If I'm Calvinist is God Hobbes? Part 3: Leviathan or What Happens When You Pick On Tommy Hobbes

This is part three of a three part tale.  Part 1 is here.  Part 2 is here.

I think Thomas Hobbes must have been picked on a lot at school. Tommy Hobbes getting pantsed, Tommy being hung from the flagpole by his training codpiece. You know, the normal fruits of being small, irritating and self righteous in a society of boys.

After all, in his book Leviathan he describes the natural state of man's existence as being among other things "nasty, brutish and short" which would have made perfect sense to anyone sentenced to a stretch at an English boarding school. His book is the dark, Hobbesian (I know but it is the mot juste) masterpiece of the English Enlightenment. And it clearly shows the fruits of years of brooding on human nature and its defects whilst hanging from flagpoles being pelted with rotting vegetables.

In Leviathan Hobbes makes essentially two arguments: the first that man in his natural state behaves like a bunch of adolescent English boys in school or stranded on a tropical island and if you think that's bad, you should spend a day with their sisters. His second argument is that the only way to stop the little shits from beating....I mean the only way to establish order and peace where the talented, tiny, tinny tenth can flourish is for an all powerful force to impose order from above. Sort of a Terminator Skynet version of Mr. Chips.

But Hobbes argued that the Leviathan didn't have to be a super intelligent globe spanning satellite and robot network dedicated to the enslavement of humankind. Well actually he didn't argue that but what he did argue was that Leviathan didn't necessarily need to be the 17th century version of Skynet: the Absolute Monarch ruling by Divine Right. Although he believed that it was probably the best most stable form of Leviathan until robots got invented. This was because in his view monarchy best facilitated the orderly transition of power for example, from from King "Potato" Chips I to King "Fritos" Chips II and so on.

Instead, Leviathan could be a self perpetuating oligarchy, sort of a school board on steroids who didn't monkey around with detention and suspension but was willing to expel the disorderly from their bodies with extreme prejudice. It could even be a democracy where the people create an all powerful government and then revel in its democratically endorsed persecution of themselves, sort of a Hobbesian masochist nirvana.

Regardless of form, the key attributes of Leviathan were that it be both an all powerful and self perpetuating institution. He argued that if it didn't have both of these attributes then society would suffer constant disorder interrupted by bouts of dynastic or electoral chaos. Like those he experience while hanging from flagpoles.

"Lookit:  I'm a Monster King!"

The one thing that Hobbesy - I guess I should pause for a biographical note: at the start of the 9th grade Hobbes decided that his bully problem was attributable to his lack of bling and threads that were far from being 'de rigueur' so he briefly became Home Boy Hobbesy. For his efforts he was tossed into the school pond and nearly drowned from all the damned Spanish bling.

So anyway, one thing Hobbes didn't include in his conception of Leviathan was God, or at least the Judeo Christian deity of that name. And you can understand why: aside from Golgotha or a men's communal prison shower, the English boarding school is considered to be the most God forsaken place on the planet. Reflecting on this while dodging flying produce was in fact how he developed the concept of an all powerful ruler in the first place. A Leviathan who by strange coincidence sure looked like a cross between God and Tommy Hobbes which is why his selfie is on the cover of the early editions of his book. On the cover, I might add, as a 1,000 foot tall giant King. Who says that academics are modest?

Well not me and certainly not Hobbes because between their obsession over their own point of view in their area of expertise (and damned near everything else) their towering rage at the other boffins for denying their peculiar brand of 'truth', contempt for the the hoi polloi who couldn't (as they would say in their quaint vernacular) 'give a shit' and their utter estrangement from what was then called 'ye olde reality based village' making one of these cats or even worse a sackfull of them Leviathan was an incredibly life shortening proposition. Think Robert Mugabe crossed with Robspierre and Pol Pot all on a toasted Paul Krugman bun. Yuck.

And this is where Hobbes and Calvin parted ways. Hobbes thought it would be swell to ruled by a crowd that called all the shots, couldn't be deposed and had a vigorous if obscure fantasy life. Mind you, he was fine with religion so long as it was civic and national in nature being run by and for Leviathan. In this he was a real Mussolini: 'everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state'. Although not being Italian he didn't have Il Duce's fashion sense or penchant for high drama much less his stable of on-call starlets.

Calvin by contrast was God's man. He had seen Mr. Big in the Vatican and knew that combining lawyers, guns and money with an absolutist religion was a recipe for one helluva toot followed by a continental scale hangover. His definition of a good Leviathan was one with powers limited by God's commands ideally interpreted by a brilliant judge. Namely himself. Now mind you this didn't make him a liberal but distrust of Mr. Bigs and the fear that if there was only one slot Luther or Zwingli might get in and if he had to listen to Luther's plodding prose one more time or sing 'A mighty fortress is our God' when it was obvious that God never ever played defence he'd probably go full Torquemada on someone. Preferably Luther.

Now where was I? So anyway this resentment and fear of the other guy drove Calvin who was a theocrat at heart to support republican governance. Limited by God's Constitution so to speak. Which is how an exiled Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey became more American than a Brit with the Kick Ass name Tommy Hobbes. Which just goes to show that ideas and faith matter more than putting yourself on the front of your book as a 1000 foot monster king.

Whoah! Settle down little scientists! A tale of Ptolemaic, Copernican, Newtonian and Einsteinian Denialism

Wrote this in my snow cave phase.

There has been a lot of loose talk thrown around about people being 'deniers' of this or that - but principally of the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming.  Whatever your view on that subject it seems to me we should have some humility about what we think we know given how often and far our understanding of reality changes not to mention all those who have been persecuted for holding the 'wrong' views. This tongue in cheek review of celestial mechanics and physics hopefully helps remind how temporary and contingent certainty and settle science really are.  Or at least makes some of you smile.

Bow wow Ow!

Before Ptolemy came along with his really stupid name, the dominant theory of celestial mechanics was that stars were God's 'daisy chain' and every time an Angel shed a wee tear, another one was 'born'. Indeed the science had been 'settled' on this "Wodehousian construct" for millennia. But Ptolemy disagreed and for his insolence was branded a Daisy Chain 'denier' by the leading scientific bodies of ancient Egypt - dogs. Or technically Mann-Dogs. Usually in such a 'progressive' age the denier of scientific orthodoxy would have disappeared from the debate without a trace, presumably into some Pharoah's tomb despite the fact that unlike the Pharoah in question the denier was not technically 'dead'. But Ptolemy was fortunate to be born in Greek Alexandria when the Romans ran the show and the Romans, not being particularly fond of traditional Egyptian religion, sent some of their legionnaires wielding rolled up Sunday Papyri to persuade the pooch priests of their error thereby establishing new 'settled' science.

This science stayed nice and settled for a long time with only the occasional Ancient Academy of Sorcerers and Scientists beheading or crucifixion to see off the odd denier. The theory even survived the rise and fall of the bacchanalian 'party hearty' theories of the Romans when so many established truths became a bit fuzzy and unstable, particularly in the morning. Even the Huns bought the Ptolemaic line although they couldn't pronounce, much less spell it, however, as was typical, the Ostragoths were ostracized

Oh poop!  I'm Passe.

And then a nearsighted priest named Copernicus, a Pole who was so blind that he spent all his time looking through spyglasses up at the sky rather than where the heck he was going - comes up with this crazy idea that 'Earth you know, is just this planet' upon which the scientific, priestly establishment blew hot steaming chunks of anathema. Because the 'wee' earth theory was clearly even crazier the old 'wee' angel tear model of the universe. The Ptolemaic establishment was able to see off such ridiculous denialism with only the occasional singed denier so long as the theory was presented in Polish or in Copernicus' execrable and oh so declasse Polack-Latin. But once the Italians - who believe it or not were the 'go-to' hepcats of high tech back then - could decipher for the Pope the Pole's priestly patter Ptolemy's period of planetery preeminnce was...passe.

Tetherballs.  It's all tetherballs these days.

A chappie named Galileo Galilei was instrumental in unsettling the Ptolemaic consensus. It seems at that time a lot of your hipper, more dialed in priests and laymen in Italy surreptitiously bought Copernicus' theory. Particularly after Galileo illustrated the theory in tetherball terms to a Curia that was mad for the sport. But the times being what they were and Polacks being, you know, Polish they were reluctant to risk their 'street cred' and A list status just because someone from Cracow was right about reality. They needed a sign from above that the Copernican construct was 'cool'. Particularly from the Pope who for various obscure reasons like having signing authority for all of God's money for the entire Earth was important to the very hip. But the Pope being very Right Wing (after all, he works for God) was reluctant to accept the new idea and risk his awesome Pope-gig. So Galileo 'took the fall' for ‘team tetherball’ so to speak, getting brought up on charges of Ptolemaic denialism and a prejudicial preference for polish pronunciation and for his effrontery was exiled to Siena. Siena. The second city of Tuscany. The same Tuscany where the Tuscan state fair was held every year and instead of Hog Husbandry the Future Farmers of Tuscany held competitions in vintage wine and cheese making. Awesome wine and cheese that goes great with a mushroom risotto. Apparently exiling Galileo to Tuscany was like sentencing him to six months hard leisure at the Santa Barbara Biltmore Spa and Resort. In effect the Pope was saying - without saying so out loud - 'two thumbs up, way up'.

Oh Gally!

So Copernicus' new theory won. But all of the credit and resulting equity upside was captured by his Italian VC the heretofore obscure firm of Galileo, Borgia & Pope. So Galileo had it made: the top new scientific theory in the world, Papal sponsorship for his fund and its rather 'sharp' dealing, the Borgia's on your side which made mealtime so much less fraught and all the time in the world to work on, I mean paint this hot, I mean intriguing new subject nicknamed “Mona” Lisa and boy was Galileo going to try. And all because he knew his tetherball.

And then the protestants blew it all to hell.

I don't care a fig about Newton or his stupid theory

Specifically one protestant: Isaac Newton was an Englishman who taught Lord knows what (honest! - he taught theology) at Cambridge while he was rethinking the foundations of the universe, inventing his own new branch of mathematics and dodging falling apples. The Cambridge establishment didn't really know what to make of this fruit fleeing wunderkund who supposedly discovered that 'apples fall from trees' which any bloody idiot could have figured out with out calling it a sodding "Principia".  But an English win is an English win no matter how obscure the sport so "jolly good shows" all around!

Watch out! Apples!

But imagine the reaction of GB&P (GG having died while - reportedly - trying to help Lisa live up to her nickname) when they got the news that Newton had discovered the secret to celestial mechanics and in doing so had just happened to invent both classical physics and the calculus thereby wrecking their CoperniCo copyrights. I imagine that they had the same reaction that college freshmen do when they come face to face with The Calculus for the first time: "What the fuck? I mean what the fucking fuck?” Which is of course the classic Anglo Saxon reaction to being asked to undertake any intellectual exercise: beery prose filled to brim with all the nuance and subtlety of an English Football hooligan.

But GB&P being more Romano-Parmesan than Anglo-Saxon responded with a more nuanced, Machiavellian manner:  Che cazzo? Voglio dire che il cazzo cazzo?  (Everything sounds sexier in Italian).  After the Romano-Parmesanisms were done they began working the 'effing protestant' angle.  Which was the novel theory that protestants weren't just hell bent sinners but in fact hell bent thinkers and they pointed to the calculus with all of its inexplicable sigmas and functions and integrals and differentials as just the sort of incomprehensible gobbledygook that Satan would produce if he wanted to confuse the faithful.  After all, counting on those Anglican bastards to pass you in calculus could lead to a serious priest shortage.

So they worked the ad-anglican angle hard while feverishly casting about for their own Newtonian or more accurately, Salamandraeian champion - someone "of the faith" who could do the voodoo that only Newton could doodoo so well.  And try as they might they kept coming up snake eyes - for a while they thought that Tycho Brahe - the noseless Nostradamus of the north and his loopy Tychonic system (honest, it was based on geometric loops) was going to save them but in the end they had to admit that all of the cazzo calculus crap made perfect celestial predictions and that the ingelese interloper had it right.  What really threw them was that Leibnitz - another protestant had also invented the calculus at the same time and all of a sudden it seemed like protestant inventors of new branches of mathematics and physics were becoming as common as fleas on a Pope and they needed to change the subject pronto.  So they relaunched that perennial favorite the Inquisition and a good time was had by all.

Nobody expects a relaunch of the inquisition.

So anyway, Isaac Newton became Sir Isaac Newton and went on to make exciting discoveries in optics and fig filled biscuits and died a happy Cambridge Don as opposed to a Cambridge Ike as one would have reasonably expected. And Cambridge really dug their Distinguished Don and lorded him over Oxford who at the time was trying to present Tycho Brahe's fake nose as a major biomedical innovation and not having much luck. And so things went on like this for a couple centuries - Cambridge on top, then Oxford, and so on and so forth until the Swiss Patent Service inexplicably butted into a game heretofore reserved for tweedy chaps with tenure at snotty English universities.  

But Albert Einstein was a clerk of a different...patent classification, I guess.  Einstein had the odd bit of trouble differentiating the German umlaut from the English colon which made him a lousy patent clerk - second class.  But that patent weakness happened to be the very same psycho-spacio inversion that allowed him to visualize the space-time continuum.  And as a result of his disability he came up with a couple theories that to be frank, were seriously bent.  For example according to Einstein when you are standing still and I pop you one right in the kisser your kisser is moving relative to my hand even as I am moving my hand to hit your kisser which is ridiculous since you're the one who falls like a sack of potatoes, not me.  Or the idea that the faster I run, the heavier I get - I mean you could go into any Bernese bar and grill and see guys sitting on their ass getting more massive by the minute.  And then there are all these examples with sliced bread in them, what in the hell does sliced bread have to do with the space time continuum?  Yet the calculus and all of these physics Poindexters say that I shouldn't trust my lyin' eyes and if I do then I've become the science denier.

Ja, I'm bent!

Well in their defense Einstein made some very specific predictions about what would happen to sunlight when it whipped around the moon during an eclipse - and the Cambridge Dons (presumably named after the renamed Newton) verified that yes, the Jew postman is right while still cutting him socially and excluding him from their clubs and daughters.  Even Oxford didn't want him so he had to go to Berlin to get a real college job and there were Nazis there and everyone knows that Nazis were serious Jew deniers.

You meant the only way I can win this war is to use Jew Science?   Well then I just won't win it. So there.

You didn't have to be an Einstein to figure out that doing the Jew Genius gig in downtown Hitlerville was not going to work out so he sent away for a job to this little Correspondence College that did a lot of IQ testing of high school students in Princeton, New Jersey.  Now Princeton, being out of the mainstream of, well, practically everything had a hard time fitting Einstein into their evaluation framework which principally relied on two aptitude tests that they had developed:  the DIG (Dad is graduate) and DIM (Dad is millionaire) tests.  However they were trying increase their reputation with crazy intellectuals and there was absolutely no one who said 'crazy intellectual' louder when you looked at him than Einstein so they bunged him into a building with all the other big name has beens.

I say 'has been' because almost as soon as Einstein got settled, Nils Bohr began to bore right into the old boy with his Quantum reality routine which was packing them in throughout non-Nazi Europe.  Typically he'd wait until his laureateness had just woken up from a nap and would run in and show him the little 'quanta circus' in his hand - it was like a flea circus only much smaller.  So he'd stand there claiming that there were at least 50,000 quantum lions standing on photons in his hand and didn't herr Doktor see them?  Right there.  "I  understand that as you get older you can't visualize new concepts or see Quantum circuses anymore but look - did you see that!  That photon went through both the north and south entrance gates at the same time.  Isn't that incredible!!!"

And what was Einstein going to say?  That the greatest physicist of all time didn't 'get' quantum mechanics?  "Vell, ja......I.....guess"  So Einstein, swallowed Bohr's boring line of quantum hooey and set out to come up with a universal theory of everything.  Which was a mistake.  As Timothy Leary showed much later at Harvard a universal theory of everything is only achievable through the use of very powerful illegal drugs and only lasts for a few minutes until the nice men in the white suits come to take you to the place that will make all of those nasty spiders go away.

I guess it was just as well that Einstein didn't go the Timothy Leary route because what with Hitler cutting up in Europe and the Japanese becoming loud deniers of western civilization much less science, it was more important for him to persuade the Americans to figure out how to build this nuclear bomb thingy before Hitler got one.  Or as Einstein would say:  "Ve must build ze big Boom!"  Only Einstein kind of slow rolled the whole program for a while because he realized that if the Americans got the 'boom' they'd just drop it on Berlin and Einstein and the missus still had a great little cottage in Wannasee that was actually on a lake rather than a see and they didn't want it incinerated.  As it turned out the Nazi's collapsed on their own accord so the cottage didn't need to be nuked after all but after the Cossacks who billeted there got through with it it might as well have been.

Ze big boom!

But that just meant that the western civilization and science denying Japanese were going to get nuked.  Which taught them a thing or two.  Nagasaki on that, you bloody deniers.

OK, I'll admit that last sentence is in rather bad taste, I don't think that people should die simply because they disagree with my choices or that I should gloat at their discomfort (well, death really).  But given the rhetoric being bandied about today one could infer that the advocates of the catastrophic AGW line are a lot closer to 'nuke-em and gloat' territory than we'd like to believe.  They seem to be straying to a 'utilitarian' 'logic', which argues that 'deniers' are destroying the world and must be shut up - for the greater 'good' you see.  Aside from that ridiculous totally unsupported assertion of "fact", the willingness of the Enviro left to dehumanize those that disagree with them is frightening.  They're trying to turn us into Mann-Dogs.

I guess so that they can thwack us with their rolled up but oh so recycled Sunday papyri.