The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Gerald Farrington
My thesis (not at all new but still controversial) is that we humans are barbarians “under wraps” — the wraps being all of the civilizing influences that keep the baser human self-interest instincts and behavior somewhat under control for the common good.
The Founding Fathers agreed. James Madison said so in Federalist No. 51. And modern iconic fiction brings the Founders’ realistic view of human nature into clarity at this destructive moment. This is a moment of tribal savagery toward those institutions and norms which were designed to keep uncivilized behavior in check.
A popular cliché seems appropriate. This American moment of truth seems stranger than what the Founders understood — truth that iconic modern fiction describes. We all know the oft-repeated cliché that “truth is stranger than fiction.” I think the truth amidst the “chaos” in America that now seems fictional may be more about human nature than anything else.
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“Human nature” is so elusive as to create entire systems of study, debate, and endless speculation about human beings as individuals and in groups. Entire religions, philosophic systems, and scientific disciplines have been created around the subject of “human nature.”
Natural man, spiritual man, science, and religion wrapped up in the package of “human behavior” come together in the form of what it means to be “civilized” and the meaning of “civilization” itself. The human “truth that is stranger than fiction” can be anticipated from the insight and imagination of the great writers of fiction.
We are barbarians under wraps. Freud and others may have provided the scientific inquiry and debate, and the great religious scholars, theologians, philosophers, and historians have given us insight and analysis to ponder, but it’s the great novelists, poets, and short story writers that can give us “human nature” truths packaged in dramatic simplicity. These truths can give us “epiphany sweats.”
I think William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” competes with Orwell, Atwood, and other moderns to capture the meaning of our chaos at this time in 21st-century America. For me, as we begin to celebrate a series of 250-year milestones related to our founding as a nation, “Lord of the Flies” meets our Age-of-Enlightenment Founding Fathers. Barbarians-under-wraps is both “Lord of the Flies” as well as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787.
The novel Lord of the Flies suggests that when raw basic human instincts for self-interest, self-gratification, self-aggrandizement, and power are “not sufficiently” under wraps with “civilized” moderating and limiting influences, social chaos, instability, and violence will prevail.
The Founding Fathers and the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century called these individual pursuits of self-interest and ambition the “natural rights” of man. These basic natural rights included Life (survival), Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (the rights to speak, gather, worship, and complain freely while pursuing one’s own perceived selfish self-interest and ambition). These natural rights also included “property rights” (things of value earned, therefore individually “owned”).
In Lord of the Flies, young boys stranded on an island were only superficially “civilized” because they were so young. Therefore, adherence to rules, norms, customs, values, mores, traditions, (normal civilized checks on anti-social behavior) were quickly overwhelmed by basic raw survival instincts and impulses. Tribes quickly developed, and the weakest among the boys became casualties, the prey of the stronger predatory boys.
The Founding Fathers believed that natural human self-interest was the same as human individual “liberty.” To protect the natural selfishness of liberty for all, governmental power needed to be divided up in so many ways that no single selfish ambition could ever lead to excessive power in any one place or person. Checks and balances among three branches of a national government, and power divided between national and state governments, would protect liberty by dividing up ambition and power.
Our founding documents and Lord of the Flies embrace the same view of human nature. Institutions and culture, if they are strong enough, can protect selfishness (liberty), but limit it at the same time — so as to protect the same selfish interests of everyone else, including the weak.
Human beings may just perpetually need to be “under the wraps” that civilization and civilized behavior struggle with so as to protect human beings from themselves. Restoring norms, values, customs, mores, traditions, and the rule of law to institutions — civilizing influences, all — can help keep the “barbarian” in all of us “under wraps.”
Those of us who fear our own selfishness need to roll up our sleeves and “shore up ourselves against our ruins,” to protect us from ourselves.
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Gerald Farrington is a retired community college professor of history, political science, and law and retired from the practice of law. He is a member of the Arizona Daily Star’s editorial advisory board.
