Conversations with Yu-Ling

Yu-Ling is not a lap cat. He requires his own chair. So on these long winter nights during the arctic outflows I set out two chairs by the wood stove. I sit in one and he sits in the other just like any other pair of duffers. I pretend to read and Yu-Ling… well, Yu-Ling sits. After the fire seems to be doing well we both retreat to the bed that Morningstar has been keeping warm. Yu-Ling will sleep on top of the comforter next to the wall until its time to tend the fire again. Then without complaint he follows me out to the kitchen and takes his seat in the chair by the stove and watches as I gather up wood to feed the fire. Then we sit together for awhile and enjoy the warmth.

With the second arctic outflow this winter I found that Yu-Ling was almost the perfect conversationalist. Recently we have been musing on just how thin the veneer of civilization is, how just below the surface the most primitive of animal instincts still lurks. You only have to read the headlines to see how fragile this human pretense really is - in Africa or Iraq or Pakistan or New Orleans.

Opining on this question was something that authors as diverse as Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, Edgar Rice Burroughs in Tarzan, and William Golding in Lord of The Flies, all had in common. Each answered in their own way in terms of process, but it seems apparent that they each viewed civilization to be a very thin veneer indeed, and something not to be depended on without either due caution or a certain skepticism, much like trusting Spring ice.

Theodore Dalrymple wrote in the National Review, September 26, 2005 an article entitled The Veneer of Civilization Utterly Removed. It focused on the looting in New Orleans following Katrina. In his article Dalrymple reprises Golding's Lord of the Flies and he states:

Is it enough just to sit back and sigh that human nature was ever thus, and that what has happened in New Orleans is exactly what any attentive reader of William Golding's Lord of the Flies would have predicted? In that book, you might remember, a group of English schoolchildren, all from good and civilized homes, is cast ashore on an isolated tropical island without adult supervision. Before long, a kind of savage order exerts itself, with the most ruthless rising to positions of leadership. In other words, take external constraint away from even the most civilized (as the English still prided themselves on being in 1954, when the book was published), and savagery results because raw human nature decrees that it should.

Yet this is perhaps a little too easy and falsely comforting. After all, even in New Orleans, most of the people left in the city after the hurricane had devastated it were not looters, at least not of items carried off wholesale for future sale. The roaming gangs that so complicated the rescue effort, and that preyed on people more unfortunate than they, were a comparatively small proportion of the population. While it is true that all of us who were born with original sin (or whatever you want to call man's fundamental natural flaws) are capable of savagery in the right circumstances, by no means all of us immediately lose our veneer of civilization in conditions of adversity, however great.

Probably the most relevant and disturbing comments on this subject come from the 1970 article Human Savagery Cracks Thin Veneer written by the historian Arnold Toynbee and recently republished on Common Dreams. It deserves to be read in light of the reemergence of torture as a defining issue of the Bush administration and the failure of the government in opposition to take any kind of decisive action to stop the use of these barbaric practices. He clearly and convincingly puts us in the ugly place as Hitler's cohorts; Toynbee states almost a half century ago: "We realize now that Hitlerism was not just an isolated aberration. It was an ominous sign of the times. It portended the present resurgence of the savage human nature that is breaking out, through the veneer of civilization all over the world today." And continues. Only this time, we are the savages. We can claim no high ground.

It is late and the fire is burning well now. It is time for Yu-Ling and me to return to bed. I hold on to the last line of Dalrymple's quote for some sort of early morning reassurance and direction for the coming day: "A veneer may be thin, but this makes it more, not less, precious, and its upkeep more, not less, important."

... Bob
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