Violence at a Distance

On dietary restrictions and the state

Abraham Bosse, Engraving for Leviathan, 1651 (Detail), Public Domain

I was a (admittedly morally lax) vegetarian in my late teens and early 20s. I eventually had to give it up for health reasons, and have subsequently constantly been tempted to go back, but never have. I've avoided returning for all the familiar reasons including convenience, but also because of something more complicated. The main thing that drew me to vegetarianism in the first place was a sense of unease about how to live. How we eat is tied up with so many things that I still feel alienated from in the world we’ve built. The distance of society from nature. Decisions to clear wilderness to raise cattle. $3 fried chicken and the supply chain behind it. The sheer scale and cruelty of factory meat. 

But it has also been the ethics that have kept me from going back. Vegetarianism can perhaps help with the environmental effects of meat production. But I’ve gradually strengthened in my sense that life is intertwined with death in a way that can’t be resolved at the level of mere lifestyle change. 

It feels like millennials have, en masse as a generation, gotten tangled up in a not unrelated paradox.

When I watch Cold War-era speeches, there is an unironic patriotism that very few in my generation seem ever to have felt. It was possible for many Americans to think of violence as rooted “elsewhere”—the Bolsheviks and their successors made the key decisions to throw the world into violence; America and its allies merely—reluctantly—responded.  There is a tone of unassailable purity in phrases like “the free world.”

The history that people now in their thirties have lived through feels like the gradual uncovering of a very different reality than those older stories suggested. My earliest political memories were probably of Iraq. Then the financial crisis, the bombing of Libya, the killing of George Floyd, and now the Gaza conflict have all emphasized a similar point, namely that liberal societies—and America in particular—are obviously making decisions, decisions that involve use of or support for violence. Perhaps some of these decisions are justified, but they are anything but unambiguous.

So many of the political movements of the past decade seem to be trying to work out this question of how to live once an overly pristine ideal begins to fail: Do you try to reassert America’s potential? Do you draw back to technocratic management of the status quo? Do you turn the other way to more thoroughgoing critique? Do you try to reestablish purity some other way? 

---

Thomas Hobbes himself apparently helped Abraham Bosse design the unnerving image which accompanied the publication of the Leviathan in 1651. The image remains shocking—the fixed stare of the sovereign, the gradual realization that the king’s body is made up of thousands and thousands of people, the massive sword.

But the image is honest in a way that contemporary discussions of liberalism often aren’t. Liberalism has many positive goods—individualism and tolerance and universal rights and freedom of speech. But it also seems to require a sword, a quite large one. This ambiguity is all over early liberal theory. If liberalism involves the establishment of rights, one must first of all establish and defend the state to serve as the guarantor of those claims. This is why not only Jefferson the democrat was considered a liberal, but also Hobbes the monarchist. It is why the French thought to declare des droits de l'homme et du citoyen (not only “people in general” but specifically “citizens.”) 

Bosse’s engraving is unsparing on a related point. It’s not just the State’s body that is made up of the people, but his right arm as well—the one that holds the weapon looming over the whole world. They may not be able meaningfully to alter the State’s decision, but they are essential to the act of violence nonetheless. 

The message of the engraving—and of Hobbes’ text—is clear: there is one large sword so that there don’t have to be a million small ones. But that sword is still deployed constantly. It gets used inside, as when the state incarcerates its citizens or engages in capital punishment. It also gets used outside to protect its borders or enforce its domain. 

The more I’ve tried to work this paradox through, the more I’ve come to think that this ideal is intrinsic to the trouble we have with liberalism. Liberalism is a strong moral ideal, but one that, at least in our time, has grown lazy in acknowledging its costs. Liberalism did not create the violence of the world, but it hasn’t escaped it either.

Even if we accept liberal ideals in the end, there is something that should trouble us about the arrangement. It is troubling because of the scale of violence a modern state can exact, at home or abroad. It is troubling because of the degree of violence needed to maintain monopoly. It is also troubling because of the sense of detachment it allows. As a citizen I benefit constantly from the power of the state, even as I personally disavow. It is a way of life that depends intrinsically, inexorably on violence, but at a distance.

***

In Colorado a couple summers ago, I watched dad step out into the back garden and shoot two turkeys (legally, I add). I very vividly remember the birds’ gradual realization of what had happened—grazing in the grass one moment, then the bang, disorientation, stumbling, falling. We spent the next hour cleaning the birds on the deck. One thing I didn’t expect: in getting ready to slice into the abdomen of the bird, it was, of course, still warm—like a living body.

A few people I’ve met, and a few essays I’ve read, hold to the principle of not eating meat unless one has oneself killed that specific kind of animal—being willing to eat fish and poultry for example, but not mammals. Somehow that principle does feel like a small step out of ennui. Violence is real and perhaps we need to accept that our hands are never quite clean. 

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

---

---