Previously, I discussed two very different attitudes toward Jewish refugees during World War II. Breckinridge Long of the State Department was an anti-Semite responsible for the deaths of 190,000 persons.
Pope John XXIII saved the lives of 25,000 Jews.
It seems appropriate that we look for an explanation for these disparate actions. In other words, what can we glean about human nature which sheds light upon behaviors best described as “good” and “evil.”
William Golding in his novel “Lord of the Flies” examines the issue.
A group of English schoolboys find themselves marooned on a tropical island following World War III.
Ralph, the 12-year old protagonist, is elected leader and attempts to establish a society based upon democratic principles.
Challenging him is Jack who represents barbarism and cruelty. The author postulates competing impulses — civilization versus savagery, law versus anarchy, reason versus impulse and good versus evil.
The final scene in the book has Jack’s tribe hunting Ralph with the intent of killing him.
Then a British naval officer appears, interrupting the hunt, and taking the boys back home.
Many readers see this as a statement about children, who require adult intervention, lest they behave like savages.
Fortunately, in his end-notes, Golding explains the real meaning of his conclusion.
The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature in the end…adult life appears, dignified and capable, but in reality [is] enmeshed in the same evil [as] the children.
The officer having interrupted a manhunt , prepares to take the children off the island on a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way.
And who will rescue the adult…?
Golding’s message is clear. Evil, or at least its potential, is within all of us.
This pessimistic view explains man’s inhumanity to man, wars, the Inquisition, the Holocaust and even Breckinridge Long.
Steve Taylor, a British psychologist writing in Psychology Today offers a different perspective. He thinks it’s simplistic to say that some people are innately good while others are innately evil.
He argues that people can possess both qualities and that “people who behave cruelly…can be rehabilitated.”
The case of Leopold and Loeb comes to mind.
These two affluent and brilliant University of Chicago students were influenced by Neitzsche’s “superman” philosophy. They set out to commit “the perfect crime” by murdering 14-year old Bobby Franks.
Caught and sentenced to life imprisonment, Loeb was murdered while incarcerated, but Leopold was released in 1958.
He moved to Puerto Rico where he served as a medical technician in a hospital, did research on leprosy, and became a researcher in a social service program in the
island’s Department of Health.
This corroborates Taylor’s contention that people are neither all good or all evil.
As he writes, “Most of us lie somewhere between the extremes of Gandhi and Hitler.”
Defining “good,” Taylor says it means the ability to empathize with other people and to feel compassion for them.
One must sacrifice one’s own well-being for the sake of others. Evil people do not have this capacity and are “selfish, self-absorbed and narcissistic.” Thus, Taylor’s viewpoint is somewhat more optimistic than Golding’s.
I look forward to sharing some other viewpoints on human nature.
Next week, I will describe Hannah Arendt’s theory on”the banality of evil” as well as Stanley Milgram’s work on “Obedience” which has been called the most morally significant research in modern psychology.” (Consider this a “tease.”)
Dr. Hal Sobel
Great Neck
As a Wiliam Golding enthusiast, I was appreciative of your short piece on Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” and his view that a will-to-acendancy evil resides in each of us. This is specifically identified by the character of Simon in the book, a mystically-minded boy who, during one of his epileptic “episodes”, hears the voice of the Lord of the Flies admitting that he is the dark force that resides within each person and is therefore “Close, close, close”. (Simon is an interesting character because the saint-like role Golding had intended for him was drastically reduced by Golding’s editor. In the novel he is killed by the boys when he surprises them in the dark.) The potential darkness within each human heart is paralleled within the group of boys by the self-cloaked, insidious figure of Roger. Golding was to later personify the human doppelgänger, the actively dark side within each of us, as the protagonist in his “The Two Deaths of Pincher Martin” (the book’s USA title).