The limits of conscience

On reading Hobbes's Leviathan

Hello friends! For the first time in six months I am actually reading a bona fide Great Book from my actual Great Books list—Hobbes's Leviathan.

Longtime readers will know my favorite part of cracking open a GB is discovering all the weird things that are actually in the book (versus what is supposed to be in the book). In the case of my old friend Levi, I knew that this book was a justification of absolutism: the idea that the sovereign authority, however it is constituted, has the absolute power to order the lives of citizens in the commonwealth, even to the point of forcing them to act against their conscience.¹

But the structure of Leviathan is both impressive and pretty bonkers. It argues from first principles. Which is to say, it begins with a discussion of epistemology: where does knowledge come from? How do we know things? According to Hobbes, knowledge comes in two parts: science and understanding. The latter consists of impressions regarding what actually exists in the universe; the former consists of making careful definitions and reasoning outwards from those definitions. The understanding is infallible: you know exactly what you've seen and experienced. But when we use our understanding to create words, we fall into error, because then we can combine these words in strange ways that give rise to nonsensical concepts.

As Hobbes puts it:

Nor is it possible without letters for any man to become either excellently wise, or (unless his memory be hurt by disease, or ill constitution of organs) excellently foolish. For words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever, if but a man

In other words, if you use words as your tools, you can be wise, but if you take them on authority, you'll be foolish.

I haven't finished the book, so I'm not gonna go into the whole thing, but at its core Leviathan is an attack on conscience. Which is to say, an attack on private knowledge. I like this! I find it fascinating! Because, to me, the whole purpose of reading the Great Books is that they help you shore up and develop your stock of private knowledge! I strongly admire a person who has a clear understanding of their own principles, and who does not allow society, nor even their sovereign, to shake those principles.

But it is a well-understood truth that liberalism is not really compatible with a strong belief in private knowledge. Because liberalism prizes the sanctity of the system of government above all else: we are allowed to disagree, even disagree vociferously, because we understand that our disagreement has guardrails--we will not disagree to the extent of undermining the system as a whole. The modern liberal not only lives within the Leviathan, but chooses to live in the Leviathan—wholeheartedly endorses the Leviathan—so long as the sovereign authority is understood to reside in majority opinion, rather than in the will of the sovereign.

It's a very uncomfortable belief. When are you justified in upsetting the applecart? The doctrine of civil disobedience—nonviolent resistance to authority—was developed precisely as a means of saying, well, there are ways of resisting sovereign authority without destroying it. But the natural rejoinder is...are we just being played for suckers? Why should we do sovereign authority's work for it? Why should we take violence, per se, off the table?

The answer is not something you can really derive from first principles (though I am sure Hobbes will try). It's more of a practical answer, which is that the dissolution of sovereign authority is an awful thing. Even relatively less-violent civil wars, like the English Civil War, American Revolution, or Latin American Wars of Independence, had awful death tolls. Modern civil wars are even worse: in their protracted violence, they render life a living hell. Look at Syria: nothing Bashar Assad could do would be worse than the anarchy that followed the Syrian Civil War. Once you unbottle the genie of violence, anything can happen, and the results are likely to be pretty bad.

I'm not 100 percent interested in the political science aspect of this discussion. My understanding is that there are many ways for a populace to put pressure on its government without resorting to revolutionary violence, and most governments, even dictatorships, cannot rule totally without the consent of their people. Which is to say, there are natural guardrails that limit government power, although obviously there are a number of configurations in which majorities are able to oppress minorities to varying degrees.

I'm more interested is the deep distrust of private knowledge. It's certainly occurred to me a number of times that the issue of transgender rights hinges on the idea of private knowledge. Transphobes have a deep, private intuition that trans women are not women; trans women have a deep intuition that they are. Both sides try to use science to support their claims, but if private intuitions weren't in play, there'd really be no discussion.

Similarly, arguments I make in favor of conscience are often used, quite eloquently, by reactionaries who argue that their conscience is violated by, for instance, treating a woman who's had an abortion, or continuing the medication of a trans woman who's in the hospital for a car accident.

In all these cases, there's no argument that these people do indeed possess this private knowledge. Transphobes are deeply, deeply offended by the idea that someone might think a trans woman is a woman, and it seems to cause them deep distress when their opinion isn't validated. The same is true for trans women, who experience deep distress at being outed and questioned and harassed and misgendered.²

We try to untangle this ball with psychology. I've seen a few articles by folks on the right be like, "The left-liberal American woman hates her own womanhood, that's why she embraces trans rights." Funnily enough, I've seen arguments by trans people that make the same claim, "The right-centrist American woman hates her own womanhood, that's why she rejects trans rights." If we can erase disagreement and reduce it to pathology, then there's a sense that one side will be the obviously correct one and the other side will be clearly in the wrong.

But determining positive values is the essence of sovereign authority. People are free to have their own private opinion about gender, but the sovereign authority is what decides which of those opinions will have governing power (i.e. which opinion will determine who gets to use the bathroom, play sports, get medical treatment, etc). This brings us back to the contradictions of liberalism: you're free to believe anything, but you're not entitled to have that belief enshrined into the law. However, if belief is only a private matter, then it's not really belief. The essence of a belief is that you think it should govern the world and govern how people live. To believe in the idea that everyone should be able to do their own thing--that is itself a belief that the sovereign authority is imposing upon its citizens.

---

Immanuel Kant outlined one solution in his seminal essay "What is Enlightenment?" Kant was careful to make a separation between man's private function and his public function. In a man's public function, he might, for instance, be a priest, and he is required to profess the faith of his denomination. But in his private function, as a writer, speaker or thinker, he is free to advance his own beliefs. When a person has a job or a social role, they become a tool of the sovereign authority, and there is no personal recourse to conscience. But in one's private role, as a thinker or a speaker, your duty is to the truth, and it is a moral crime to falsify your beliefs.

This is why so many old-school liberals have trepidations about the idea that professors or writers should become advocates. It is precisely because we operate in the world of ideas that we have so much freedom. The moment you're operating in the world of real politics, you have to worry: am I destabilizing this system? Am I abrogating my social role? What gives me the right to impose my beliefs on my students or on this organization?

But the idea that you should give up even an iota of your moral decision-making power is pretty anathema today. Like, what if you're a clerk in Nazi Germany—should you peacefully go along and tinker with the machinery of death, just because it's your job?

There are certainly times and places where groups of people resisted their sovereign authority, often to great effect. Look at Bulgaria, where the government signed a treaty with Nazi Germany where they agreed to deport their Jewish population to the camps, but the church and several prominent politicians spoke out against the deportation, with the result that the Jewish population of Bulgaria was saved. Was it their duty to assist with the agreement lawfully entered-into by the sovereign authority?

It's just impossible to put the kinds of guardrails on conscience that we want. We cannot make it entirely toothless, or we free sovereign authority to do whatever it would like, whenever it likes. At the same time, if people hold too tightly to their conscience, they risk causing catastrophe. The creation of the notion of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" was an effort to determine a category of actions that no sovereign could ever lawfully choose: if your sovereign engages in war crimes or crimes against humanity, then you can do whatever you want to resist them. But obviously this has become murky, and now the idea of war crimes, as separate from war itself, has become unbearably opaque. When does war turn into war crime? When does pro-choice become forcing doctors to allow the murder of infants? Ultimately these become more questions that can only be determined by...sovereign authority.

I don't really have an answer. I'm deeply offended by right-wing conscience arguments, which I regard as meretricious and cruel, just as I'm deeply moved by left-wing appeals to conscience, which I regard as brave and heartfelt. I think in my private role, as a thinker, I'm willing to admit the truth of many critiques of liberalism, even as, in my public role, as a teacher, mentor, voter, etc, I regard those critiques as absolutely inimical to the flourishing of the citizens of the United States.

---

Ten or fifteen of you found me this week because of an article on LitHub about how literary fiction tends not to discuss money.

I’m not particularly moved by considerations of fairness—most literary writers come from privileged backgrounds. That’s true today, and it was true in Austen’s time as well, and I don’t see it ever changing (even in the Soviet Union, it was rare for a successful writer to be from a peasant or proletarian background). But I do think this silence about money seriously harms the work on an artistic level.

Leaving Atocha Station, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, and Detransition, Baby are amongst the best and most honest novels of the last decade, and yet these stories are seriously compromised by silence about money. In the attempt to have it both ways—to tell stories about moneyed people without mentioning money itself—the authors end up writing tales that don’t make any psychological sense. Characters become hysterical over subjects that seem not to merit worry, and they don’t worry about things that ought to be of great concern.

Money can’t be expunged from the text, it can only be repressed, and in being repressed, these novels become the site of a neurosis that can be endlessly discussed but never quite explained.

---

As always, I must shill my upcoming literary debut: The Default World. I'm marginally more honest about money in it than most literary novels are, but my book still tends to speak in code. The book is pitched as a satire (I guess?) of wealthy Bay Area burner types. I certainly pitched it to publishers and agents that way, so that's fair enough. But really I think it's about the conflict between freedom and community. The burners want limitless freedom, but they also want to be enclosed by the snug embrace of community. And yet community is inherently restrictive, inherently involves dealing with people you dislike, and that’s just not something the burners are prepared for. Similarly, they want complete sexual acceptance, but they only want to be around people they’d like to fuck. Obviously these goals are incompatible.

This is something my protagonist understands that her friends don't. I know many readers will dislike Jhanvi, but I wrote her as something of an ideal: a person who lives honestly, and who understands that her own choices have rendered her an outcast, and who, in some ways, revels in that freedom.

Between me selling the book and the book coming out, the anti-woke film / book has become a thing (a la American Fiction). I suppose my book loosely falls into this category, but honestly I don’t find woke liberals and left-wingers to be particularly upsetting—if anything I find them a bit charming, and I think that comes through in my book.

If anyone out there reviews books and wants an advance copy let me know--I have SO many.

Event schedule:

• Saturday, May 4th - YALLwest in Santa Monica

• Thursday, May 30th - Bay Area Launch at the Ruby @ 23rd and Bryant in SF

• Thursday, June 6th - New York launch at P&T Knitwear

1. The term “leviathan” is drawn, of course, from the Book of Job, which is the original defense of sovereign authority against conscience. Readers of the Book of Job will remember, I’m certain, how God wins his argument in the end against Job. During the bulk of the book, Job’s three friends plead with him not to foreswear belief in God, and Job rebuts all of them. Then God comes down himself and is basically like “Who are you to question me?”

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said,
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.

This goes on for many verses! It’s an absolute harangue. Like chapters and chapters of it, God saying stuff like, can you make the eagle lay an egg or make a unicorn bow down to you, etc. Finally he says:

Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?
Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn?
Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee?
Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?

And Job basically gives up:

I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee.
Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.
Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me.
I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.
Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.

2. I don’t think the pro-trans and anti-trans positions are equally backed-up by the evidence, or that the harms to both parties are equal in any real sense. Obviously I believe that both logic and justice lie on one side rather than the other—but at the end of the day, the people who disagree with me also think that logic and justice are on their side as well!