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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Carmen Lawrence on fear, power, security « Previous | |Next »
November 5, 2005

At the dawn of modernity Thomas Hobbes argued in his Leviathan that politics was based on the desire of power and the fear of death. The social contract, he argued, was one where a multitude of men gave up their rights to an authorized sovereign authority to act on their behalf. The sovereign, in return, needed to be absolute to overcome the haunting fear of death that man has in a state of nature, and a government's sole reason for existence is for the safety of the people. Hobbes sought to construct a political order on humankind''s most powerful passion---fear of violent death.

Sound familar, as the dusk of modernity falls around us? Tis the disourse of the conservatives and the national security state. Their discourse is one in which the biggest risk to our safety (self-preservation) comes from terrorists who might attack us at any moment. The specter is haunting the late modernist polity is the specter of insecurity.

Our government, political class and media have adopted without question the "War on Terror" slogan as a representation of how we should respond to these threats. The war paradigm does not fit the battle against transnational Islamic terrorism, as involves political violence by nonstate actors, not nation states.

In this conservative discourse fear is --"Fear of Death and Wounds,"---what causes people to seek peace through the use of power. Fear of each other's power is the only antidote to the power struggles inherent in human desire and relations. Unable to know the outcome of actions or foresee the future, people are in constant fear of possible dangers, evil turns of event, or sudden death. In order to preserve life, we must seek peace. What has been dropped is Hobbe's underpinning talk of natural law and the social contract, in which we accept that the price one pays to leave the state of nature is renouncing the natural right to further one's interests by any means necessary. What has been retained is the idea that the sovereign State is the source of order and security in society.

So it is good to see Carmen Lawrence exploring the way fear shapes our condict in our political life. It is important issue, not because it is one way to understand Conservatism, but because Liberalism is itself fearful, in most instances, of popular power, of---for want of a better term---the power of the people. So what is Carmen Lawrence saying?

After giving many instances or examples of fear Lawrence dips into Hobbes:

Fear is arguably the most powerful human emotion. It acts as an alarm to indicate the presence of a threat and stimulates us to respond to save ourselves from damage, destruction, and death. Since fear is one of the primary human emotions, we do not need to learn how to feel fear. But we have to learn what to fear. In his definitive work, Denial of Death, Becker argued that knowledge of our own death is the source of our 'peculiar and greatest anxiety'; it's what makes us human...Fear.... is normally an adaptive response to danger, to the perception that we are not safe. When we are extremely afraid, surviving at any cost may become our top priority and we may, at that moment, be willing to do almost anything just to stay alive. Excessive fear can overwhelm rational thought.
If we are frightened enough, we will even be willing to give up our freedom.

That's Hobbes---the fear of violent death at the hands of others, not nature, is the most powerful of all passions. This fear expresses the most powerful of our desires---the desire for self-preservation. What Hobbes adds to this is that the desire for self-preservation is the sole root of all justice and morality, with all duties being derivative of the fundamental right to self-preservation.

Lawrence then explores the way the threat of fear is a familiar tool for ensuring compliance. Political fear is a political tool, an instrument of elite rule created and sustained by political leaders or activists who stand to gain something from it. She says that:

Such fear can operate in one of two ways: political leaders and elites can define what is or ought to be the principal object(s) of public fear and they can wield fear to threaten those who appear to challenge their power and status. In the first case, the selected object of fear usually does pose some level of threat, but the threat may be exaggerated or given undue emphasis when compared with other potential objects of fear. It is usually politicians who define what is worthy of attention, who mobilise public opinion and who propose methods to deal with that threat. It does not automatically follow that everybody shares the fear, but rather that it dominates the public debate and monopolises resources. Politicians' success as protectors - not so difficult when the threat is exaggerated and the remedies ill-defined - then consolidates their legitimacy and enhances their power.

This is true enough. However, this way of approaching fear undercuts Hobbes' insight. Our fear of violent death is so great that we are willing to give up some of our freedom (to further one's interest) in exchange for security and peace. It's a tacit contract.

Are not the Australian people doing that with John Howard? They are willing to give him extra power to protect them from a violent death caused by home grown terrorists? Fear is a fundamental to political power. But it is not just a tool of political governance used to discipline the governed. That is one side of it, as the other side---the governed---are also free individuals in a liberal democracy who vote for Howard because he stands for the strrong state that will do the job of protecting their right to self-preservation.

Maybe I should re-read Leo Strauss on Thomas Hobbes?

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:37 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)
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» the politics of fear from philosophy.com
I've returned to reading Carmen Lawrence's Lectures on Fear and Public Policy. I'm reading the third lecture entitled Fear and Annihilation. n this lecture she quotes from Ernest Becker's psychologically-orientated Denial of Death (1973), where it is a... [Read More]

» the politics of fear from philosophy.com
I've returned to reading Carmen Lawrence's Lectures on Fear and Public Policy. I'm reading the third lecture entitled Fear and Annihilation. n this lecture she quotes from Ernest Becker's psychologically-orientated Denial of Death (1973), where it is a... [Read More]

 
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