State of Nature

Hobbes would recognize what is happening in New Orleans right now. There is no government of any kind. There is no order. There is only chaos, suffering, and death. Snipers are killing people outside of hospitals, for no apparent reason, preventing the hospitals from being evacuated.

Not that there are any evacuations going on. FEMA has suspended rescue operations from the city due to the violence that has erupted there. Where is the military? The National Guard is out in force after every major event in California that potentially could lead to violence; whether it was a riot, an earthquake, a high-profile verdict, or a 50-Cent concert.

No one is taking away the dead; corpses are left to rot in the sweltering heat and humidity out in the remains of the waterlogged city, or gradually float down to the river, there to come ashore at random points and deposit the ghastly remains of victims of the hurricane. Cholera, typhoid, dysentery, malaria, and who knows what other kinds of third-world diseases are going to break out in an American city, because the survivors are all waist-deep in water becoming befouled by rotting corpses and raw sewage. The former city that is now Lake New Orleans resembles nothing so much as Bangladesh.

It is sickening and frightening to think that all of the glittering technology, profound social and political ideals, and accumulated wealth that makes us Americans feel smug and confident of our place as masters of the world can be so quickly wiped away -- and leave us, as we see in New Orleans, behaving like creatures out of the state of nature.