This is another guest posting by Jim Lynch, our favorite English teacher from Bishop O'Reilly. I still remember reading this book in 1974 as one of our class assignments.
The Golding Rule
One of the
standard assignments in my high school British Literature curriculum was
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Written
in 1954, the novel concerns a group of pre-adolescent English boys stranded on
a tropical island without adults, after an abortive attempt to evacuate them to
safety during a nuclear war. Within a brief period of time, these children of a
sophisticated Western European nation with a proud tradition of culture and
civilization turn to bloodlust, savagery and murder.
After the classes finished an exhaustive
discussion of the novel, I always called for a personal and secret written
response to a few pointed questions. On
scraps of paper they’d respond to the following: 1. If you and your entire
class were stranded on a similar uncharted island for the rest of your lives,
without hope of rescue, name the person in the class for whom you would vote to
be chief. 2. Excluding identification,
is there any potential Jack Merridew (the antagonist who become a bloody
dictator) in the class? 3. Without rescue, would the eventual outcome your stay
on the island be positive or negative?
Invariably, their responses led me
to wonder if we had read the same book. In their eighteen-year-old naive
camaraderie, an overwhelming majority of my students: 1. Named a popular
athlete or student council president as chief, 2. Refused to allow for the
possibility that any of their peers could become ruthless savages, and 3.
Thought that their acquired wisdom would allow them to overcome and solve any
difficulties that arose. “Gilligan’s
Island” anyone?
After each and every such class
response, I’d attempt to bring my students’ utopian vision more in line with
Golding’s theme. In the summer of 1972,
I reminded them, Tropical Storm Agnes wrought devastation to the town
surrounding the very school in which they now sat. Many of my students were evacuated from the
flood zone. After the Susquehanna’s raging waters finally subsided, I rode
through the town in a panel truck, picking up flat tires from huge pay-loaders
and delivering repaired ones, as an employee of a local tire company.
On every street corner, I’d
continue to point out, were members of the National Guard carrying locked and
loaded M-16’s, with orders to shoot looters on sight. Pennsylvania’s governor
had declared a state of emergency, and the local police force was temporarily
out of commission. Why would such an action be necessary in such an area filled
with friendly family neighborhoods and small businesses? What could have been
the governor’s reasons for such a move?
After moments of silence, the only response ever offered was a variation
of, “That was different.”
I then would offer a theoretical
proposition. Suppose, I said,
representatives of the police in their municipality had gone on the local news
and indicated that protracted and unsuccessful negotiations for a new contract
had broken down. Consequently, all members of the police department would go on
strike as of midnight next Friday. Would the crime rate in their town, I asked,
go up, go down or remain the same on that weekend? Once again I encountered
initial silence, followed by, “That’s different.”
Reminding them that Golding crafted
his story as a microcosm of larger society, I then asked why their parents paid
hefty taxes to support a criminal justice system. Beyond police protection, I said, why do we
need courthouses, magistrates, judges, lawyers, and prison facilities? Because there are bad people in society, they
would respond, and we have to protect ourselves from them. And all those bad people, I’d remind them,
once sat in classes just like this one and had every opportunity to work hard,
play by the rules, and choose happy and productive lives.
Ultimately, I would conclude class
discussions of the book with my hope that my students would reopen the
discussion at their 25th class reunion, and my belief that, by that
time, the seeds planted in their consciousness by Golding would have germinated
in the soil of their maturity. While I appreciated their idealism, I found
their naivete unsettling. I only
attended one such class reunion, but the alumni were having such a memorable
evening catching up and sharing family photos that I was loath to raise the
issue with anyone.
I seriously doubt, however, that
the needle would have moved to a great degree in the direction of a pessimistic
view of the human condition. While the signs are abundant, most prefer to avert
their eyes and focus on family and friends, rather than the larger world. Despite media websites, and twenty-four-hour
cable news, people tend to push unpleasant intrusions into the background.
Iran’s hell-bent quest for atomic weapons;
Russia’s incursions into the Ukraine; ISIS’s mass beheading, burning and
drowning, and its goal of a world-wide caliphate; domestic terrorism; a $19
trillion national debt with 93 million American adults unemployed; massive
illegal immigration; race riots in St. Louis and Baltimore; soaring homicide
rates in urban areas - let the people we elected deal with such things, while
we are busy attending to our own problems. When it appears that crime is a
little too close for comfort, we’ll simply have an ADT sign planted in our
front yard and a deadbolt installed on our front door.
Most people believe that if we live
by the golden rule, we’ll all get along.
And for those few in society who don’t abide by that principle, we have
police departments and a criminal justice system. The ugly reality that we
don’t want to face, however, is that only a larger framework of laws makes it
possible for anyone to abide by such an idealistic rule. For those who choose
to live by a more primitive code of behavior, the golden rule is a fairy tale.
People likely to ignore criminal
law are only restrained by the penalties involved in breaking the law. When the
laws cannot be enforced due to natural or man-made disasters, all bets are off,
and the ranks of those few begin to swell. According to historian Will Durant,
“Pugnacity, brutality, greed, and sexual readiness were advantages in the
struggle for existence.” Those “relics”
of our emergence as a species, he cautions, are still firmly embedded in our
DNA. The systems of laws that have
evolved over millennia were put in place to protect us from ourselves.
While most us are focused on
mortgages, soccer practice for the kids and paying the bills, however, those
laws are beginning to fray around the edges, along with many commonly held
social mores and practices. As the
federal government looks the other way in the face of millions of illegal
immigrants streaming across our southern border, and of mayors establishing
sanctuary cities in defiance of federal law, society has also changed its views
on acceptable behavior. The melting pot has been replaced by separate, “multi-cultural”
groups with individual agendas.
Even when people do venture outside
their home and work bubbles to offer an opinion on larger issues, they are
subject to censure for being politically incorrect. They aren’t successful because they have
invested time and energy in education and career, but because of their “white
privilege” (African-American success is often attributed to being an “Uncle
Tom”). In the absurdity of political
correctness, domestic Islamist terrorism has been transformed into workplace
violence, illegal immigrants have become undocumented immigrants, drug addicts are
dubbed chemically-challenged, prostitutes are renamed sex workers, and an
illegitimate baby becomes a love child.
On many university campuses, students are
warned about “micro-aggressions” for using “trigger words” which remind the
hearer of past traumatic events:
“Selling someone down the river” is a racist reference to slavery; acting
like a “hooligan” and being put into a “Paddy Wagon” are slur terms for those
of Irish ethnicity; calling a rioter and looter a “thug” is code terminology
for the “N word.” If you have doubts
about man’s role in climate change, you are branded a “global warming denier”
(with the added insinuation echoing a holocaust denier). Charlton Heston aptly referred to political
correctness as “tyranny with manners.”
Durant’s comment on this phenomenon
is instructive: “Civilization gives way to confrontation; law yields to
minority force; marriage becomes a short-term investment in diversified
insecurities; reproduction is left to mishaps and misfits; and the fertility of
incompetence breeds from the bottom while the sterility of intelligence lets
the race wither at the top.”
What too many fail to recognize or
acknowledge in the sophisticated, technologically-advanced 21st
century is that civilization is a razor-thin veneer. Despite our scientific discoveries and
breakthroughs, we remain captives of our primitive ancestors in our essential
nature. Man is only an evolutionary link
between primitive apes and truly civilized human beings.
Having served in the Royal Navy
during World War II, Golding witnessed the worst of human behavior, with the
cost of more than 60 million dead - six million of whom were cruelly obliterated
in the concentration camps of a cultured and Christian European state. The
trauma he witnessed occurred a mere twenty years after the seemingly minor and
avoidable events leading to the outbreak of World War I, which claimed 37
million military and civilian casualties.
Golding knew that those civilized
British children in his novel represent the distressing reality about where
humankind actually stands in its slow development as a species. Through his
work, he speaks to the necessary, if unpleasant, fact that the golden rule is
only possible within the context of the Golding rule: we must never fail to
recognize and remember that civilization is built on the rule of law. Treating
one another with generosity, kindness and decency is contingent upon our
willingness to subordinate ourselves to the hard-won lessons of history.
Without that commitment, we run the horrific risk of setting, not an island,
but the world on fire.
Jim Lynch
Fleetwood, PA
August 2, 2015
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If you’d like to provide any feedback to Mr. Lynch, he can be reached at jimadalynch(at)gmail.com. You’ll need to fix that email to use it, by substituting the @ symbol for the (at) characters.
