Beyond Hobbes's Leviathan: the Alarming Visions of JG Ballard

         Beyond Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Alarming Visions of JG Ballard

The 17^th philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that, without a civilising authority, humankind is condemned to live in a state of nature, where there is war of all against all and life is nasty, brutish and short. In his book Leviathan, Hobbes proposed that there was a profound drive, or law of nature, to escape this fate:

"The final….design of men in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, in which we see them live in Commonwealths, is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of war which is necessarily consequent…. to the natural passions of men when there is no visible power to keep them in awe.."

Hobbes further and controversially proposed that a “commonwealth” is achieved by a notional mutual agreement among people to give up their rights to self government (and to wage war against one another) in favour of a sovereign power (monarchy or other form of government), which would have absolute authority over its subjects so contracting, thus ensuring peace.

The lethal state of nature described by Hobbes has not been short of examples in history, ancient and modern. Hobbes had foremost in mind the chaos in England during the Civil War, but one can take one's pick of lawless lands in today’s world where life approximates to Hobbes’s dystopia. Writers have also given us countless literary versions of dystopias, war-torn, post-apocalyptic or otherwise.

Ballard is one such writer. His formative experience, when he was a young teenager, was to live through the swift Japanese takeover of Shanghai a day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, all as described in his novel Empire of the Sun. The privileged expatriate existence of the British businessmen and their families (imposing commercial buildings, social clubs, large villas in comfortably anglicised suburbs (“Amherst Avenue”) was suddenly swept away and replaced by war's brutalities and the privations and cruelties of internment. Ballard discovered a basic truth: “Reality was a stage set which could be dismantled at any minute”. (And what was the "real" reality in Shanghai? Bourgeois expatriate life, or the parallel life of pre-war china, with its extreme poverty and casual public cruelties, including executions?)

This experience might have led a writer to dystopian fiction along conventional lines – a catastrophe; how humans cope/do not cope. But Ballard, whilst his fiction contains such elements, is more interested in what he sees as human unfittedness for modern, over-civilised, Western life, and the psychological tensions, disasters even, that creates. If wartime showed him how flimsy is the fabric of civilisation against deadly assault, peacetime in England caused him to meditate on how humans have the potential to tear at the fabric themselves without the intervention of any outside destructive forces; that, indeed, the very nature of the fabric might compel us to destroy or subvert it.

Back to Hobbes’s Leviathan, or absolute, civilising authority: the original frontispiece of the book depicts a gigantic sovereign figure, looming over the lands of the Commonwealth. Close inspection of the “body” of the giant reveals that it is composed of the multitude of the individuals that have covenanted to accept the Sovereign’s power over them. Civilisation is both a giving away and a pooling of rights.

To tweak the reading of this image a little: suppose the Leviathan equates to modern, Western, bourgeois existence, to which we have all submitted, and the compositional figures to modern Westerners. Ballard’s thesis is that the figures may rebel against Leviathan, not because Leviathan is unjust or cruel – but, essentially, because Leviathan is boring and sapping of life. The compositional individuals become destructive viruses.

Here Ballard draws on wartime experiences, and his reading of Freud, to suggest that there is permanent dark side to human nature – that there is, at some deep level, a regret for Hobbes’s State of Nature, and for the lack of a “war of all against all”. Deep down, some sort of criminal is always waiting to get out.

In Cocaine Nights, one of Ballard’s later works, the expatriate communities of Spain’s Costa del Sol provide a ready metaphor for the deadness of modern life:

“Europe’s future: everything will be like this soon”….”A willed limbo”…”the pueblo monoculture of sun and sangria”

But in the upmarket resort of Estrella de Mar all is different. There is a vibrant cultural expatriate community. It is also laced with crime – drug dealing, prostitution, theft, rape and even murder. It becomes clear that the crimes are committed by the expatriates themselves and that the psychic energy unleashed by their self-discovered feral dispositions sustains their “civilisation” of culture and sport.

"Crime and creativity go together, and always have done. The greater the sense of crime the greater the civic awareness and the richer the civilisation. Nothing else binds a community together. It’s a strange paradox.."

The novel’s protagonist, Frank Prentice, is at first horrified and repelled by what he discovers as an outsider. But he is gradually drawn in, discovers that he is at home in Estrella de Mar, and ends the novel as a key member of the energetic but criminal local scene.

In an earlier novel, High Rise, recently and accurately adapted as a film, Ballard approaches the darker recesses of human nature from a slightly different direction. Ballard was drawn to the brutalist city architecture of the 1960s and 1970s (Charles Prentice in Cocaine Nights has a flat in the Barbican). One fascination is the network of urban motorways on their viaducts (such as the Westway in London), and the barricaded dead patches of land they create, where outcasts live unnoticed; and into one of which, in the novella Concrete Island, an upper-middle class man is pitched by a car accident to fend as best he might. 

The zenith (many would say the nadir) of this obsession is the infamous celebration of highways and (literal) auto-eroticism, Crash. The narrator hymns the motorway and its superiority over the merely human (unless, as the novel proposes, the two are violently united through the medium of of the automobile):

"Our apartment home [was] shielded from the distant bulk of London by an access spur of the northern circular motorway, which flowed past us on its elegant concrete pillars. I gazed down at the immense motion sculpture....[A]ll the hopes and fancies of this placid suburban enclave... faltered before the solid reality of the motorway embankments, with their constant and unswerving geometry."

Another fascination, centrally explored in High Rise, is the tower block. Its anonymity and uniformity creates both a seeming shared conformity for its inhabitants; but also represents an empty canvas onto which to project their characters – whatever those might turn out to be.

The tower block is also in a literal sense a stratified society, and one where the richest tend to be in the higher strata. In a Ballard novel, it is also a society that can break down (in High Rise, the catalyst is the literal breakdown of common amenities such as lifts, lighting and rubbish disposal). A dysfunctional high rise is set up to produce social tensions that quickly change into a willed savagery.

The building becomes a Hobbesian concrete jungle, with the well-heeled professionals forming into bands for a war of all against all, a war that descends into casual murder and cannibalism, accompanied by sexual orgies.

As in Cocaine Nights, the protagonist, Laing, a medical academic, finds these developments invigorating. He readily adapts, giving rein to his hitherto concealed perversities and psychopathy.

Ballard said that he did not celebrate or welcome the extreme states imagined in his novels. He regarded himself as a writer who hoists warning signs. He was serious about the dead hand of modern materialism, exemplified in one grim form by the pueblos and urbanaciones of the Costa del Sol. He also, like the philosopher John Gray (whom he admired – and see blog 5/02/16) was not a believer in the necessary march of progress or in the proposition that humans’ better natures will be more in the ascendant than not. Ballard said in an interview:

"I suspect that… the human race will inevitably move like a sleepwalker towards that vast resource it has hesitated to tap – its own psychopathy. This adventure playground of the soul is waiting for us with gates wide open, and admission is free."

What current phenomenon in the “developed” world, above all others, would have given Ballard some grim satisfaction, confirming in part his diagnosis? Undoubtedly it would be Donald Trump- and the weird and dangerous pathologies he has unleashed.

In some Valhalla for pessimists, Hobbes surely shook Ballard’s hand.

April 2016