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This is KCSU Stanford. Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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A lot of you queried us about the music that opened last week's show with Fred Turner,
so we're giving you another blast of highway tune by Greta Van Fleet 2017.
Is that singer the genetic replica of Robert Plant or what?
Thank you Mary Meatsu Yoshii and Mark Gonerman for turning me on to this unlikely
band of brothers who call themselves Greta Van Fleet. Mary and Mark are long-time friends of
entitled opinions and have sent a lot of good music my way over the years.
Thanks also to Phili Primol, a first-time e-mailer who's inspired response to our recent show on
human rights I greatly appreciated. The same goes for Michael Gerlinger from Frankfurt, Germany.
I'm still not a fan of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
but we'll let that rest for now. Several others of you out there have shared your thoughts with us
in the last few weeks and we're always happy to receive your communications from near and far.
So thank you all for joining in the ongoing conversation of entitled opinions
our little garden of ideas in the midst of the growing wasteland and oh my is it growing.
And since I'm sending out thanks today as we wrap up our 2018 season, let me take the occasion to
express our collective gratitude to Vittoria Moltenlow, the managing producer of this show,
who has done a great job over the past two years. In title opinions has had a number of outstanding
producers and she is as good as they get, so many warm thanks to Vittoria who oversaw the creation
of our new website, who records and edits the shows, who sends out our announcements, who answers
your queries when you need help with something, and who sits beside me here in the pulsating
underworld of studio B at KZSU, where we practice the persecuted religion of thinking.
Before I welcome today's guests and introduce her to you, let me mention that most of the shows we
we've aired this season have had a distinctly political orientation, and I know that some of you are
wondering whether entitled opinions has shifted its center of gravity away from the literary and
philosophical to the political. The answer is no. In title opinions will never become a political
talk show because we have other more important things to think about here, like the history of
the aphorism or inflationary cosmology or Edgar Allan Poe's legacy and French modernism
or the vagaries of the so-called singularity. Yet it's also the case that politics is a reality
that is hard to ignore these days. I call it a reality but I would do better to call it a
sur reality. Every day when I open the newspaper or watch the news, I have the same sense of
disorientation, a feeling that America has jumped into an alternate reality, like one of those
Star Trek episodes where the enterprise phases into a different timeline. Things seem real
enough but something is not quite right, since this reality is not the one it belongs to,
not the one it's supposed to be in. I keep feeling we need to get back to the timeline in which
Hillary Clinton won the election and Donald Trump still lives in Trump Tower and not in the White House.
Clearly this is one of those moments when the surreal has erupted into the real
and it takes an extra effort on our part to preserve our lucidity and sanity. So maybe
in title opinions has merely been trying to do its share when it comes to maintaining
this grip on the real this season. Is there such a thing though as the real when it comes to politics?
Or is politics an endless power struggle to define reality and impose a set of norms on it?
Is that what power is ultimately the power to dictate what counts as real and what doesn't?
It seems to me that the reality of politics is always fantastic to one degree or another.
In the sense that politics always has to reckon with the crazy fears and hopes and hallucinations
of the human imagination. American political reality in particular is caught up in the truly
weird fantasies, paranoia, and apocalyptic passions of the American psyche.
It's nothing short of miraculous that we have a relatively sane form of government
when you consider what large segments of the American electorate desire, believe in,
and think they're voting for when they cast their ballots.
We live in a madhouse friends and I marvel that we still have something we can call a shared
reality for how much longer no one can say.
Speaking of politics and reality, I'm joined in the studio today by my Stanford colleague,
Allison McQueen, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science here at Stanford,
who has just published a book with Cambridge University Press called "Political Realism in
Apocalyptic Times," which probes the relation between political realism and apocalyptic system.
Realism and apocalypse seem to belong to wholly different spheres and in some sense they do.
Yet Professor McQueen's book explores how three political realists in particular,
Machiavelli in the 16th century, Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, and Hans Morgenthau in the 20th century,
have systematically engaged and responded to the apocalyptic imaginary of their respective eras.
Professor McQueen joins us today to share some of her thoughts about this volatile dynamic between
realism and the apocalypse, and its strange relevance for the politics of our own time.
Allison, welcome to the program. Thanks Robert, it's great to be here.
Well, why don't we start since you begin your book, your first chapter is on the, you know,
kind of history of the apocalypse and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Why don't we start then with
this basic concepts and definitions beginning with apocalypse? What do we mean by
apocalypse and apocalyptic thinking in general? Well, in the simplest sense,
and apocalypse is, as the REM song tells us, the end of the world as we know it.
Now this end could be good for us as it's described in the book of Revelation.
It could be an end of the world where, as Revelation puts it, God will wipe every tear from
our eyes. Death will be no more mourning and crying and pain will be no more. But,
and apocalypse could also be bad for us. Total annihilation. Think of the end of Dr. Strange Love.
Now, when people think apocalyptically, they're thinking about the end of the world,
in some sense or another. They're often thinking of that end as imminent. Think about what
the Gospels tell us that Jesus told his followers. He said, "You will see the end of the world
in your lifetime." So there's a sense of imminence about it. There's a sense that the end is going to be
cataclysmic. The world will end in a bang, not a whimper. In Revelation, of course, the world is
consumed by divine violence that wipes out most of humanity. It's true as well as you write in that
first chapter that the apocalyptic tradition in Judaism did not come merely from religious sentiment
or some kind of fantasmatic unconscious desires, but there were a set of determinant political
circumstances and conditions that nourished an apocalyptic mood and expectation.
And I think that from the start, therefore, you're linking
apocalypts with political reality. Correct?
That's exactly right. And so if you think of the circumstances in which the
the Jews were living, an ancient Palestine, they were living in circumstances where they'd been
plagued by centuries of conflict, by foreign domination, by pressures for assimilation to become Hellenized
Jews. And they asked themselves the reasonable question, "Why is all of this stuff happening to us?
Why is all this political trauma befallen us?" Now, the first answer they came to, and one that
we're very familiar with, is the answer of prophecy. You're suffering because you've fallen away
from the laws of God. Get yourself into line, follow the laws of God, and everything will go better
for you. But that answer didn't work for them. There was the phenomenon of Jewish martyrdom to
wrestle with. The very people targeted by the rulers of ancient Palestine were often the ones who
held fast to God's law, who were the most pious and the most religious. So how could it be
that this kind of oppression and trauma was happening to them? And the apocalyptic worldview emerges
as a sort of answer to that question. It's a sort of political theodicy. It's a way to understand
oppression, dispersion, loss of sovereignty by situating it within a sacred narrative, by reassuring
people, God is still in control, and all of your suffering is but a prelude to a better world on earth.
Now, obviously there are many cultures in history that have undergone oppression,
conquest, enslavement, and that have not come up with apocalyptic narratives for themselves. But
clearly there's something about the Hebrew God, which is almost intrinsically political,
in the sense that it was understood that there was a covenant between God and his people.
That he would protect them as long as they are obeying the law or being obedient children.
And therefore there was this kind of shock of how this God, with whom there was a political covenant
that people of Israel could allow such disasters to befall his people. And as you are suggesting
once the realities of political disasters have befell, it had to be projected into a future where
this justice that had failed in history was going to triumph at the end of time.
That's right. And where the suffering that the Israelites had endured would be redeemed and would be
made meaningful, would not be the result of circumstance or unpredictable fate. It would be revealed
to be part of God's plan and it would be redeemed at the end of days.
And in that respect there is a strange psychological region in which apocalypse works,
it's kind of magic on the psyche, I believe, in the Judeo-Christian tradition for sure,
because Christianity then, as you mentioned, Jesus really believed in the imminent end of the
world, the coming of the kingdom of God. And the Christian tradition subsequently incorporated a
certain expectation for the end days. Maybe we don't know when it's coming, but it's coming somehow
in the notion of history. Is that there will be some final redemption at the end of time.
And you mentioned in your opening remarks that on the one hand there is a fear and horror
of the end of the whole story. But there is also this strange desire. There's a, I believe,
that there's an apocalyptic unconscious where there's some eager anticipation for some kind of end
to finally manifest itself.
I think that's right. I mean, the way I'd put it is, I think the biggest appeal of apocalyptic thinking
has to do with intelligibility. We want to understand the suffering or the crises that plague our world.
And what apocalyptic thinking does is it helps us to situate those crises in a plot, in a story that
makes sense of them. So for the early Christians who heard the biblical revelation, the trauma of
Roman imperial rule suddenly became meaningful for them. Their trials, their oppression, were just a
prelude to their lives in heaven. And you can think of it in a secular sense today too. A lot
of us long for that kind of intelligibility. People feel like things are getting worse. And apocalyptic
stories confirm that feeling. They help us make sense of it. And if that apocalyptic thinking
incorporates an element of redemption, it can be quite comforting. It tells us these terrible things
that are happening to you are not random or meaningless. They're somehow a prelude to a new
and better world. Now, that's immensely appealing. We might also say there's something that,
in a some sense, appeals to the vanity of every generation as well. We like to think we're living
in a special time at the edge of a great transformation. And to see ourselves as participants in the
great denouement of history. That's immensely appealing to us as well. Yeah, you give an interpretation
of it, which is more, let's say, sane than sometimes my suspicions around in the sense that there's
something comforting about the idea of a redemptive end and something that provides an
implotment of our lives and our moment in history with intelligibility and meaning.
I think there's also some more sinister death drive or death wish and some active
embrace of the possibility of a total annihilation. I remember in when I was a graduate student
Cornell in the 80s, Richard Klein was a professor in romance studies. And this was during the Reagan era
when the tension between the Soviet Union and America was very strong. And the idea, the prospect of a
nuclear confrontation was not at all unrealistic in the minds of many people, even political experts.
And there were a number of studies that Richard Klein was drawing attention to of how, for example,
the exodus from metropolitan centers to the suburbs over the past several decades in America and
other such evidence that there wasn't what he called the nuclear unconscious in America where
our national unconscious had already decided that there was going to be a nuclear apocalypse and that
we're at least for the cities and that we were ready to sacrifice our cities and hence the movement to
the suburbs. So he Richard Klein started a, it's not a school, but he started an organization called
the nuclear unconscious, which lasted for about three or four years. I thought it was very interesting,
the kind of contributions that were made to that from people from all sorts of different
disciplines, all predicated on the notion that we are capable as human beings to desire
our own annihilation and not only our own redemption. I think that that's probably borne out in any
survey of American summer blockbuster movies as well. And some sense they feed that desire in a
safer way perhaps, but they still reflect something of it, I think. And I was reading your
opinion piece that you have in the opinionator of the New York Times. Yes. And this was about
Morgan Thauv, whom we're going to talk about. That's right. And how in the 60s I believe he
he thought that Americans were way to complacent about the possibility of nuclear confrontation with
the Soviet Union and he was trying to get the public to awaken to what the reality of a nuclear
catastrophe would amount to and it would be the abolition of any possibility of meaning.
Because it would be the destruction not only of individuals, but the world and histories that
would carry on any memory of them and so on and so forth. And that in that piece you cite a survey
that was done, that he's responding to in part, which is where people were actually quite
sanguine about the fact that even in the worst case scenario of nuclear war with the Soviet Union,
there would be arising from the ashes and that people would get out of their bunkers and start
anew and perhaps it would be this clearing away. In other words, it is very hard for a public to
believe that this kind of ultimate scenario of devastation will be there will be an end for them.
That's right. And I think we tend to as we look back as you just did on the on the period of the
Cold War and the apocalyptic fear in that period. We tend to forget how much optimism was in the air.
I mean in the early 1960s, the height of the fallout shelter movement, time and life magazine
are running features about how people might emerge after an all-out nuclear war from their
fallout shelter. A time magazine article from the early 60s described this emergence and I
referenced this in the New York Times piece with trousers tucked into sock tops and sleeves tied
around wrists with hats mufflers, gloves and boots, the shelter dweller could venture forth to
start ensuring his today and building for his tomorrow. That's what Morgenthau was trying to
combat with his utterly bleak picture of nuclear annihilation. Yes, and do you think that he,
Well, maybe we'll go in order of the thinkers and return to Morgenthau later on our show.
Let's reconstruct things historically. With the Christian era, apocalypse becomes something that's
more and more deferred. This great Fusiyan wrote this book called "Long Me, the Year 1000"
There was all this apocalyptic kind of expectation. Yeah, hysteria. There was certain that the
year 1000 was going to be the end of the world. It kind of passed very quietly, nothing happened.
So this idea that the apocalypse always has to be deferred is fine. But periodically,
these apocalyptic conditions happen in agriculture. The first thinker you deal with
Machiavelli, who is really one of the founders of this traditional political realism, was dealing
with a phenomenon in Florence of this guy, Savonadola, who was a fiery preacher and had some
rather apocalyptic prophecies. Machiavelli, it's too easy to imagine that he just dismissed this
as a bunch of nonsense, that the people were being fed, that he actually continued to engage with
this apocalyptic thinking that was coming from Savonadola's camp. That's right. We tend to think of Machiavelli's
perspective on Savonadola as an entirely negative one. Savonadola appears in the prints as the
paradigmatic unarmed prophet, Chapter 6. I think there's something actually a lot more complicated
than that going on. Savonadola preaches at the end of the 15th century in Florence. He preaches to an
Italy torn apart by wars to a Florence in the midst of immense domestic political crisis. And his genius
was in the way he used apocalyptic rhetoric to make sense of these crises for his audience.
He warned them. He said, behold, the sword of the Lord falling on the earth quickly and swiftly.
But as bad as it was, as bad as what Florence was facing was, this scourge from God would be the
beginning of a process of worldly peace and renewal. Florence would become a new Jerusalem.
And Machiavelli is absolutely fascinated by Savonadola. I mean, as a civil servant, Machiavelli
is sent to go listen to and report on his sermons. He has a lot of respect for the friars,
rhetorical skill. And I think Machiavelli himself is drawn in as a flirtation with this apocalyptic
way of thinking. And I think where that's clearest is in the final chapter of the Prince, the chapter
that a lot of us have trouble making sense of. It seems to come out of nowhere. The rest of the
book is about attending to the harsh material power realities of politics. The final chapter is
a call for redemption. And Machiavelli, like any good apocoliptist, describes a present crisis.
He says, Italy is more enslaved than the heat bruise, more serviled than the Persians, more dispersed
than the Athenians without a head, without order beaten, disboiled, torn, pillaged, and having
endured ruin of every sort. But for Machiavelli as for Savonadola and as for any great apocoliptist,
this crisis is just the prelude to an impending redemption that Italy awaits her redeemer,
someone who will save her from her sufferings and usher in a new world. That is Savonadolan rhetoric
at its height in Machiavelli's Prince. No doubt. It's also the chapter that is crucial to many
interpretations of the Prince as not being this just bare bones political realist track, but that
there's some higher good to which all this realism is being attached, namely the redemption and
unification of Italy and doing something for the common good. And also there's other apocoliptic
prophecies of that sort, in particular in Dante, when you have in the very first
canto of the divine comedy where Virgil comes to rescue Dante in the dark wood and points to the
she-wolf of greed, avarice, as the radix malorum, the root of all evil, and says there will come
the Hound, the Velthro will come with secular redeemer and will chase that she-wolf out of Italy and
Italy will finally be redeemed in a secular way. So there, Machiavelli is also plugging in
to Dante's, it's not an apocoliptic scenario, but it is about redemption in this.
It is about a crisis leading up to a moment of transformation and redemption. That's right.
So let's talk a minute about Machiavelli's realism because I've done a show on Machiavelli before,
and my reading of the prints is that for all the political realism of that treatise,
there is something ironic about the fact that Machiavelli did not have much impact on political
reality. He never founded a school, he never was responsible for creating a constitution or any
institution. He hasn't been nearly as impactful on reality as something like Marxism or Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, the dreamer, or even Christianity. I mean Christianity with this other world, the orientation
completely radically transformed the politics of Europe on the basis of its utopian projection.
And you have natural law theorists, most of our listeners have never heard of, like Grotesius
and Pufendorf and so forth. These people were much more impactful. So for someone who was so
fixated on efficacy in the political sphere, Machiavelli's, the prints has been strangely
feckless. I mean, the most you can say about it is that Kissinger preferred it as bedtime reading,
or that Nixon really liked to read it. But isn't there a paradox that somehow historically
speaking it's the great idealist of the tradition that have had more direct influence on political
reality than the political realist like Machiavelli? That's right. This is, and this is,
as you note, it's not particular to Machiavelli. There are some scholars of realism that suggest
that realism, like the owl of Minerva, takes flight at dusk. We only attune ourselves to it or see
its wisdom after all the damage of idealism has been done. And so this is a fate that
befalls many a realist. I mean, realists ask us to attend closely to the brutalities of politics.
They ask us to be anti-utopian and are thinking. They ask us to prioritize order and stability
over the demands of justice. Now, these things may all be eminently sensible,
but they're not the kinds of injunctions that move people to great sacrifices and transformations,
even though they may be wise and often right. Yeah, I agree with that 100%. They don't have the
power of inspiration. And yet, I'm coming more and more to believe that they have, they're right
in many ways. And yet, unfortunately, it's the Sabonarola's who can really whip up the passions of
people and bring about the kind of revolutions that Michael E. Lee was hoping would come about.
Another great realist of the 20th century E.H. Carr, the British historian, said that this is a
fate that befalls many a realist. And there's a reason why Machiavelli's prince ends in this
redemptive chapter. There's a reason why Marx, after the most brutal analysis of the workings
of capitalism comes to this idealistic vision of the communist revolution and its aftermath. And Carr suggested
this is something endemic to realism and it's precisely because realism is such a bleak
vision. It offers us no comforts, no consolation for our ills that realists in the end,
it's such a hard position to hold that they often end with an idealistic or apocalyptic
outburst. So what do you make of the fact that in Shakespeare, for example, the villains are
very often the political realists? Edmund in King Lear is a kind of orthodox Machiavelli and he
believes that power is there to be manipulate. If you need to be fraudulent, you'd be
fraudulent. You always are temporizing. You're looking for that opportunity, the right moment in
which to act and he has a very disabused concept of what politics is all about. And I think if
Machiavelli had been able to read King Lear, he would have approved a Edmund all the way. And yet
Shakespeare, who was a reader of Machiavelli himself, or at least a popular version of Machiavelli,
invariably has his Machiavelli or Machiavellas and in a kind of abortion of their schemes to
amass the kind of power that the so-called illegitimate prince or the prince to be the would-be
prince who is not privileged through birth that Machiavelli gives all this advice to. So yeah,
I take your point. Well, I'd also like to save Machiavelli from being read as a completely
amoral thinker. I mean, I think all of his realist advice is ultimately in the service of some kind
of moral end. He comes again and again to what a prince has to do to maintain the state,
Montanare Lestato. And it's important that Machiavelli argues when he offers his most famous
realist advice when he says things like rulers must not depart from good when possible,
but know how to enter into evil when necessary. He's not giving them free reign. He's actually
relying on their judgment about what is necessary to maintain the state. And their actions are
to be put in the service of that moral end. Maintenance is, you know, there's nothing more
important than maintenance and there's nothing harder to sell than maintenance. When Hillary Clinton
says, "elect me, I will maintain continuity. I will preserve what you've had in the last eight years."
It's a hard sell. Shall we move on to Thomas Hobbes? Sure. Who is another of your protagonists.
In what way would you define him according to the four criteria that you just laid out of what
real is a political realist is? In what ways Thomas Hobbes, a quintessential political realist?
Well, I think Hobbes, like Machiavelli, thinks that politics is distinctive. It's going to have
its own kind of moral rules, its own distinct normative order. Hobbes also sees politics
as that root conflictual or agonistic. And part of the job of the sovereign or the state is to make
sure that that conflict is contained doesn't become explosive, doesn't lead to civil war.
Most importantly, Hobbes is going to insist again on the priority of order and stability
over the demands of justice. Hobbes lived through, I'll be at a distance from France, a civil war
in his own country in England. And he recognizes that order and stability are fragile
accomplishments and that justice purchased at the cost of order is going to be worthless.
And Hobbes also at times, especially as a count of human psychology, as a distinctly anti-utopian
bent, he doesn't expect much of us. And those are his starting points, and I think they're
eminently realist starting points. So he believed like a good political realist in the
distinction of some politics that it has a separate set of rules for itself. It's not ethics. I mean,
it's not completely divorced from ethics, but it's not impunable under the category of ethics
as it was for Aristotle. That's right. He believed that politics essentially conflict
sees that everywhere. So parentheses question. Trump goes to the G7 meeting,
and then insults the premier, Trudeau of Canada, and gives a sense that what kind of friends
will it's not pretend to be friends? We are actually, you know, we're competitors. It's a winner
take all thing. And he completely throws up the whole ritual and tradition of considering
ones allies, the friends and partners and collaborators and so forth. In what sense could you say that
a gesture like that is political realism on the part of Trump when he takes our best friend in
LA, Canada, and treats it like a competitor? Well, I tend to think that for the most part,
Trump would do well to read some of the some of the great realists. So I don't think it's
very realistic. And I think he also, he made a moral appeal as well, apart from throwing
Canada and Trudeau under the bus. He also said how dare Trudeau come out and when I'm on my way to this
summit in North Korea and say that Canada is going to stand firm against the United States.
This is the time when all my allies should be behind me. For God's sake, I'm about to try and
negotiate a pact with a dangerous nuclear power. And so just as he was throwing in his ally under
the bus, he was also appealing to a certain idea of what it means to be an ally, to be loyal,
and so I think there's some tension there that is not unusual with Trump. For sure. And I think
he would also benefit by understanding how fragile is the order as well as stability of international
institutions. That's right. That they are vulnerable to the unthought-through whims of the leader of
the most powerful country in the world. Right. And it's precisely because politics is all about conflict
that sometimes stability and order are that which prevents us from falling into the open armed
conflict now. That's right. And as my colleague in political science, Barry Wineghast insists one
of the great achievements of modern liberal democracies has been through institutions and laws to
lower the stakes of politics. So that conflict that Hobbes is so worried about doesn't have to
erupt into civil war and revolution. That's why we ought to value the institutions that we have
in place in the United States. So with Hobbes, the last two books of the Leviathan, you as you point
out there very much about the apocalypse or they're related to it, no? So could you say a few more
words about Hobbes and Apocalypse? Sure. So it may seem strange to suggest that Hobbes is really
preoccupied with the apocalypse because if you've read Hobbes and any of your college history
of political thought classes, you probably read the first half of Leviathan books one and two
which are very secular, very philosophical in their orientation, make a case for why it is that
rational people would want to leave the state of nature and put themselves under a virtually
absolute sovereign. But the second half of Leviathan is primarily concerned with religion and scripture
and part of that set of concerns has to do with apocalyptic expectations. Now Hobbes tells us in his
autobiography that he wrote Leviathan to absolve God's laws of the charge that they
legitimate rebellion. And I think that's how we ought to read the second half of Leviathan,
perhaps even the first half with that motivation in mind. And so Hobbes is very concerned about
the way in which apocalyptic prophecy is fueling the Civil War. The clergyman Stephen Marshall
was invited to Parliament to give a speech to the members of Parliament. And Marshall said to them
that if it be in the service of God against Antichrist that they ought to be willing to take babies
by the heels and beat out their brains against the walls, that speech was made before Parliament
and it was published by Parliament. Hobbes is concerned about that sort of rhetoric. He's concerned
about the way in which apocalyptic rhetoric vastly raises the stakes of politics, that if you see
your enemy as part of the force of Antichrist to be vanquished, then anything goes.
Beating babies against walls is okay in a battle against the Antichrist. And Hobbes realizes that
he has to disarm this apocalyptic rhetoric. And that's what he spends a lot of the second half
of Leviathan doing. So he's an opponent of apocalyptic thinking, but at the same time you say
he's fascinated by it. He's fascinated by it and he's willing to use it for his own end. So he
doesn't turn away from it. He doesn't just say this is all nonsense. He affirms parts of the
apocalyptic story, but he does what many Christian thinkers before him had done. And you just
ured to this earlier. One of the things he does is he suggests that, well, the apocalypse will
happen at some point, but it's not for us to know when it's going to happen. It's for God and it
it'll come as a thief in the night. And you should really never understand it to be happening
here and now. He also takes aim at some of the particular beliefs circulating in his time.
And so it was a commonplace of English Protestant apocalypticism to argue that the Pope was the Antichrist.
Now, this was all well and good under Elizabeth I. It helped unify England against its Catholic
enemies. The problem comes in the 17th century when suddenly people are worried that the
Church of England is looking awfully popish, that their King has Catholics sympathies. Suddenly,
the Antichrist was no longer safely over there in Rome. He was at home in England, and a lot of
English Protestants thought that they had a religious duty to combat him. And so Hobbes spends quite a bit
of one of the most lengthy chapters in the second half of Leviathan arguing that the Pope cannot
possibly be the Antichrist. Now, that looks awfully strange to us now, but if you see it in the
context of the beliefs circulating in his time, it's really clear what he's trying to do is
try to disarm what he sees as an immensely dangerous and pathological apocalypticism.
Do you believe Hobbes was a believing Christian?
I think that question is really hard to answer. It's something that scholars spend a lot of time
fighting about, and I worry that that fight actually distracts us from more important questions.
I think it's very hard to infer based on what someone in the 17th century writes on the page,
what they would have believed in the depths of their soul. That said...
Well, I guess I'm less interested in what they believed in the depths of their soul, and more what
role God plays in the political theory that you have in Leviathan.
I think that Hobbes thinks that the people around him, or at least most of those people,
are motivated by a belief in God and certain Christian commitments that go along with it.
And I think he's pragmatic enough, whatever his own beliefs are, to realize that he has to
meet them where they stand and argue on their own terms. And that is why the entire second half
of Leviathan makes its arguments with scriptural evidence. Whatever Hobbes himself believed,
he knew he had to appeal to people where they stood, where they were coming from, and that's how he did it.
Did he find this animus, this kind of hysterical animus against Catholicism to be pathological,
or in any way justified? Because it's something that it's hard to understand that chapter of British
history, if one doesn't appreciate the truly psychologically pathological animus, that many of
the actors, political actors of the time had, and paranoia about the Catholics.
Hobbes shared some views with some of these paranoid reactions to Catholicism, and the main one
he shared was a suspicion of church hierarchy, of the episcopacy. And he was worried that too much of
Catholic doctrine, legitimate religious interference and temporal jurisdiction. Those are the kinds
of things that concerned Hobbes, but that's not hysteria, that's Hobbes making reasoned arguments
about certain forms of church government. So he would have found himself on certain issues on the side
of some of this hysterical anti-Catholicism, but he also recognized, I think, the danger of it, that
it's all well and good to call the Pope the Antichrist, but the chickens come home to roost at some point,
and he saw that that kind of anti-Catholicism had devastating effects on the politics of England.
I don't know when this so-called secularization of Western civilization takes place, but let's just assume
it's an enlightenment effect of the Enlightenment, but the question arises now in our own time,
how do things stand with apocalyptic thinking in, let's say the 20th century, in our own century,
where there has been a certain kind of abdication of any kind of truly religious belief in the
imminent end of days, but that apocalyptic patterns of thought and maybe even desires are still very
much present with us. Is that right? So we were speaking earlier about Morgenthau and his nuclear
apocalypse, which of course is slightly different than the apocalyptic phenomena that we were
discussing with Mikeviddly as well as with Hobbs, where they were talking about a god who will
intervene in history to bring about an end according to his own providential design and
intentions, as opposed to a situation now, geopolitical situation, where humanity has amassed the
means to bring about an engineer, its own apocalyptic self-diver station. That's right. So let me start by saying
we're not free of the religious apocalypticism yet. A Pew survey from 2010 suggested that
a little over 40% of Americans think that the world will come to an end within 50 years,
sort of as foretold along religious lines. So that's still with us in spite of the enlightenment.
I know I alluded to it in my intro. Exactly. But you're right, at the same time,
the apocalypses that preoccupy many of us now are wrought by human hands rather than by divine
agency. And this really is a transformation, I think, that starts with the dawn of the thermonuclear
age and the hydrogen bomb. The possibility that we now could destroy ourselves or destroy a good part
of the world comes firmly into view. At the same time, our ways of thinking about it still owe a lot
to those religious traditions of apocalyptic thinking. In the book, I talk a little bit about
some of the people who are involved in the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer, was an obsessive reader
of the 17th century poet John Dunn. And so he was thinking of his own work on nuclear weaponry as in terms
of kind of crisis and redemption and salvation. And so one of the things I want to insist on in the
book is that the division between what we might call the religious and what we might call the
secular is very muddy in the 20th century thinking on nuclear apocalyps. It's not so clear
as we would think. Right. And clearly we're no longer in the midst of the Cold War of the 50s and 60s and even
70s. And yet, as you say, we're not maybe thinking as much about nuclear apocalyps as we might have in
the past. And yet the threat of it is still very much with us even more, perhaps, potentially than ever
before. That's true. There are still over 9,000 nuclear weapons in the hands of Putin's Russia.
There are, I think, a little less than that in the hands of Trump's America. Despite all the talk,
at the recent Summit with North Korea, about denuclearization, there's no agreement between the
US and North Korea on what that actually means. And so some number of nuclear weapons are in the
hands of Kim Jong-un. The possibility of nuclear war has not gone away, we have just ceased to think
about it as much. Does it have anything to do with our contemporary politics apart from who has the
button power or does us not thinking about it have anything to do with our contemporary politics?
It might. It might also have to do with some. Would we vote differently, for example, if we were more
present to mine? I think we might well vote differently. We might choose leaders whose attitude
toward the possibility of nuclear war was less whimsical than our current leaders seems to be.
I think, though, that part of the reason we don't think about it as much is kind of run of the
mill psychological reasons. Psychologists have suggested that humans have a finite pool of worry.
Most people, what they're worried about now in terms of existential threats, it's climate change
and not nuclear war. It doesn't mean that nuclear war has become less of a threat or that it's been
eliminated. It means we can only worry about so much at once. And climate change has taken on
a apocalyptic dimension for many people, correct? That's right. Not surprisingly. And people
trying to get us to recognize the threat of climate change have made ample use of apocalyptic rhetoric,
perhaps most famously Al Gore in an inconvenient truth. And at numerous points thereafter
says that the catastrophes, the floods, the drought, the storms, the attributes to climate change are
quote, like a nature hike through the book of Revelation. And that kind of apocalyptic rhetoric,
both in its overtly biblical and seemingly secular form, pervades the debate on climate change.
So I was thinking of a book that I was very important for me when I was, as a graduate student,
when I, but it's a theory of narrative by Frank Kermode. That's right.
The sense of an ending, you know, you're well aware of, well, familiar with that, that deals a lot with
the apocalyptic psychology of certainly, you know, the Christian era in various moments. But
it's more this, he points out how human existence is denied a beginning, a historical beginning,
and because we are all living in what he calls the meantime, he calls. I mean, it's not his word,
but it's the fact that there's a world that preceded our entry into it and will presumably outlast,
you know, our exit from it. And we don't know how this story is going to end. And yet, the demand for
meaning, which you were referring to earlier in our conversation, that something reassuring about
apocalyptic scenario, they would provide an employment with a kind of beginning middle and end that
would make sense and confers meaning on the whole story and retrospect, that because we don't have
access to such an end, narrative end from which perspective we can make meaning of our present,
that human cultures universally have narrative stories, myths, and so forth. And yet, this
narrative impulse, which he roots in our existential condition of mean timeless,
is one that I can't help but think is inseparable from an apocalyptic imaginary.
Yes, I mean, if you think about how a lot of us think about our own lives, how drawn we are,
to narrative, to telling the story of our life such that it has a beginning, middle, and hopefully
some sort of reasonably dignified end. And I mean, I do think this impulse runs strong,
and so as human societies, we spend a lot of our time living in this middle time either
trying to recover our lost origins or in trying to anticipate some sort of prophesied end.
And as you do, I think this runs extremely deep.
And so one of the most interesting claims that you make about political realists is that
they tend to have a tragic worldview, but a tragic worldview that strangely is actually
much less dangerous than an apocalyptic worldview because the tragic worldview would
begin by acknowledging the fact that we live in this middle time, that we are denied access to
an absolute end time that would give an absolute meaning to the story as such. But that there's
nothing very consoling or edifying about accepting the fact that we live within these very finite
spans that our fragments and therefore do not necessarily allow for the demand for meaning that we
bring to bear on our existence. And that therefore a tragic acceptance of limitations would be
consistent with the reality of a human existential situation, but that is also a hard sell
politically speaking, no? I think that's right. So I do argue that Machiavelli after his initial
flirtation with a sort of savanna role and style of pakalipticism gravitates in the end,
and especially in the discourses on Livi toward a more tragic worldview. And that's certainly
the worldview that Hans Morgenthau starts his career with as well that we later
departs from it. And the tragic worldview essentially sees politics as the same damn thing over and
over again. There's no hope for a final escape from the political conflicts that plague us,
there's no hope for redemption. Now, there's something quite morally appealing about that
worldview. It's not just as you suggested that it might better reflect the reality of our
condition of living in this middle time. But a tragic worldview really resists apakalipticism's
dangerous moral clarity, it's sense of certainty about who and what is good, who and what is evil.
It resists the apakaliptic impulse to push for ultimate justice at any cost. The tragic worldview
recognizes that when we see our enemies as apakaliptic threats, rather than as flawed humans who
find themselves in the same circumstances that we do, that that can be awfully dangerous. But at the same
time, you're right, it is such a hard position to hold. And it's certainly a hard position to sell.
It's a view of the world as fundamentally resistant to our mastery, as unresponsive to our
virtuous intentions, as capricious in its rewards for goodness. It is not a worldview that offers
much consolation, but it is one that's very consistent with political realism's underlying commitments.
It may in the end be the right worldview, even if it's one that offers us no consolation.
It offers us also no, it renounces what Zheeshk calls the sublime object of ideology,
which is another interesting question about the way in which apakaliptic thinking and totalitarianism,
what do they have in common, at least in a subterranean way, where the totalitarian sublime object
of ideology is that it will promise some kind of redemption if you're dealing with, let's say,
the Marxist view of it in this totalitarian instantiation, it's this utopian future of the
triumph of the proletariat, getting the communist state and so forth, or in the case of fascist totalitarianism,
there's also some other sublime object of ideology, which at the there's an end point where things
are put right again. And the tragic worldview would renounce the siren call of this kind of absolute,
and I think there's enough dignity in the call of a tragic worldview that you could actually
sell it the way someone like Albedkamu does in such an inspired manner when he writes the rebel,
yes, as where he's making a claim for rebellion versus revolution and that the revolutionaries are
promising that ultimate synthesized end and whereas the rebel has a tragic understanding of life
and therefore accepts limits and understands the principle of restraint.
Yes, I've tended to think about it in terms of the difference between resistance and
revolution and I think what the tragic worldview asks of us is that we recognize the hard work of
resistance that it is like it is as Weber called politics, the slow boring through hard boards.
That is a lot of what political resistance looks like on a day-to-day basis. It's also what a lot
of political transformation looks like so it's not that the tragic worldview it has to be a status
quo worldview. Morgenthau was fond of saying that his brand of realism didn't give up on the
project of a transformation toward international justice. It just recognized that that had to take
place through the slow workman-like processes of everyday politics. I think there is a dignity about
that that's worth celebrating and I also suggest in the book I think that the tragic worldview
has an optimism to it which is that if politics is just the same damn thing over and over again,
then we have some hope of being able to look to the past for analogs and wisdom that we can use in
the present. The apocalyptic worldview always sees our current circumstances as radically
unprecedented. There's nothing that can ever be learned from our past struggles that for
a gd in at least sees the past as a source of resources for coming to grips with the present.
Absolutely, which is why Machiavelli's prince is full of examples from the past.
For every political principle he proffers, he takes an example from antiquity and an example from
his contemporary history. That's right and the discourse is on livid as well just with a focus on
Roman examples. Well, Allison, I'm all in favor of rallying to the cause of a tragic worldview that
would spare us greater tragedies that might ensue from another kind of apocalyptic thinking
when it comes to the political realm. I want to thank you for coming on to entitled opinions
and remind our listeners we've been speaking with Professor Allison McQueen from
Department of Political Science here at Stanford just published a very provocative book,
very interesting book called political realism in apocalyptic times Cambridge University Press
2018, right? That's right. Yeah, it's hot off the press. Hot off the press and it's
well worth reading. So thanks again for coming on. I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Take care.
[Music] I can see what you're looking to find in a smile on my face.
[Music] In my face and mind, my state of grace, I send what I came to make from the madness to me.
[Music]
With a diamond ring, with a ball of heaven's plan, yeah, and you sure can't save.
Now it's all I can fall, but the load is sent me down into me.
I can save a little children in a poor country.
Got my teeth in heaven, never left in life.
We've got to ride all the way to pay for a dime. Got my teeth in play.
Never left in life.
All the way to paradise.
[Music]
Now there's nothing left full luxury. Nothing left to pay my life and build.
But the good lord will provide. I'm the way with it.
So said what you came to the man will die on the way.
We've tuned in a call for the man to hear him sing.
I've got my teeth in play, never left in life.
Got to ride all the way to paradise.
Got my teeth in play.
I've never left in life.
All the way to paradise.
[Music]
I would say that the P