Leviathan in the Flood: Katrina and the Fishy Logic of the State

The following appeared yesterday, September 16, 2005, in the e-zine

Dissident Voice. It is written by Lila Rajiva, and is a brilliant,

thought-provoking read. Link to the full version appears at the

bottom of this post. - DB]

 

"All glories to you, O Lord of the Universe, who took the form of a

fish. When the sacred hymns of the Vedas were lost in the waters of

universal devastation, you swam like a boat in that vast ocean to

rescue them."

 

-- Jayadeva, classical Hindu poet

 

LEVIATHAN IN THE FLOOD: KATRINA AND THE FISHY LOGIC OF STATE

 

Mythology has it that the first incarnation of Lord Vishnu -- the

second person of the Hindu trinity -- took place after the sacred

word of ancient India was snatched away by a demon. The periodic

flooding and dissolution of creation that ended each world epoch was

about to take place. But Vishnu disguised as a gargantuan fish

rescued the divine word just in time and steered it away through the

cascading water in a boat packed with seeds and animals salvaged for

the next round of creation. In the Hebrew Bible, this legend of the

flood loses its Piscean hero but Noah's ark still saves the animal

and plant kingdom "two by two" -- male and female -- from the fluid

chaos.

 

In the Big Easy it seems the saviors were not so organized or

logical. Not two by two but by tens and perhaps thousands, men and

women, the frail and the tender, were left to rot and bloat in the

stinking water. No pagan fish-god to the rescue, no ark. Instead the

ancient Titan ruled -- Chaos.

 

Chaos was what Hobbes, the philosopher of the all-powerful state,

feared more than anything else. For him, brute nature and human

nature ungoverned told only one story -- the war of all against all.

And it had only one remedy -- an all-powerful state. For a metaphor

for that state Hobbes turned to Leviathan, the whale-monster in the

Biblical tale of Job. Hobbes, a Christian, believed that Leviathan

alone could save mankind from its self-created chaos.

 

Man's nature was too depraved to attain salvation on his own. He had

to be under dominion.

 

Judging by the coverage of Louisiana's watery inferno, though the

left and right keep tearing each other apart on everything else like

endlessly divorcing spouses, on the inhumanity of man left to his

own devices, they coo in one voice.

 

Here, conservative columnist David Brooks writing in the New York

Times blames New Orleans on a "failure in administration" and there,

Katrina Van den Heuvel of The Nation decries the state for

abandoning its people. No question. But then both turn around and

beg for more. Brooks wants more anti-poverty programs and Van den

Heuvel goes one better with a second New Deal. Having diagnosed the

poison in the body politic, right and left want to give carte

blanche to the arch poisoner.

 

The statism clatters right out of the closet:

 

Brooks (September 4, 2005) mourns the past "Hobbesian decade," and

the "dark realities that it is not in our nature to readily

acknowledge: the thin veneer of civilization, the elemental violence

in human nature, the lurking ferocity of the environment..."

 

Van den Heuvel attacks the "dog-eat-dog, antigovernment philosophy

of the far right." (September 8, 2005)

 

Hobbes would have cheered.

 

For left and right, the problem is homo homini lupus, man is a wolf

to man.

 

For left and right, the answer is Hobbes' monster.

 

And so the numberless delicate acts of coordination, reciprocity,

and self-sacrifice by which the people of New Orleans and their well-

wishers all over America showed their distinctly un-lupine natures

made no impact. Even those who recognized them still argued that the

state would have to intervene in a much bigger way the next time to

muzzle the shiftless, antisocial, thieving poor or to choke public-

spiritedness out of the racist, antisocial, exploitative rich. The

poor without the state cannot be relied on to overcome, and the rich

without the state cannot be relied on to help.

 

This is slander of human nature, poor or rich. This is amnesia of

the real history of human beings whose voluntary cooperation has

over and over again shored up the levees of civilization against the

barbaric outbursts of the state. When human nature has been most

vicious, it has most often learned its vice at the knee of its

rulers.

 

A glance at the reports from New Orleans shows that it was state

action of some kind that created and exacerbated this catastrophe

down the line.

 

It was the federal government which violated development regulations

protecting the wetlands south of the city which would have blunted

the force of the typhoons.

 

It was the federal government which cut the funding for levee repair

to hold the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain out of the low-lying

city.

 

It was the federal government which diverted a third of Louisiana's

National Guards to the Iraq war when they might have aided the

rescue. (1)

 

While $600 million of private aid flowed to Louisiana, FEMA was busy

sabotaging relief efforts:

 

"Wal-Mart trucks containing water and supplies were turned away; the

Coast Guard was prevented from delivering diesel fuel; a 600-bed

Navy hospital was left unused; firefighters were ordered away from

flood sites; donated generators were refused; and rescue attempts by

private citizens were rebuffed." (2)

 

Is this a record that suggests a bigger helping of state action? Is

it too hard to imagine that people on their own, without their all-

knowing, all-powerful leaders, could voluntarily contribute to their

own welfare? Apparently, for right and left wing ideologues it is.

 

But in fact, people did just that, opening their homes, treating the

sick, sharing food and water, coordinating escape routes, simply

suffering together

 

They acted as individuals in a community, not fragments of a mass.

Not a mass to be rescued by the left or a mass to be beaten back by

the right. And like individuals everywhere, some broke under the

strain, some could not live up to their better natures, some were

perhaps driven to insanity or rage so great that they shot at each

other and at their rescuers. But perhaps they were simply shooting

at the insignia of the all-knowing all-powerful monster.

 

By ignoring the individuality of human beings, left and right

connive to read the problems of society as a problem of equal

numbers. Each individual no more nor less than any other and each

interchangeable. Left and right reduce the individuality of human

interchange to arithmetical addition and subtraction. To units of a

mass to be computed. To commercial calculation.

 

Nietzsche named this poisonous logic the reasoning of the herd and

saw behind the scientific statecraft which uses it nothing more than

a manipulative and insatiable urge to power:

 

"Whatever the state saith is a lie; whatever it hath is a theft: all

is counterfeit in it, the gnawing, sanguinary, insatiate monster."

 

Of course, Nietzsche also saw the same will to power behind the

wisdom of the philosopher-statesmen and the priesthoods. But unlike

the Oida of the Greeks, the Vedas of the Hindus, or the Logos of the

Christians, the rationality of the modern state from the start set

its face unrelentingly against the idea that goodness and wisdom

might flower naturally in human beings. For Hobbes, human nature,

like brute nature, was simply a mechanism prone to chaos and in need

of overwhelming force to subjugate it. The only part of natural law

that Hobbes did not discard was the right of self-preservation and

in its pursuit, anything was permissible.

 

Force and fraud -- otherwise known by the high-minded as raison

d'etat, was the rationality of the state from the start.

 

It was a reason like none before it.

>From the science of the Enlightenment it took the binary logic by

which push must be followed by pull and up by down, where every

action has an equal and opposite reaction and this can never be

that. Reason became mechanical.

>From a dying Christianity it took dualism. Nature was severed from

man, matter decapitated from spirit, object estranged from subject.

The cogito of Descartes began its bloodless reign, and unhoused and

unfleshed, the ghost-mind led the body around haughtily by the nose

like a Brahmin chivvying an untouchable. Reason became alienated.

 

Then, not too long after Christianity had driven the fairy folk and

the whispering spirits, the witches and the wizards, the daivas and

asuras of the pagans underground, the new scientists of mechanism,

bent on usurping the waning power of the Church, took the next step

and drained Nature of the last remnants of enchantment, bringing the

old goddess to her knees, submissive. But when they did so, they

snuffed out human nature as well. Individuality and intuition

perished, Reason became unnatural.

 

Finally, from the mercantilists of the newborn European empires, the

new reason borrowed its calculating streak. Like the Romans, who

extended the word ratio from the accounting of money (rationes) to

the practice of reckoning in general, state reason modeled its logic

on the state counting houses. Wet-nursed by the accounting practices

of the pirate merchants, the new reason never grew up but stayed

forever suckling at those hard teats. Reason became exploitative.

 

The calculating "dog-eat-dog" philosophy that the left mistakenly

pins on private enterprise per se was therefore strictly always the

spawn of the state. And those who think that it can be domesticated

to their pet social schemes, however laudable, are as mistaken as

Frankenstein. Today, Leviathan's one body has two heads, corporate-

state and managed capital. To feed one is to fatten the other.

 

That's why looting quickly became the most repeated image out of New

Orleans.

 

Why not? There was looting all around, though only the least of it

appeared on our TV screens.

 

What we never saw:

 

1) The looting of federal tax money, withdrawn from New Orleans

flood control and diverted to a profligate and criminal war abroad.

 

2) The looting of the consumer as oil companies used the flood as an

excuse to jack-up gas prices.

 

3) The looting of federal insurance as property owners submitted

fraudulent claims.

 

4) The looting of private citizens' firearms under the guise of

maintaining law and order.

 

5) The looting of the currency as the federal government cranks out

more paper money to paper over the $52 billion hole that Katrina

will put in the nation's finances.

 

And the looting will roll as businesses, fresh from the bid-rigging

and cronyism in Iraq, rush into the reconstruction racket. And it

will roll on as the bloated government lets out its belt a notch and

begins stuffing its face again. And it will roll triumphant when the

businesses which root in the same trough with government seize Kelo

to smash the last bastion of the free citizen, his home. (3)

 

The whole country smells the stink of New Orleans.

 

Looting by elites, by the middle class, by the underclass. The last

perhaps the least pernicious.

 

And in each case, it was the insertion of the state into society

that created the provocation, the opportunity, and the cover for the

looters.

 

In fact, the so-called anti-government right that Van den Heuvel

loathes is really not anti-government enough by half. It's anti-tax

positions begin and end largely around the destruction of welfare

for the poor. Welfare for the rich however passes muster. One of the

most vocal anti-government activists, Grover Norquist, somehow

manages to be in favor of government regulation suddenly when it

comes to monopoly pricing for drug companies.

 

Leviathan is rotten but it rots from the head down.

 

Make no mistake. The state did not fail in New Orleans. It

succeeded. It did just what its logic drives it to do. It acted in

the interests of its masters, a handful of the privileged. Before

the universal protection of citizens' lives, it put the selective

securing of property. And when reconstruction begins we will again

see lives displaced by the manipulation of the market as the forced

reconstruction/gentrification of New Orleans begins, as it has begun

in cities all over the country. As it has taken place in Baghdad. It

was no accident that the U.S.S. Bataan, in which Iraqi prisoners

were held secretly, was sent to New Orleans. It was no accident that

active duty forces are reported to have intervened. It was no

accident that the victims of the flood were labeled refugees and

insurgents. New Orleans was a brilliant photo-op. State created

lawlessness inviting military intervention. Inviting destruction and

rebuilding, the sanctified looting of the state.

 

Market manipulation, the one constant in the vicious Rake's Progress

that is the history of the imperial state.

 

The drunken looter's logic of the broken window that Von Mises

described.

 

Smash a country and reconstruct it -- that is the state's job

creation. Waste a resource and price-fix -- that is the state's

energy policy. Borrow and then devalue your debt -- that is the

state's financial planning. Artificially inflate house prices and

drive out the city's renters -- the state's urban renewal program.

 

Katrina of Nature speaks louder and clearer than Katrina of The

Nation. Her senseless violence recognizes itself in the mirror of

the state, shows it for what is. That is the lesson of New Orleans:

human society pinned helplessly between the alienated power of

senseless nature and the alienating power of a malevolent state. Two

desolations.

 

Lila Rajiva is a free-lance writer in Baltimore and the author of

The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the US Media (Monthly Review

Press, September 2005). She can be reached at: lrajiva.

Copyright © 2005 by Lila Rajiva

 

REFERENCES

 

(1) David Lindorff, "The Real Disaster: Bush and the Democrats,"

Counterpunch, September 1, 2005.

 

(2) Ron Paul, "Responding to Katrina," Lew Rockwell, September 13,

2005.

 

(3) Paul Craig Roberts, "Power Grab in New Orleans," Counterpunch,

September 12, 2005.

 

SOURCE: DISSIDENT VOICE

URL: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept05/Rajiva0916.htm]