Let’s Stop Teaching Lord of the Flies

I was heartbroken to learn recently that my fourteen-year-old daughter was assigned William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies in her eighth-grade language arts class.

I read this novel myself in high school more than forty years ago. Many of us did. Lord of the Flies is like Animal Farm (which my daughter also read this year, and hated), To Kill a Mockingbird, and Catcher in the Rye—books that get threaded into the curriculum at some point and then become difficult to remove. Lord of the Flies left a mark on me, but it wasn’t until many years later that I could clearly explain it.

The novel is a modern morality play about human nature disguised as a shipwreck adventure story: At the start, a group of English schoolboys is stranded on an island after their plane crashes during World War II. Initially, they cooperate to build shelter, gather food, and start a signal fire, under the direction of Ralph, the charismatic and capable boy who is elected by the other boys to lead them. As the story progresses, however, fear and irrationality begin to set in. Another charismatic boy, Jack, creates a rival faction around the desire to hunt, and over time, he wins over most of the other boys to his side. The story ends with Ralph being hunted by his schoolmates, who accidentally set the island ablaze in the process. At the end, they are all rescued by a naval officer who spots the fires and investigates. The Empire arrives just in time to reassert order and save the boys from anarchy (not the good kind, but the bad kind). The message embedded in this story is not subtle: rationality cannot compete with irrationality. Civilization is a thin veneer, easily broken, and just underneath, the Hobbesian war of all against all is waiting to burst forth.

My problem with Lord of the Flies is this: it lingers on in the collective eighth-grade curriculum as a supposed literary masterpiece because of its power to prompt fourteen-year-olds to contemplate issues of power, leadership, and civilization, but it frames these discussions in a catastrophically wrongheaded theory of human nature.

Let us begin with shipwrecks since this novel positioned itself within the genre of shipwreck stories that include such classics as Robinson Caruso, Swiss Family Robinson, Shakespeare's Tempest, and Treasure Island. There were hundreds of shipwrecks during the period of European expansion and colonization. In his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of the Good Society, author Nicholas Christakis analyzes twenty cases of large groups of shipwreck survivors (parties with more than 19 members) and concludes that most of these ad hoc communities banded together peaceably, cooperating and sharing resources for the benefit of all. There were outlier cases in which the survivors resorted to savagery, but the general pattern of these groups was cooperation. In situations where food was available (as it was to the boys in Lord of the Flies), groups tend to cooperate well.

One notable twentieth-century shipwreck story follows this cooperative pattern and stands as a stark counterpoint to Lord of the Flies. In 1965, six teenage boys from a strict Catholic school on the Pacific island of Tongo “borrowed” the boat of a local fisherman and set sail for Fiji. They were blown off course and stranded on a tiny island called Ata. Over the next 15 months, the boys cooperated to both survive and thrive on Ata. When the crew fishing boat finally rescued the boys, they discovered a habitat with a garden, a rainwater storage system, an ad-hoc gym complete with handmade weights, a badminton court, and pens for chickens. The boys were in excellent health, though one had broken his leg and was nursed back to health by the others. The boys created strategies for resolving disputes and activities to keep their spirits high. Their experience is the antithesis of Golding’s fictional portrayal of castaway schoolboys embroiled in a tooth-and-claw struggle with one another.

Cooperation occurs even in the most extreme circumstances. In 1972, a plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team crashed in a remote part of the Andes, and survivors were rescued 72 days later after a brutal ordeal. This case is infamous because the survivors cannibalized the already dead corpses of crash victims to stay alive. Less well publicized is the high level of cooperation among the survivors, a fact that is beautifully illustrated in the 2023 film, Society of the Snow. The same basic pattern of cooperation for survival can be found among the survivors of the Donner Party, another infamous case of survival in extreme circumstances involving cannibalism.

It is not necessary to search extreme survival stories to see this cooperative ethos in action. Spontaneous and large-scale cooperation and mutual aid occur in the wake of every natural disaster. Sometimes looting, predation, and violence also occur in these situations (and the media is quick to cover these stories), but ordinary people organizing to help others in need is the far more common state of affairs. For example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Common Ground Collective and the Cajun Navy organized to give aid to survivors. They were but two of dozens of such groups. After Hurricane Sandy, Occupy Sandy and an informal network of churches and community organizations kicked in to help people. If you look closely at the recent floods in North Carolina and the fires in Los Angeles, you will find a similar undercurrent of mutual aid. This was certainly the case in the early days of the COVID crisis as well.

Does it matter that Lord of the Flies fails to depict shipwreck survivors or human nature under duress in a realistic way? I think so. From the start, Golding aspired to write a fable or allegory for human nature that traced "the defects of society back to the defects of human nature." He also said, “The shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.” By setting the novel in World War II and bringing the war into the story (the fact that the boys are refugees, the dead fighter pilot, the areal combat witnessed from the island, etc.), Golding wanted readers to see the boys’ traumatic island experience as an allegory for World War II. Many teachers have simply assumed that the novel can perform this allegorical function.

Golding’s analysis of the human condition is dead wrong. Wars are not the consequence of some universal battle between rationality and irrationality within individuals; they are caused by the large-scale actions of states, or the dissolution of states. Wars are essentially political—"the continuation of policy by other means" as Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz famously said—but Golding would have us believe that they are inevitably the outcome of something akin to original sin.

The books that become “classics” on high school reading lists typically either validate commonly held beliefs or at least do not challenge them in any significant way. Catcher in the Rye arrived on the scene when teen alienation and rebellion were on the rise, and for decades, this novel provided a kind of safe escape valve in the curriculum for these impulses (after all, Holden Caulfield ends the novel in a mental institution declaring himself “sick,” not exactly an advertisement for teen rebellion). Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm were easily hitched to the anti-communist plow during the Cold War because they were written with Stalinist Russia in mind. For all of its promise of being a novelistic critique of the American Dream, The Great Gatsby also glamorizes wealth, fails to offer any structural or class critique of American society, and allows its most despicable characters Tom and Daisy Buchanan to escape any punishment.

I could go on. My point is that many of the novels that linger on high school reading lists are at the very least ideologically safe. Often, they quietly, steadfastly uphold status quo values. This is certainly the case with Lord of the Flies.

What do I mean? Lord of the Flies presents a relentlessly Hobbesian view of human nature that is also, sadly, held by many Americans. Thomas Hobbes was the English philosopher who famously proposed that an all-powerful state was necessary to prevent humans from living in a degraded state of nature. In Leviathan, part 1, chapter 13, he says “During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.” In other words, without state power to keep people in a state of awe and compliance—police, military, the threat of prison, and formal instruments of coercive power exercised through government agencies and institutions, etc.—humans will naturally descend into chaos. We need to be kept in line, Hobbes thought, or else we cannot live well in the world.

This bleak analysis of the political prospects of humanity begins to crumble as soon as we look at the vast sweep of human history. In their new book Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow describe some of the many societies that have existed without state structures or top-down governments, including the Wendat (Huran Confederacy), Lakota Sioux, and Iroquois Confederacy in North America; Neolithic societies such as the Çatalhöyük in Turkey and the Pre-state Celtic societies; the Tupi-Guarani peoples of the Amazon; the Harappa in the Indus Valley; and the Tlaxcala in Mesoamerica, to name a few.

A strong central government is not the automatic prerequisite for social order. While it is certainly true that the sudden collapse of governments can cause chaotic outcomes, humans often adopt systems of self-governance in the absence of large-scale government power. There was no central government in Somalia for decades, but the capital city of Mogadishu did not slide into chaos because a network of private and public institutions and cultural practices held it together. Similarly, during the long Syrian Civil War, several autonomous regions emerged, including most notably Rojava, the Kurdish region.

At some point, the "classics" are woven into the curriculum and become difficult to remove. The case for removing Lord of the Flies is simple: The behavior of the boys in the novel is unrealistic, and a novel that aspires to say something about the human condition should share some familiarity with it.