lord of the (f)lies

One of the most read novels in high school classrooms is William Golding's Lord of the Flies. It begins with a plane crash that maroons a group of British schoolboys on a deserted island during a war. The young lads attempt self-governance before descending into violence and savagery. One boy is beaten and stabbed to death by a frenzied mob, and another boy's head is crushed with a boulder. The tragedy only ends when a naval officer comes to shore. He says, “I should have thought that a pack of British boys–you’re all British, aren’t you–would have been able to put up a better show than that.”

The book portrays human nature as selfish and primal. The boys might be more obvious with their savagery—covered in dirt, painted clay, and blood—than the prim and proper naval officer, but he, too, is fighting an unnamed war presumably filled with suffering and barbarism. It reinforces what Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal derisively calls "veneer theory." In his 2005 book Our Inner Ape, he criticizes the characterization of morality as "a cultural overlay, a thin veneer hiding an otherwise selfish and brutish nature." The proponents of veneer theory argue that there are no genetic ties between human morals and animalistic tendencies. Sometime in prehistory, we suddenly decided to be moral, rather than morality being an evolved attribute. On those grounds, as Hobbes argued, all human political organizations are artificial, covenants born of convenience or coercion. When removed from the confines of society, we return to our vicious state of nature.

This is not to mention the racist undertones of the naval officer's line above. Not even the civilized, Protestant lads of England could stop themselves from their primitive behavior.

Two bodies of evidence are crucial to consider before taking Golding's story to heart. First, let us examine the author himself. A chronic alcoholic all his life, Golding taught as a teacher at a grammar school in Salisbury, where he reportedly "divided pupils into gangs, with one attacking a prehistoric camp and the other defending it." Golding often expressed deep self-loathing. He wrote in his journals that he "enjoyed hurting people" and viewed himself as a monster. He attempted to rape a 15-year-old girl named Dora when he was 18 and at Oxford University. He privately excused his behavior because she was "depraved by nature" and, at 14, "already sexy as an ape". He was disgusting, reckless, and crude, and so perhaps not the moral paragon of human nature. I do not mean to equate the validity of his observation with his own personal failings, but is it not more than plausible to say that his depravity bled into his bleak worldview?

Now for the more interesting refutation of Lord of the Flies: a real-life example of its premise that played out very differently. In 1965, six indigenous Tongan teenage boys between the ages of 13 and 19 fled their Anglican boarding school. They stole a boat, a storm wrecked it, and they swam ashore to the abandoned, remote island of ʻAta. They dug a cave by hand and hunted seabirds for meat, eggs, and blood. They found an abandoned village in a volcanic crater and lived in its remnants. Surviving on feral chickens, wild taro, and bananas, the boys collected rainwater using hollowed logs. They equally divided the labor of gardening, guard, and kitchen duties among them. One of the boys started a fire, which they kept alive for more than a year. They made a ramshackle guitar and sang and wrote songs. They were found (15 months later!) by an Australian seafarer, completely healthy and in high spirits. All of this was retold by journalist Rutger Bregman when he tracked down the survivors decades later for his 2019 book Humankind.

In addition to this story, I could summon hundreds of examples of disasters bringing people together, of spontaneous cooperation and reciprocity emerging under the most dire circumstances. As disaster sociologists have found, it is often society's elites that do the panicking, while looting and rioting remain rare. My point is not that human nature is good, but that the presumption of savagery is empirically weak. Beyond that, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cynical expectations of fellow humans lead us to become cynical actors ourselves.