Sometimes words dissolve on the page even as I write them. Words are not enough. Now is one of those times, as Australians grapple with the shocking attack on federal politician Helen Haines, allegedly by a man described by neighbours as displaying disturbed, volatile behaviour.
Brendan Nugent has also been engaged in political activism. Rage, mental stress, hyper-politics is a combustible mix. Our world appears to be inflamed.
Paris is burning. American democracy is collapsing. The nation state is in retreat. Autocracy is on the march.
The order is collapsing. There are lots of words being written and spoken this week trying to explain the temper of our times. But modernity was born in flames. It is more useful to look to the deep past than the headlines of today.
The end was written in the beginning. Two weeks ago, I was invited to New South Wales parliament to deliver a talk on a book written nearly 400 years ago that established a new global order and warned of the collapse to come.
I entered a time machine and set the dial for Florence 1636. British philosopher Thomas Hobbes sits at a table with Italian scientist Galileo Galilei.
Galileo is under house arrest, his work banned by the church, and suspected of heresy. He has been forced to recant his evidence that the Earth is not the centre of the universe but a lonely rock orbiting just another sun.
It would take 300 years for the church to say he was right.
There are moments when the world turns. The meeting of Galileo and Hobbes was one of them.
The heavens had fallen and a new human was on the horizon.
If God was not at the centre of our lives, if we were a mathematical oddity not a divine miracle, then who were we really? What would order our lives?
Galileo had confirmed what Nicolaus Copernicus had theorised. We had gone beyond Aristotle. Galileo was the father of modern physics.
Hobbes wrote not only of his time. He wrote the future. I read Hobbes and find that as much as he saw the beginning, he glimpsed the end.
When Hobbes met Galileo, the world was in freefall. The war of religion – the Thirty Years War – was raging in Europe. Up to eight million people would die. In parts of Germany, half the population would be wiped out. Soon, the English Civil War would break out.
From this tumult, a new world was born. Modern statehood came into existence.
In 1651, two years after King Charles I was beheaded outside the Banqueting House on Whitehall, London, Thomas Hobbes published his magnum opus, Leviathan. It was Hobbes’s response to a world of savagery, what he called a war of all against all.
Political philosopher Michael Oakeshott has called Leviathan “the greatest, perhaps the sole, masterpiece of political philosophy written in the English language”.
It shook my mind when I first read it at university. I have dipped in and out of it many times since. These past weeks I have re-read it in its entirety. There is nothing like it.
Hobbes creates a new order. Like Copernicus and Galileo, he changes the nature of truth. He writes a new reality. Hobbes was also a mathematician and knew maths would determine our future. Maths was a new God.
Hobbes wrote not only of his time. He wrote the future. I read Hobbes and find that as much as he saw the beginning, he glimpsed the end.
Most people would be familiar with the short-hand Hobbesian world view, that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Left to our unrestrained desires, Hobbes argued, we live in “continual fear, and danger of violent death”.
Hobbes was neither a nihilist nor pessimist. He was cynical but believed our desire to live was greater than our impulse to kill. His leviathan – the ultimate sovereign – promises us safety. In return we surrender our natural rights.
The sovereign wields a mightier sword.
“Covenants without the sword,” Hobbes writes, “are but words and of no strength to secure man at all.”
This is a foundation for modern democracy, but it is not a democracy we would recognise. The Hobbesian social contract is more about subjugation than rights. Society is mechanical. The human is not heart and nerves and brain but so many springs and strings, wires and wheels.
Indeed, more than 300 years before artificial intelligence, Hobbes uses the word artificial. The state imitates nature, he writes, to “make an artificial animal”.
Hobbes asks, “Why may we not say that all automata (engines that move by themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life?”
In a world of science and reason, the artificial sovereign creates an order out of a godless world, where nature runs amok. The leviathan holds back the kingdom of darkness.
The full scope of Hobbes’s vision is beyond the limits of this column, but it is tempting to wonder what Hobbes would say today. Undoubtedly, in the worst excesses of social media, he would see a return to a war of all against all. In the cacophony of public discourse he would see the collapse of civility and discernment essential for order and peace.
On the burning streets of Paris, he would feel vindicated for warning of the dangers of unbridled human passion and protest.
Hobbes saw this. When we lose our speech, he warned, we descend again into chaos.
“A democracy,” he wrote, “is no more than an aristocracy of orators.”
Control, he said, must be exercised over speech and press, or people will be “so readily moved by demagogues”.
Hobbes cautioned against what he called “metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words”. They are, he said, “ignes fatui (foolish fires)”.
He foresaw the post-truth world. When words lose their meaning, when desire speaks over reason, we have no truth.
“True and false are attributes of speech, not of things,” he wrote. “And where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood.”
What would Hobbes say about the most lawless rioting students of France? I can hear him say, I told you so.
He would say the same thing about the uber rich. Hobbes saw the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few as a disease. He wrote: “Again, there is sometimes in a Commonwealth a disease which resembleth the pleurisy; and that is when the treasure of the Commonwealth, flowing out of its due course, is gathered together in too much abundance in one or a few private men, by monopolies or by farm of the public revenues …”
Hobbes was writing about the modern United States. The economy is a shell game. The rich are obscenely rich and the poor stay poor. There is no American dream.
Everywhere, wealth inequality is tearing at the fabric of democracy.
Hobbes warned of a return to civil war or heightened sovereign oppression.
Hobbes’s leviathan was tempered by the liberalism of John Locke, the liberty and collective reasoning of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the civilising moral imperatives of Immanuel Kant.
These, and other thinkers, have formed the fulcrum of the modern democratic social contract. Today, that is in pieces. In the West, liberal democracy cannot hold the weight of voices all yelling for their rights.
The balance of liberty and security requires common purpose. Today they are as likely common enemies.
Thomas Hobbes might recognise himself more in China than his native Britain, Europe or America.
The Chinese Communist Party leviathan promises security, safety and economic flourishing in return for harmony, not rights. It is a different vision of the human.
It resembles more the words of the ancient Chinese thinker Gaozi, who said: “Human nature does not distinguish between good and bad, just as water does not distinguish between east and west.” The human is malleable, not moral. China promises peace for its citizens, but not freedom.
Thomas Hobbes might find his fulfilment more in autocracy than democracy.
Thomas Hobbes and Galileo Galilei shepherded a new universalism. Galileo opened the heavens, while Hobbes gave us a vision of order that tests the limits of the human.
We cannot live on 17th century ideas. The 21st century is being contested on burning Parisian streets, in a corrupt American oligarchy and the totalising harmony of China. It is being contested in Australian towns.
Or, to steal a vision from Hobbes: perhaps a more artificial future awaits us.