Hobbes Locked Out

After yesterday's Court ruling that sodomy is included among those "rights" protected under the 14th Amendment's provisions for privacy and individual liberty, it occurs to me that that dusty British Whig John Locke is ascendant if not already triumphant. Not that he was ever descendent, but Lockean individual natural rights to life, liberty, and property were at least (until recently) subject to the prudent checks of social stigma and what was, to use a colonial phrase, "meet and convenient." Liberty went only so far as "the soft collar of social esteem" allowed it, marking that happy combination of liberty and order. The two were meant for each other, a match made in human nature/heaven. Most saw that liberty without order was anarchy, and order without liberty was tyranny. Seems sensible, no?

No longer. Increasingly, all infringements on individual rights are seen not only as violations of something natural to man but unconstitutional. Virtually nothing that society at large deems necessary for political, social, or moral order is allowable, legal, or defensible -- to defend such things marks one for several varieties of hatred and isms. And so, we have this interesting combination (some might say contradiction) of an increasingly democratic world with fewer and fewer matters open to majority rule. If we embrace democracy and majority rule, yet tell majorities they have no right telling other people how to live, what will be left to decide? Won't democracy be merely a shell, a quasi-libertarian system where everybody does as they please, society and majorities be damned?

Which brings to mind the much abused "Monster of Malmesbury" Thomas Hobbes, a thinker shoved into the shadows by the Lockeans. Hobbes saw that liberty without order, which truly is man in a state of nature, was a nightmare. Everyone following their own little versions of happiness (or in Hobbes' eloquent word "felicity"), everyone an atom unconcerned with others unless others infringed on my pursuit of happiness. Such a life is ultimately unliveable and, using Hobbes' famous phrase, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Hasn't this come to pass? A Lockean world of individual rights is one profoundly solitary. The quality of modern life is often poor, nasty, course, and unsatisfying. Blind pursuits of happiness contra society do indeed have a brutish quality, natural man satisfying his wants against the competition and criticism of others, leading too many to rather short unhappy lives.

So while Locke may smile that the world is his, Hobbes may frown that it is his too. Only no one realized that Hobbes' "war of all against all" was not heaven, but a hell of our own making.