Maybe we are all like Buck, the dog featured in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. Or maybe we’re like the boys stranded on an island in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. That is, we might all be a bit wild inside though most of us mask it with a bit of civilized mildness.
Apparently, being wild is a normal youthful behavior as Spring Break—nay, every college party—often demonstrates. Wild isn’t new, of course, and it’s not limited to the young. There are all those risk-takers, for example, like those who just perished on Mt. Everest or at precipitous selfie-sites, where being in the wild or being wild has gone wrong. With a growing population, the wild beckons an increasingly larger number of humans with its Siren song, some hearing it just once before hitting rocks. Maybe William Golding had a legitimate point when he portrayed an innate savagery and wildness in his characters in Lord of the Flies. The wild, in Golding’s view, is only suppressed and repressed by the civilized mild.
Wild, today, comes in yet another guise, the wild of the riled. It seems that lots of folks are “riled up” about something, often about politics, political correctness, and social norms. I’ll leave you to make your own list—possibly including whatever riles you. A quick look around social media and the Internet reveals that there’s no shortage of topics that rile. And as riots and violence attest, the riled often become the wild outside the virtual world of phones and computers.
In a world of riled and wild, remaining mild is difficult, but not impossible. Remember that almost all past reasons for being riled have faded from memory. That which riles is usually temporary, a condition that applies to today’s riling points and to those Sirens who rile.
The mild do not sing as loudly or as often as the riled. Their preference is often silence or muted comment. They recognize that any song they might sing either further incites the riled to be wild or lacks the decibels to be heard over the din and cacophony of the wild.
Past generations might have associated wildness with physical behavior alone or with the impulse to act wildly, but such associations don’t fully characterize today’s wild; we can add verbal behavior and, strangely, “virtual” behavior. The online and social media of the riled play daily tribute to their own lords of flies.
One of the characteristics of mildness is compromise. Another is a search for solutions. In Golding’s novel, boys unchecked by the controls of civilizing mildness serve destruction and death, not compromise. Boys turn savage regardless of their connection through a common background and their need to cooperate for mutual survival.
Today, we might ask ourselves how mechanisms originally meant to connect people across varied geographies and political lines have become mechanisms for destroying lives. Surely, as the mild would like to believe, those who foresaw an interconnected planet were not motivated by some lord of the flies when they made and perfected the Internet and social media.
However, that their inventions of Internet and social media have made the interconnected world an island of wildness might indicate Golding was correct in his assessment of humanity. There is an underlying wildness that will of its own accord surface and pay homage to some lord of the flies.
If Golding was correct in his assessment of humanity, then all mildness is an easily removeable mask. In our present circumstances, that mask seems to be a transparent covering through which we readily see the underlying wild in the riled.
Apparently, being wild is a normal youthful behavior as Spring Break—nay, every college party—often demonstrates. Wild isn’t new, of course, and it’s not limited to the young. There are all those risk-takers, for example, like those who just perished on Mt. Everest or at precipitous selfie-sites, where being in the wild or being wild has gone wrong. With a growing population, the wild beckons an increasingly larger number of humans with its Siren song, some hearing it just once before hitting rocks. Maybe William Golding had a legitimate point when he portrayed an innate savagery and wildness in his characters in Lord of the Flies. The wild, in Golding’s view, is only suppressed and repressed by the civilized mild.
Wild, today, comes in yet another guise, the wild of the riled. It seems that lots of folks are “riled up” about something, often about politics, political correctness, and social norms. I’ll leave you to make your own list—possibly including whatever riles you. A quick look around social media and the Internet reveals that there’s no shortage of topics that rile. And as riots and violence attest, the riled often become the wild outside the virtual world of phones and computers.
In a world of riled and wild, remaining mild is difficult, but not impossible. Remember that almost all past reasons for being riled have faded from memory. That which riles is usually temporary, a condition that applies to today’s riling points and to those Sirens who rile.
The mild do not sing as loudly or as often as the riled. Their preference is often silence or muted comment. They recognize that any song they might sing either further incites the riled to be wild or lacks the decibels to be heard over the din and cacophony of the wild.
Past generations might have associated wildness with physical behavior alone or with the impulse to act wildly, but such associations don’t fully characterize today’s wild; we can add verbal behavior and, strangely, “virtual” behavior. The online and social media of the riled play daily tribute to their own lords of flies.
One of the characteristics of mildness is compromise. Another is a search for solutions. In Golding’s novel, boys unchecked by the controls of civilizing mildness serve destruction and death, not compromise. Boys turn savage regardless of their connection through a common background and their need to cooperate for mutual survival.
Today, we might ask ourselves how mechanisms originally meant to connect people across varied geographies and political lines have become mechanisms for destroying lives. Surely, as the mild would like to believe, those who foresaw an interconnected planet were not motivated by some lord of the flies when they made and perfected the Internet and social media.
However, that their inventions of Internet and social media have made the interconnected world an island of wildness might indicate Golding was correct in his assessment of humanity. There is an underlying wildness that will of its own accord surface and pay homage to some lord of the flies.
If Golding was correct in his assessment of humanity, then all mildness is an easily removeable mask. In our present circumstances, that mask seems to be a transparent covering through which we readily see the underlying wild in the riled.
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