Su Fang Ng makes (I think) a pretty compelling case that that Hobbes ‘rejects the story of Lucretia’s rape as the foundational myth of Rome in favour of the wolf suckling Remus and Romulus, which represents a more monarchical aetiological myth of state formation.’ According to the story, Lucretia, a Roman noblewoman, is raped by a king’s son named Tarquin (a name I had come across before as the kind of thing a stereotypically posh British person might name their child, which it turns out is extremely fucked up thing to do) and kills herself. This suicide prompts a rebellion amongst the Roman aristocracy, following which Rome ceases to be a kingdom and becomes instead a republic. It makes sense that Hobbes, obsessed with making sure that there’s ultimately one person with the power to decide, and much more worried about the threat of political dissolution than he is about abuse of sovereign power, would be less interested in this kind of origin story than he is in the one where two brothers, more or less identical, fight to the death to decide which one gets to be the decided. But reading Ng made me wonder whether a similar argument could be made about Augustine.
According to The City of God, the story of Romulus and Remus encapsulates the truth of the earthly city: a society in which everyone loves themselves above everything else, and which conflict emerges out of pride, selfishness, and the desire for mastery. Augustine contrasts the story of the warring Roman twins with the biblical story of Cain and Abel, which for Augustine exemplifies not the war of all against all which characterises the earthly city but the conflict between the heavenly city — Abel, a pilgrim — and the earthly city — Cain, who exemplifies ‘the devilish envy that the wicked entertain towards the good for no other reason than that they are good, whereas they themselves are evil.'(15.6).
Lucretia does appear in The City of God, not as an avatar of republican revolution but as a thought experiment on the ethics of sexual violence and of self-murder (Augustine rejects the suggestion that women should be held morally responsible for their violation by others, but also, because he can’t just be kind for once in his life, does insist that to kill oneself in the wake of violation is to add ‘to the crime of others a crime of [one’s] own’ (1.19)); and then briefly in a later discussion of how the Roman kings met their ends which seems to me (on an admittedly superficial reading) intended to demonstrate that the fortunes of Roman leaders should not be straightforwardly understood as indicative of divine judgment: in service, that is, of Augustine’s broader insistence that the declining fortunes of the Western Empire can not be laid at the feet of Christianity’s rising influence.
Thomas Hobbes’ biographer Arnold Rogow writes that, “Hobbes … may never have loved a woman, but no one has ever hinted that he was homosexual” (Radical in the Service of Reaction, 66). Even if that was true at the time Rogow was writing (1986), I’m sure it can’t possibly be true any more; but I spent some time digging around Hobbes scholarship over the summer (with the generous support of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies) and came up empty-handed. Let me then be, perhaps, the first person to suggest it: I think it’s possible that Hobbes was gay. Here are some of my reasons:
As Rogow notes, Hobbes never married and was described by his biographer John Aubrey as not ‘a woman-hater … but … even in his youth, (generally) temperate, both as to wine and women’ (66).
One of Hobbes’ early pieces of writing was a Latin poem about a cavern in Derbyshire called the Devil’s Arse (‘partially so-called because the rocks supposedly look like the buttocks of a person bending over. The rocks are enormous and between them is a very deep cavern, in which the sun never shines’), in which he also discussed another local cave called “Poole’s Hole”. (A P Martinich, Thomas Hobbes, 73)
Rogow writes, ‘References to human anatomy in the Peak do not establish that Hobbes and the second earl shared an interest in the more intimate physical aspects of life, but we may doubt that Hobbes would have included these references had the earl, for whom the poem was written, be displeased by them’ (71) — the earl here is Hobbes’ student as well as his employer, and also a close companion. Of the earl, Hobbes writes in a. poem full of bawdy innuendos the following lines: “Magnificent, not lavish, still he spends/His riches freely, and amongst his Friends’ (73).
Rogow suggests that these images of holes and caves haunted Hobbes for the rest of his life and that the Devil’s Arse may have inspired Hobbes’ last reported words before his death: ‘I shall be glad to find a Hole to creep out of the world at’ (71).
Hobbes was convinced that the secret to a long life was ridding the body of excess moisture, and so as an old man he would play vigorous games of tennis or go for long walks to work up a sweat and then, according to Aubrey, “give the servant some money to rub him” (Brief Lives, 165).
Also, apparently in quest of a less moist life, Hobbes would lie in bed at night singing ‘prick songs’ (Rogow, 226). Here ‘prick’ refers to a particular form of musical notation, but also, I mean, come on
Aubrey also recounts a story told to him by Hobbes about a time that Hobbes was hired as a tutor to the young Duke of Buckingham, according to Hobbes a man of ‘great naturall parts’ and a quick wit, who was however slow to comprehend Hobbes’ instruction; this, it transpired, was because he was “at mastrupation (his hand in his Cod-piece)” (Rogow, 153).
At the heart of Hobbes’ political theory is an (unusual!) insistence that authority has no gender, that the distinctions between men and women are overwhelmingly artificial rather than natural, and that the same therefore goes for any societal norms around sexual behaviour
Obviously none of this is conclusive. But I do think that it’s at least worth both asking the question, and also wondering why it is that the question has not been more seriously considered (in the process of writing this post I began to wonder whether Rogow — a psychoanalyst and close friend of Gertrude Stein — was, in fact, hinting at the possibility of Hobbes’ homosexuality). I do think it’s symptomatic of a general gap between political theological readings of Hobbes which tend to be better at thinking about the symbols, metaphors and underlying metaphysics of Hobbes’ thinking but tend to ignore questions of gender and sexuality, and the feminist scholarship of Hobbes which tends to a somewhat literalist reading of Hobbes which tends to assume that his ideas about gender can primarily be inferred from the times when he explicitly discusses gender and not say, his ideas about snakes and frogs and rivers of blood. Rogow says, when discussing Hobbes in relation to Bacon, that both expressed ‘more than a hint of misogyny’. I’ve not finished the Rogow book so it’s possible I am missing something, but what I’ve read so far suggests that it is not so much that Hobbes — who worked for women, left money to women, and could imagine a world in which women ruled over men — hated women as that he was just more personally interested in men.
As I have been writing my posts on the relationship between Trump and neoliberalism, a feeling of futility has sometimes set in. Who cares about this abstract question amid all the wreckage he has already created? My first response to such a demand for practicality is to insist that it is always better to understand than not to understand. To the extent that my analysis is accurate, it’s important because it’s true. And that truth may lead to a strategic gain, insofar as viewing Trump as a big dumb continuation of neoliberalism might reduce the leftist temptation to think “maybe we can use this” or, worse, “maybe he has a point.”
On a personal level, though, part of the reason I am focusing on such large-scale questions is simply that I have done a poor job as a day-to-day commentator or prognosticator. I wrote shortly after the election that it seemed fanciful that Trump would attempt to cancel future elections. Now it turns out that his opening gambits were to attempt to invalidate the Fourteenth Amendment and the separation of powers, which makes extreme outcomes like that much more imaginable. At the same time, however, the Democratic refrain that democracy is in peril seems to remain unconvincing to the general population. Trump’s approval ratings are favorable, seemingly precisely because of the actions he is taking. He won the election, he seems to be taking bold action to fulfill his promises, and most people like it — where’s the threat to democracy?
The problem, as ever, is the lack of clarity about what democracy is and why it’s valuable. And part of the confusion comes from the tendency to conflate “democracy” with “the US Constitutional system,” which was avowedly set up in order to tame and even frustrate democratic ambitions to the extent possible. To the extent that Democrats are simply calling for a return to the conventional constitutional order, I would certainly prefer that to the current situation. But that order is sclerotic and unsustainable. Indeed, many of the kinds of actions that Trump is doing now are ones that I would have liked to see Obama or Biden do — strong-arming the Senate instead of deferring to their stupid anti-democratic customs, or simply ignoring things like the debt ceiling. I’m even on record as saying that Obama should have refused to acknowledge Trump’s Electoral College technicality and begun the transition with Hillary.
What’s frustrating about this situation is that this final presidential push was bound to happen. The current system does not fulfill popular demands, by design, and there’s no reason to expect a society to tolerate that indefinitely. And unfortunately, the presidency is the only institution other than Congress with anything like a democratic mandate, and it is definitely the only institution that can directly do stuff. The shame is that it didn’t happen under a president who wanted to do good, instead of a president who wants to do nothing but harm. And that stems in part from our old friend neoliberalism, whose “best practices” do not include bold state initiatives. But it also stems from the older generation of Democrats’ pathetic Boomer reverence for the Constitution that never evolved past childish Cold War truisms. And now that it’s tumbling down, we’re all being asked to hope that the system that frustrated popular demands for a generation and gave us Trump will somehow stop Trump.
There is nonetheless a deep irony here, because Trump’s rampage against the constitutional order is obviously undercutting the sources of presidential power and even of state legitimacy. One reason that the executive branch is able to do stuff is that it knows stuff — indeed, it provides the standard statistics that underwrite all other public and private economic activity and much else besides. By destroying that basic state capacity, Trump is destroying any reason for citizens to trust the government about anything, unless they happen to trust the current holder of the presidency. It becomes pretty difficult to run a society — even a paranoid police state determined to carry out the biggest forced population transfer in human history — without that baseline of trust. It also becomes pretty difficult to know whether you’ve succeeded in achieving your goals and to convince others that you have.
Low-information voters are still only seeing the broadest themes in Trump’s actions. He said he’d cut foreign aid, which most voters falsely believe to take up a huge portion of the budget, and he’s doing so. He said he’d appoint Musk to head up an effort to aggressively cut waste in the federal government, and he’s doing so. He said he’d use tariffs to strong-arm other countries, and he’s doing so. The self-undermining and nonsensical nature of many of those actions, much less their long-term consequences for the constitutional order, are seemingly not on people’s radar. But if he continues to “succeed,” many people will be rudely awakened to the fact that the government seemingly has no ability to benefit them in any way — and whether that realization hits while Trump is president or after he dies peacefully in his sleep surrounded by his friends and family, it will be a major, probably fatal blow to the legitimacy of the system.
It might even be the kind of things where particular states or regions start asking why the federal government even exists, and then the great “national divorce” so desired by conservatives might actually happen. And then we might all recall, too late, that “national divorce” is a euphemism for civil war — which, as everybody knows, is the very worst thing that can happen to a society. So now I’ve maxed out the negativity of my predictions about Trump and no longer have to worry about being made to look naive by the actual course of events.
At the AAR this past weekend, Beatrice Marovich hosted a discussion about the decline of theology. Eventually, this evolved into a discussion of the decline of theology blogging, which was where many of us had cut our teeth intellectually — and, of course, where many of us met in the first place. I have been processing this conversation over the past few days and wanted to write down some thoughts for posterity, as someone who was (if I may boast of such an august position) pretty central to the enterprise of theology blogging at its height.
The first question to ask is why theology blogging took off in the mid to late 2000s. I believe that part of the reason is simply that theology as a field has many intrinsic properties that dispose it to a relatively open-ended, undisciplined discussion like the blogosphere. Above all, theology is inherently interdisciplinary, combining conceptual analysis, literary interpretation, historical and political reflection, cultural criticism — basically everything that any humanities discipline does is done in theology. People in theology were therefore ready to be part of the widest possible range of conversations in the humanities blogosphere, and people in my immediate intellectual circle were in fact closely engaged with bloggers in literary studies, philosophy, political theory, and many other fields.
There are other factors more particular to that historical moment. To put it bluntly, it was the Bush years. This meant that religion was an unavoidable topic. That was the heyday of political theology (in the “real,” Schmittian sense, not the broader sense of “politically engaged theology”) and of the Paul and philosophy trend — meaning that other intellectuals were ready to take theologians seriously as interlocutors in a way they might not have been in the 90s. By the same token, the fact that the evangelicals seemed to be so clearly in the ascendant in the 2000s produced many opportunities for alienation and disillusionment among intellectually curious and passionate young adults, in a way that would have been less potent when evangelicals could present themselves as a threatened subculture in the 90s.
From both directions, then, it was a perfect storm. And for a few years, things were very intellectually intense and exciting. But the vibe started to shift already as I was finishing up grad school. Part of it was a degree of attrition — people got jobs and got busy, or didn’t get jobs and dropped out. The impact of the Financial Crisis was especially damaging in the latter respect, and in cutting off the pipeline of younger participants. And of course there was social media, which cannibalized the entire internet. A big part of blogging culture were the comment threads, which fell virtually silent as people decided they preferred to comment on social media rather than on the post itself. For a time, I would exhort such people to comment on the blog if they wanted to join the conversation, and they inevitably dismissed the idea — or (since they tended to be left-leaning social media users) claimed that I was somehow violating the principles of social justice by suggesting that someone should comment in a space where they felt potentially “unsafe.” My reaction to such remarks, then and now, was: “Bullshit.” And in retrospect we can see how damaging it has been to shift all public discourse onto algorithmically-driven, profit-seeking platforms — which now even actively discourage the use of links that would take one outside the corporately-curated experience.
There were also factors specific to academic and particularly theology blogging. I am thinking here of the tendency toward institutionalization. Specialist journals, centers, and even departments started putting up blogs, which competed for everyone’s free writing time even as they squelched the free-wheeling fun of the blogosphere. Even among bloggers themselves, there were attempts to create quasi-institutions in the form of group blogs (like Long Sunday or The Valve in circles adjacent to me). Obviously this is somewhat hypocritical of me to criticize, since The Weblog and An und für sich were always group blogs. But they were also very clearly my personal blog, not an impersonal institution. Since I knew that few had the same writing stamina, my strategy was to provide the audience for whenever a friend or intellectual comrade wanted to put something out there. (In retrospect, I worry that my dominance might have dissuaded some potential contributors, but that’s a different problem than impersonal institutionality.)
In the theology blogging space, there were two attempted institutionalizations that I believe were particularly damaging. The first was Syndicate Theology, which stole the idea of doing book events on major new publications in theology (a stock in trade of The Weblog and An und für sich at their height) and sucked the life out of it by overproducing them. I know that saying “stole” may come across as loaded language, but I heard reliable reports that the creators of Syndicate had our practice specifically in mind when they developed the site. They did not consult with me in any way, nor did they solicit me to participate or offer to do an event on any of my books — all of which points to a guilty conscience in my opinion. I’m happy to burn that bridge publicly now, because of course virtually no one reads the site. Just like Borders, they put their independent competitors out of business before overextending themselves.
The other problematic institutionalization was the blog attached to the journal Political Theology. Reportedly they were forced to do the blog by the corporate owner of the journal, but even within that context they proceeded in an unethical way. In the early stages, they repeatedly attempted to “poach” writers from my blog — though, again, never me. Later on, they started apparently publishing anything anyone sent them, leading to some pretty embarrassing posts. Ultimately they put out something so egregious — accusing leftists of supporting jihad — that some friends and I, concerned with how the low quality of the blog and the offensiveness of that post might reflect on the field, requested that it be taken down. The editors were so stubbornly defensive that we were forced to publish an open letter on the issue. Along the way, they had offered that we could write a rebuttal piece for the blog or even take over some of the editorial duties — both insulting offers in context. I joked at the time that I would take over as their blog editor only if I would be allowed to shut it down altogether.
Obviously I still have some bitterness on the last two points, but as I said, this was a huge part of my life — and honestly, a lot of the institutionalization attempts seemed to involve stealing my ideas or poaching young academics I had supported, while cutting me out personally. Whatever may be the case with my own personal grudges, though, what is certain is that the atmosphere became much more cynical and careerist, which again militated against the fun, free-wheeling atmosphere of blogging. Blog posts became a chore, a CV line, a way of doing a favor that one might be able to cash in later — not a forum for community-building or intellectual exploration. If Twitter and Facebook were what killed off the blogosphere, maybe what made people less resistant to the change was that blogging had already become too much like LinkedIn.
In the best spirit of the classical age of blogging, I have been open and vulnerable to you, probably to an inappropriate and self-undermining degree. Please reciprocate in the same spirit by submitting any comments, questions, reminiscences, apologies, points of rebuttal, or cease-and-desist letters in the comment form below rather than grousing on social media about it.
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