Paradise and Society: The Middle Worlds of Rousseau and Golding

Plato, that ancient Greek philosopher who most influenced Western thought, believed that the way one came to a knowledge of the truth was through dialogue. In this context, then, community is important, socialization significant. In our own time former First Lady Hillary Clinton has written a book titled It Takes A Village, by which she means that the responsibility for raising children rests with an entire community. Even those of us, however, who would disagree with Mrs. Clinton do not, in general, believe that community is a bad thing. Most people agree that community is a healthy and important part of life. Jean Jacque-Rousseau, however, disagreed. In his work A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Rousseau asked the question “What is the natural state of man,” and in so doing postulated a theory about the role of society. In comparing his theory with that of William Golding’s, however, from his work Lord of the Flies, readers find that while the two authors do not agree they both accept a middle-ground between pure civilization and complete savagery, and this they call paradise.
Both authors begin with the savage man, that is man outside of the constraints and structure of civilization. Rousseau confronts the task of looking at the natural state of man head on. In the opening paragraphs of his work he deals with the preliminary question and wrestles with the difficulty of his assignment.
The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of returning to the state of nature, but none of them has reached it. Some have not hesitated to ascribe to man in that state the notion of just and unjust, or even that it was useful to him. Others have spoken of the natural right that everyone has to preserve what belongs to him, without explaining what they mean by “belonging.” Others started out by giving authority to the stronger over the weaker, and immediately brought about government, without giving any thought to the time that had to pass before the meaning of the words “authority” and “government” could exist among men. Finally, all of them, speaking continually of need, avarice, oppression, desires, and pride, have transferred to the state of nature the ideas they acquire in society. They spoke about savage man, and it was civil man they depicted. (Rousseau, 17)
The task appears somewhat daunting to the author but he is aware that he must make this his starting place. In raising questions about the role of society one must begin with an examination of what man is like outside of society. For Rousseau the man outside of society is closest to paradise. So he writes:
When I strip that being, thus constituted, of all the supernatural gifts he could have received and of all the artificial faculties he could have acquired only through long progress; when I consider him, in a word, as he must have left the hands of nature, I see an animal less strong than some, less agile than others, but all in all, the most advantageously organized of all. I see him satisfying his hunger under an oak tree, quenching his thirst at the first stream, finding his bed at the foot of the same tree that supplied his meal; and thus all his needs are satisfied. (Rousseau, 19)
In this quote readers will be able to note elements of a paradise. The garden, or at least vegetation, imagery, the delight and satisfaction of that creature dwelling in it, and the peace all reflect the Genesis account. He continues, “When the earth is left to its natural fertility and covered with immense forests that were never mutilated by the axe, it offers storehouses and shelters at every step to animals of every species (Rousseau, 19),” and, “Let us conclude that, wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without dwelling, without war, without relationships, with no need for his fellow men, and correspondingly with no desire to do them harm, perhaps never even recognizing any of them individually, savage man, subject to few passions and self-sufficient, had only the sentiments and enlightenment appropriate to that state…(Rousseau, 41). Isaac Kramnick states, rather succinctly, “For Rousseau, men were naturally good, ‘noble savages,’ who were corrupted by civilization” (41).
In Lord of Flies William Golding finds man in his natural state not as one closest to paradise, but rather as violent and even “beastly”. Sociologist David P. Barash comments that the theme of this work is “An unruly, ingrained savagery, verging on bloodlust” (B19); this assessment is a bit extreme. John Fitzgerald and Johan Kayser, however, have interpreted this work as an illusion to the Egyptian Osiris myth. They summarize the myth as follows:
According to Plutarch, while reigning as king on earth, the god Osiris gave the Egyptians civilization by introducing laws, worship of gods, marriage, and agriculture. Before Osiris gave them agriculture the Egyptians had been savages and cannibals. Osiris’s brother, the daemon Set-Typhon, filled with envy and pride, sought to usurp his throne. Frustrated in this attempt to take his brother’s place, Typhon tricked Osiris and drowned him. Isis, the wife of Osiris, searched for the body, regained it and concealed it in the woods. Typhon, while hunting pig during a full moon, discovered and mutilated it. A war, punctuated with “terrible deeds” and “confusion,” ensued until Horus, son of Osiris, appears to have defeated Typhon. But as Plutarch notes, although “weakened and shattered [the] power of Typhon still gasps and struggles” (362E). (Fitzgerald and Kayser, 78)
Their research is helpful in the analysis it offers on Golding’s original state of man. The authors write, “Most importantly, an Osirian interpretation illuminates man’s fallen nature…” (79). When Golding speaks of man as savage there is no hint that he is a “noble savage,” as Rousseau would have it; rather man is depraved from within. The Osirian interpretation is interesting but even Fitzgerald and Kayser concede that “Lord of the Flies is a multilayered work and open to various interpretations” (Fitzgerald and Kayser, 78). That being said it is not necessary for this essay to examine it further; it is sufficient to say that their conclusions about Golding’s conviction of man’s inner wickedness is a keen observation.
Golding himself makes this point abundantly clear within the work. His character Simon identifies, at an early stage in the plot, that the beast that the children fear is actually themselves. When asked whether he believes in the beast or not Simon responds, “maybe it’s only us…We could be sort of…” (Golding, 89). He hesitates but the narrator fills in the thought, “Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.” As the plot unfolds further it becomes even more apparent that the “beast” is the innate corruption in the human heart.
Simon finally comes to a definite affirmation of this concept by means of a revelation. The head of a pig, which the boys have viciously slaughtered, impaled on a stick speaks to the young boy and explains what or who the beast is.
“Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!” said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. “You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?” (Golding, 143).
When Simon goes to leave the head adds this stirring comment, “This is ridiculous. You know perfectly well you’ll only meet me down there- so don’t try to escape!” Simon does indeed meet the beast face to face when he returns to the boys; their response to his appearance is to murder him. This is what happens, Golding argues, when we move further and further away from society, from civilization, and from sociability. Christina Perez Braid comments that “When Ralph asks, ‘What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?’ he raises one of the fundamental questions readers of Golding’s novel must consider” (237). Alongside this question comes a related one: “What causes someone to act “human,” “animal,” or “savage”?
For Golding it is man’s nature to be savage, for Rousseau it is civilization’s influence that causes him to become a criminal. Rousseau claims that the creation of law also made for the creation of crime; so he writes, “For according to the axiom of the wise Locke, where there is no property, there is no injury” (Rousseau, 50). This raises the question, however, of what would posses someone to offend newly laid laws if he did not already have a bent toward evil? If it was not in man’s nature to be “savage” why would the creation of laws compel him to break those laws? Golding’s answer is that it is within man’s own nature to commit crime and that the creation of laws is the only thing that keeps him from being as bad as he possibly could be. It appears that Lord of the Flies offers a criticism of Jean Jacque-Rousseau’s theory.
It is not, however, as though William Golding completely disagrees with the philosopher. The two authors do have one common agreement: civilization does not stand as the epitome of paradise. It has already been clearly stated that Rousseau sees civilization as the downfall of paradise, but Golding also testifies to the horrors of civilization.
Continually throughout the work the author reminds his readers that the civilized world, that is the world off the island, is in the midst of waging a war. The “Sign [that comes] down from the world of grown-ups” (Golding, 95) is evidence of a war. The author describes the scene in such a way that there is no room for ambiguity. He writes, “There was a sudden bright explosion and corkscrew trail across the sky; then darkness again and stars. There was a speck above the island, a figure dropping swiftly beneath a parachute, a figure that hung with dangling limbs” (95). If the island, away from civilization, is becoming more savage and violent it is necessary to remind us that the civilized world offers only a more acceptable form of savagery. Paradise, however, can still be found in a sort of middle world.
For Golding that middle world is best displayed in Ralph’s democratic society. Here is a medium between Jack’s wild and animal-like tribe and the civilized warfare of the adult world. Ralph’s small society has two key leading figures with different roles; it is in these figures that readers find the basis for the middle-world.
Both Ralph and Piggy represent two facets of civilization that are necessary for creating this paradise. Ralph is the representation of morality and hope. His belief that his father will rescue the boys repeatedly gives rise to hope in the boys. Fitzgerald and Kayser quote the author himself having said that Ralph is “the average rather more than average, man of goodwill and commonsense” (81). Meanwhile Piggy represents the logical, scientific, rational thinking figure.
After arriving on the island, Ralph does not know how he got there. The opening conversation makes it pellucid that Piggy does. Although Ralph discovers the conch, Piggy knows what it is and how to use it. But perhaps, most important of all, Piggy sees the need for a meeting. Once the boys are gathered, Piggy “moved among the crowd asking names and frowning to remember them” (p. 17). Not Ralph, but Piggy knows the importance of assemblies. Piggy can, for these reasons, be deemed the true founder of the parliamentarian society created by the assembly. At the start of the novel, the narrator states, “what intelligence had been shown was traceable to Piggy” (p. 21). (Fitzgerald and Kayser, 80).
It is the combining of these two qualities, the hopeful (dare we call it religious) and the rational that Golding sees as the foundation of the paradisiacal state, not the absence of reason as Rousseau attests, nor the commitment to reason alone. Both men seem to be, in someway, distancing themselves from the work of the Enlightenment, which hailed Reason as god.
Rousseau fought against the Enlightenment tendencies in a different manner. He articulated the same things Golding here articulates: that human civilization is no paradise. He did not, however, agree with the natural corruption of man’s heart. Isaac Kramnick writes, “Fame came to Rousseau in the early 1750s, with the Discourse on Arts and Sciences and the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, both of which rejected the central creed of the Enlightenment, its belief in progress fueled by reason, science and commerce” (41). Concerning the divergent paths of Golding and Rousseau Fitzgerald and Kayser remark, “The foregoing interpretation of the Osirian myth loosely resembles the view of man advanced by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, and obliquely attacked by Jean Jacque-Roussea in Discours sur I’origine de I’inegalite. Man is a fallen creature, destined to prey upon his kind, because he is vain” (85). Rousseau’s criticisms of Hobbes are, indirectly, a criticism of Lord of the Flies.
Despite their differences, however, both articulated a paradise between savagery and civilization. For Rousseau this paradisiacal state comes after the development of language but before the corruption of a full-blown society is in place. So he writes:
But it must be noted that society in its beginning stages and the relations already established among men required in them qualities different from those they derived from their primitive constitution; that, with morality beginning to be introduced into human actions, and everyone, prior to the existence of laws, being sole judge and avenger of the offenses he had received, the goodness appropriate to the pure state of nature was no longer what was appropriate to an emerging society; that it was necessary for punishment to become more severe in proportion as the occasions for giving offense became more frequent; and it remained for the fear of vengeance to take the place of the deterrent character of laws. Hence although men had become less forbearing, and although natural pity had already undergone some alteration, this period of the development of human faculties, maintaining a middle position between the indolence of our primitive state and the petulant activity of our egocentrism, must have been the happiest and most durable epoch. The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state was the least subject to upheavals and the best for man, and that he must have left it only by virtue of some fatal chance happening that, for the common good, ought never have happened. (Rousseau, 50).
Here Rousseau argues that an existence between laziness and ill-temperedness, the state we were in just post language development, was the best state of our existence. This state, however, cannot last. For the author of that quote, once you have begun to build up a society you cannot prevent the progression toward a full-blown civilization. “As soon as one man needed the help of another, as soon as one man realized that it was useful for a single individual to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property came into existence, labor became necessary” (Rousseau, 51). He continues by saying, “Things in this state could have remained equal, if talents had been equal, and if the use of iron and the consumption of foodstuffs had always been in precise balance. But this proportion, which was not maintained by anything, was soon broken” (53). As with the loss of the traditional paradise, in the Garden of Eden, so Rousseau sees a transgression occurring in the loss of this paradise of isolation: egocentrism.
Golding too sees a transgression occurring in the loss of his paradisiacal middle-world. Frank Field noted this when he wrote:
“William Golding showed in Lord of the Flies how fragile civilized behavior can be. Away from parents, schools and police, the boys at first change their established patterns of behavior only in small and almost imperceptible ways, but then descend at alarming speed into mayhem and finally murder. Early in the novel, Ralph, the boys’ natural leader, shouts at Jack, his rival, that he is breaking the rules. “Who cares?” Jack replies nonchalantly. Ralph then delivers a great truth for our age. Rules are crucial, he says, because they are “the only things we have got.” (Field, 42)
The speed of the transgression isn’t nearly as astounding as is the degree to which even Ralph himself goes in the degeneracy. “Damning to the interpretation that Ralph is the reasonable character,” write Fitzgerald and Kayser, “is his attraction to the seductions of hunting, fierce exhilaration, and ambition.” They continue:
“In the incident where Ralph almost maims Robert in ecstasy of a pig killing ritual, he was ‘Carried away by a sudden thick excitement’ and overmastered by a ‘desire to squeeze and hurt’ (p. 104). More damning is his participation in yet another pig killing ritual: the murder of Simon” (81).
Even Ralph succumbs to the temptation to be violent. The major transgression comes, however, from the boys desire to be rescued. They want to leave paradise and return to the world of the adults; thus it is quite appropriate that their rescuer was a naval captain (another reminder of the civilized savagery of the adult world).
From reading both of these works readers note an all to common assertion, paradise is rather short lived. As with the biblical account of paradise so all paradises end due to some transgression. Concerning the role of sociability in paradise both Rousseau and Golding seem to suggest that it is limited. Their creation of middle-worlds, containing both elements of the “natural state” and the created society, direct the reader’s attention to a narrow function of sociability. While Rousseau contradicts himself by suggesting society is purely evil, and then using it in a limited fashion to develop a post-lapsarian paradise, Golding re-affirms all that he says within his novel. Humanity is depraved from within, not corrupted from without, and even in civilization that depravity seeps out in culturally acceptable ways. The reason, according to Golding, is that while society stands for logic, logic is not sufficient to stem our immoral natures. By combining both Ralph and Piggy, and, as Kayser and Fitzgerald suggest, Piggy and Simon, Golding presents paradise as a middle-world where both the religious and the rational must co-exist.