A Natural Law Narrative for the 21st Century

The wonderful thing that I’ve learned about the natural law is the perpetual human tendency to stumble across it in all forms of art; the simple fact of the matter is that as human beings, we know true beauty, flourishing, and truth when we see them.

This fact became apparent to me a few months ago after standing in line in the biting Philadelphia cold to watch Mockingjay: Part 1, the latest installment of the Hunger Games film series. As I was walking away from the theater, deep in conversation about the film, I began to see that this is not just a typical work of young-adult literature warning humankind about the typical evils of conflict and climate change; rather, I noticed some far more transcendent themes coming through the floorboards. I realized that these were more than simple stories about children taken from their homes and forced to fight each other. What I saw, especially in Mockingjay: Part 1, was a story about natural law, natural rights, human life, and human flourishing.

Panem is a land devoid of free speech and liberty of thought, with an overly-centralized, despotic, and self-interested government. This regime, of course, has absolutely no problem regularly desecrating human life, and the culture supporting this political order regularly delights in it: it’s patriotic! The protagonists of the Hunger Games series are forced to contend with the necessity of human rights to life, liberty, belief, thought, and property, and upon realizing that they have been deprived of them, are forced to take a stand. The natural law narrative of the Hunger Games is one that those of us concerned about cultural renewal and human flourishing must latch onto and make our own, if we are to prevent or combat the same trends in our own culture, society, and polity.

Human life in Panem is little more than raw material, the sort of raw material that Lewis warned about in The Abolition of Man. Whether it be the annual reaping of the most innocent of a society, its children, or the suppression of dissent by immediate execution of citizens by police forces, death is ubiquitous. It reminds me of a society in which death is normalized through a foreign policy that worships the sword as the ultimate good, a social policy that dismembers millions of a nation’s young for the sake of “sexual liberation” and “personal convenience,” and an entertainment industry that delights in the simulated murder of faceless human beings on the television screens of its adolescents. But from this nightmare of perpetual destruction of the imago dei and constant affront to human dignity, Katniss Everdeen, the Mockingjay, rises and stands obstinately opposed to the “culture of death” in which she finds herself. It pains and disgusts us deeply to see the wasteland of dried and charred human remains left in District 12, and to see the hospital attacked by Snow’s drones. We weep with Katniss, simply because it is a part of our humanity to be repulsed by the repulsive. When Katniss turns around and faces the camera and rebukes crimes against humanity committed by President Snow, I am reminded of Antigone’s rebuke of Creon. And much like Antigone burying Polynieces, Katniss’s unyielding defense of the human rights of her fellow citizens is a defiant reminder that human dignity is to be defended at all costs. Whether it be libel, imprisonment, or execution at the hands of the most vicious dictator, nothing deters the heroines of the natural law from their moral convictions.

Coriolanus Snow fits the description of a tyrant perfectly. Suzanne Collins’s dictator is a perfect representation of a Machiavellian statist, re-written for the twenty-first century. His government promotes its own protection at all costs. Sometimes citizens who dissent have to be silenced; sometimes they must be silenced permanently. After all, if left to speak their minds freely, they may be “wrong” and therefore pose a threat to the order and well-being imposed by the state. Furthermore, all of the political power and real wealth of the nation is contained in the Capitol. And why shouldn’t it be? People in the Capitol are much smarter and more cultured than those in the districts. Ultimately, they must know better than those foolish bumpkins, coal miners, and laborers on the fringes of society. It’s best to keep them in their place, really. The best way to do so is to make sure that the districts are highly technocratically specialized and separated, all in the name of administrative convenience. After all, the Capitol knows best; why should there be any sort of economic or political self-sufficiency at the district level?

Time after time, the dangers of an overly centralized state have made themselves evident: in the fictional Panem, the Roman Empire, pre-Revolutionary France, and other Western political systems. Of course this may seem like a pointless comparison to make in the modern context. After all, our leaders don’t have the same sort of tendencies. They have families, convictions, and lofty rhetoric that espouses an account of the “Good.” This may be true, but the parallel remains, as Coriolanus Snow is no different in these respects either; his viciousness is just made more obvious by the narrative.

What sets the Hunger Games narrative apart from the typical dystopia and brings it back to the natural law are the salvific, sylvan, and sacrificial elements used to bring the inhuman back to humanity. Probably the most striking moment that I saw in Mockingjay: Part 1 begins when Katniss is given some time out on the surface, away from the bunker. There, in the long-forgotten remnants of the natural world around her, she finds a temporary peace from all that is wrong with society. There, in the woods, under a canopy of green leaves and sunbeams, beside a river, Katniss seems to be reminded of what she is actually fighting for. She sees an end to this exhausting effort and, thanks to the excellent cinematography of the scene, silently seems to come to a vision for the future.

I cannot help but feel that, in a way, this is Collins channeling Tolkien. Finding peace away from the mechanism and industry of a chaotic world recalls (or evokes) the two-sided memory of both Hobbiton (being the foil to the smoky, industrial, and naturally perverse Mordor) and Samwise Gamgee’s iconic soliloquy at the end of The Two Towers, both reminding us that “there’s some good left in this world and that it’s worth fighting for.” But this isn’t a trite, pithy, and platitudinal reminder that better days are yet to come for Panem. It is a resounding reminder that, no matter how far things err toward the evil, the debauched, the inhumane, and the unnatural, the natural, transcendent, and divine will still be there, silently urging us back to the Good, the righteous and the dolce et decorum est.

I never expected to see such transcendent and poignant parallels in a blockbuster movie. I suppose I’ve been jaded by the entertainment industry. Nonetheless, the film interpretation of Collins’s work stirred something, a dark and dormant concern, deep within me; perhaps that was the goal. Nonetheless, the narrative of The Hunger Games speaks with a perhaps unintentional depth for those of a conservative mindset. In an age in which we see our government becoming more Romanesquely centralized by the day, and in which we see human life becoming more and more an “inconvenience” and a video game punchline, perhaps we need Katniss Everdeen as a new Antigone. In a day and age in which the freedoms to believe, espouse, and follow an account of the Good contrary to the one popularly adopted by the state and culture are becoming more and more corroded, perhaps this is a book series that conservatives ought to give a serious second read.