Dear Benj,

Thank you for your letter. If I draft a reply without delay,
it's because I don't trust my memory. Forgetfulness is a
function of (old) age. An idea which is very vivid today is
likely to have disappeared after a day or two, as does snow
as soon as the weather turns warm.

I was much pleased with your thoughts about Caribbean history.
Confronting with integrity what we can know about the past is
often embarrassing and painful. I consider it a moral obligation
which we cannot avoid. To my way of thinking, the two courses
about which you report, history and moral philosophy, are closely
linked.

Much of today I spent reading about Hobbes and his Leviathan,
and about the English Civil Wars.  I hadn't thought about Hobbes'
writing for many years, and was pleased that in my old age,
this text which I barely understood when I was young, takes
on new meaning. I found it useful to reread, in the 41st chapter
of Job, in the Bible, the original description of the Leviathan
as a deadly monster. The kings of England under whose rule Hobbes
spent his life must be recognized as the models for his description
of government.  Do you think Hobbes' comparison of these kings with
terrifying monsters, was deliberate, intentional irony, if not was
it satire? Was the image of Leviathan perhaps something like the
brazen serpent which Moses fashioned in the wilderness, so that
the victims of snake bite who gazed upon it might recover from an
otherwise fatal injury? Might Hobbes' fantasy of the Leviathan whom
he requires to protect him from his fellow humans, reflect an
otherwise undocumented trauma of his childhood?

The theory of Hobbes, if I understand correctly, is that individuals
are by nature independent of and antagonistic to each other:

Ostendo primo conditionem hominum extra societatem civilem
(quam conditionem appellare liceat statum naturae)
aliam non esse quam bellum omnium contra omnes;
atque in eo bello jus esse omnibus in omnia.

I show in the first place that the state of men without
civil society (which state may be called the state of nature)
is none other than a war of all against all;
and that in that war, all have a right to all things.

That's not how I see it. My understanding is that the natural
state of man is to be born into and to grow up in a family,
which he trusts and loves, a family which protects him,
and that the family which is, or should be, anything but
"bellum omnium contra omnes", is the prototype and 
precursor of civil society.  Hobbes probably had a
very troubled childhood.  He reported later:
"my mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear."
It's no wonder that he was looking for protection
to the monarch as a father figure.

It's my habit, Benj, always to write down what is on
my mind, when it's there, in real time, as the computer
programmers would say, aware that in the next moment
it may be gone. Therefore, please don't take my letter(s)
seriously, and never feel you owe me an answer: you don't.

Stay well and warm and happy.

Love Yoyo