Hobbes and Rousseau

After months of living with my thoughts with fewer than usual interruptions, where I have lingered in a depressive position of more or less accepting this and that with a minimum of judgement, as we lurch forward into an increasingly uncertain future, one that is not so easily predicted from the past, I am recognising a new sense that there really is a struggle going on between our capacity to draw on our strengths for compassion and cooperation, for kindness to strangers, and our undoubted ability to turn our rejecting violent and murderous thoughts against what we may think of at any particular time as the other. We may put the argument to two referees, Hobbes and Rousseau, as Rutger Bregman has done in his book, Humankind. There is the old self-interest of neoliberalism, the corruption that comes as part of the package with power, the capacity for gratuitous cruelty that defies theological explanations –and evil has often been cloaked in religious fervour. But it feels like we continue to battle with ourselves. (Excuse me, if you have worked this or knew this all along. But I come from a different place, still lost in enquiry.) So I indulge some magical thinking about the virus – that it is teaching us a lesson, offering us an opportunity, a 21st century equivalent of Noah’s Flood. We abuse nature, we know that but we still do it. Nature fights back. We - those of us who live comfortably – know that our way of life is unsustainable. The political process makes our doubts irrelevant – who votes for the Greens, even now? In our politics we still vote for self interest, not our actual literal economic self interest, as the neoliberal ethic dictates, but something more dangerous, the confirmation of our unconscious prejudices. It is said that political rainmakers, those who seed the clouds of discontent to support their way of life, propping up politicians to do their will, do not trust the people. And that this is the threat that may lead to the fatal weakening of democratic processes. Well, we cannot altogether blame them for their mistrust, when they have discovered how easy it is to manipulate the so-called will of the people. There are movements that make a difference. I think that #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have shifted the balance of public opinion and put chauvinist and racist prejudices on the defensive. But I am not yet convinced that Occupy, while it was a defiant celebration of anti-capitalist sentiment, has changed anything. Nor – as yet – has Extinction Rebellion. Leftish commentators talk about a low level swell of resistance against the complicit exploitation of resources. I don’t know as yet if they are right. The attempt to mobilise some of that questioning resistance in the recruitment to Labour Party membership has not worked out well. I saw uplifted faces on a protest march, as if they were going to the Sermon on the Mount, but the political leadership failed in its first duty to be an effective opposition to the Government in power, and allowed its own prejudices to contaminate the movement. I am sitting by a reflective pool in my garden. In a pandemic we are aware of our interdependence with all humankind – or we bunker down in survival mode. Which way do we jump? So asks the frog as the pond gets hotter. On that question depends our future.