Progressivism's Book of Genesis

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was an English thinker who wrote during the turbulent period of civil strife and the struggle for power between King Charles I and Parliament. His thoughts on the best political system for avoiding the calamitous consequences of war were put down in a book titled Leviathan (1651).

Leviathan is one of the first books of modern political philosophy. Hobbes' central concern was peace, more specifically how to avoid the calamities of civil war. He began with two principles or axioms from which all else follows:

1. Men are all engaged in a constant struggle for power over others.
2. Men try to avoid death with all their might.

The word "leviathan" means great beast and is used to describe the state or commonwealth as Hobbes saw it. Hobbes' book, historian Peter Ackroyd observes, has been called "the only masterpiece of political philosophy in the English language."

Be that as it may, Hobbes wrote that the worst calamity to befall men is war. In one famous passage he wrote these lapidary words:

In such condition [i.e. civil war], there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In a primitive state of nature, He argues, in which there is no government, the condition of man ...

...is a condition of war of everyone against everyone, in which case everyone is governed by his own reason, and there is nothing he can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemies; it followeth that in such a condition every man has a right to every thing, even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live.

And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.

Men in a state of nature are in a constant struggle each with every other for power and each lives in constant fear of violent death. Hobbes' solution is for all men to yield their own individual sovereignty and rights to that of one sovereign (or a committee) of rulers, whose will would govern all.

Once yielded, that sovereignty can never be rescinded. There would be in Hobbes' state no such thing as liberty of conscience, which only leads to conflict and violence. The state will determine what religion people will follow. Justice and truth are whatever the sovereign determines them to be, and nothing the sovereign does can be deemed to be unjust.

Leviathan is an outline for big government on steroids. It's the blueprint for the totalitarianisms of the Nazis and communists of the 20th century, and it's the logical endpoint of liberal progressivism, even if many progressives would deny wanting to go so far.

Progressivism is a faith that a government run by highly educated elites will naturally be the best way to prevent conflicts and protect individual rights. The bigger, more massive the bureaucratic state, the more power it has over individual lives, the less liberty the individual retains, the more able the state will be to provide for the security and welfare of its citizens.

Government is the progressive's religion, and its book of Genesis is Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.

Is Some Racism Okay?

Elizabeth Vaughn at The Federalist calls for a national conversation on racism, but it's not what you might think. Vaughn wants a national conversation about the racism that's being directed at whites.

She discusses primarily the June 30th remarks by Nick Cannon in which he claimed that white people fear black people because of their lack of melanin, that melanin gives blacks their soul and compassion. He said this:

The people that don’t have it – and I’m going to say this carefully – are a little less…and, and, and…cause I’m bringing it all the way around to Minister Farrakhan, to where they may not have the compassion or the, when they were sent to the mountains of Caucasus, when they didn’t have the power of the sun, the sun then started to deteriorate them, so then they’re acting out of fear, they’re acting out of low self-esteem, they’re acting out of a deficiency. 

So, therefore, the only way they can act is evil…They have to rob, steal, rape, kill, fight in order to survive.

So, then these people who didn’t have what we had – when I say we, I am speaking of the melanated people – they had to be savages. They had to be barbaric. They’re in these Nordic mountains, they’re in this rough terrential [sic] environment.

And so, they’re acting as animals. So, they’re the ones that are actually closer to animals. They’re the ones that are actually the true savages. And then they built up such this, this – I want to say warrior – but they built up such this, this conquering barbaric mentality.

Cannon was fired from one position he had with Viacom because other remarks he had made in this same incident were anti-semitic, but despite both his anti-semitism and racism he remains as host of Fox News' "The Masked Singer." It's hard to imagine a white celebrity saying something like this about any minority group and not having his career ended on the spot.

Part of the reason for the relatively mild treatment Cannon has received is, perhaps, that the definition of racism has undergone an evolution in this country. A generation or two ago one was racist if he or she hated members of another race simply because they were members of another race or if he or she merely believed those others were somehow less than fully human. 

Today that definition is obsolete. Today, at least among progressives of every race, racism is defined as a disease that uniquely afflicts white people and which taints everything white people do.

The contemporary definition is self-serving and tendentious. Once it's accepted then no matter what a black person says or does, whatever it is it can't be racist. Moreover, whatever a white person says or does is often racist solely by virtue of the fact that it's a white person who says or does it.

Thus the conversation on race in America is not a genuine conversation but a lecture in which blacks speak and whites are to shut up and listen. If a white person ventures to dissent from what she's being told in this "conversation," whatever dissenting view she expresses is ipso facto racist and thus disallowed. 

This is not a "conversation," of course, it's indoctrination. It's a demand for total conformity to the views of those who wield the power in the relevant social setting.

Moreover, whatever problems beset the black community are often blamed on white racism, either current or historical. According to leftist progressives blacks have no responsibility either for causing the problems or for solving them. Whites are responsible so whites must solve them, not by telling blacks how the problems could actually be solved, that would itself be racist, but simply by handing over money to the community in question.

As long as these attitudes and conditions exist the racial divide in this country will only grow wider. The contemporary understanding of racism is guaranteed to breed further resentments and hostility between the races. 

An equitable society is one in which everyone is treated fairly, and the rightness or wrongness of one's words or actions do not depend on the color of the person's skin. If an act would be wrong if a white person did it it's just as wrong if a black person does it. Race should be irrelevant.

Progressives once praised the words of Martin Luther King who longed for the day when his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. To quote those words today, however, is at best an act of racial naiveté. 

Today among progressives the color of one's skin is often all that matters. To say, as King did, that skin color should not matter in assessing how one is judged by others is to adopt an anachronistic view of race and racism that's largely rejected not only by the Nick Cannons of the world, but also by progressive government bureaucrats, academics and media opinion-makers.