Hello again,
Again, I am aware of the lack of consistency in these electronic correspondences. I would make some witty excuse as to why I failed to write last week, or the week before, but the truth is that I simply didn't feel like writing. It's my blog. I can skip if I want to.
My time in France has come to a close, and I am very sad for it to be over. I would go back and live there if I could, but what I think I really loved was the freedom from everything. It feels almost like there was this other version of me that existed there, one that I was more comfortable with and more confident in being. He hid a little bit in the anonymity of the language, but it wasn't out of fear. It saved a lot of mental effort to ignore conversations completely because they were in some complex dialogue I couldn't understand. I learned a lot more than French there; I learned how to show up for someone, I learned how to be independent but not separate from a group, I learned that people really do actually like genuineness.
For the last week, I have been in Connecticut again waiting for Christmas, similar to last year. My circumstances are obviously different, but it is interesting that my changes in phases of life get a three week buffer. In my infinite boredom, I have done a lot of thinking. I take walks like I'm 50 years old, sometimes 2 or 3 hours. I don't know. I enjoy them.
In this perpetual state of reflection, I also did something that I might not normally do: I picked up a book and I read it. I didn't read it out of obligation, I just read it for the sake of reading it. Which book, you ask? Why, Lord of the Flies, of course.
I am aware of this novel's status as king of banned book lists in the English speaking world. That's part of why I wanted to read it. If you know me well, it's that I have to be in the right mood to accomplish something. I was not in that mood in the 10th grade, when I was tasked with writing an essay on symbolism and selected this particular book as the palette from which to write of. It was due in class the following morning and I had not so much as read a page of the book. This was in the days before ChatGPT, and a seasoned professional procrastinator might have had the sense to read something like Cliff's Notes (which I saw physical copies of in France at vintage bookstores -- dang have people been cheating reading for a long time). The thought did not cross my mind. Instead, I perused the list of approved novels, saw Lord of the Flies -- ironic, I know -- and read until a symbol was mentioned. I believe it was on page six or seven that the conch shell was introduced, and I did not take in another page of that book. I grasped at straws and wrote that entire essay without having any clue as to the plot and turned it in the following morning. I did, in fact, put the A in essay; when a teacher tells you they can tell when you do something last minute, they are probably not lying. However, they don't always expect it, and you just might be able to get away with it if you write well enough that the possibility doesn't cross their mind. I don't think it was a good essay, and I'd be interested to see what I wrote about 5 years ago on a book I hadn't read. Sorry, Mr. Nagro.
Things have changed. I have read it.
It is imaginatorily graphic. People die, and it does describe their death, but it leaves much of that description for the reader to imagine. If a youth of 13 read this book, they would probably rate it as less graphic than a 27 year old would simply because their ability to imagine such grotesque scenes is probably lesser. Even the children participating in the murders likely didn't really see them as murders. They saw them as defense and as solutions to problems that lie in front of them. However, they knew they were wrong, since nobody will talk about them. I'm about to spoil the book. Don't complain, it's been out forever.
There are 3 literal murders in this book, all to varying degrees of fault. The first is a young, unnamed boy with a birthmark. Piggy and Ralph, two main characters, realize they hadn't seen him since the first day of their desert island survival efforts post plane crash. This was a murder of neglect. The second is the murder of Simon, who suffers from some illness and is already in a state of fragility when he mistakenly happens upon a pig-killing ritual and finds himself being beat, as they all believe him to be "the beast" that has haunted their island. Nobody was willing to put a stop to things and think for a moment, and Simon simply became a casualty. A lack of factuality and rational thinking led to his death. This was a murder of ignorance. The third is the active, intentional murder of Piggy as he demands his glasses back. Two groups had formed between the now "savage" boys and the rational ones, the ones who understand that keeping a fire to lead to their rescue should be the primary task. The hunting tribe kills Piggy as an act of half-defense, since they weren't really under threat, but their leader told them they were. This was a shift from the passive to the active malevolence that continues through their rescue. The hunters begin to hunt Ralph like one of their pigs for trying to restore the order they once had, and there is very nearly a fourth murder. In some miracle of timing, a naval officer sees the smoke from their island, which they were burning to get Ralph out of the forest. This all-consuming destruction was still fire, and it happened to save them, but only because they had begun to destroy themselves. The fifth and final murder in the book is genocide of the boys' innocence. After the arrival of the officer snaps them from their self-created societal structures, they are forced to come to terms with the horrible things they had done. The severity increases with each one, suggesting that the transition from innocent to guilty is the most brutal.
I can see why this book gets banned, but I understand why it is important that it isn't. It is a commentary and an exploration on how horrible things come about. It looks into why and when people lose their humanity and what drives them to do unimaginable things to one another. It comes slowly, with an implicit decision to ignore rational thinking in favor of immediate reward. They crave meat over the plentiful fruit available to them and hunting for pigs becomes the thing that converts them. Are we any different? Many of us have all we really need. We ignore our friends who are struggling until it's too late to make a difference. We still find tax loopholes when we can and figure, hey, it's my money. We still look down at a homeless person and decide they don't deserve our generosity, participating in their deaths. Eventually, we're voting for people that condemn an altruistic worldview and ignore the things we lose along the way. We begin to fight over resources until we are fighting each other and lose sight of the fact that we all started this together.
Of course, that's a bit of a dramatization, and I don't expect most of the people reading this to get to a point that they are actively choosing malevolence over kindness. I also understand that things are a bit more complicated than a linear story and that some choices are hard because answers aren't totally right or wrong.
This exercise of morality is something that has really been on my mind lately. It has a special name in psychology, called a locus of control. This fancy looking Latin word simply signifies the source of something and what influences it. I have been thinking about the locus of control for morality.
There are two sides, an internal side and an external side. An external locus of control would mean that someone does something for a reward. Sometimes these rewards are direct, like, "clean your room and you get a cookie," other times, not so much, say, if you check up on your ministering family you get to say "i did it" to the person you are supposed to report to. One is a very direct logical statement, the other is much more complex yet still retains the same motivation. The internal locus of control means that you do something just because you believe that you should. Maybe I will clean my room because having a clean room is important to me. I will check up on someone I know because I wonder how they are doing. I write these emails from a place with an internal locus of control, by the way. I don't care who reads them. My mom isn't making me. I write them because I like writing them and feel like I have things to say sometimes.
One major goal that an individual spends their entire life trying to achieve is to become themselves. Part of that lifelong process includes morality, shaping not just what you do, but why you do it. You get to make active decisions every day. Most of them do not require a deliberate choice involving complex questions of ethics, which is probably a good thing. If they did, we'd all go to bed at 8 o'clock every night, which would make late night hangouts very boring. However, we still have some level of responsibility to make those choices for ourselves. Letting someone or something else make a choice for us completely circumvents the growth that is supposed to occur. I have more often thought about this in an LDS context lately, in addition to the general form I normally think about, so you can read this with that interpretation in mind if you want to, but know that it isn't the only one.
I have been frustrated lately by the lack of trust I feel that is given to me to choose for myself. You may ask, "okay, computer man. What specific events can you point to that you are not being trusted? You gotta be specific." To you I say, I don't need them. It is a general attitude that I have picked up on in my time at a church sponsored school and I am voicing my concern. I don't like when rules are laid down thick because they rob the individuals beneath them from the chance to practice being ethical. I think this is one thing that I loved about being in France so much: I had a wonderful professor and program director who gave all of us the chance to choose for ourselves and see what we really felt was important. If it worked for us and we felt good about it, he did too. I felt like we handled ourselves pretty well. Of course, there were occasions where, looking back, we would have done something completely different, but now we know. Turns out experience is a pretty good teacher.
In order to adopt a position on a subject, one must practice having their opinion. It is not optional for the sake of the belief. They must see how it stands compared to others, to scrutiny, to practicality. If they find that it doesn't work, they are presented with three options. They can a) switch to agree with the opposite side, b) lie to themselves and double down on their original opinion, or c) adapt their thinking to accommodate new information. Guess which of these is the easiest? Guess which one is the hardest? One of them requires an honest introspection to determine exactly which parts of a belief need to disappear, and which ones simply need pruning. Sometimes you find the whole tree is dead and infected and needs to be removed. That is okay too, you can't hold onto that tree just because it was "your favorite" or had "been there the longest". Be honest with yourself, and recognize that you may find yourself realizing that you had been right the first time. Quite literally for the sake of all of our futures, do not just shut down and give up and go to beliefs that aren't yours. Have your own. They don't have to match a template. They can be yours and they will be better when they are yours.
The most poignant moment in Lord of the Flies was in its final page. The naval officer sees the boys in their paint, blood, and mud, holding their spears, and yelling at one another. Casually, he asks, "What, are you playing war or something?" Then, as if to further the cruel joke, he asks, "Was anybody killed?" Ralph responds with a harrowing "two".
"Playing war". This man, actively engaged in war himself, did not understand the scene in front of him until it was too late. It simply took his presence for all of the children to understand what it was that they were doing, and that it all looked like some sort of casual game. Real people had died. It wasn't just a game anymore. The frenzy was over.
That was it. I had been rescued; what from, I don't know, but it didn't feel like much of a rescue. I left for Paris thinking that I would have to do some real mental prep and build some kind of stoicism in being gone, and that it was about to be a very long 88 days. I threw up in September, the night I left. I was so anxious I couldn't sleep at all. When we left a couple weeks ago, I felt the same way. I had to go home. I couldn't stay anymore or the government would come get me. I was being rescued.
I felt like this the night before our trip ended, when I realized, "that was it." That whole three months that I had just spent working on the way I thought and making friends was over. I had grown really, really close to people. They were inevitably going to disappear as our schedules and social lives made different demands for us. I wasn't going to see them everyday. Over the last couple weeks, I have realized how much I am going to miss a lot of people and how much I really care about them. I felt much happier and better around those people. I was kinder, more likeable, more considerate, funnier (hard to imagine, I know), and more fun to be around. Things are going to be different. I'm not on the island anymore, and the rules aren't the same. I'm not playing war.
From Paris, I learned how to relate to people. I learned that I was capable of caring a whole lot more than I thought I could. And, I learned how to speak French. Sort of.
Anyway, that's probably most of my thoughts as of late. Welcome home, Jacob! also Claire, Ashlee, Becca, Abby, Eden, and Link. Love you guys.
-Will
