Homo homini lupus

Jul 26, 2009 Editorial

“Homo homini lupus” – “man is a wolf to man” – is a Latin phrase that has come down to us from the Roman playwright Plautus (300BC). It succinctly summarises a view of man that sadly history in the succeeding millennia has given too many illustrations to suggest that things might have changed for the better since.
The excesses of Atilla the Hun and Adolf Hitler are two bookends that have received a lot of press but the genocides in Cambodia in the seventies and in the Congo every decade since remind us that man can still be spectacularly cruel to his fellow man.

But that cruelty is not confined only to mass murderers and sociopaths at the national level. As the recent battering to death of the mother, Ramrattie Deonauth, by her own adult son, after years of vicious abuse, it appears to have seeped into individual relationships of even the most intimate kinds. How else do we also explain the daily reports of women beaten, chopped, battered, maimed and killed almost invariably by their partners?
All of this, of course, does not include the now seemingly routine police “roughing up” interrogation techniques and other apparently high-handed official actions.
Over four hundred years ago, the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes evoked the phrase in the introduction to his masterpiece, Leviathan, to summarise his view of human nature. He proposed that left unchecked, such a nature guarantees a “life of man (that is) solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The check, he proposed, was a strong government that would enforce rules of the society that would ensure that ‘advantage” is not taken by the strong over the weak. Man would then have literally come out of the law of the “jungle”. It would appear, however, that in Guyana we are fast regressing towards the Hobbesian “state of nature”.

It would appear also, as if the process is accelerating. As the daily acts of cruelty play out in our individual and national lives, our sense of moral outrage is dulled – there is a callusing of our moral fibre – which then demands even more outrageous acts of spite and brutality to make us sit up and take notice. And incredibly, as if on cue, the acts do come: the rape of toddlers and infants and now the killing of a mother, who supported a crippled husband, by her son who demanded food that he did not provide in the first place.
Change from this precipitous slide into anarchy and barbarism can only come when we the Guyanese people stand up and say, “No more!” Whatever view of human nature we may have – even if we believe that there is none – we will each have to work to recreate a community in which wolves do not prowl among us with impunity.

We can do no better than, in the felicitous biblical phrase, start with removing the mote from our own eyes. Even if we do not believe in some cosmic law of karma, there is enough evidence all around us that should convince us that “what goes around, comes around”.
And when it comes to man’s inhumanity to man, it comes around in spades as the entire society degenerates.
But Hobbes intervention reminds us that lasting change will not return unless we also reform the “Leviathan” – the state and its governance – that we have invented, (and nowadays elect) to save us from our baser instincts. The state currently is certainly strong; but the question is, “Is it effective?” Few today would answer in the affirmative. And it is not just a matter of laws. There has been a flurry of activity recently to fill the various lacunae in the law as it relates to many of the gratuitous cruelties that abound in our midst – such as domestic violence.
It comes down to the matter of enforcement and the example set by those in positions of power in our society. As the head goes, so will the body follow.

Discover more from Kaieteur News

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Latest News