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Lost blogging, part I: Founding political societies

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Many of us political theory types have a particular interest in the facts and fictions of the founding moments of political societies, especially under extreme and unusual circumstances. Lost, ABC’s stellar new mildly soap-operatic stranded-on-a-tropical-island drama (I recently finally got around to watching the episodes so far, a procrastination made possible by the magic of Tivo). This is the first of at least two Last posts, and they’ll all contain mild to moderate spoilers from various episodes already aired, so you’ve been warned. If our free version of blogger had a “below the fold” function, I’d deploy it at this juncture.

The show begins with 48(ish) survivors of a plane crash somewhere between Australia and Los Angeles. The soon learn that rescue crews are probably looking in the wrong place. Slowly, after the panic fades and they begin to come face to face with the practical difficulties of life on the island, it becomes clear they may be stuck there for a while.

The early efforts to cope with this condition are practical rather than political. Food, Water and medicine are more pressing concerns. A few “natural” leaders begin to emerge, but there are very few meetings, discussions, and so forth dedicated to this problem. Indeed, the nascent society is largely unorganized for several days.

For the first several episodes, we have an emerging society, but it’s not yet what we might call a political society. Norms of behavior and hierarchy are only just beginning to emerge. That slow emergence is challenged by the anti-social behavior of one person (specifically, hoarding medicine specifically needed by a sick woman and assaulting her brother when he tries to retrieve it). This moment seems to call for a founding of political society like no other so far. Two of the emerging leaders are a medical doctor and a former Iraqi soldier. They discuss their options, and reluctantly agree on torture as a means to produre the medicine.

At this point, it would appear that the founding act of a political community is forthcoming. Nation-states are born with blood on their hands as often as not, and the political community of this island would be no exception. In her outstanding book Democracy and the Foreigner, Bonnie Honig examines the myth of a foreign founder–an outsider who, in part because of their very outsider status, is able to commit the founding act of statehood. The obvious example of this notion in political theory is Rousseau’s Lawgiver, but Honig finds the foreign-founder myth at work in both the Bible (through the story of Ruth) and modern fiction (The Wizard of Oz and Shane).

My observation at the time is that this founding would fit well with this theory–it will be the Iraqi soldier–already perceived by some as a threatening, dangerous outsider–who would commit the act that would restore order, by punishing and presumably ending the anti-social behavior and creating order.

To my surprise, the writers take things in another direction. The torturing is bungled, the hoarder didn’t have the medicine anyway, someone else devises an anternate cure for the illness, and we all move on, defying expectations, with no political society having been founded.

If the inaugural act of order-restoring violence fails to found political society, what will? We find out a couple of episodes later. The grand founding act: A census. After a mysterious attempted attack, a few frustrated castaways decide (seemingly for lack of ability to do anything actually helpful) to conduct a census, and create a record of the identities of all the islanders. When they check their list against the manifest, they discover some information crucial to the security of their community (a few minutes too late, of course). Against all expectations, genre and otherwise, it is this ordinary, boring, everyday political act (a census) that matters more than political violence.

The strangers stranded on a desert island scenario is often deployed as part of a thought experiment to get ‘down to basics’ about human nature and social interaction. As we usually imagine, violence is a goodish part of what’s left when we strip away the trappings of civilization. But the great power of the modern state of which we are all a part is not only that it’s an efficient killing machine, but also that it’s a relentlessy efficient and powerful counting and observing machine, and the latter makes a significant contribution to security and social control as well.

Up next: Locke and Rousseau on the island.

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