Starting Humanity Over

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.

Does Humankind Belong on Earth?

Happy Earth Day. Do we, as destructive humans, have a right to wish the Earth a happy Earth Day?

Is humankind a legitimate part of the natural world, belonging to the Earth’s ecosystems and ecological communities, or is mankind a diseased scab upon the planet? This question is meaningless, because here we are, like it or not. Meaningless, that is, unless you are God and capable of wiping out life on Earth and starting over.

What follows is one blogger’s review of the movie Noah, starring Russell Crowe and Anthony Hopkins and other very good performers. I review it primarily as a writer and as a scientist who thinks about Big Questions. My verdict is that it was better than the original. The reason I say this is that the original Flood story (Genesis 6-8), which is a gigantic epic even more worthy of immortality than the Odyssey, addressed issues of major importance, but left some questions unanswered. The movie filled in the missing issues.

The major point of both the original and the movie is that human evil had defiled the Earth, and the human stain needed to be cleansed away. In the original, God recognizes Noah and his family as uniquely virtuous on the entire face of the Earth. In the movie, Noah recognizes his own sinfulness, and concludes that his job, and that of his family, is to facilitate the rescue of the innocent animals, and then to vanish into obscurity after the job is done. This is why, as he saw it, only his eldest son was married, and this son’s wife was barren.

But then Noah’s wife implores Noah’s mystical, magical, and still-living ancestor Methuselah (played by Anthony Hopkins; who else?) to restore Mrs. Shem’s fertility, and he does. Thus, while the Ark is floating on the face of the waters, Mrs. Shem becomes pregnant. Noah decides that, since his duty is to bring the human blight to an end, he must kill the child if the child is a girl (a boy would just grow old and die without issue). So what does he do? Wouldn’t you like to know!

As a result of his decision, Noah concludes that he has failed God. This is why, in the movie (something left totally unexplained in Genesis), Noah goes off to live in a cave and get drunk. But Mrs. Shem convinces him that in fact he made the right, not the wrong, choice. Noah returns and is reconciled to his wife. It is a supremely touching scene. Mrs. Noah was working in the garden, so that human life might continue on Earth. Noah walks up to her, places his hand on hers, and then begins gardening with her. You will not be surprised to hear what I did when I got home from the movie. My wife was out in the garden planting delicate parsley seedlings. I did with her exactly what Noah did with his wife in the movie. Then I gently, oh so gently, watered the seedlings, seedlings so delicate that too much water would plaster them to the sticky ground.

The ecological theme was clear. Sinful humankind had created an industrial civilization (a sticks-and-stones version of it, at any rate) that had made the Earth a barren wasteland. And Noah had to save biodiversity—all of it, not just the species Noah deemed useful.

The problems that creationists leave unexplained in their literalistic interpretation of the Flood story are similarly left unexplained in the movie. But that’s okay, since it is just a story. It is the creationists that turn it into a problem. It is a story that reveals deep truths, and might be considered truer than literalism.

Even the little touches were good. Hopkins, playing Methuselah, had a craving for berries, and was out grubbing for berries in the forest. He finally found one (judging from the leaves, I’d say it was a bearberry, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) just as the Flood waters overtook him.

So I invite you to leave doctrinal arguments aside and go see this movie, in which a modern reinterpretation of great fiction addresses some of the most important questions in human history and in the world today.