It's not quite as simple as "it works like 'Lord of the Flies' or it doesn't". Nicholas Christakis, in his book "Blueprint", devotes a chapter to a database that he and his grad students made of shipwrecks, where the survivors lived long enough, in enough isolation, that they had to more or less put together a temporary society. There were lots of cases where they turned on each other, and lots of cases where they did not.
Nice review. In a sense I find this something akin to the late David Graeber point on it’s column about bulling. How you can find data pointing towards the human society propensity for violence, and also data of human society propensity for cooperation and refusal to engage on violence even when confronted with losing their way of living, although he also raises the point when historically there has been more propensity to consider only the violent ugly aspect, as you can almost certainly find it on people who appeal to “human nature”.
IDK if its a modern bias or a recurring one, but people are very drawn to the idea of a core human "nature:" what we are when all the surface level stuff is stripped away.
The way the conversations I've had tend to go is ever more contrived scenarios. Eventually it gets to spaceships carrying sperm and eggs to be raised cultureless by robots. You need to avoid scenarios like these, where the boys know about raising chickens, praying and stuff. lol
As if a parentless, cultureless person is more human than the rest of us... more indicative of "true" human nature.
Once we set to answering a question, it seems very hard to question the question.
>core human "nature:" what we are when all the surface level stuff is stripped away.
That always seemed out of whack for me. If you change the environment, the individual changes too.
That's just a different individual, calling it more "true" or "pure" seems like asking "how much is 1 + apple?" (where Apple is an actual apple, not a variable).
The whole premise is fundamentally wrong. How I am right now is not false nor unnatural.
Exactly. There have never been culturaless, parentless people. If there were/are, then that is simply a terrible circumstance and terrible results will probably occur.
These villages better build defenses against the marauders or all is for naught. And of course, the best defense is a good offense. And... Fast forward to the presently peaceful times of mutually assured destruction!
That is a point of a village as opposed to living in separate farmsteads. (there are other points to villages, but putting a group of people together is an automatic form of defense)
Villages appear long before defensive fortifications in the record, in many cases. Pure reason is not very good at forming predictive theories about history, as a general rule.
There are many possible reasons for villages, and cultural reasons are a very big determinant of how people live. So are economic reasons. Many of us live in big cities now, and it's generally less safe.
Don't underestimate just how many people are needed to defend a village.
A village has a lot of land to defend and not many people to do it. The local town or city sized group will just pitch up with many more men and overrun you. All whilst having enough people left for defence. And they are likely to have more access to heavy weapons that can blow your house up from a distance.
Nations will overrun villages, but a city alone doesn't. Cities need villages to provide food, so a city never goes to war - it is instead the nation, headed by the city but also including all the villages.
We tend to record the raping and pillaging because those are the times of disruption. I'm not a historian, but I can imagine that there are long stretches of history that are relatively conflict-free for most of the world, but such times are not really that interesting so no one tells stories about them.
At least in the enlightenment period, tend to come from political philosophy rather than history... though the two are closely related in this period. Notably, Hobbes and his "state of nature" concept.
Philosophy of this period (also Locke, Marx, etc) tended to speculate about the past using reason, rather than empirically. A lot of their ideas have been passed down to us.
Hobbes' saw life in the "natural" state "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." Eventually government arises, using its monopoly of violence to end day-to-day violence, cheating and such.
I don't think the original writers are compelling anymore, but they are hard to shake entirely. Memes die hard.
In any case, I think the reality of people at all times is that cooperation is a fundamental. There are no societies without cooperation, some form of solidarity, love, etc. We could have never survived without it. Violence is also common in history, but we don't need it to survive. We also know that primates, dogs and other creatures have demonstrably empathetic behaviours, a sense of fairness and such.
As I implied at the start, I think the mistake is literal fundamentalism. Human behaviour can't be logically derived from a fundamental nature.
People are quick to discount the value of education (or upbringing) from the early age. Humans have started developing quickly with the development of language and especially writing. Take that away, and we are looking at another dozens of thousands of years of getting back to it, if at all.
The best evidence to me is how those "lost in woods, found years later" kids have developed: mostly mimicking other animals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child). It's even hard to change that later on.
It is not what is human. It is also, how you raise those kids. Ars you raising them in bully house boarding school full of abuse? You get different results then if you raise them with different values.
This review is obviously high effort. What's the incentive here? Is this what the community regularly does in Goodreads? Or are you somehow affiliated with the author and treat this as a favour?
I don't know why you're being downvoted when it's clear your question is out of curiosity.
High effort reviews are common on Goodreads, why? Because it's a community about passionate readers and probably those who write the very detailed reviews have enjoyed reading some other reviews and want to contribute back to the community. I think it's the same reason as people contributes to wikipedia: for the sake of sharing knowledge
> I don't know why you're being downvoted when it's clear your question is out of curiosity.
It is an odd question on the internet where people regularly and normally put a lot of effort into reviews, blog posts, discussion forums comments and so on.
That coupled with question about affiliation probably makes people interpret is as not questions out of curiosity, but rather as sleazy way to introduce doubt on the author motivation.
Other reviews for this book on Goodreads are equally high effort. It’s not uncommon to see long and insightful reviews in the Goodreads community. I’d assume good intent :)
Hmmmm...not sure, entirely. I think it's that, by putting in more effort, I end up processing the book mentally in a more thorough way. Something like what my grade school literature teacher might have said was the point of book reports. Thinking over "well, exactly what did I think of it?" tends to make me think over the book's contents more carefully, instead of just putting it down and immediately moving on.
Turnip: you're the one that's toxic, likes to go on Goodreads spread your little hate. Come on here, hate me standing against bullies. That's makes you toxic, supporting the toxic. I'm standing against the toxic, that's makes me awesome and good. Not like you, you're toxic. And I'm like the antidote to toxic that's why you think I'm toxic cuz you are toxic. Btw I didn't go through your history past two pages even then it wasn't worth reading it's just what I sense about you. You can talk big but I know my words are effective and I know they hit home and now you got to live with that. Karma for your comments. Maybe you'll learn those consequences and act better in future. Thanks for your cooperation and for joining in here, you really helped me do one thing I'm meant to do: stand against the toxic, like you.
tutivillusrex: king of the nothing. You're so good, humble and sane. Not. It's always the crazy bad and arrogant ones that launch the insults first at others.
Weekeerney999: oh no I just stand against the toxic. That makes me awesome, and good. And if you don't like that that makes you toxic.
The coin flip in the book is that they had two potential leaders, one of the responsible and the other one pretty sociopathic but charismatic - the nascent society followed the sociopathic, charismatic one.
At any rate there were quite a few more kids than 6 in the book, so pointing at this incident and saying 'see, it would work out' is just silly.
> The attempt to infuse sociology with biological facts (e.g. genes matter, evolution still impacts humans, etc.) has been controversial (even today the term "sociobiology" is radioactive to some).
My immediate reaction to your post was that maybe we could learn something about what causes societies to collapse, and learn something?
Did they find any variables that could explain whether or not the group turned on each other? e.g. resource abundance, gender makeup, age of people, N people, N days stranded, etc?
One important factor was, "did they sacrifice somebody early on?", for example in the actual evacuation from the ship. Once it is implanted in everyone's minds that individuals get sacrificed, it erodes trust, and makes everyone suspicious of everyone else. Of course, it's hard to distinguish between cause and effect in things like that.
There's a lot of details in the details, though, you might want to read the whole thing! :)
That makes sense. Nobody has a monopoly on violence so everyone wants to front-run their own demise by killing the person that will kill them with a small but non-trivial probability. Pre-emptive violence becomes rational in such an environemnt.
It shouldn't be glossed over that these were six boys from a boarding school on a getaway. So, unless there were only six pupils in the boarding school, it would mean that this was a group of boys who like and trust each other enough to let in on a plan which could get them into serious trouble if the wrong person found out about it. Also, the school being a boarding school implies that the group had a preexisting social structure, and that they had been literally living together before the event.
So, it's sort of a best case scenario of 'a group of boys forming a society on a deserted island'.
I would also put some emphasis on the fact that it is a "strict Catholic" boarding school. To Guardian readers this is a dog-whistle to signify oppressive and potentially abusive; but the reality is very possible that the boys had learned some of the positive aspects of the faith - it does after all state that they regularly sang and prayed together - so I would imagine, despite their boredom at school, they may well have learned and internalized some of the "love thy neighbour" type teachings and carried them into this situation.
I believe you have a good point. I highly recommend listening to the above interview. He elaborates how they had a system in place where he would get any two boys who have a problem together in the evening to talk it through, hug, and then pray together. It's clear that at least from their own perspective faith did play a significant role in their group cohesion and survival.
That's a wonderful story and and an uplifting rebuttal to Lord of the Flies.
But to be fair, six Tongan boys were probably far hardier and well equipped than the typical British schoolboy of that time would have been. It seems they thought nothing of stealing a fishing boat and heading to sea, and they most likely had abundant life skills already - they basically relocated from life on one pacific island to another.
So a great story but I don't know how much can be extrapolated from it about human behaviour in general.
> So a great story but I don't know how much can be extrapolated from it about human behaviour in general.
Given that this really happened, a lot.
Lord of the Flies came out of the fantasy of an English superintendent. Yet, it has permeated our culture as a cautionary tale about human behavior. It is 100% fiction.
I’d like to recommend Humankind by Rutger Bregman - a wonderful book dismantling the toxic narratives we have about ourselves.
Lord of the flies was written shortly after world war 2, which also really happened... I don't take it seriously as a story of what would really happen if boys ended up on an island, but humans killing each other for dumb reasons is not the stuff of fantasy.
No, but the why is. It's worthwhile being very careful taking fiction books as a depiction of how peoples minds work, because they're just plainly not - they're a depiction of how a very small subset (authors who publish books) think peoples minds work.
Tribalism is generally closed, but not automatically antagonistic with other tribes. In contexts where there is no forced competition, tribes rarely fight.
The modern view is that most likely hunter-gatherer societies, which didn't have fixed lands and had no general reason to be territorial, had little warfare. It is only with agricultural societies, where competition for land becomes a factor, that we start finding evidence of warfare, as far as I understand.
Hunter gatherer societies fought all the time for control of hunting grounds.
What's interesting it's that researchers that lived with the Yanomami and other Amazonian peoples noted that most inter tribal conflicts weren't about competition for food sources-that was rather plenty- but instead for women. In polygamous societies, high status males acquired many wives and young males frequently kidnapped neighboring tribe's women which sparked constant retaliatory raids.
It's a distinction without a difference- one could argue a less primitive species wouldn't have found itself caught in world wars. The man-children starting world wars are paralleled by the children-children killing each other on the island.
Reducing the historical and contemporary reasons why humans engage in war to people being "man-children" is a level of sticking-my-head-in-the-sand that I hope to never attain. I've never understood the urge to think of people and things one morally/politically disagrees with as simply stupid, braindead or immature - but there seem to be way too many people who seem incapable of contending with the idea that humans can be intelligent and highly amoral/immoral.
I have had the privilege to visit concentration camp museums. I actually didn't have the feeling these were unintelligent savage places.
It was actually trying to be orderly, efficient and exceedingly bureaucratic. These institutions were very much a part of civilization. Everything was thought through.
My parents lost members of their families to genocide. The people who planned it were not stupid. Ruthless yes, calculating and callous and cruel yes. But not stupid, and it's both amusing and highly frustrating to see people who've mostly never had to confront these things pretend that it's just the work of "man-children" (because gods forbid that we contend with the idea that the intellectualism and intelligence we place on pedestals might ever be morally bankrupt).
Pointless pendatry over words doesn't move discussion forwards. I wouldn't personally use either of those words to describe Nazis, which is largely what WWII "happened for".
Those were not the words you used, and (continuing the pointless arguments about words), "morally abhorrent" does not mean the same as distasteful, at least to most english speakers.
The (very clear, to me at least) point was that calling war "dumb" because it is unpleasant is irrational. WW2 was very clearly not the product of stupidity.
It's interesting though that you are nitpicking about "distasteful" vs "morally abhorrent" (and will probably do the same about "unpleasant") while calling my point pedantry.
I haven't read Humankind yet, but a recent review I have read[0] gives a mix of positives and negatives to it. A lot of the cited studies are controversial in their own right: S.L.A. Marshall's claim that only 15% of soldiers in WW2 fired their weapons is based on subjective evidence, omits mention of whether they had any opportunity to fire, and has many other flaws that have since been picked apart, for example.
This is not to say that our negativity is justified! Only that Bregman seems to have as persistent a bias to positivity as other writers have to negativity.
I read both the book and this review, and while the review makes some valid points, it also holds the book to a pretty high bar.
Usually I'm all for doing exactly that, but this book is not about hard scientific proof for some fancy new theory. It's about an idea, the idea that humans are good by default. To be taken seriously as an idea, it only needs as much proof as the idea it's rejecting, which is that humans are a razor thin layer of civility over evil, savage animals.
It's about debunking that as much as it is about proposing an alternative. I think Bregman is perfectly happy to leave the hard science for the scientists. If readers agree that his idea is at least as plausible as the one he's up against, he's done pretty well. And to my reading, even this review agrees with that.
Cultural experience matters a lot here though. If 6 boys who dealt with hard grueling hunter gatherer labor, they'd have no issue pulling themselves up by their makeshift sandals so to speak, in the jungle. Western boys who may have had at worst, had a few days of hard labor, the rest school and sports, not so much.
Your forgetting about culture shock. White boys who know nothing of hunting and gathering aren't going to fare well compared to Tongan boys who studied the school or hard knocks first hand. It's like dropping a black bear in the Arctic and guffawing that it can't adapt like the polar bear! They're not equipped for the situation appropriately.
People are trusting. We know this. People want to work together. People want to survive. The simple fact that we are here today is evidence of that. Hunter gatherers, trusting an outsider showing them dropping seeds in the group produces crops. And now we have iPhones. All because baseline humans are "selfishly selfless." We learned that delaying gratification of the Id can provide greater rewards. That's why we aren't still animals fighting over berries with grizzley bears...
I have no idea where you are getting the idea that six boarding school boys had "dealt with hard gruelling hunter gatherer labour" or "studied the school of hard knocks first hand".
That is an amazing amount of assumption to draw out of the simple fact that they were Tongan.
This was my thought, as well. At the risk of sounding...I don't know some 'ist' word, people are just raised differently and the world varies so much.
Picture you're on a beach, and behind you is a shirtless man with a machete. How you feel is completely dependent on where you are in the world. In LA, you'd run for cover. In south east Asia, it's Tuesday.
I learned a lot from my travels, to back the adage about traveling and learning. I remember being in a small fishing village and someone caught a large fish. I don't even remember what it was now, but the fisherman was so excited to catch this big valuable fish he shared it with everyone, even me the foreigner he'd never see again. Made me think about how selfish we as Americans can be. We already have a good life, and still look for ways to get ahead of everyone else. Yet a person with nothing is happy to share what little they'd found.
Story aside, I agree that the experience would vary wildly by country, or at least upbringing.
Yup, much as the world is becoming more and more culturally homogenous thanks to freely sharing information, there's still significant differences that shouldn't be underestimated.
I mean even though we consume the same media, I still strongly dislike many aspects of American culture.
Funny you mention the machete. Last time I was in Suva in Fiji, some of the locals come into town for their evening drinks, directly I guess from cutting sugar cane in the fields, all with machetes hanging from their belts. It's a head turner all right if you're more used to people being kicked out of pubs just for wearing their jandals.
I don't think that's true. So my Dad grew up in the 50s in Southend, UK, and I wouldn't have been surprised at all to hear a story about him stealing a boat with his brothers for a joy ride.
And the oldest was 16, almost an adult and easily far past the age children are often taught to sail in the UK even today.
A year younger than when their rescuer originally ran away to sea at 17.
And they were clearly still a bunch of idealistic, uninformed, woefully unprepared children, not even taking a map or a compass. And bringing only fruit as victuals.
There is a lot of complaining in this thread about English teachers over-interpreting literature. But I think it is pretty clear that the question Lord of the Flies tries to answer is not "what would happen to a bunch of boys stranded on an island?" but more like "how could the holocaust happen?".
The fact of the matter is that Nazism, WWII and the holocaust did happen and many people in 1954 was looking for some kind of explanation and understanding of how Europe could descend into barbarianism. Whether the book is insightful in its association between totalitarianism and tribalism and primitive religion is a different question.
The story is a "rebuttal" in the same way that it would be a rebuttal to Animal Farm to prove that pigs are not actually able to learn to walk on two legs.
The most disturbing for me is that people interpret work of fiction as if it really happened rather then one persons speculative take. Lord of flies is made up. It is not sociological study.
Yet, the other thing is that boarding schools are notorious for bullying problem. And English boarding schools have ... particular history where older boys were allowed to beat younger boys. If we insist on making it real, that someone in charge of such school writes a book like this says less about general humanity. It says more about about how that institution was run and how he thinks they shaped the boys in their care.
I think it's fair to say "don't bet against human ingenuity and spirit".
I mean, we're here aren't we? We are alive, because of the will, intellect, and energy of those who came before us. Survival is essential to living things, so why expect that humans will degenerate to their worst in the absence of civilization rather than come together and make the best of it?
Maybe the issue to consider isn't human behavior but rather leadership structure of the group of boys. With the boys in real life on the island who lead and how? There were moments of disagreement and they also had a system of administering justice and resolution. Did they follow the one boy who knew most about survival? That is a very different system of government than a voting democracy. The key is that when one broke his leg the rest provided for him. This goes all the way back to Plato observing city states in Ancient Greece attempts at creating institutions for mutual survival and defense.
Thirty years ago I saw recording of a heated interview with William Golding about the character in the book the boys should have chosen to lead. I can't remember if it was Ralph vs Piggy however I think Golding argued that it was Simon, the Christ like mystic, who would have provided salvation for all the boys if he was followed. Simon represented altruism in the book picking hard to reach berries for the smaller boys who couldn't reach. So in real life when a group of boys who are stranded on island who have religious values, altruism like in the case of caring for the one boy with a broken leg it is like they would have chosen Simon as Golding suggested in his interview to lead.
It might not be a rebuttal to the Lord of the Flies. It is a confirmation of what Golding said about the boys and their values.
This story is examined nicely in Rutger Bregman's book Humankind: A Hopeful History.
TL:DR; It turns out that in the real world, nothing like the Lord of the Flies happened; in fact the opposite happened.
Highly recommend Bregman's book, by the way, which shoots down many of the faulty foundations of what we take for granted as fact today about human nature. I believe this article is an excerpt from the book.
I second this. It challenged a lot of my beliefs and busted a lot of myths (Stanley Milgram, the Stanford prison experiment, etc.). I didn't agree with everything but I rarely ever do, nonetheless it was a great read. A very readable book as well, shouldn't take you longer than a week to read.
Does the book cover the experience more from
the boys’ perspective? I was a little disappointed the article was so light on the details of how they managed.
The book does show the story from the survivor's perspective. Here's a little snippet:
"The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. The squabblers would go to opposite ends of the island to cool their tempers, and, ‘After four hours or so,’ Mano later remembered, ‘we’d bring them back together. Then we'd say “Okay, now apologise.” That’s how we stayed friends.’19 Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits."
> "For me it's so hard to process because 'whiteness' believes it can own anything and everything," she said.
Sounds overly racist to me.
> The New Zealand Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi has weighed in on the conversation, writing on Twitter that in his opinion, "you should prioritise Polynesian (Tongan if possible!) filmmakers as to avoid cultural appropriation, misrepresentation, and to keep the Pasifika voice authentic".
> Gesa-Fatafehi agreed that if the story was made into a film, she would like to see Tongans behind, and in front of, the camera.
Well, they can do it if they want to - nothing can stop them to make a movie like this but they do not have any right to stop others to make their own interpretation (and they can dislike it and explain to everyone what is wrong with it).
I would like to see a Hollywood movie with mostly white but with at least one Asian and at least one black actors :) Ok, I am just joking about Hollywood stereotypes here.
Read “whiteness” as describing culture, and it seems more true than racist. It's your traditional Victorian English capitalist, top hat and monocle, making children work with heavy machinery and turning the sky grey. Your colonialist, beating children for speaking the language of their parents and expecting them to be grateful for it. Your Disney, selling a child-sized “tattooed Polynesian skin” costume. (Why are all my examples about children?)
I agree it could be phrased better, but I assume this is a quote from an interview? The speaker had seconds to think of a wording.
>Read “whiteness” as describing culture, and it seems more true than racist.
No, describing a group of people based on their race instead of a more accurate descriptor for the category you're looking to talk about is just plain old racism. Being more specific might also be, but this is guaranteed to be.
And your statement just sounds like the contemporary-palatable version of grandpa explaining that when he talks about black people, of course he doesn't mean all black people or exclusively black people.
Fair enough. There are still people I wouldn't begrudge for using “whiteness” like that, but I probably shouldn't assume good faith straight off the bat. You're right that this kind of thing is important to stamp out.
That being said, we don't really have a good word for “originally-European (but kinda American too now) take-everything attitudes”. How would you describe this succinctly?
> Your Disney, selling a child-sized “tattooed Polynesian skin” costume. (Why are all my examples about children?)
The people who got upset with the Maui costume strike me as the exact same type of people as the characters in the movie who got upset about the titular character's "cultural appropriation" of seafaring.
There's a difference between children painting Polynesian-looking tattoos on themselves because they think they're cool, and a multinational corporation exploiting whatever fragments of culture seem profitable, and wallpapering “Disney magic” over the rest.
Imagine the uproar if Disney made a film about Christian culture – maybe some story about St Paul going on a quest to slay a dragon using Jesus Cant (the tongue of magic) – and then started selling tacky Body-of-Christ merch (or something), and that was the only representation of Christianity in mainstream culture. Some people would get upset, and I don't think they'd be unjustified.
I do have a problem with movie merchandise in general for being cheaply made plastic garbage, I just don't think there's anything more egregious about the Maui costume than anything else. And Christians already have the market cornered with tacky Body-of-Crist merch in the form of Mass play sets. If you ask me the Orthodox have the right idea, just give the kids the real Holy Communion from the moment they're baptised, bypassing the whole need for that garbage, but that's besides the point.
I think Moana was actually very good, and I was greatly and pleasantly surprised to see something of that quality come out of Disney. It's a captivating story that stands on its own legs without any pandering or preaching, and I see nothing wrong with how it represents Polynesian culture.
I can confirm that Moana (the movi) induced respect and interest in Polynesian culture in me. Fortunately prevalence of crap merchandise is not wide where we live (in EU).
not sure of your context, but I often find that concepts from outside (de(post(colonial))) national experience are tricky to translate directly into it. The word racism particularly has a lot of unstated philosophy behind it depending on which country it is used in. To be plain, white people in history did try to 'own' everything in the Pacific, and that history is the base of the present we have today ect..
> This article questions the colonial view point it was mostly reported from.
That's funny coming from a member of the colonial power famous for the heroic conquest of 300,000 km² of ocean and thousands of islands using nothing but dugout canoes.
What she really means is that it's the view of the people who came late to the party and played the game on easy mode.
This article is an excerpt from Chapter 2 one of his latest book. The book, Humankind, seems to be making the argument that humans are essentially trustworthy and industrious and are thus proper candidates for UBI. UBI is more or less the topic of his first book.
Here is a review of his first book, Utopia for Realists:
"OK, so basic income is all about the freedom to say no. That's a privilege for the rich right now. With a basic income, you can say no to a job you don't want to do. You can say no to a city in which you no longer want to live. You can say no to an employer who harasses you at work . . . that's what real freedom looks like."
"This is not about AI," he insists. "You go back to the 1960s, and all the economists, all the philosophers, all the sociologists said we're going to be working less and less and less and less and boredom is going to be the great challenge of the future. Didn't happen . . . mostly because we have this ideological obsession with creating new jobs."
Some other articles he has written for The Guardian:
My high school's district required students to read The of Lord of the Flies.
My freshmen English teacher hated the book so much he broke district requirements and told my class he was giving everyone A's on that assignment. He asked the class to read any substitute book in its place. To this day I still consider him to be a wise teacher.
I used to be a voracious consumer of fiction, but somehow critical reading of Lord of the Flies knocked that out of me in sophomore high school English. I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise.
> I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise.
That was literally my entire high school honors English program. You must interpret everything, to the satisfaction of the English teacher, or else.
It quite reliably took people who absolutely loved reading and made them hate books. I'm not quite sure the point of it, really. It took me a decade after high school to read a fiction book again, and this is far from uncommon among those who suffered through it alongside me.
I don't remember a thing about Red Badge of Courage except I had to extract meaning from why the grass in this particular scene was green - to symbolize new life, hope, rebirth, etc.
I was also one of those students who loved to read going into high school only to have it beaten out of me by English teachers over-analyzing everything. But... as an adult I can definitely see and appreciate the value of it.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen comments on r/TheHandmaidsTale along the lines of “why do people keep bringing up abortion laws here it has nothing to do with this show!” or have discussed Avenue 5 or South Park or some other satire with someone only to realize they’ve _completely_ missed the underlying message the writer(s) had made exceedingly obvious.
I remember my teacher used to talk about the “what level” and the “so what level” and he definitely went overboard in exploring the so what level but I’m also grateful I’m not blind to it. I think there are a surprising number of people who are unaware of any meaning beyond the literal words they read or hear.
On the other hand, the meaning of art is determined by what you bring to it. If you find a self-consistent interpretation that is not or perhaps even contrary to what the author had in mind or the classical analysis, that interpretation is just as right.
I recently learned that 19th century literature was often released one chapter at a time. This lead to substantial "filler" chapters which were required for the author to keep the story going.
I sometimes wonder if at least some portion of literary analysis is equivalent to teaching contemporary fan theories while waiting for the next episode/sequel/release.
Stephen King released The Green Mile in serial form like this.
He said it was a major challenge because once the chapter is out there it’s committed, so you can’t go back and fix major plot holes that you didn’t foresee at the time.
Yes, a lot of modern television shows have been serial works rather than episodic ones. Babylon 5 comes to mind as one of the earliest serialized television shows, if not the earliest.
Well, I suppose soap operas existed before that, but as far as I can tell they rarely had proper narrative endings; they were designed to last as many years as possible.
I was wondering why you wrote Babylon 5 when I can think of earlier long running shows, I.e. the original Star Trek, but I guess those are more like soap operas? Hm.
It’s not about how long a show was on the air, it has more to do with how interconnected the episodes are and whether the work has a story arc that was planned in advance. In a purely episodic work, you can experience the episodes in any order and have the same enjoyment. In a purely serial work, the order of the episodes (or should we call them installments?) matters a lot.
Star Trek was episodic. No matter what happens in one episode, most things remained status quo for the next. There were some slow changes to the cast, but for the most part you could watch the episodes in any order.
TNG was book–ended by their dealings with Q, but that story had no closure and only took up about four or five episodes out of 7 years. There were some other stories like that as well, stories that were longer than an episode but much shorter than the show as a whole.
On the other hand, Deep Space Nine was closer to a single story with a beginning, middle, and end. There were still plenty of episodes that would still make sense if you moved them to a different season, but it was much less episodic than the previous shows.
Voyager was billed as a serial work, but was so badly written that most episodes could be moved around at will with no harm to the storyline.
Babylon 5, in contrast, gave every episode some link to the overarching plot, even if it was just hints. (Especially in the first season, when the main antagonists were still hidden and all we had were hints.)
It’s easy for episodic shows to be written at the same pace that they are filmed. With serial shows, you have to know in advance where the story is going to go even if you still write most of the dialog at the pace of filming. I didn’t watch much of Lost, but I got the impression that while it was a serial, the writers had no real plan from the start and that everything was made up as they went along. The result is that the story is incoherent. I’ve never watched any soap operas either, but I gather that they try to arrange for frequent cliffhangers and dramatic changes (making the story more serial), but that there is never a planned end to the story; they’re perpetually in the middle. The result is a work with constant churn and no resolution.
Lost definitely felt episodic and incoherent at times. I think they did plan out some arcs loosely that worked over the course of a few seasons. Some character progression and morality flip was clearly unplanned, and those arcs felt like a soap opera.
I’ve seen the other shows you’ve mentioned, but not Babylon 5. I had read of comparisons between it and DS9 before, and now that comparison makes more sense.
High school English class was like this for me too. It was usually obvious what my teacher wanted students to say but it just seemed all so contrived and I couldn’t bring myself to participate in the silliness. On my report card she once wrote, “stubbornly sticks to his opinions even when wrong”.
One day, for fun, I tried out saying what I thought she wanted to hear. I got a lot of praise from her that day.
I kind of enjoyed the absurdity of it, but I openly acknowledged it was a game. Fortunately discussions at my highschool after freshman year were less about the teacher imposing their will, and new ideas were the most rewarded. It was fun racing to support tenuous conclusions before anyone else could.
Spanish Literature was an especially exciting class. I still think one of the greatest accomplishments of my life was writing a two page Spanish paper on a 12 line poem and only receiving marks off for grammatical mistakes. My teacher even wrote "haha" in the margins next to one of my more ridiculous explanations, but didn't say it was necessarily wrong.
I used the improvisational analysis techniques I learned in those classes to entertain art student friends in college sometimes. Especially popular with free drinks in an art gallery.
> It quite reliably took people who absolutely loved reading and made them hate books. I'm not quite sure the point of it, really. It took me a decade after high school to read a fiction book again, and this is far from uncommon among those who suffered through it alongside me.
I pretty much only read science fiction now, and the occasional crime thriller, although I used to be a voracious reader. I din't realize why until I read your post: high school English made me hate fiction. It's like I was playing a game of guess-the-password, and was being graded on how close my arbitrary answer matched the teacher's expectation. I hated it, and it destroyed any interest in reading "high" literature to this day :(
I think I can appreciate sci-fi books in particular because my brain knows there's no way they'd ever be taught in an English classroom, so it doesn't evoke memories of those horrible literature classes.
I remember suffering through that nonsense as well. Then I remember a moment in a class in college where something "clicked" and I suddenly understood the game. After that it became simply tedious, but not raw torture like it had been. To be honest, it has helped me think a couple layers deeper about some of the media I consume.
I still think it's stupid and trite in the way it's handled in the educational setting and completely agree it mostly a garbage way to analyze things. Once you understand the game it becomes quite brainless and formulaic in most cases.
I remember being stunned in high school that people would get degrees and an entire semester would be devoted to finding hidden symbolic meanings that authors in many cases obviously didn't intend.
This was back when you could read Huck Finn. The teacher droned on and for over a week about how it was a symbolic journey of a boys growth towards manhood, how Huck was on the metaphorical river journey of overcoming racism. I said no, I didn't think that was what the story was about. It was just a story, in a certain time, in a certain place, meant to entertain, not to enlighten. She got really mad.
So I opened up the intro to Huck Finn where Twain writes the following:
*
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per
G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”`
*
I read it out loud in the class and said I didn't believe he was joking. He had foreseen the possibility of people like her arising and attempted to preempt it! I'll never forget her standing there with her mouth open and no answer.
There is deeply symbolic literature, no argument. But all of it clearly is not. And interpretation of symbolism in many cases is summoned directly from thin air. Turns out it's an entire profession!
> * “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”` *
Have you considered that Mark Twain, a master of satire, may have intended that passage to be just that?
I think the 'will be shot' gives it away.
I don't know much about metaphoric journeys on rivers from boyhood to manhood, but there was more of a point to that story than you seem to think.
While some may analyze beautiful literature into oblivion and I feel your pain, I can’t agree with you on Huck Finn. My interpretation of the intro you quoted is very different from yours.
Mark Twain went out of his way to highlight barbaric racism on rubber plantations in the Congo by writing a satirical pamphlet to try to get the word out:
Even though he masterfully wove his beliefs into the underlying fabric of Huck Finn, I am sure he wished to subtly communicate important truths while spinning a really delightful tale.
While satire clearly can go above a young boy's head, it is important to keep an open mind about literature. Symbolism doesn't necessarily need to have a purpose.
We can also learn a lot about the environment in which a writer operated, just by learning from which symbols was used to convey a message. This is one of the central points, but also perhaps the most misunderstood, of modern (and post modern) literary criticism.
Your teacher may not have been the best, but that does not mean all literary criticism is bad.
My complaint was (and still is 30 years later) is that an entire cottage industry seems to have arisen around finding hidden meanings.
Would we do that to television today? Does the cartoon "King of the Hill" contain hidden significance and deep moral lessons? Maybe. Or maybe it's just wit mostly designed to entertain.
This reads like something you would find on the ThatHappened subreddit. I bet your classmates also clapped after you so brutally took down that dumbass teacher with facts and logic, right?
You had to take that class to learn not to take everything you read at face value. As sometimes happen people decide to go the other way around and declare that texts never have any deeper meaning and that it is all just nonsense and gosh darn how can those liberal arts even exist??????
It’s a shame because it prevents you from enjoying literature at a deeper level, instead of saying that Anna Karenina is the exact same as some silly airport novel.
We now have proof that it really is "going far beyond the author's intention". Texas licensed a poem for a standardized test. The poem's author was still alive, and was unable to "correctly" answer test questions about the meaning of the poem.
So yes, the English teachers really are spouting nonsense, and we have proof.
There also is a similar story of such in my country. There was this guy who wrote a short and it was included in the national textbook. The guy's son (or grandson, I can't recount exactly) was assigned to analyse that short and the author, out of curiosity, made the kid submitted his analysis instead. The teacher even went as far as commenting "You don't understand the author's intention at all". Which really make us think how absurd literary education can really go.
Depends on whether you subscribe to the "death of the author" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGn9x4-Y_7A) or not. Does the author's intent in writing something trump everyone else's interpretation? What if we don't have the original author around to ask? A good example of this is all the interpretations of various passages in the Bible different groups have had throughout history.
Instead of privileging the author's intent, one can treat literature, or even religious text as akin to art. The reader participates in the meaning of the piece. Or you can think about how people argue over and critique movies and television shows.
You can find your own meaning, but you should be honest about the fact that it is your own meaning.
English teachers are demanding "correct" interpretation that has nothing to do with what the author intended. It's bullshit, and they need to admit that. It's also squeezing very important topics out of the schedule, such as the teaching of proper grammar and other things needed for non-literary writing in a professional career.
This is the fate of much good literature - forcing recalcitrant high schoolers to dissect something that doesn’t talk to them which can result in a life-long hatred.
I wonder if it would make it better if teachers would explain to you that this bit is not very useful in and of itself, but we do it to practice writing and because other people think we should. It might dissuade some people from pursuing English literature degrees in college, but that's probably not a bad thing. Would the honesty help at all?
I didn't hate literature class in highschool but I think I might have liked it better if I wasn't so confused about why the various arguments and analysis seemed so tenuous to me. Fundamentally, the analysis of literature is the least productive skill we teach kids in high school, although writing is still very important.
I was turned off from fiction in high school because I thought "we are being told to read the best of what the world had to offer, and most of this is shit".
Turns out there are great fiction books out there - took me a while to unlearn the bias.
Assignment: Write about what the main character (Homer) does after leaving the nuns he'd helped.
What I did: Wrote a hysterical (to me, at the time) story about how he went to South America in search of a mystical coffee with some made up Latin name which, when translated, meant "Grave-digging coffee that really stinks". I'm still proud of that line. His team of scientists (who all looked like "Billy" from The Far Side) were all killed in various ways while traversing the Amazon, all of them funny (to me, at the time). I was very, very happy with myself. Creative writing was fun.
Teacher: Rewrite it, be serious.
Me: Wrote some drivel that I hated, turned it in, got a lousy grade.
That stifled me for a long time, because it's been hard ever since to just let loose on a story. I criticize it every step of the way now. I find short form poetry (often as music lyrics) to be far simpler and just as expressive if not more so.
well this is the key thing really. why are we so hung up on authorial intent? For example, Bradbury claimed that fahrenheit 451 is not about censorship - should we let that influence how we interpret and utilize his work? I think it is valuable to use fahrenheit 451 as a precautionary tale about censorship, regardless of what Bradbury originally intended.
Why? We read it when I was in the Danish ground school (ages 6-16, as in not from 6-16 but 9-10 years during those years) and we never got the idea it was anything other than fiction.
I’m a tad surprised that humans defaulting to corporation is supposed to be news. It’s always been taught to us as rather common knowledge because it’s basically the only way a functional and stable society can evolve. But maybe it explains why so much American post-apocalyptic fiction is so silly.
What a dude. I too was forced to study that book in school and if my teacher would have let me do anything else they would have had my lifetime loyalty.
I think one of the things in the boys' favor is that they had true community. It sounds they they grew up on the same island. Were part of the same community. All went to the same Catholic school. From the mention of "Their days began and ended with song and prayer" along with the Catholic school, it also seems they were all religious.
As much as we on HN like to think that logic and the rational mind is what makes people behave good, many times it is the subconscious ties of shared family, friendship, and faith that that help people pull together in times of crisis.
K-Hole’s seminal pamphlet on normcore says something along the lines of: in the old days we were born into communities and had to find our individuality, now we’re born individuals and must find our tribe.
To quote a since-deleted twitter thread written in response to this article at the time:
> Golding is not trying to play this Rosseau-v-Hobbes game of bringing humanity back to the state of nature and see what they look like. His children are not living in a natural state: they are self conscious heirs to an entire civilization, and they realize quite early on that they live on the razor's edge of life and death. So they create rules and orders to keep their society running. A little democracy that honors natural goodness and leadership.
> A little democracy that does not last.
> And that is what people don't seem to get about this book. It isn't a parable about what happens when you taken men out of society--it is a parable about how men act in society.
The whole thread is worth reading, though it's not well preserved:
What people so often forget is that the stories we tell ourselves create our nature just as much as they describe it.
When we decide how to act, many of our decisions comes from our culture, which is the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. We don't tell stories just to learn, but to become.
One wonders how those six Tongans would have acted had they had the misfortune of reading Lord of the Flies before they went sailing.
I went down the rabbit hole reading about the incident when that happened, pretty interesting.
He didn't just rescue the shipwrecked kids and move on, he was treated as a hero in Tonga, the king of Tonga asked him what we wanted as a reward and he asked for fishing rights in an area he had been denied before and it was granted, he lived in Tonga for 30 years after that.
He was involved in a second shipwreck rescue of a yacht named the Sospan Fach. The member of his crew that spotted the second shipwreck was Sione Filipe Totau. Sione was one of the boys rescued from the first shipwreck.
I think the state of nature as imagined by the likes of Thomas Hobbes is more just an assumption that is more based on observations of conflicting social groups, as such it is an emergent nature. But, I think humans evolved on the basis of mutual cooperation is a better survival strategy. So I think we have this ingrained base nature that wants to work together with other humans.
The fact that he wrote the book during the English Civil War really ought to get more play than it does; amid such dire circumstances a desire for order at any price is understandable, but Hobbes' situation and personal biases are rarely taken into account.
A thoughtful counterpoint (albeit a somewhat idealistic and romantic one) to Hobbes' is found in the writings of Peter Kropotkin.
Humans evolved to cooperate within their tribe. Everyone else is an outsider, who you might trade and cooperate with, but you might also fight. All depends. At any rate, the history of civilization has lots of conquests and empires. Once an empire is established, forced cooperation also happens, until it doesn't.
I bought nine of these to the local MP's last summer. Mostly to emphasize the fact that all of us are not as greedy as their context might be. Not very surprisingly I only got one message from MP that had read it.
This story is amazing and The Guardian did a great job presenting it in an interesting way.
The comments here make me wonder, just why did Lord of The Flies become popular in the first place? Was there a generation that thought it was a good story for illustrating human nature? Why?
Survivorship bias? If another group of boys failed to form a successful team with enough skills to survive, they wouldn't have survived to tell their story. So it's not surprising that the author only found a successful story. We don't know what happens to the thousands of boys who go missing every year.
> We don't know what happens to the thousands of boys who go missing every year.
These are not lost kids surviving islands. These are kids escaping abusive situations. They typically become homeless, get money either by small crimes or sex work. They eventually end up in prison fairly often.
Regardless of whether its outlook was positive or negative, I thought Lord of the Flies was too plot-driven and heavy handed with ridiculous character motivations (or lack thereof).
Anyway, would be really cool to see a film of this story; I'm disappointed it hasn't been made yet!
> From June 1965 to September 11, 1966, six Tongan youths, Sione Fataua (17, the eldest), "Stephen" Tevita Fatai Latu (17), "David" Tevita Fifita Siolaʻa (15, the youngest), Kolo Fekitoa (17), "Mano" Sione Filipe Totau (16), and Luke Veikoso (16, later a boxing champion),[15] all natives of Haʻafeva island, were shipwrecked on ʻAta after running away from their strict Catholic boarding school, St. Andrew's College,[16] in Nukuʻalofa on Tongatapu.
I also can imagine that a 16 year old kid in Tonga is probably, by most accounts, already considered an adult with enough skills to provide for himself.
Its interesting everyone just keeps referring to the Catholic school they escaped from as a school. Knowing what we know about things like the Magdalene laundries and usual Catholic way of dealing with kids, they were likely escaping from a prison like and abusive situation. They would be more likely to be cooperative to not end up back where they started from. There is really no comparison to LOTF here where the kids were going back to a middle class existence if rescued.
These children set out together with the intent to escape, an entirely different scenario than the novel. I imagine a racially diverse set of kids in the novel and my take is genocide would happen fairly frequently. Lord of the Flies is a wonderfully insightful book on human nature.
My review of Christakis' book, in case you're curious: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2851365787