So, white British dude imagines that boys marooned on an island will become murderous "savages." Actual children — Tonga people, "savages" as imperialism endlessly frames them — built a commune and took care of each other. https://t.co/aa3bCw3P5e
— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) May 9, 2020
I’d read Kipling’s Stalky & Co. some years before we were assigned Lord of the Flies in the eighth grade, so I took it as further proof that the British public-school system was designed to turn callow teenagers into mature sociopaths. Never found it believable that anybody other than overwrought English teachers would mistake Golding’s nasty fantasy for anything more than torture porn, but apparently such people still walk among us. Rutger Bregman’s report in the Guardian is a lovely corrective:
… The real Lord of the Flies, Mano told us, began in June 1965. The protagonists were six boys – Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa [Tonga]. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one main thing in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or even all the way to New Zealand.
There was only one obstacle. None of them owned a boat, so they decided to “borrow” one from Mr Taniela Uhila, a fisherman they all disliked. The boys took little time to prepare for the voyage. Two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner were all the supplies they packed. It didn’t occur to any of them to bring a map, let alone a compass.
No one noticed the small craft leaving the harbour that evening. Skies were fair; only a mild breeze ruffled the calm sea. But that night the boys made a grave error. They fell asleep. A few hours later they awoke to water crashing down over their heads. It was dark. They hoisted the sail, which the wind promptly tore to shreds. Next to break was the rudder. “We drifted for eight days,” Mano told me. “Without food. Without water.” The boys tried catching fish. They managed to collect some rainwater in hollowed-out coconut shells and shared it equally between them, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening.
Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year…
They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).
They were finally rescued on Sunday 11 September 1966. The local physician later expressed astonishment at their muscled physiques and Stephen’s perfectly healed leg. But this wasn’t the end of the boys’ little adventure, because, when they arrived back in Nuku‘alofa police boarded Peter’s boat, arrested the boys and threw them in jail. Mr Taniela Uhila, whose sailing boat the boys had “borrowed” 15 months earlier, was still furious, and he’d decided to press charges…
feebog
Ozark Hillbilly linked to this story several days ago. He should be given a hat tip at least.
Capri
In a crisis, humans band together to help one another. We’re social animals after all. We are so wed to the notion of the rugged individual we don’t appreciate that – but we are.
Ohio Mom
We read LOTF in junior high. It seemed to me a not too subtle hint about how the teachers saw us. I was miffed.
Betty Cracker
@feebog: At the risk of revealing that maybe I’m NOT aware of all internet traditions, my understanding is that “hat tips” are reserved for occasions when a third party draws your attention to a story? It’s possible AL discovered this independently. Pretty sure I did. Read it this weekend and forwarded it to my husband to read too. Not really surprising that people with left-leaning political views might independently stumble across the same articles in the same publications from time to time. Such an interesting story!
dnfree
I read this article and thought it amazing that the message was taken to be “Human nature is better than that depicted by Golding” without even mentioning the difference in the societies the fictional and real boys were raised in.
Matt McIrvin
As I said in the other thread, I found Lord of the Flies to be a completely accurate and perceptive description of how my American junior-high boys’ PE class would have behaved if marooned on a desert island. But this behavior was likely actively encouraged by the teachers. If returned to the “state of nature”–well, after any amount of time they’d likely have taken that baggage with them.
WereBear
At the bottom of the article it says it’s from an upcoming book, just translated and available for pre -order. I got it.
LuciaMia
Id always assumed Goldings book was a reaction to stories like Swiss Family Robinson and adventure story books for boys from the Edwardian era.
Brachiator
I read this story yesterday and thoroughly enjoyed it. The true story of friendship and co-operation made me smile. And these kids were incredibly resourceful.
I have no problem with “Lord of the Flies.” It is fiction, a cautionary tale, not an attempt at realistic history. Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” similarly is a work of fiction, and omits many details relating to the adventures of real-life castaways like Alexander Selkirk.
And as for the good and bad sides of human nature, I was recently doing pandemic themed reading about lockdowns and catastrophes. One was a story of two shipwrecks near Australia. In one case the survivors co-operated and I think all survived. In the other case, the survivors resorted to survival cannibalism. One of the survivors confessed that he had developed a taste for human flesh.
Omnes Omnibus
Is there any evidence that a group of boys marooned on an island would actually live out LOTF? Aside from people’s assumptions based on their experiences with teenaged boys?
cokane
@Brachiator: Well said, there’s a reason Golding’s work has had such a long life, it’s a compelling story. But I don’t think he ever intended to say this is what would always happen.
narya
I saw an article maybe 6 weeks ago? maybe in the FYNYT? about the folks who did research in Alaska after a huge earthquake. They found the same thing–people banded together, workred together, took care of each other. And, really, I still see a lot of that now–the MAGAts and gun-fondlers are getting press that is wildly disproportionate to their numbers. Polls repeatedly show that everyone, including self-professed Repubs, think that we’re not ready to fully open everything up. We will reach the point, if we haven’t already, that everyone knows someone who got sick or died. With HIV, as a comparison, it was easier to Not Know Anyone (up to a point . . .).
Roger Moore
@dnfree:
If people’s behavior varies radically depending on which society they came from, though, you’re no longer talking about “human nature”; you’re talking about learned social behavior. Of course we don’t have an actual experiment with British private school kids, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out more like this story than like Golding’s.
To me, the real lesson from this is that no matter how compelling they may be, works of fiction are not a reliable guide to the real world. People who build their worldview around what they learned from a novel- whether it be Lord of the Flies or Atlas Shrugged– are making a terrible mistake.
PenAndKey
@Omnes Omnibus: Considering Lord of the Flies is essentially a thinly veiled propaganda piece for Hobbesian morality, the base savagery of humanity, and the virtue of central authority to “civilize” humanity… not really.
Could it happen? Sure, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a cautionary tale to not get stuck on an island with a group of sociopaths. I wouldn’t read much more into it than that, and even that’s stretching it.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
How do we rectify that … for science?
medrawt
If we’re sidestepping any deeper consideration of what Golding’s point might actually have been and vetting the scenarios for realism, LotF is about a bunch of boys who don’t all know each other, the oldest of whom I think is 13 or 14, whereas the Tongans were a handful of good friends, the youngest of whom was 13. That seems significant to the social dynamics involved!
It’s been decades since I read it but I’m dubious that Golding was saying “THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE ARE REALLY LIKE” as opposed to “this is something that can happen to people.” Where “this” = a group of average people can be led into awfulness by a persuasive bullying asshole. (Gestures broadly at human history.)
Jess
Here’s a link to the book coming out in June:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316418536/?coliid=IPZTDJ06LJN04&colid=2HU3BPL2GU3OF&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it
He has another interesting looking book titled “Utopia for Realists” available on Kindle for $2.99:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MXDBTWM/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0
Benw
Especially for fans of sci-fi and fantasy I highly recommend N K Jemisin’s books!
Jess
@Jess: The author, Rutger Bregman, was one of the voices who popularized the idea of universal income, btw.
ThresherK
This article reminds me that it’s time to watch Ripping Yarns’ Tompkinson’s School Days again.
Salty Sam
I ordered it too. You may remember the author, Rutger Bregman, gained notoriety earlier for taking the Masters Of The Universe at Davos to task for attitude about taxes: On his first visit to Davos, Rutger Bregman dismisses ‘stupid philanthropy schemes’, saying the real issue that needs tackling is tax avoidance. ‘We can invite Bono once more but come on we’ve got to be talking about taxes … all the rest is bullshit in my opinion,’ he says. The Dutch historian feels like he’s ‘at a firefighters conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water.
I like the cut of his jib, can’t wait to read his book.
HumboldtBlue
I read this story the other day and someone else linked to it later in the day.
Stalky and Co. was some of my favorite Kipling writing.
Emma
@dnfree: I enjoyed the article, but I thought the same as you, and also the fact that he bothered to fly to Australia and drive hours to see Peter Warner, but didn’t mention meeting any of the Tongans involved? I assume he did meet them to write his book and quotes them there, but just a little miffed that he quotes only Warner for the free article that perhaps more people will read than the book.
debbie
@Ohio Mom:
It was my favorite book in high school. In my mind, it was a true depiction of the human race. Of course, this was during Vietnam and all.
Yutsano
@narya: To be honest, HIV was one of the things that busted the closet door open. When “normal” people also started getting AIDS, it became much harder to hide their sexuality. It also brought the concept of bisexuality more into the consciousness of straight white folks. It was uncomfortable for a lot of people, especially the unfortunate spouses who got infected, but it made LGBTQ people come out of the woodwork. And suddenly it was much more common. It’s a sad testament that a devastating illness brought us to equal marriage by 2015, but it’s how it ended up happening here.
debbie
@PenAndKey:
Or survive a plane crash in the Andes. I’m not so sure LOTF is only a parable, but I don’t trust my memory enough to debate it.
trollhattan
“Little Donny continued strangling the boys, one at a time, at night, adroitly deflecting blame to others until there was just one boy left, conveniently the smallest, youngest one.”
“The chickens were delicious, if overcooked.”
Salty Sam
So far, all the discussion here about LOTF has left out the perspective of the author, William Golding. I’ve read that he was a miserable man. Alcoholic, himself abused as a child, and as a British school teacher, would set his students against one another as “experiments”.
bjacques
@Baud: There’s one group of (overgrown) private school boys (and) girls I’d believe would quickly descend into savagery and cannibalism, because they already have: Boris Johnson and his cabinet.
Emma
@Salty Sam: yeah, article quotes him saying that he empathized with the Nazis, because that’s the sort of mindset he had too. No elaboration on what kind of mindset exactly he thought Nazis had that was like his, but I’m too creeped out by Golding to do further searching.
Salty Sam
So far, all the discussion here about LOTF has neglected to mention the perspective of the author William Golding. Apparently he was a miserable sonuvabitch, alcoholic, abused as a child himself, and as a British schoolmaster, would set his students against one another as “experiments”. Ugh.
I wish I had know that when it read the book in school. It creeped me out, and it was taught as “social theory”.
Omnes Omnibus
@debbie: If you are talking about the Uruguayan rugby club, they actually handled the situation well. They didn’t kill and eat people. They waited until their other food supply ran out and then made a group decision that their choice was eating the dead or dying of starvation. To the best of my recollection the dead were treated as respectfully as possible under the circumstances. I actually think that situation reflected reasonably well on humanity.
LuciaMia
My favorite is “The Curse of the Claw.”
debbie
Back to people being and doing good, here’s an article (ignore the source) from last week:
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: But then I don’t think that I am as misanthropic as many here.
Emma
@bjacques: not sure they’d have the competence to build a fire, shelter, or forage for food, so unless they’re marooned on a tropical paradise, I feel like they’d die of exposure first.
Michael Spicer videos are the only way I can listen to him and his cabinet members.
cokane
@medrawt: also, i mean, it’s narrative fiction, it kind of helps to be dark and gloomy. a story of boys who built a fully functioning mini society while marooned just doesn’t tend to be as compelling as the darker version!
I mean we all watch movies and tv shows that are absurd, darker versions of what actually happens in life.
debbie
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes, thanks, that’s it. As I recall, Jack and Ralph had to do a fair bit of convincing to get the others to follow them, but they definitely lacked the respectfulness you’ve cited.
Emma
@debbie: what tickles me about the Irish donations is that the original donor’s message, which was screenshotted onto the GoFundMe organizers’ post thanking him, is that he made a big deal about the Irish remembering the Choctaw donation, and he was returning the favor. He donated $5 XD Makes me feel better about my unimpressive donations.
Uncle Cosmo
@Benw: How about for those of us who are fans of science fiction[1] but loathe fantasy[2]? Whereabouts on that spectrum would you say Jemison’s work falls? Just curious – no way I could get to it till the libraries reopen…
[1] NB In the time when I reviewed science fiction for a major metropolitan newspaper, the term “sci-fi” was considered an insult, & I still consider it so.
[2] Never got more than a couple dozen pages into a fantasy novel without tossing it aside in boredom. Including Tolkien. I was quite taken with one series at first I thought was fantasy – Sean McMullen’s Greatwinter trilogy – but realized about halfway through the first book that (spoiler alert) it is in fact science fiction of a fairly hard sort.
Matt McIrvin
@Yutsano: We don’t have the counterfactual to examine. I suspect AIDS was a net harm to progress in gay rights–there was a lot of progress about to happen in the 1980s that got knocked back, and didn’t happen until effective HIV treatments appeared in the mid-1990s.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Maybe the same thing. Human beings are social animals. We do not exist as human without learned social behavior. Of course, we can also modify, reject and adapt social behavior.
Very true. Except for Star Trek. Star Trek is just the bestest ever model for human society. ;)
Elizabelle
In news of employers NOT acting like LOTF and looking out for their employees and critical mission for the American people:
from top of WaPost website just now:
Scuttled by the factory. Trump was fine with virus-spreading and work-interrupting if the staged visit made him look like a wartime president. Moar of this, please.
Braskem is the company John Cole highlighted a few weeks back, for their self-sacrifice. They’ve suggested Trump come back after the pandemic. LOL.
Earlier story was entitled
They lived in a factory for 28 days to make millions of pounds of raw PPE materials to help fight coronavirus.
And Trump wanted to put them all at risk, for a photo op. Of his orange WAR PRESIDENT face without a mask. I hope this episode strengthens West Point’s spine. Just say no to a June graduation so Trump can parade around.
The Pale Scot
@Capri:
In a crisis, <properly socialized> humans band together to help one another.
I have no problem thinking that various strains of English speaking white people would turn on each other. Small island people especially would more corporative
Uncle Cosmo
@Omnes Omnibus: Over 40 years ago I worked with & for a former football punter/placekicker who played rugby in the DC area – got used to seeing him come in Monday mornings limping & bruised. He related the following story:
I heard the story 40-odd years ago & it’s stuck with me ever since. Can’t vouch for its authenticity, but my colleague had no particular reason to lie (though he might have embellished).
Martin
Huh, I never interpreted the book that way, and I’ve read it several times.
It always seemed quite apparent to me that the book traces a similar contour to Bob Altemeyer’s work on authoritarianism. Jack is an authoritarian leader and sociopath, while the boys choir are authoritarian followers, that accept sociopathic behavior because it’s approved of by Jack.
It’s not that the British system turned out individuals like this, it’s that individuals like this exist in every society and this group of boys just happened to have the bad fortune of one. At the end of the book, when Jacks authority is overshadowed by the military that have arrived to rescue them, the followers give up on Jacks authority and their tolerance for his behavior, and basically return to normal, crying and traumatized by what they willingly did.
We know that roughly 30% of the general population tend toward being authoritarian followers that when presented with an authoritarian leader will accept their leadership and actions basically without question (sound familiar?). Authoritarian regimes happen everywhere. Germans were not more susceptible to this than people in any other country, yet a sufficiently large number of them went along with Hitler’s actions. The same is true here and among those boys.
But the point is that you don’t have a society of sociopaths – you need one, with authoritarian tendencies, to get about ⅓ of your population to become tolerant of sociopathic behavior. Remove that leader, and that tolerance goes away. That’s part of the reason why racism ebbs and flows in the way it does in this country. When the followers have a leader that doesn’t tolerate racism, they tone things down and become less tolerant of racism themselves. When they get a leader that tolerates it, they immediately reverse course and ramp things up. Their own moral compass is VERY attuned to that of the leader.
oatler.
It might have been The Guardian where I read it but I remember the comment that there already was a female version of The Lord of the Flies, it was called high school.
Brachiator
@Uncle Cosmo:
Science fiction is fantasy fiction. Or, you could say that science fiction, any work based on an imagined or alternate society, is a subset of fantasy fiction.
“Hard” science fiction is a subset of general science fiction, which is a subset of the larger genre fantasy fiction.
Wow. I cannot even imagine someone trying to be a science fiction purist.
I know a number of people who loathe any type of speculative fiction set in the future or imaginary worlds. For them, fiction is by definition about “real” human societies. Oddly enough, they can make exceptions for fantasy worlds set in the past, but cannot relate to works set in the future, on other planets etc.
The one exception is that these people can sometimes accept science fiction if they can read it as an allegory for some contemporary social issue. They apply a Twilight Zone filter to make the work morally acceptable.
Similarly, I have run into a number of adults who will never watch an animated film. For them, animation is only for children.
ETA: I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings movies, but didn’t much care for the novels. On the other hand, I read and loved Spenser’s Faerie Queene and similar works when I was a college student.
planetjanet
@Martin: That is just fascinating.
eemom
@The Pale Scot:
The Donner party included two Native Americans who ran away because they refused to engage in cannibalism (and were later found and murdered). That fact has always stayed with me.
Feathers
There was a thread on twitter from someone from either the island involved or a nearby one. Couldn’t find it again, but he basically complained about the front and centering of the white savior and how had he ended up with the rights to the story? But also told a good bit about the culture of these islands, where thrift and extreme cooperative sharing is necessary for survival and drilled into everyone from earliest childhood.
I seem to recall being assigned Lord of the Flies to read in middle school/early high school, figuring out that it was bullshit and a polemic, not actually reading it and skating on talking about the philosophy of it all.
If someone is looking for a very good book on survival at sea and probably extra pertinent now, Lifeboat, by John Stilgoe is a history of the lifeboat through the ages. Tidbits I learned: that lifeboats are pointed at both ends both ends because they need to be able to land on a beach through the surf and you can’t count on anyone who knows how to turn a boat around being onboard. Also, that when they started making ships out of metal, they started making lifeboats out of metal, too. But they quickly went back to wood, when they realized a metal boat traveling through an oil fire was a horrible death, while a thick wood boat had a chance. He is a professor of visual studies (AKA looking at the past) at Harvard and this was written after hearing from all his students who survived 9/11 in NYC. Each chapter stands alone, so it can be taken up and put down. Makes for excellent reading and learning.
Eternal Optometrist
As commented here in a discussion on MetaFilter about the article: The point of Lord of the Flies isn’t that human beings are inherently monsters but that upper-class British boys are raised to be monsters.
(Plus link to nice 2018 video clip of Peter Warner and Mano Totau)
Starfish
This thread by a person from Tonga on what they thought of the article was interesting and was wondering if this had to do with Tongan culture being different from British culture.
moonbat
I always took LOTF as an allegory for what the adults were up to in the wider world at the time. Weren’t the kids supposed to be stranded during a fictional World War III raging across the globe? The kicker at the end is the horrified surprise of the adults who discover the surviving children. “Aren’t you boys British?” comes out of the mouth of the rescue captain and and I was like, “Ah, yeah! Some of the most vicious colonizers on planet earth!”
trollhattan
@oatler.:
Heh, as captured in the documentary, “Mean Girls.”
Or was it “Heathers?”
narya
@Yutsano: Totally agree. Act Up help disrupt that for example. I think that, also, enough folks had created open communities and chosen families, and were used to living openly in the cities (especially) and just said, hell no, not going back into the closet. There’s a great book by Lilian Faderman, “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers,” that documents part of that history. Essentially, in the case of lesbians, they had to have the ability to support themselves, and live in places where they could be out.
Nora Lenderbee
@oatler. @trollhattan: In my experience, it was called “summer camp.”
TruthOfAngels
It’s a decent story, but then decent stories aren’t necessarily realistic. I don’t think The Handmaid’s Tale (the book, not the series*) is particularly realistic when it absents the US Army from the narrative, has Congress machine-gunned and then everybody goes ‘oh shit a new army, all hail Gilead’ is realistic at all, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great work of art.
Is it a good idea to prescribe it to schoolchildren as an example of the worst that can happen and what not to do? Yes, unless bullying’s stopped and I just missed a meeting or something.
It’s worth noting that Golding didn’t like himself much for writing it in the first place.
*Don’t even get me started.
Morzer
@Roger Moore:
I refer the honorable gentleman to the creep currently squatting in 10 Downing St and ask that the last ten years of British government by privately educated “Conservatives” should be included in the evidence.
Morzer
Golding’s own introduction to The Lord Of The Flies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYnfSV27vLY