Choosing Up Sides and Smelling Armpits

Both of us say, "There are laws to obey,"

But frankly, I don't like your tone.

-Leonard Cohen, Different Sides

In William Golding's book Lord of the Flies, there is a group of young men from a boarding school who are marooned on a deserted island.  Absent any adult supervision the group of boys devolves from the staid manners and conventions of British civilization into a savage society.  There are two distinct types of leader: Ralph, who represents the early choice of the group, and Jack, who leads the boys choir clique and who becomes the antagonist to Ralph.

Ralph's primary focus is trying to maintain some sense of order and civility among the boys, he organizes them, assigns tasks necessary to survival and, at least in the early going, is rather successful.  Jack on the other hand, sees the island as a place to live out his fantasy of becoming a hunter, and organizes his followers around the goal of procuring food in the form of wild pigs.  Ralph gradually loses the majority of his people, either to Jack's wildman fantasy or to idleness.

Then there is Simon; the mystic, perhaps an epileptic, who shuns the competition between Ralph and Jack, and who takes special care for the "little-uns" meaning the younger boys, the ones who don't know what to do in their new predicament, and who are mostly scared and want their mothers.  Simon could be the all important middle ground between Jack and Ralph, but Simon is disconnected and perhaps a bit unstable.

Ralph has a lone loyal adherent, Piggy, the myopic, chubby kid whom Jack instinctively loathes, because he represents weakness, and whom Ralph protects for the same reason.  With Piggy's often unhelpful assistance Ralph tries to hold the rapidly decaying society together, and fails.

The force of Jack's conviction, and the overall tendency of the majority towards apathy and idleness, doom Ralph and his ideas of a progressive civilization that seeks to emulate the standards of the adult world.

I loved Lord of the Flies, when I read it in about seventh grade.  I saw in the story an extreme analog of the "savage" world of adolescence, and it brought a certain amount of clarity.  However, I had hoped that someday, like what happens at the end of the novel, the dystopia would end.

But it hasn't, it has simply changed character.  The on-going clash between passionate extremists, the utter ennui and disengagement of the majority of sensible people, the dreamy disengagement and disregard of the mystic perspective, it's all still here.  I'm not going to make direct correlations between who represents which faction, because the strength of the novel is it's simplification of a rather complex socio-political struggle into a microcosm.  The characters are presented in two dimensions.  Ralph never sees the obvious truth that he cannot quench the fire of savagery in Jack, and so he is literally almost consumed by it.  Jack only realizes how far he has descended into that savagery until the deus ex machina moment, when the adult world suddenly and surprisingly reappears.

The church at it's best and at it's worst is best identified as Simon, the protector of little ones, and the one who would prefer not to get involved in the affairs of Jack and Ralph.  Simon, because he is poorly understood, can be enlisted by either cause.  Simon generally thinks Ralph has the right idea: stay calm, keep organized, focus on getting rescued, but he is also puzzled and perhaps a little drawn to Jack's passionate intensity.  But Simon, if he allows himself to be too absorbed with these political pursuits, could quickly be corrupted and become a danger to the ones he most wants to protect.

Simon's vision is too dreamy and abstract, and he is prone to get lost in himself.  When he's on task and purposeful, he is the provider of shelter and safety.  He discovers that "the beast" on the island is really just a product of the boys fears and he is the first victim of the violent cult of Jack.  Simon, in the minds of many critics, is actually the Christ figure of the story, because of his neutrality in the struggle for power, because of his mystic insight, and because of his martyrdom.

Which leads me to the point: in our passionate pursuit of causes, we would very much like it if Jesus were on our side.  Unfortunately, Jesus is a tricky character to actually have on your side.  He has this persistent concern for the least of these, and anything that runs afoul of that concern is likely going to be a problem.  It doesn't matter whether your an obvious hero, like Ralph, or an obvious villain like Jack, the place you lose Jesus as your ally is when you set power as your goal and use violence as your tool.

In our current grown up world, we have people who want to claim Jesus for their side all over the place.  Liberals/Conservatives, Progressive/Evangelical, whatever dichotomy draws your interest, it usually boils down to a choice between Jack and Ralph.

Simon's corpse floats out into the ocean, and the Lord is not on our side.