I cannot say what persons I know would do under such stark conditions as Pitcairn had. One would think they would, if considered Christian in those days, at least act in ways that would not lead to eternal punishment. Punishment, here and now, may be a deterrent to crime.
Your so called civilized society that is tame and domesticated also lacks altruism. There’s really no difference although one could argue one environment is more cruel compared to other concerning the disposition of the inhabitants. Such as this civilized world you speak of concerning its endless cruelties…
What is the public good?
What is enlightenment?
Not everybody in the story did that. Enough of them did that it became the dominant social order. I think that’s accurate. It’s not so much that we all under duress do this or do that, and that we need a strong social order because at heart we’re a bunch of savages. It’s that some of us are that way, and it doesn’t take very many in an anarchic situation to ruin things for everybody else.
In the end of the story, weren’t they eventually rescued? I seem to recall that in memory. Too bad the real world doesn’t work that way. That’s why they call it fiction.
True. It may be that a few rotten apples can spoil the barrel, not that all apples in the barrel are rotten at the core.
That the boys were eventually rescued from the island does not negate how they acted on the island.
That the boys were eventually rescued from the island does not negate how they acted on the island.
Well, again, they weren’t just a random sample of people. The Europeans had all committed a crime punishable by death. In the movies we are told that they were justified in mutiny. Scholars are less sure. But in either case the having already committed a capital crimes makes them a very poor sample for what most people would do. IOW these men lived under fear of being found, tried and killed, and harshly judged by their society. This also was a crime or ‘crime’ committed after being in the very rough circumstances of being sailors in the British Navy, and it may not have been a free choice to be in that role. There was also built in racism in British culture and this affected the way the Europeans and the Tahitians related to each other and also the way the men and the Tahitian women related to each other. I can only assume it affect how the mixed race children were treated also.
At some point you refer to them as animilistic. But groups of social mammals generally function in good behavior with each other. Wolves for example share food, help the weak, co raise children, and so on. So reverting to an animal state need not mean anything negative from most people’s ideas about altruistic behavior.
To me this thread is based on an idea in a novel and using a very poor sample from an incident in history to draw conclusions about universal human nature.
This is true, the fictional rescue, does not do away with the fictional acts of the boys on the island.
I was merely trying to say real life unlike fiction doesn’t always have happy or positive outcomes.
Sometimes the calvary or messiah never comes and the end is one of bleakness and massacre.
Fiction doesn’t always have happy endings. Hollywood tends to, but fiction does not. Literature can be very bleak, dark, savage, throttling. Innocence destroyed, sometimes slowly almost unbearingly. Heroes who fail. Savage murderers who succeed. I can make a list off the top of my head if you want.
Lord of the Flies is at base dark. Yes, they get rescued, but the book is saying that we are like that at root. So the rescue functions more as a counterpoint. Civilization comes to contrast the already damned nature it has within it. It is not a happy ending.
Perhaps animalistic was the wrong word. I did not mean it as comparison with mammals who show empathy for their own kind, but as a reference to “the latent savagery within” (Wiki) us humans= the Beast in the novel.
Yes. The basic irony of the book is that the rescuing adults were engaged in a war.
Oh yes, I know these things as well Moreno.
I really can’t stand stories with happy endings. This is why I am more at home with literature revolving around tragedy and drama with horrible endings. I think to myself, now this is more realistic of things.
Anybody that say animals outside of the human sphere are moral or ethical commit the fallacy of anthromorphizing.
Though they will get pissed off over unfairness. They can be altruistic and obviously empathetic, even cross-species. and I am tlaking about wild animals here. My point was that saying that what people do is animalistic is often an insult to animals. It takes rationality to perform the most horrendous stuff. Social mammals for example often function in groups, in the wild naturally, with kindness, collaboration, mercy, sharing etc. Reverting to our animal nature, whatever the fuck that means, could be an improvment over this society. Western civ carries around this snobbery in relation to animals and indigenous people. They are supposedly the savages. But nothing compares to the savagery of Western Civ.
And that’s an old not longer used global criticism to say someone is anthropomorphizing, back when science and religion followed the idiotic idea that we were not also animals.
People, then, could fling out the word, anthropomorphizing, sort of like how in discussions one can use the word ‘pedophilia’ and it’s end of discussion, nothing more irrational than that. But even in science itself that criticism has gone the way of flat earth theories. Of course they are like us in many ways, we are part of the same family.
Only human animals crap in their own nests. We, supposedly, are more intelligent than most animals are; yet, the more can cause considerable harm to ourselves and our environment and does. And the word savage has been used to denigrate those primitives who are often more moral than their accusers. So what would you say the preadolescents were reduced to on the island? Did their world become a microcosm of civilization?
Those adolescents were reverting back to their original savage nature. The other adolescents were idealists like yourself who can’t handle or embrace this human nature where instead like you they go off into the clouds thinking of a better world that will never materialize. I use the word savage as a way of describing an extreme rugged, brutal, and indifferent way of survival often enough as it is for all organisms.
Moreno objected to the use of the words savage and animalistic. The condition of the boys on the island produced murder. Is that natural animal behavior? Most animals kill only in order to eat.
Animals kill each other all the time and things going way beyond just for food.
Clearly you haven’t researched it enough.
We are animals and it idealists trying desperately to make human beings into something we’re not.