Governance in Dark Times: Thinking About Security After September 11 and
Hurricane Katrina
Camilla Stivers
Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs
Cleveland State University
If anybody should have been prepared for this, it should have been the federal
government.
 Henry J. Rodriguez, president of St. Bernard (LA) Parish
By the summer of 2005, the events of September 11, 2001, the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and revelations concerning Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, had all
combined to produce a palpable sense of living in dark times. Questions of homeland
security had become central to governance. Then Hurricane Katrina slammed into the
coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi, virtually destroying New Orleans and many smaller
communities. Although the question is still open as to whether federal, state, and local
government emergency response was adequate (a question that probably will never be
answered indisputably), in the minds of many Americans government had failed its most
basic responsibility.
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Commentators from both sides of the political spectrum agreed that the
devastation wreaked by Katrina had already profoundly affected American public
sensibilities. Conservative commentator David Brooks worried about the “thin veneer of
civilization, the elemental violence in human nature…the uncertain progress good makes
over evil.” His diagnosis: “It’s already clear that this will be known as the grueling
decade, the Hobbesian decade.” (2005, 11) From the liberal side, Paul Krugman charged
that the Bush administration’s “ineptitude” at dealing with the disaster “was a
consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the
public good.” (2005, A23)
Brooks’s reference to 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes was far from idle.
To Hobbes we owe the idea that providing security from internal and external threats is
the bedrock responsibility of the state. It is the one function for which even the most antigovernment commentator is ready and willing to grant the need. In Hobbes’s thinking,
security is fundamental because without it society itself is not possible. He argued that
the natural condition of humankind is war, whether actual fighting or simply the threat
that it will break out at any minute. In one of the most famous passages of Western
political theory, Hobbes says that in war, or (in his eyes the same thing) without
guaranteed protection from violence,
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
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Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger
of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and
short. [Hobbes 1985 [1651] XIII, 186]
Hobbes is widely considered to be the leading light, if not the implicit founder, of
a “realist” school in political thinking. This realism stems from Hobbes’s view of human
nature as essentially violent. Contemporary Americans view as plain common sense the
idea that when all is said and done “all men, old or young, big or small, famous and rich
or poor and unknown, have more or less equal capacities to kill each other” [Roelofs,. 45]
as well as the propensity to do so if not checked in some way. To base a theory of public
life on man’s inherent violence seems “realistic,” much safer anyway than assuming that
people are basically good and trustworthy.
The crux of realism, however, is not just assuming that people are essentially
selfish and violent, but that because of human nature, basing policy on principles of right
and wrong, just and unjust, is woolly-headed and foolishly risky. [Hanson 1984, 329]
Much better to assume the worst about people, and act accordingly. Carried to its logical
conclusion, this view excuses any kind of behavior that can somehow be justified as
necessary for security. As Jean Elshtain observes,
Realism’s bracing promise is to spring politics free from the
constraints of moral judgment and limitation…and to offer a picture of the
world of people and states as they really are rather than as we might yearn
for them to be….Realist thinkers exude the confidence of those whose
narrative long ago ‘won the war.’…[A]lteratives [are] cast into a bin
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labeled idealism that, for the realist, is more or less synonymous with
dangerous if well-intentioned naivete.” (1985, 40)
Americans are so used to interpreting political life along these Hobbesian lines
that it is often difficult to introduce the possibility of an alternative. In my experience,
this is the most difficult assumption to get public administration students to re-examine.
(For what it’s worth, nearly all my students are working in the public sector, and they
place a very high value on practicality, which is the form their realism takes.) Many are
so sure that people are basically selfish, and would be violent if left to their own devices,
that they have developed a real flair for interpreting all behavior of whatever kind in
these terms—even the sacrifice of one’s life for another. The same perspective can be
observed at work in some of the reactions to the sporadic violence that broke out in New
Orleans.
Clearly this disaster, like the events of September 11, forced most onlookers to
confront what happens when the social order is severely destabilized. Not for nothing did
Curtis Green, 38, a cook waiting in a bus line at the Superdome, level this accusation:
“Nobody has any plans. We’re depending upon them for food, water, and shelter. Who’s
in charge?” (Dao, Treaster and Barringer 2005, A13). Nevertheless, I want to suggest that
there is danger in restricting our thinking about security to this Hobbesian perspective.
The problem with not thinking more broadly about security, what we mean by it, and
why we accept the definitions we do and the policy actions that flow from them, is that
by not reflecting we overlook points of view that might lead toward steps that strengthen
the social fabric in ways we tend to neglect. A second reason is that the Hobbesian
framework makes us vulnerable, out of fear, to manipulation by people in power.
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There are at least two ways (probably more) of probing beneath the surface of
Hobbesian assumptions. One is to look in a bit more detail at what Hobbes himself said,
which I hope will reveal the down side of the bargain he laid out between subjects and
the sovereign. The other is to consider another way of thinking about security. The one I
will offer comes from Hannah Arendt, and I think brings our attention to other, perhaps
more productive, ways of thinking about security. My reflections conclude with the
respective implications of the two views for governance.
Hobbes
Hobbes grounds his theory of the state in the view that the “generall inclination of all
mankind” is “a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in
Death.”(1985 [1651]XI, 161) The quest for power is perpetual, he says, because only by
continuing to seek more power can one ensure not losing the power, and the means to
live well, that one already has. But beneath the ceaseless struggle for power is something
less obvious and therefore more interesting: man’s awareness of his mortality. This
awareness is the source of constant anxiety, “a perpetuall solicitude of the time to
come….So that man, which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, hath his
heart all day long, gnawed on by feare of death, poverty, or other calamity; and has no
repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep.” Hobbes sees “perpetuall feare” of
premature death as the real source of the human longing for security, “always
accompanying mankind in the ignorance of causes, as it were in the Dark.” Unable to
explain life and fate to himself, constantly vulnerable to violence, man seeks to be secure
and to feel secure, by agreeing with his fellow men to live under the authority of a State,
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and by turning to religion, positing some invisible cause to explain what happens to him:
“In which sense perhaps it was, that some of the old Poets said, that the Gods were at first
created by human Feare.” (1985 [1651] XII, 169-70]
Anxiety and fear, then, in the face of uncertainty and under threat of extreme
attack, lead human beings to turn to authority to calm fears and settle disputes. This
authority is most obviously embodied in law and the state’s grant of legitimacy to
exercise violence, but also in societal systems like science and religion that claim to have
final answers—to speak authoritatively. It has been observed, however, that in Hobbes’s
view the “radical uncertainty” of the human condition cannot be expunged, because what
we fear most is that to which we cannot put a name: “[A]n objectless fear is an
unresolvable fear. No one can fight or flee what he cannot identify or know. To be
resolvable, fear must attach to something; it must have an object. Thus when an object is
lacking, men will find an imaginary one.”(Blits 1989, 425)
Hobbes is aware that, if humans are violent by nature, animals are, too. It is not
our propensity to violence that makes us human, but self-awareness, language, and
culture. If we fight, if we have different ideas about the good, we can still agree with one
another not to tear each other apart. What saves us, in a sense, from the war of all against
all is that we develop institutions. In Hobbes’s view, institutions are entirely
conventional—the product of human agreements about what ends and practices to value.
Since they are our constructions, we can know them completely. We can study their
workings and develop a “civil science” that will give us the only possible certainty and
the findings of which can be taught. (Hanson 1984) By science Hobbes meant not the
type of empirical investigation familiar to us today, but something closer to linear
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rationality, yet with a scientific interest in establishing cause-effect relationships. This
kind of science enables us to start from concepts—“elements, which are Names”—and
move by orderly method to connect assertions in a chain of reasoning which leads to
certain knowledge of the consequences inherent in what we started with: “Science is the
knowledge of Consequences, and dependance of one fact upon another: by which, out of
that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like,
another time…” (1985 [1651] V, 115) Hobbes’s idea of a civil science is the seed from
which much of the study of public life has sprung, and the possibility of certain
knowledge about the workings of political and administrative institutions remains
immensely attractive to many. But two problems persist.
The first is that civil science carries a price tag that is often overlooked. In
Hobbes’s state, for the sake of security, differing opinions must be banished: politics has
been removed from the life of society and turned over to the sovereign—to Leviathan,
“sweeping away all inherited beliefs whatsoever and..replacing them with…civil
science.” (Hanson 1984, 345-6) The frontispiece to the 1651 edition of Hobbes’s classic
depicts Leviathan as a giant looming over a city, sword in one hand, scepter in the other.
The body of the giant is made up of countless tiny human beings, but the head of the
sovereign is unitary. The people make up the strength and sinews of Leviathan, but his
head does all the thinking. We have resolved our differences from one another by turning
the decision-making over to him.
In Hobbes’s state, citizens will be educated to the wisdom—for the sake of
security—of confining their ambitions to the achievement of private desires, and leaving
public choices up to authority, preeminently to Leviathan, but also to the authority of
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science. If we could not learn to do so, in Hobbes’s view, avoiding the war of all against
all would be hopeless. The threat of disorder posed by diverse opinion, which cannot be
resolved, is dealt with by getting rid of all opinion. The only political actor is the
sovereign. Civil science settles any potential dispute about the workings of institutions.
Peace is purchased at a cost paid by ordinary citizens: the cost of politics, leaving
legislation and execution up to those in authority—the monarch in Hobbes’s world, our
representatives today.
As Peter Ahrensdorf has noted, the importance of educating citizens is that it will
enlighten people by giving them
foresight—‘those prospective glasses’—to see and feel the terrible
consequences of…vanity…without having to experience them directly.
The purpose of enlightenment is to make human beings who are secure
feel insecure…The price of objective security is subjective insecurity….If
you ‘enjoy’ your security, then you will take it for granted….But if you
feel insecure, if you feel in your bones ‘the continuall fear, and danger of
violent death,’ then you will continually cherish peace and the state that
provides it. (2000, 583; emphasis added)
In Hobbes’s state, then, the cost of security is high, at least for the ordinary citizen. What
we trade for security is, first, political life, and second, the hope of feeling secure, for if
we felt secure, our willingness to turn over power to authority would diminish. We might
begin to feel that we could handle public affairs better ourselves. In Hobbes’s world, this
would be a fatal mistake, because sooner rather than later, the war of all against all would
break out. The stability of any government, for Hobbes, lies in the people’s obedience.
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Whether they live in a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a democracy, the people flourish
because they obey authority. (1985 [1651] XXX, 379-80)
In short, what Hobbes teaches us, or what his civil science is intended to teach us,
is that if we want security, if we want a sure way of achieving results, we can only have it
at the cost of our freedom, at least any positive freedom that extends beyond the bounds
of private life. Hobbes’s definition of freedom is simply not being hindered from doing
those things which a person has the “strength and wit” as well as the will to do. The
purpose of the state is to create the conditions for the exercise of this sort of private
freedom, not for the public freedom that is participation in politics. For Hobbes,
“diversity of belief and interest is politics, but…this politics is war, and that is why
diversity must be confined to the sphere of private life.” [Hanson 1984, 353) The more
security, the less freedom. It’s a zero-sum game. The influence of this way of thinking is
widespread and it goes deep.
Its influence in American public life is actually rather surprising when one
considers that Hobbes lived through the English Civil War, complete with the deposing
and beheading of the monarch. In his life, the war of all against all was not just an idea.
Granted, the United States came out of a similar revolutionary impulse. But one might
argue that the American Revolution had a positive outcome—in fact, the American civil
religion does argue this, endlessly. Strange, then, that we are so lured by Hobbesian
visions, in which revolution ends inevitably in disaster. Need we be? Is there another
way of thinking about the relationship between security and freedom?
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Arendt
Most, if not all, of what is being said and written about homeland security fits the
Hobbesian vision of a dangerous world, protection from which requires people to obey
the orders of the sovereign and confine their interests and opinions to the private sphere
of market and family. One of the clearest alternatives to this way of thinking comes from
Hannah Arendt. The turn to Arendt is fitting at this moment in history because of all
Western political theorists she wrote most directly and compellingly about “dark times.”
Arendt acknowledges the pervasiveness of the Hobbesian tradition in Western
political thinking. Since ancient times, she observes, government has been defined as “the
rule of man over man”—rule based on “the means of legitimate, that is allegedly
legitimate, violence.” (Arendt, On violence, 134) She notes that, taking their cue from
Hobbes’s comment that “Covenants, without the sword, are but words”, writers in this
tradition have insisted that the state’s power is grounded in its license to exercise violence
in order to ensure the obedience of citizen subjects and to create the conditions for the
achievement of private desires. John Stuart Mill, far from the most bellicose of these
theorists, said: “The first lesson of civilization [is] that of obedience.” (Ibid., 138) Arendt
points out that there is “another tradition and another vocabulary no less old and timehonored.” In the Athenian city-state and in ancient Rome existed concepts of public
power not grounded in the dialectic of command-obey. In the case of the Greeks it was
the idea of isonomy, or no rule; in the Roman case, the idea of a republic, or the rule of
law to which the citizenry had given its consent. In Arendt’s recounting, it was to these
sources—especially to Rome—that the American founders looked for inspiration when
they conceived of the new government.
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Admittedly, in the writings of the Founding Fathers one can find as much
Hobbesian skepticism about human nature as faith in the people’s wisdom. But Arendt is
persuasive on the existence of an alternative way of thinking about the relationship
between citizens and the state from the very earliest days on the new continent. As she
reminds us, a compact was drawn up on board the Mayflower. This compact, she argues,
reflected the Pilgrims’ fear of the state of nature in the wilderness to which they were
journeying. Just as palpable, in Arendt’s view, and even more remarkable,
is that their obvious fear of one another was accompanied by the no less
obvious confidence that they had in their own power, granted and
confirmed by no one and as yet unsupported by any means of violence, to
combine themselves together into a ‘civil body Politick’ which, held
together solely by the strength of mutual promise ‘in the presence of God
and one another,’ supposedly was powerful enough to ‘enact, constitute,
and frame’ all necessary laws and instruments of government (Arendt
1977 [1963], 167)
At the very beginning of what became the United States, according to Arendt, was
faith on the part of settlers in their common ability to craft a viable society, despite
differences of religion and class, and willingness to promise one another to do what was
required to achieve as much security and stability as possible. She argues that there were
significant differences between this mode of social contract, based on reciprocity, and the
better known type that fits the Hobbesian framework.
First, although the social contract envisioned by Hobbes was an agreement among
men, the agreement required each of them to transfer his own power to the state. It was a
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‘surrender of rights and powers to either the government or the community’ in return for
security—for protection of life and property. The contract was “I’ll consent to be ruled if
you will.”(1977 [1963], 169) In contrast, the Mayflower Compact and other agreements
reached among the colonists in the earliest days took the form of a mutual and reciprocal
binding together in order to constitute a community. As the Mayflower Compact
declared:
“We…covenant and combine ourselves together into a civill body
politick…and by vertue hearof to enacte, constitute, and frame such just
and equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, & offices, from time to
time, as shall be thought most meete & convenient for ye generall good of
ye Colonie, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.”
(Willison 1945, p. 143)
Second, the Hobbesian social contract was a “fictitious, aboriginal act” whereas
the constitutive agreements among the early settlers actually took place. We are
confronted, Arendt says, with “an event rather than a theory or a tradition.” (1977 [1963]
170, 171) Thus by the time of the American Revolution, “experience had taught the
colonists that royal and company charters confirmed and legalized rather than established
and founded their commonwealth.” The Mayflower Compact and similar agreements
were constitutions in the sense that they were founding acts, not abstractions.
It must be acknowledged that both the historical compacts and the theoretical ones
reflect noticeable roots in mutual fear. As one historian of the Pilgrims has told the story,
it was a near mutiny on the part of the indentured servants and lower-class freemen on
board the Mayflower that prompted the leaders to draft a document modeled on the
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religious covenant. (Willison 1945) Nevertheless it was a ground-breaking agreement in
every sense. But as Arendt says, the remarkable fact was that the fear of one another
reflected in the signing of the Compact “was accompanied by the no less obvious
confidence they had in their own power…to combine themselves together into a ‘civil
body Politick’…held together solely by the strength of mutual promise” (1977 [1963]
167-8). They had neither Hobbes nor Locke for conceptual guidance. A good thing, too,
perhaps, since Hobbes would have assured them that covenants “without the sword” are
worth little more than the paper they are written on.
Arendt argues that the Pilgrims had the notion that security ought to be based not
on covenants backed up by the sword but on the act of mutual promising, the assumptions
of equal standing and equal worth that lay behind it, and the common bonds that would
be forged from joining together to act in freedom. Recall that for Hobbes, freedom means
liberty from confining strictures that keep each man from seeking his own private
happiness. For Arendt, “political freedom, generally speaking, means the right ‘to be a
participator in government,’ or it means nothing.” (1977 [1963], 218)
The Mayflower Compact became the model for a number of other similar
agreements, including the Cambridge Agreement drafted by members of the
Massachusetts Bay Company before embarking to America in 1629. By the time of the
American Revolution, mutual promising as embodied in the Mayflower Compact had
become a well-established political precedent. These events had taught the Founding
Fathers the elemental truth that power (as distinguished from authority) comes from the
people. For them this was not a “fiction” but a “working reality.” (1977 [1963] 166) John
Adams gestured toward the Compact rhetorically in the years immediately preceding the
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Revolution. Adams said that New England’s founders had known “that government was a
plain, simple, intelligible thing, founded in nature and reason, and quite comprehensible
by common sense.” (Craven 1965 [1956], 29) Thomas Hutchinson’s History of
Massachusetts, published in 1764, declared that those who had migrated to America in
the mid-1630s “thought themselves at full liberty, without any charter from the crown, to
establish such sort of government as they thought proper, and to form a new state as full
to all intents and purposes as if they had been in a state of nature, and were making their
first entrance into civil society.” (Ibid., 41) No surprise, then, that the time of the
Declaration of Independence was a time of spontaneous constitution-making in all the 13
colonies, by men who saw themselves as representatives who had received their authority
from below. This grant of authority from the people was a far different phenomenon from
the conventional idea of “consent.”
Thus the early colonists were participators in governing in a way that is almost
lost to us today. This base in experience, Arendt suggests, may be why the Founding
Fathers were willing, despite their Hobbesian “realism” about human nature, to bind
themselves into a community. They knew that the act of founding, in fact any political
act, is fundamentally plural: “American faith was not at all based on a semi-religious trust
in human nature, but on the contrary, on the possibility of checking human nature in its
singularity by virtue of common bonds and mutual promises. The hope for man in his
singularity lay in the fact that not man but men inhabit the earth and form a world
between them.” (1977 [1963] 175)
Although she devoted little overt attention to the issue of security, Arendt’s
arguments make it clear that for her security lies not in first responders, armies,
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impermeable borders, and state surveillance of daily life. She would no doubt admit the
importance of such measures when a nation is confronted with disaster or imminent
threat. I suggest, though, that she would disagree with the Hobbesian emphasis so patent
in current homeland security measures: reminding people constantly of how insecure they
really are, instead of strengthening the fabric of society so people have firmer ground on
which to stand. In a recent discussion about whether security can be designed, one artist
criticized the current emphasis on surveillance (“If you see something, say something”).
He said: “I feel like the next [step] should be…‘Trust.’ Security isn’t locks on doors; you
can put a lot of these on. But it’s better to talk to your neighbor eventually.” (“Can design
prepare for disaster?” 2005, p. D10)
The basic point is this: We must find some way of strengthening the bonds
between us. This can only be done by means of countless tiny interactions in daily life,
over long periods of time, interactions that build the sense that “we are all in this
together,” so that we have some other source of security besides those promised us by the
state. The importance of weaving this fabric may be sensed by considering the unanimous
opinion of security and terrorism experts: future attacks are virtually guaranteed to occur.
The next ones may disrupt vital societal systems on a vastly greater scale than the attacks
of September 11, 2001. Being lulled by government half-measures, continuing to travel
and shop as usual, will not prepare us to meet the challenge.
In Men in Dark Times Arendt pointed toward “the disorder and the hunger, the
massacres and the slaughterers” that overwhelmed Europe in the mid-20th century. She
maintains that “until the very moment when catastrophe overtook everything and
everybody it was covered up not by realities but by the highly efficient talk and double-
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talk of nearly all official representatives, who…explained away unpleasant facts and
justified concerns.” (1968, viii) The real “darkness” for Arendt comes not because of
terrible events but when the light shed in the public realm has gone out so that people can
no longer see and talk to one another, can no longer perceive what is happening around
them. Politics, which Arendt defines as the words and deeds that are revealed when
people appear together in public space, has disappeared.
The “pillars of the best known truths,” which are also the pillars of the political
order, have collapsed, according to Arendt, and we are standing together “in the midst of
a veritable rubble heap,” bereft of the foundations of a “relatively secure, relatively
imperishable home.” Arendt argues that there is no way to build the old pillars back up:
“Restoration is never a substitute for a new foundation but will be at best an emergency
measure.” Under such conditions, people’s mistrust of government and public life
deepens inexorably. (1968, 10-11)
Hobbes and Arendt both experienced dark times—times when the most
fundamental foundations of society and the state were shaken, even collapsed. One
argued that the only safety lay in turning over the reins of power and knowledge to
unshakeable authority, in return for security and personal liberty. The other suggested
that the only hope of rekindling the light of the public world lies in each of saying, to one
another, what we deem to be the truth. Hobbes hoped that civil science would give us
unarguable truths; Arendt believed that public truth is fundamentally plural and endlessly
debatable.
Thus we have two visions of governance, one focused on authority, the other on
freedom. We are fairly well acquainted in today’s dark times with governance rooted in
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the authority of the state and the authority of science. Neither seems able to keep up with
deepening darkness. Might we not turn toward the possibility to which Arendt brings our
attention: the possibility that public authority has its roots in the people, not the concept
of a ‘people’ who have tacitly if not fictively turned over their authority to the state, but
real people in all their plurality? As Arendt once said, “not man but men inhabit the
world.” In the potential of plural human beings to understand, judge, and promise one
another lies a source of light that, though it may not be enough to vanquish the darkness,
we have yet to give a fair try.
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