I’ve been reading a lot of classics lately, and I thought I’d do some rather candid reviews of them. Here’s my first.
The Jungle
1906. By Upton Sinclair
I just finished reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. It’s a very well written piece of social commentary and a powerful work of propaganda. Ninety percent of the novel I can get behind. In it, Sinclair brilliantly tells the tale of the immigrant man Jurgis and his downward spiral through the dante-esque levels of corruption and greed that plagued American industry and society at the time. In dramatically charged, tragic yet entertaining prose, Sinclair realistically portrays life in the slums of Chicago, using the character of Jurgis as a vehicle for the reader to explore the foul strata of turn-of-the century working-class American society. Jurgis works in a slaughterhouse, a fertilizer plant, and a harvester factory; he becomes a jailbird, a bum, a charity case, a criminal, a small-time politician, a strike-buster, and finally a socialist. Throughout his adventures, the reader is shown an intricate web of injustice and corruption, and the human suffering and destruction it brings. The last ten percent is a rosy advertisement for the socialist party and the heaven-on-earth state it promises its followers. This is the part I can’t get behind.
In these last few chapters, Sinclair dangerously ignores both the American constitution and Christianity, claiming Almighty Socialism as the only hope for America and mankind. He blames the social injustice of Jurgis’s life not on unjust laws, lawbreaking and the disregard of constitutional freedoms, but on the capitalists who practice these injustices. He attacks the basic freedom of the pursuit of prosperity, claiming that all powerful and wealthy people are parasites who do nothing. One must ask: if these wealthy “parasites” do nothing, than how did they get wealthy in the first place? This childish wining and name-calling reminds me of a certain president I know. He must have loved reading this book in school.
Sinclair’s twisted view of freedom and justice is nothing short of insane. As has been proven time and again, socialism and communism lead to only new forms of injustice. By giving the power of wealth redistribution to the masses, what really happens is that new leaders rise to take control who are even less limited in their power than the old. Humankind cannot escape basic authority structure, it comes pre-programmed in us all, and if our authorities are morally good and kept accountable, all is well. All socialism does is give unlimited power to the the new socialist leaders, power that they should not have. Thus “justice” becomes just a new form of injustice. A new elite rises atop the old.
The human sin nature is what is truly the problem here. Wealth redistribution only gives power to new tyrants. Capitalism was broken when Sinclair wrote this book. The law was disregarded by huge trusts and immoral robber barons who, like Stalin and Hitler, destroyed millions of lives in their constitution camp-like factories. But the answer was not revolution. Instead, new laws had to be passed, and corruption had to be slowly broken by just men. We now live in a country, that, if not perfect, is far more just and prosperous. Russia, on the other hand, got abject poverty, a loss of most personal freedoms, and long bread lines. And in China, the government can punish its citizens for their religious beliefs.
The only true hope we have as Americans and humans is in obeying God’s laws. By allowing people to prosper by the work of their hands and punishing those who take shortcuts, we are obeying His laws for the most part, but if we desire true and perfect peace, we can only find it in total obedience to Christ, which is only found in his blood. Freedom from sin is much greater than freedom from men. I kept wishing that Jurgis had found the former as well as the latter.