Only a few decades later than the rest of you, I finally
got around to reading Lord of the Flies
by William Golding. This is the classic novel of a bunch of young boys on a
desert island in the Pacific who did not know whether they would ever be
rescued. They chose a chief, who tried to get them to build a fire on the
mountaintop as a signal to passing ships. However, a renegade chief influenced
most of the boys to murder two of the others and to pursue the original chief
in order to, it is implied, impale him on a stick. In the process of becoming
murderers, the boys also burned down the forests of their island which were
their only source of food.
This story directly addresses the question of whether
violence is a natural part of the human mind or is something that is learned, a
very hot debate at the time Golding wrote the novel and, strangely enough,
still debated. Those who thought (or think) that violence is learned might have
guessed that these innocent boys would have developed into a peaceful society.
But the boys created a society more vicious than the war-torn world from which
they had come. The clear message is that hitting the reset button, starting
over, in human history, even if it were possible, would not create a utopia,
and would be very likely to produce something much worse than modern
civilization which at least has a few traditions that restrain savagery.
The Bible has very similar stories. Adam and Eve were in
a perfect garden (in which the only thing to eat was fruit) very much like Golding’s
island. Adam and Eve could not be satisfied there, however. And, as in
Golding’s novel, one of the results of the rejection of paradise is hunting and
meat consumption. So humankind started over, this time outside the Garden.
Perhaps the most famous Bible story of all was about God pressing the reset
button on humankind by destroying everyone in the world except Noah’s family,
whom he considered to be perfectly righteous. But this didn’t work. Very soon
after Noah’s family emerged from the Ark, Noah got drunk and his family was
torn apart by intrigue (with a sexual overtone). Then God pressed the reset
button again: this time, destroying Sodom and Gomorrah while rescuing Lot and
his daughters. But they had hardly escaped into the mountains before they
involved themselves in intrigues presumably as bad as anything they had left
behind in the wicked cities. Then God pressed the reset button again, leading
the Israelites out of captivity and into the wilderness to start their own new
and righteous society, which failed at every step. Finally, God pressing the
reset button to start Israel over again in the time of Nehemiah worked about as
well as the previous attempts. These stories are some of the epic tales upon
which western civilization is based.
Our evolutionary ancestry assures that every human
society, large or small, isolated from or connected to others, will have
conflict that results from competition and the desire for domination. Leaving a
burning hulk of Earth behind and starting over on a new planet somewhere else
in the galaxy would likewise fail. Evolutionary science has at least revealed
to us that these destructive behaviors are not mindless evil but are the result
of natural selection and are therefore understandable even if not excusable.
