We all need somebody to lean on

Bill Withers – the singer-songwriter you may know from ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’, ‘Lovely Day’, or ‘Just the Two of Us’ – had only one number-one hit. It was ‘Lean on Me’ (1972), a song as simple and honest as it is transporting:

Lean on me/When you’re not strong/And I’ll be your friend/I’ll help you carry on.

For it won’t be long/Till I’m gonna need somebody to lean on.

We’ve witnessed, and hopefully participated in, an unprecedented amount of exactly this kind of generosity, friendship and mutual support over the last several weeks. Social media temporarily transformed into a volunteer hotline, with people in need reaching out for help for their families or for neighbours or even for strangers. It’s reminiscent of another passage from the song:

Please swallow your pride/If I have things you need to borrow.

For no one can fill/Those of your needs that you won’t let show.

Others more fortunate, or simply desirous to help, have also been sending out unsolicited offers to assist in myriad ways. I saw on Twitter an offer to tend to the house pets of ill owners.

All this has been exclusively societal and private, everyday citizens picking up the slack where their government had failed. For an average person, this might seem unremarkable; indeed, all things considered, it might even strike her that people have done too little for each other. But for a political scientist, there’s something vexing about this voluntary mutual support, about how unrelated people have risen to fill the void left by a feckless State.

What’s the State for? Why do we even have a Government of India or of Russia or of the UK? The history of political thought – whether Indic or otherwise – has basically offered two alternative baskets of justification for the existence and legitimacy of the sovereign State; that is, the State that exercises power and authority (and at times violence) over its subjects. The first set, more ancient, consists of various claims regarding how persons can only flourish and fulfil their full potential (purpose, destiny) within political communities. Humans are social by nature, communities are necessary, and the institution of the sovereign State emerges from these premises. This kind of conception tends to justify only weak states, usually buttressed by various theological or cosmological claims regarding everyone’s proper place within society and the natural right of the rulers to rule. In modern times, this first group of explanation for the State has fallen out of favour for being too metaphysical.

The second, more current account of the legitimacy of the sovereign State derives from social-contract traditions. Here, the State does not enjoy any metaphysical right to exist but is simply the most pragmatic solution to perennial problems like insecurity and injustice, man’s beastliness to other men. To quote Thomas Hobbes, an early advocate of this view, without the State, the life of persons is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The stronger the State, the more capable it is of assuring its subjects’ security. But there’s a flip side: since the State exists to ensure the health, security, prosperity and justice of its subjects, it is obviously in breach of its obligations – and is thus illegitimate – if the lives of persons within the State were to be as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” as it would be without the State.

Within this apparent breach of the present moment, people have not become more brutish but often just the opposite. Life for those abandoned by the State has not become more solitary but in many instances, less so. It may still be poor and nasty, and if the healthcare system continues to fail, it will also be short. But contrary to what Hobbes had opined, it is not the ungoverned subjects who bear responsibility for this condition.

(The author is a Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Law, author and editor of over 20 books and counting, and as Mr Hyde, one of India’s top-ranking Ironman triathletes)