Human nature is a product of evolution, the result from the adaptation of the human mind and body to the diverse challenges human individuals have faced until some 10,000 years ago. Consequently, this natural selection has shaped the human condition into a dichotomy, a duality between kindness and cruelty, between empathy and evil, that has pervaded and still influences the art world. Complex historical and philosophical lines of thought about this so-called “human nature” have explored the origins of human “moral instincts” and the sense of ethical commitment, trying to explain the conception of humans as ethical and responsible agents. Nowadays, challenging the traditional belief that sympathy and compassion are a product of human culture, there is the strong idea that the afore mentioned qualities are innate. However, the catastrophic violence and organized slaughter of the 20th century persuaded many Western philosophers to shy away from this belief in an innate consciousness, presenting human beings as just “cultural beings” and empathy as a product of moral civilization. That is, cruelty was believed to be a uniquely innate human feature, though perceived as an aberration and not an essential aspect of the human condition. The following essay will try to examine, by analyzing and comparing William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies (1954) and Marina Abramovic’s experimental performance Rhythm 0 (1974), the notion that cruelty – within the duality of good and evil – is not merely a primitive instinct, but a product of the emergence of consciousness and civilization. In this sense, both previous artworks will be analyzed as a response to the political environment in which they were produced, as parables that – being part of the 20th-century political reality and through an aesthetic experience, the explicit use of unlimited cruelty as a theme, and the creation of a fictional moral world – depict human civilized propensities towards atrocity. In other words, these artworks portray the horrific consequences of an “irresponsible power” (Frederick Douglass 32), the premise that “the approval of an authority figure is sufficient for ordinary human beings to perform and rationalize cruel acts” (Stanley Milgram 135).
Golding’s Lord of the Flies can be interpreted as a moral parable that focuses on the nature of man, his propensity towards evil, and the general distinction between chaos and civilization by examining the state of man’s soul through the moral nature of its characters and the problems raised by the presence of a weak ethical commitment. William Golding was an author deeply preoccupied with morality and ethics who established his own moral framework, which permeates all his literary production. Heavily influenced by the writer’s brutal experiences during the World War II, the afore mentioned novel is a cruel depiction of a battle for survival that highlights the question of what is innate to human nature and what is derived from the outside world, and delves into the characters’ ability to distinguish between the so-called good and evil, as well as their compliance to these constructs. Consequently, as Kristie Farley suggests, the author’s moral framework is based on man’s moral choices (3). Intentionally analogous to the island setting of the innocent and untainted The Coral Island (1858), Golding’s novel portrays, in contrast, the horrors of the apparent idyllic surroundings – which mirror the miseries of the war –, and the characters’ savagery, which not only comes from the external environment – as in Ballantyne’s book –, but from within themselves. This dual source of cruelty is depicted through the characters of this dystopic and allegorical novel, each of them representing a different set of moral principles and attributes, manifesting the two fundamental instincts to human beings, the distinctive behaviors of the savage instincts and the civilizing instincts. Moreover, these behaviors become more prominent than the characters’ personality features and, by extension, they represent more than their identities, embodying different degrees of savagery and civilization in a narrative that can be divided into two main branches, one being the distinction between law and chaos, and the other, between good and evil. Particularly, these oppositions can be analyzed through the antithesis between both main protagonists (Ralph and Jack), who, though being antagonistic in the second distinction, may be considered equally “lawful” figures. This last condition implies that civilization is not necessarily parallel to kindness, an equation that is clearly reversed by the character of Jack, who, being the embodiment of the savage instinct and thus the main power of evil in the narrative – the “bad lawful” that lacks a moral code –, abuses of his “irresponsible authority” and benefits from the laws of civilization that, in fact, assist and facilitate the progress of his evil. Conversely, Ralph – the “good lawful” – is the main representative of the civilizing instinct as he delineates the values of civilization and establishes rules in order not to succumb to chaos. Nevertheless, involved in one of the character’s (Simon’s) murder, Ralph also shows that civilization, although comprehending goodness, can be overpowered by the savage instinct in extreme situations. It is noteworthy that, throughout the narrative, there are many manifestations that embrace savage behavior. These manifestations can be classified, following Farley’s thesis, into three evils, which are cruelty, present in many forms and enacted by all characters (with the exception of Simon); ignorance, which begets evil as it rejects and dismisses the reality of a cruel situation; and the unawareness and abuse of power, which includes the powerful tools of intellect, language and authority (21). As a result, all these previous aspects reflect Golding’s premise that civilization does not always equal goodness, and, by exploring the conflict between violence and civilization – in an imaginary moral world where freedom is exercised without boundaries –, and man’s tendency towards evil, savagery (the source of cruelty) is an instinctual human feature aided by civilization, by social constructs. This moral proposition is also depicted in Marina Abramovic’s performance Rhythm 0, albeit through a different artistic experience.
Abramovic’s Rhythm 0, also an allegory that stablishes a division between civilization and chaos in order to depict human savage and civilized sources of evil, can be interpreted as an attempt to present the body of the artist not only as an unidentified object to be used and abused by the cruel potentialities of the audience, who embody the so-called “irresponsible power”, but as a political object, a moral world whose corruption is a reflection of conflicting political ideologies of the 1970s. Rhythm 0 became an iconic and important piece of performance art that marked a turning point in the art world as the artist entirely submitted her bodily identity and autonomy to the hands of an audience who dangerously exercised an escalating extreme violence, revealing those human cruel potentialities. In a way, Rhythm 0 examines the limits of human consciousness as well as some socio-psychological aspects about humanity, which lead to negative conclusions about human nature and the influence of social constructs on human equation. Following these interpretations, Frazer Ward provides a political dimension, emphasizing the inherent political nature of the art piece (120). In this sense, Ward suggests that the performance is an inherently political piece about power relationships, about the
ownership of the body in relation to the dichotomy between the individual and society. That is, the artist consciously surrendered her bodily ownership to the audience, who, at the same time, divided over whether or not to exert physical and verbal violence on her, creating an ideological breach between those individuals defending the morality of lawfulness and those seeking chaos. By extension, Rhythm 0 presents the body of the artist as a political object that must be contextualized in reference to the violent political climate of the “Years of Lead” (1960s-80s), of an Italy tainted by ideological conflict and civil unrest. Therefore, the surrounding politics show Abramovic’s art work as an inherently political canvas in which the conflicting political ideologies of that time become part of the artist’s body and identity, a violence that is, at the same time, metaphorically extrapolated to the audience in moral terms. In other words, the author’s body, which incites opposite reactions from the audience divided into savagery and civilization, becomes both a political and an unidentified object to be abused that depicts not only the political conflicts of the 1970s, but the premise that, in a corrupted reality where free will is exercised limitlessly, the instinct of savagery arises aided by civilization and thus, when individuals are given the opportunity to exert and “irresponsible authority”, they engage in acts of violence and cruelty.
In conclusion, human nature, the result of thousands of years of evolution, is sometimes divided into a duality between good and evil, savagery and civilization. Both William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 are a response to their respective political environments, which provide the ideological dimension upon which the authors try to portray the potentialities of cruelty – a product of both human nature and culture –, breaking the intellectual descriptions of human beings as ethical and responsible instruments. These parables, however, portray human tendencies towards atrocity, towards the use of an “irresponsible power”, through different artistic strategies and aesthetic experiences. Golding’s allegorical novel, by examining the characters’ moral features and establishing a clear division between good and evil through its antagonistic heroes (Ralph and Jack) as a depiction of the clash of the two basic human instincts (the savage instinct and the civilizing instinct), creates a moral word that mirrors the struggle of power and brutal violence during World War II, and in which savagery, the source of cruelty, is an innate human attribute aided by civilization. Regarding Abramovic’s symbolic performance, by transforming the artist’s body into an unidentified but also political object that embodies the political conflicts of the1970s in Italy, which, at the same time, are metaphorically transferred to an audience divided between savagery and civilization, the author expresses the premise that instinctual cruelty emerges hastened by social constructs. Finally, it is worth mentioning that these artworks, despite being sometimes analyzed in universal terms, exist in limited contexts, in their own microcosmos of time, space and gender, and, as a result, they cannot be considered as moral declarations about humanity as a whole, but as artistic reactions to the specific political environments they were produced in.
The Focalizer 