Life Lessons from Hobbes

No. Aaaugh, no, no, no. No to the max. No a million times. Why am I reading this? Why did I finish this? WHY DOES ANYONE LISTEN TO HOBBES?

Hobbes is known for saying that life without gov is “nasty, brutish, and short”. The basic idea is that: humans are animals that will tear each other apart (like chimpanzees!), and so the gov has to be the Strong Man that strikes fear into the heart of everyone else and keeps us in check. And it's better if that Strong Man gov is actually, literally a strong man, like a dictator. “‘Tyrant' is just what we call leaders we don't like!” Hobbes says at one point (I paraphrase).

Ugghhh. Can you see why I'm not into this?

Not only am I not into this from the get-go, but I also found Hannah Dawson's love/hate-Hobbes thing kinda demotivating. Like, much of the book's commentary is, “Yo, everyone hates Hobbes, even his friends hated him, OK, he was kind of a douche, but ain't it true we're all jealous angermongers all the time anyway? I mean, he's right in a way, RIGHT?!” And I was just like, no. No, this doesn't jibe with my experience. But then, I wasn't a butthurt Royalist during the English Civil War. I shouldn't kid about these things, I know. The English Civil War was a serious business.

Seriously, though. I was annoyed by this at the textual level, but also the meta level. Cuz WHY OH WHY does Hobbes (still) get a platform for his ideas, but non-white, non-dead, non-men are relegated to the ghettoes of “feminism/women's studies” or “African-American studies”? The School of Life - which is basically the Alain de Botton factory (and I like Alain de Botton!) - produced this book as part of a series. De Botton/School of Life stuff is all about being kind of intellectual yet whimsical, drawing us to learn from Great Authors and Classic Philosophers via quirky, fun books/videos/lectures that make a joke about iPods and teach us about Schopenhauer. I'm down with that.

But what is starting to annoy me is School of Life's extreeeemely conservative definition of who the Great Thinkers are: i.e. it's the same dead white dudes (DWDs) that have been considered Great Thinkers by the Oxbridge crowd since forever. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and so on. I'm fine with that - IF THEIR GREAT THOUGHTS ARE INDEED GREAT. Hobbes's thoughts did not feel so great. I had to read The Leviathan in school. It was very meh. I ended up (re-)discovering philosophy in grad school, and writers like Said, Foucault and Derrida were MUCH more interesting. Why can't School of Life do a Foucault book? Or, for the love of God, a Judith Butler or Simone de Bouveoir one? Or Paul Freire? Again, why are these other authors always given some “genre” label (“post-colonial studies”), instead of being recognized as, just, Great Thinkers. We don't call Hobbes “English Civil War studies”. We normalize the DWDs and ghettoize non-DWDs. And, dammit, as Fannie Lou Hamer would say, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired about it. :/