Paris & Hobbes – Why do I feel like we are still in the State of War...

(A Parisian Icon)

According to Hobbes, man in his most natural state exists in a state of war, possessed by a potent drive for self-preservation. Competition, distrust, and curiosity arise from this aversion to death. Reason counsels us to trust no man as a friend. Contracts, or mutually beneficial agreements, are null. Thus, we get Hobbes’s famously dire formulation of the life of man in the Leviathan, as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Hobbes conveniently offers solace via the absolute sovereign, who institutes law, justice, and morality. Hobbes is certain that a commonwealth will suffice to free man from the bondage of battle. Yet is this confidence well founded? Is formalized society really so freeing? Isn’t the very suspicion of fellow man just as pervasive in society as in his state of nature?

I found myself in Paris a couple weekends ago, reading Hobbes for my coursework at Oxford. Hobbes himself sought refuge in Paris during the English Civil War, fearing retribution for his Royalist ways. The city of love is evidently also the city of Hobbes’s Leviathan.

While in Paris I tried to understand whether society was really as freeing as Hobbes imagined. I raise three points in contention with Hobbes.  

First, I raise the political reality of France. For a year now, the gilets jaunes protestors have been a persistent element of the French and Parisian landscape. The gilets jaunes began as a protest against a new tax on diesel and petrol, meant to encourage the shift towards green energies. For protestors, the tax is symbolic of a system engineered against lower earners. In particular, the movement argues that reforms disproportionately burden the working and middle classes, especially those in rural areas. The group chafes with traditional leadership and has shied away from instituting any formalized leaders or organization. The movement is still fierce at its one-year anniversary, as violent protestors (joined by other protest groups) destroyed banks and storefronts on November 17. Man certainly seems galvanized by Hobbes’s distrust or diffidence here, aimed at the very governing body meant to quell such passions.

Second, I investigate the arts. As a former ballet dancer, I do my best to watch a local ballet production during my travels. Few companies can contend with the Paris Opera Ballet and their home theater, the Palais Garnier. I caught a performance of up and coming choreographer Crystal Pite’s newest work. The first half of the performance was comprised of men and women in workwear. They wore boots and moved close to the earth, heavily grounding their every step in position. Following a brief intermission, the dancers had transformed themselves into other-worldly creatures. They wore skin-tight black latex suits with masks and long appendages to extend the arms of dancers. They now wore pointe shoes, but again the movements were uniform, echoing the uniformity of the first half, though in a new form. The sole deviant from the pack wore floor length hair and metallic gold pants. He danced shirtless, using contemporary movements diverging from classically balletic positions and poses. He was the sole dancer to receive whooping cheers from the packed audience. As I cheered him on myself, yelling “Bravo,” I wondered, why do we always choose the non-conformist as the hero? The one who escapes from the brutal grind of the workweek? The one who lives out our seemingly more innate and real human characteristics? It seems that we always praise the unabashed individual.

Finally, a small and perhaps trivial point. The instant I set foot on the underground at Gare du Nord, I was pushed into a crowded train car and within a single stop my passport was stolen out of my backpack. A passport is perhaps the most symbolic item of our world of nation-states. The passport alone gives you license to move between countries and enter the provinces of other governments. Without my passport I was not allowed to leave France, yet I was not treated as a proper citizen while there. A flimsy book of paper serves to eliminate my right to movement. How can we be free when a piece of paper means so much?

Having raised my own thoughts, I return to Hobbes. Hobbes agrees that the individual is the most natural formulation of human beings. Yet he would argue that if we were to live as mere individuals, life would not be about gold fringe pants fit for fashion week. Instead we would be consumed by constant fear of attack by our neighbors, existing in a Hunger Games mode of existence. Yet, how can we reconcile Hobbes’s assured safety with the stark unhappiness and inequity embodied by the gilets jaune movements, the significance placed on the passport, and our celebration of the non-conformist?

I don’t have an answer, just these lingering questions…

Man struggles so brutally with the constraints of organized society and experiences such great unhappiness – are we really to say the state of war is vanquished upon consent to the will of one? Or submission to the laws and regulations of elected bodies? Doesn’t formalized control serve to enhance our worst vices by generating institutional inequality?