Unbecoming

I recently decided to re-read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The book was written in 1954, two years before I was born. I wanted to see if it lasted, if it was, in any way, dated. It read, unnervingly, like a contemporary novel. Turning the page to read what I assumed would be the final chapter, I discovered there wasn’t one. The story had ended. It was unexpectedly chilling.

I wrote to a friend telling her that reading the book felt like reading today’s newspaper. She responded, “Not exactly a ringing endorsement.”

Or was it? The murderous lust for power Golding illustrates in Lord of the Flies isn’t what jarred me. It was his final prescient sentence, the way he signaled the root of our unmoored lust for power that defines who we are as a society now.

The marooned boys have descended into chaos, driven by their unquenchable, irrational need for dominance. They’ve set the entire island ablaze, murdered two of their schoolmates, and are cornering Ralph, a third schoolmate, intending to roast him over an open fire on a double pointed spear like they’ve done with the pigs. In a reckless and doomed run for his life, Ralph trips and falls near the water’s edge. With all hope lost, he looks up to see “a huge peaked cap. It was a white topped cap, and above the green shade of the peak was a crown, an anchor, gold foliage. He saw white drill, epaulettes, a revolver, a row of gilt buttons down the front of a uniform.” Golding spends three full sentences describing what Ralph sees: the officer’s decorous uniform with all its gleaming ornamentation. From Ralph’s perspective, the clean, crisp uniform in the middle of the filth of the island’s chaos signals what Ralph needs and has none of: power.

The Admiral then looks around. Every armed and painted spear-carrying boy has emerged from the thicket to stand calmly on the shore, having shed their lust for the hunt now that rescue has arrived, interpreting what he sees as boys engaging in “fun and games.” The officer grins cheerfully at Ralph as he summarizes what he makes of it all, chuckling, “Nobody killed, I hope.” Ralph answers, “Only two.”

It’s the word “only” that is the gut punch in his answer.

Yet the officer prefers his own blindness because it keeps him undisturbed. He sums up the deadly, chaotic reality by interrupting Ralph to say, “Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island,” referring to a popular juvenile novel by R. M. Ballantyne that tells the optimistic story of three boys marooned on an island, the sole survivors of a shipwreck, where devotion to hierarchy, leadership, and God win the day and all ends well. It was published in 1857 and has never been out of print.

That’s when Ralph begins to sob in uncontrollable spasms of grief. Golding specifically describes that Ralph didn’t just cry, he “wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart…”

That seems akin to what I read in the news these days and why I cry.

But it’s the final paragraph that carries the thunder. “The officer, surrounded by these noises, was moved and a little embarrassed. He turned away to give them time to pull themselves together; and waited, allowing his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance.”

That is the last sentence of the book.

And that is when my understanding of the story changed—not only from what I understood when I was seventeen, but what I understood just thirty minutes earlier. Yes, this novel is about what happens when thirst for power eclipses all. No one can live consciously and get to my age without knowing how the perverse force of the lust for power and money—More! More! More!—always wins when pitted against kindness and inclusion and investment in the long term for the good of all.

But this last paragraph of Lord of the Flies feels new to me—prescient and scary and true. It feels like an inversion of cause and effect. It isn’t that power seduces and then erodes and then claims your soul so you choose not to see. Of course it does. But what Golding says in that one simple final sentence is that the perversion begins in the first looking away. Our collective destruction begins when we comfort our unease by looking away rather than facing the bloody, broken-hearted mess that is right in front of us.

Then, the day after I finished Lord of the Flies, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Without pause, conservative musicians, Catholic writers, internet influencers, and Republican legislators gasped, “What have we become?” a startling upgrade from the usual chant of “Thoughts and Prayers.” I guess after so many mass shootings and, now, assassinations, we’ve moved from an enfeebled call to prayer to an astonished wheeze of incomprehension. What have we become? Really? Where have we all been? How can the fact of an assassination in this addled, angry, gun-toting country be an astonishment?

How can we gasp as if seeing something horrific for the first time? Why is it that the slaughter of twenty eight people, most of them children, in the schoolyard at Sandyhook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012 didn’t move us to wonder What we have become? Nor the twenty six worshipers mowed down in 2017 at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas? Nor the sixty music lovers murdered at a festival in Las Vegas in 2017? I could go on and on and on about the various opportunities for us to upgrade from Thoughts and Prayers to What have we become?

What in bloody hell have we become? This happened on our watch, citizens. We have actively participated in what we have become. And we must do more than ask the question. We must answer it.

Here’s what we’ve become: We’ve become the collective consequence of chanting Thoughts and Prayers when angry men slaughter our citizens instead of doing something collectively to create the kind of country it is possible to live in safely and proudly, a country that reflects a set of collective values and diverse points of view.

Instead of gathering in the face of our disagreements to talk, to find a way through, we yell, we insult, we deflect until enough time goes by that our weary attention spans lock on to something less taxing.

We use the massacre of our citizens to raise money to win elections. We scramble to gerrymander so we can win elections. We distort the truth to inflame fear and violence so we can win elections. We make promises we know we cannot fulfill so we can win elections. We go to sleep at the wheel of our lives, our communities, and our democracy. We get as distant as possible from the values this country was founded on—freedom of speech, press, and religion for starters—because to do otherwise is too hard.

Worse, we get distant from ourselves, we lose the truth of who we are and what we care about in the quiet clarity of our hearts.

We do this because it’s much easier than doing the hard work of gathering to talk and to listen in order to achieve some kind of imperfect consensus. We have lost control of our personal selves.

That is why I have lost hope. I don’t see us recovering. We cannot for one moment turn off our phones without getting the shakes, jonesing for one more dopamine hit of someone else in the multiverse repeating our own opinion back to us, ensuring it won’t occur to us to change our minds, to learn something new—or more importantly, something true. We get the bliss of reading the recycled drivel of a carbon copy version of ourselves. Mark Zuckerberg and The Boys have ensured that we will always get our little dopamine fix and they’ll make another million bucks. Or billion. I don’t know how high the current payoff for their cynicism has risen at this point. Whatever it is, that’s the price of our souls. And by the way we act, we seem to think it’s a bargain. I’m curious that this most recent crack of a gun seems to have temporarily roused us from our slumber—enough at least to change our response from Thoughts and Prayers to What have we become? I have no hope that we can stay awake long enough to answer it.

We have become who we are for the same reason the Admiral in Lord of the Flies can’t look at the nine-year-olds dressed up as savages, carrying spears, can’t bend to his knees to gather Ralph, who is brokenhearted and bawling, into his arms, the officer so blinded by his own discomfort that he can’t even see what is going on right in front of his face. So he turns away to admire the beauty of his ship.

And so do we. And so we’ve become what we are. What have we become? Look in the mirror for your answer. Then stay awake to ask the next question: What would I rather be?

Don’t look away.