writings, which some
analysts consider to be an ideological influence on violent Islamist movements
such as al-Qaida, contain an uncompromising
anti-Western slant that Qutb supports with
observations from his travel experiences in the
“In these classic jihadist
works, Qutb is never all that specific about how and
where he went about assembling his presumed expertise on American culture, but
biographers note that he spent a majority of his 1948-50 U.S. sojourn as a
scholarship student at Colorado State College of Education, in the high-plains
town of Greeley. Moreover, not long after his return to
Read the whole article at http://www.vagablogging.net/06
New CI Fellow – The Commonweal Institute is proud to welcome Bill Scher, the Executive Editor of the popular political blog LiberalOasis.com and a regular commentator on Air
Marketing Training – On January 12, Commonweal Institute President
Katherine Forrest will train budding environmental activists in techniques of
marketing and factors that increase social influence. Others on Acterra’s Be the Change program
that day will be California State Senator Joe Simitian
and Palo Alto City Councilman Peter Drekmeier.
ENDORSEMENTS
“Moderate
and progressive members of Congress need a substantial resource that can
develop public support for our whole range of issues in a timely fashion, and
defend our gains from right wing attacks. The Commonweal Institute is
positioned to be that organization. I hope to see them grow quickly.” – Congressman
Mike Honda, D-San Jose, 15th CD-CA
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