Rutger Bregman has once more assaulted us with his Rousseauian onanism, and lit the world of popular political commentary on fire. By stripping William Golding’s book down to its most cartoonish interpretation, he has got every half-wit, left and right, bickering about the merits of Rousseau vs Hobbes, and made six small Catholic boys into a proof that mankind can totally handle communism.
The story he tells is true and heartwarming, and wonderfully written; everyone should read it for the testament it offers to the human spirit. But it is his grand ideological strategy I detest, to which his rose-tinted panegyric to the human heart is but a siren song.
T. Greer, someone smarter than me has crafted a response on twitter which cuts straight through the grease, and I will quote it here because it is, by my estimation, correct, and follows a similar thread to that which Solzhenitsyn famously tugged on – the line of good and evil runs through every human heart:
Golding wants to figure out why the bad parts in society inevitably seem to overwhelm the good. Why does democracy fail, what gives the power-hungry their chance, why can’t goodness and civility long persist? Golding believes that they *don’t* long persist–but can you blame him?The man who wrote LotF lived in an empire that was collapsing and in a society threatened by the spectre of atomic war. He wrote less than thirty years out from WWI, twenty years from the fall of Europe to Communism and Fascism, and less ten years out of World War II. He fought in that last war and was permanently scarred by it. If I am a Brit in mid 1950s I would probably conclude that norms, order, goodness, *civilization* is always doomed to fall apart as well. It would have been the totality of my own life experience. But why?That is what LotF is meant to answer. Golding is not trying to play this Rosseau-v-Hobbes game of bringing humanity back to the state of nature and see what they look like. His children are not living in a natural state: they are self conscious heirs to an entire civilization, and they realize quite early on that they live on the razor’s edge of life and death. So they create rules and orders to keep their society running. A little democracy that honors natural goodness and leadership. A little democracy that does not last. And that is what people don’t seem to get about this book. It isn’t a parable about what happens when you taken men out of society–it is a parable about how men act *in society.*Why do we have Hitlers and Mussolinis and Lenins and civil wars and world wars and great terrors? You can answer that question with economic statistics and long chains of historical causation or with the intellectual genealogy of the anti-liberal political philosophy…. Or maybe there is something more fundamental at work. Maybe there is something about fear, or the power-lust, or cruelty that transcends any individual political program or historical moment. Maybe there is something that holds together tyrannies the world over. Golding thinks there is. His little parable–one of the most carefully and artfully constructed in English literature–is an attempt to get at what those things may be.Reducing this novel to “all humans are evil once you take civilization away” doesn’t just over-simplify Golding’s message; it fundamentally misunderstands Goldin’s entire project.That is all.
While Golding’s point, according to Greer, is that the struggle between good and evil is eternal and ever-present, equally in civilised as in “innocent” conditions, Bregman insinuates that pessimists and skeptics are just misanthropists, and that misanthropy is next door to nazism.
I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.
Bregman is one of the greatest propagandists of our age. It hardly matters what the facts are, because very few readers will engage on that level, and it isn’t the level on which Bregman’s thesis operates. He’s fully aware that a single instance of six boys living on an island for 15 months without killing each other says nothing about human nature, because he isn’t stupid – he knows his favourite anecdotes are ridiculously small samples of human behaviour, far too small to draw lasting conclusions from. Hence his backup argument that “things thought impossible before are possible now, therefore nothing is impossible”.
But he is very aware of the symbolic narrative value of his vignettes, and so is the Guardian. It is a fully Rousseauian narrative, even if the reality of the case can be explained otherwise. His thesis that people are good, except for a few bad apples we can easily identify, and quietly get rid of, is the basis upon which he justifies an MMT/UBI/open borders path to global fully automated luxury anarcho-communism, where any natives who might object to having their property dispersed are instantly outnumbered by a newly imported majority.
He advocates a public relations strategy of being kind and listening to racists (by which he means anyone opposed to open borders), so that they can be pacified into acquiescence by Jedi mind tricks. Of course, he believes in the same approach for ISIS, so lord knows whether he gives a damn about any sort of political violence. After all, it is fairly obvious that no population has the capacity to resist their government anymore.
Every slogan Bregman utters demands the total sacrifice of all autonomy to the state. “Binmen should earn more than bankers” “24 hour workweek” “Capitalism will always create bullshit jobs” “moderates are the real fringe” “poverty isn’t a lack of character, it’s a lack of cash” “billionaires should stop talking philanthropy and start talking tax“.
He describes his project, in part, as appropriating conservative rhetoric about common sense and efficiency to sell left wing utopian ideology. This is propaganda, pure and simple, and will bypass the rational part of the audience’s brain. Almost all discussion of this piece in the public sphere so far has been a Rousseau/Hobbes dichotomy, which plays into the narrative Bregman constructs here.
You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and Bregman has smeared his political program with so much honey it threatens to send the reader into diabetic shock. Like Rousseau before him, he tells a beautiful and emotive tale of the nobility of the human spirit freed from the cruel constraints of society. But as much as you sweeten the meat, there is still blood inside.
There is no simple answer to the nature of humankind. We are free, but limited, kind, but cruel, wild, yet easily tamed. Every man who has sought to nail human nature to a post in the past has lived to see it raised, fly-blown and foetid, over a field of blood.
Who knows, maybe Rutger will live to see his god in the flesh.
By the way, since I wrote this, Ben Sixsmith came out with a really excellent refutation of Bregman’s Rousseauian propaganda pocketbook, Humankind. You should read it.
The Eccentric Flock 