The wrong story

Earlier this year BBC television serialised a new adaptation of William Golding’s famous 1954 novel Lord of the Flies. There was uniform agreement among the critics that it was well made, but does the novel itself tell the right story? In portraying what happens to a group of British schoolboys stranded alone on an island, it shows a fairly rapid descent from civilised behaviour to conflict, chaos and eventually outright savagery. What’s usually been taken from the story is that evil, depravity and brutality are inherent in human nature and, if left to themselves, any group of humans will develop a mob mentality, end up at one another’s throats and a hierarchy of tyranny will form.

It’s a plot that certainly chimes in with a lot of what was being written and published widely in the decades following the Second World War. We need only think of books like Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative, and (arguably) George Orwell’s Animal Farm. And from some sources at least this take on humanity kept on coming right up to the end of the century, an example being Richard Wrangham’s 1996 book, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. What such writers were doing in effect was to put forward a secular version of the longstanding religious dogma of original sin, a view of human beings as tainted by innate selfishness and aggression and in inevitable competition with one another. As for Golding, this was openly his agenda, as expressed in the words he used in an interview in 1970, where he said ‘man is a fallen being’ and went on to state: ‘He is gripped by original sin. His nature is sinful and his state perilous’. He is also on record as saying about himself: ‘I have always understood the Nazis, because I am that sort by nature.’ So what he seems to be doing in Lord of the Flies is projecting his own dark view of humanity on to children while turning it into a supposed lesson about human nature for millions to read.

As for the TV adaptation, it must be said that its creator, the screenwriter Jack Thorne, did make an effort to temper the ‘human nature’ message by providing ‘back stories’ for its main protagonists. So, for example, we were given to deduce that the savagery of one of the most violent child characters might be, at least in part, a function of the loveless household he had been brought up in. But such tweaks only mitigated to a limited extent the original message carried by Golding’s book and which, as we have seen, the author himself was never shy of defending. In light of this, we can only agree with what Steve Coleman wrote in an article on Golding in the August 1993 edition of this journal: ‘Few novels have so eloquently served the cause of capitalist ideology which contends that humans are inherently aggressive, gullible, self-serving, easily led and uncooperative than Golding’s Lord of the Flies.’

So one thing to be said is that the 2026 TV version of the book came across as a bit of a throwback, largely reflecting as it did views about human nature which have been widely superseded since the book’s original publication. It seemed to close its eyes to the large amount of recent well-evidenced research and investigation on the topic to be found in works whose titles speak for themselves, for example Beyond War. The Human Potential for Peace; Team Human; Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity; Ultra-Social, many of which have been discussed in articles and reviews in the Socialist Standard (see Suggested reading ). The majority of these investigations conclude not that human beings are automatically non-selfish, non-competitive, or non-prone to violence but rather that selfishness, non-cooperation and fighting are not their most natural inclination, even if they are capable of being driven to such behaviour by circumstances. The historian Rutger Bregman, in particular, in his 2020 book, Humankind. A Hopeful History (reviewed in the Socialist Standard May 2021), explicitly takes up Golding’s challenge about the kind of situation portrayed in Lord of the Flies by recounting a ‘real-life’ story of shipwrecked schoolboys. What took place in this case was the exact opposite of what was portrayed by Golding. In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga stole a boat, got caught in a storm, and were washed up on a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific. They stayed there for 15 months, during which time they established a friendly cooperative way of living, taking care of one another before they were discovered and rescued. In other words, when real children found themselves alone on a real island, there was no impulse to tyranny, no one descended into savagery, nor was any kind of cruel hierarchy set up as in Golding’s novel. This, as well as other examples of human behaviour Bregman draws on, leads him to reject the notion of an innately self-serving, potentially evil human species. Instead anti-social behaviour, when it occurs, is seen as the reaction of the highly adaptable and flexible creatures that human beings are to conditioning and circumstance (ie, bad circumstances can make us bad people), all of which lies very far away from Golding’s dark view of humanity.

So, while there is no doubt that, when people feel unsafe, unseen, deprived, or their needs are unmet, their actions can shift in unpredictable and undesirable ways, overwhelmingly it is the human capacity for working cooperatively with others that comes to the fore when circumstances make it necessary. What we can envisage with some confidence, therefore, is the likelihood that this will be the default behaviour in the democratic free-access society of from each according to ability to each according to need that is campaigned for by socialists. So not difficult at all to imagine that, in a society organised in that way, peacefulness, cooperation and empathy – the diametrical opposite of what is portrayed in Lord of the Flies – will be the overwhelming order of the day.

HKM

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