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The Tonga castaways don’t disprove “Lord of the Flies”

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Book cover of "The Lord of the Flies" by William Golding

With the release of a new Netflix adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies comes another round of media reminders that the book’s most famous plot element—shipwrecked children turn barbarous and violent—was “disproven” fifty years ago on an island in the South Pacific.

The logic goes something like this:

In 1965, six Tongan teenagers were shipwrecked on ‘Ata, an uninhabited island on the southern tip of the Tonga archipelago. Rather than descend into savage violence, as the children do in Lord of the Flies, the Tongans managed to survive and form a communal-like existence. They shared duties, kept spirits up, and even tended to one another, such as setting one’s boy’s fractured leg. After fifteen months, they were rescued and returned to their families.

The story of the Tongans has grown into a modern parable warning against taking Golding’s book seriously, or even simply discarding it outright. One example comes from a recent article, where Lenore Skenazy recounts the Tongan success story with the brisk conclusion, “So much for barbarism.”

The popular linking of the true-life Tongan incident with Golding’s novel appears to have begun with Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. His 2019 book Humankind: A Hopeful History sets out to prove that people are fundamentally decent and eager to build a better society. Whatever Golding’s fictional account may depict, he says, real children do not become wild and bloodthirsty creatures once removed from the watchful eyes of civilization.

Bregman followed his book with a 2020 Guardian article headlined “The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.” The story went viral on social media, leading to years of articles reiterating that the uplifting story of the Tongan castaways refutes Golding’s grim worldview. A sampling of subsequent headlines mirror the Guardian‘s, almost down to the word:

Since the Tongan teenagers didn’t turn against each other, the logic goes, Lord of the Flies has been proven wrong. It’s as if we should discard the lessons of Animal Farm because there exists not one recorded episode of farm animals forming an authoritarian Marxist collective.

The best at everything

As Scott Alexander writes, “Beware the man of one study.” A single example that ends well does not slam the door on Golding’s book, and it’s pretty sad that so many people think it would.

But if one example is proof positive, is a single counterexample dispositive? Consider the Sugamo child abandonment case. In 1988, a mother left her four young children alone in a Tokyo apartment for nine months. No, they weren’t shipwrecked like the Tongans or the Lord of the Flies boys—but that’s kind of the point. The children had modern shelter, clean running water, and easy access to food, which they procured from local convenience stores using money the mother had left for them. The children did a remarkable job of taking care of each other, but it wasn’t enough.

When finally discovered by social workers, they were malnourished, and one of the children was missing. The eldest boy admitted that two of his friends had assaulted and killed the youngest girl. While the eldest boy was not present at the killing, he helped his friends bury her body.

Still from Nobody Knows (2004), a Japanese film based on the Sugamo case.

When reports reached the public, the response in Japan mirrored an underlying question posed many times in Lord of the Flies: “How could Japanese children be reduced to this behavior?”

In Lord of the Flies, it’s the English who are puzzled: “I should have thought that a pack of British boys…would have been able to put up a better show than that,” one character remarks at the end of the book. The boys were raised well and taught in boarding schools. Each had a reading diet of British Empire adventure books about self-sufficient boys who always act as proper young gentlemen, even in the face of adversity. “We’re English, and the English are best at everything,” young Jack declares, a statement which turns out to be surprisingly empty by the final chapter. “The northern European tradition of work, play, and food right through the day, made it possible for them to adjust wholly to this new rhythm,” the narrator of Lord of the Files declares, another statement found to be empty after only a few pages.

After all, the book most often named the first prose novel in the English language is none other than Robinson Crusoe, a story about a shipwrecked Englishman surviving due to self-discipline, routine, and his education. Crusoe was written for adults, but over the years it developed a younger audience. It also became a model for how every Englishman should act under duress.

It’s not hard to imagine Ralph, Jack, and the others reading Crusoe while in school. Yet Golding’s book feels like a rebuttal to Defoe’s classic, tearing down its colonial-era pride with cool precision.

Scene from the 1963 adaptation of Lord of the Flies.

“How can you be surprised that Tongans survived on an island?”

Contrary to popular depiction, the children in Lord of the Flies don’t immediately descend into barbarism. Upon their arrival on the island, the boys form rules, coordinate efforts, and develop routines, just as their boarding school education taught them. They choose a leader in the fair-haired (and fair-minded) Ralph, who sets about in assigning duties. He even leads the boys in building a signal fire atop the island’s sole mountain, exactly as the Tongan boys did.

The Tongans numbered six teenagers, aged 13 to 19. They were friends at a Catholic school. They ran away, gathered food and supplies, and stole a boat. That is, they were working together before they even reached the island.

In contrast, the number of children in the book is not stated with precision, but it’s likely close to twenty or thirty. The children do not know each other, and none are pubescent. The “littleuns” are so numerous that, after the mountaintop fire grows into an inferno, the older children are unsure if one of them perished in the blaze.

Two months after Bregman’s story in the Guardian, Tongan Meleika Gesa penned a rebuttal arguing the boys of ‘Ata were not the “real” Lord of the Flies. Gesa explains how Tongan values and education prepared them for survival. Not only did they know how to start a fire and catch and prepare fish, the Tongan culture instilled a familial cohesion among the group. There’s no such unity among the boys in Lord of the Flies, save for their nationality.

Amusingly, Gesa asks, “How can you be surprised that Pasifika people, specifically Tongan, can survive on an island?”

The Guardian article claims Bregman “unearthed” the forgotten story about Tongan teenagers on an island, like a paleontologist discovering a new fossil. Gesa points out the story of the teens is well known among Tongans, and not forgotten at all.

Gesa has more complaints about the way Bregman presents the story, but the overarching tragedy is that Bregman’s, not Gesa’s, account dominates public perception. “While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read,” Bregman wrote in 2020. That’s not so true today.

Realism and literalism

In the 1950s, William Golding wrote that Lord of the Flies “is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. … The whole book is symbolic in nature.” (Emphasis mine.)

That Lord of the Flies is a parable constructed with symbolism and metaphor, and not a detailed, realistic account of children on an island, seems incredibly obvious to me—and yet, here we are, with people treating the book as a failed thought experiment.

We all seem to agree that society is defective—otherwise, we wouldn’t spend so much time arguing over politics, policy, and taxes. If society’s defects don’t emerge from defects in human nature, where else would they come from?

I see little evidence in the world that people’s natural instincts are to work together, avoid conflict, and live peaceably side-by-side. If anything, much of our modern existence is spent pushing against those social norms. (For example, tech companies’ practice of “better to plead forgiveness than ask permission,” or people treating all criticism as a personal attack.)

But can those social values—work together, avoid conflict—be taught? At one time, they were, via humanistic education, religion, active parenting—the same institutions Western culture has been discounting over the past fifty years.

Have we adopted some system of moral instruction to fill the void? If so, I can’t locate it. What appears to have taken its place is a kind of raw, undeveloped trust in Realism and Literalism, twin brothers of interpretation which frantically attempt to nail down, rather than open up, our understanding of human nature.

William Golding wrote, “The moral [of Lord of the Flies] is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system.”

Tongan Meleika Gesa wrote during the pandemic, “Just look at how we’re surviving Covid-19 together. My family have given away food to our neighbours and checked up on friends and family because that’s how we survive.”

Jack in Lord of the Flies says, “We’re English, and the English are best at everything.”

That’s the ethical and moral divide between the Tongan teens and the boys in Lord of the Flies. What follows flows from within.


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Hell freezes over: Netflix adapts “White Noise”

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White Noise promotional photo

While I’m mildly optimistic about the announced adaptation of Neuromancer to Apple TV+, I found myself…stunned? aghast? tickled?—when I heard Netflix has adapted Don DeLillo’s White Noise to its streaming service. As I wrote on Mastodon and Twitter:

White Noise is not the kind of book one associates with popular entertainment, nor its author as the kind of person to acquiesce to its adaptation.

This merely touches the surface of my reaction to Netflix’s latest project.

If you’re not familiar, the novel White Noise is a 1985 literary comedy about Jack Gladney, a “professor of Hitler studies,” and his nuclear family in a fictional Midwestern college town. The early chapters depict suburban life as one soaked in crass consumerism, commercialism, and the ubiquitous nature of mass media. Things go pear-shaped when a railroad car spill on the edge of town triggers an “airborne toxic event,” leading to an evacuation and the concomitant strain on the family unit.

Remember, this is branded a comedy. The comic thrust of White Noise comes from its supposedly scathing parodies of American middle-class life. Take the novel’s opening paragraphs, where Gladney observes the college’s students returning to campus in single file:

The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags — onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.

You’re forgiven if you stopped reading halfway through and skipped down. You didn’t miss anything.

Critic B. R. Myers categorizes this manner of list-making as a symptom of “a tale of Life in Consumerland, full of heavy irony, trite musing about advertising and materialism, and long, long lists of consumer artifacts, all dedicated to the proposition that America is a wasteland of stupefied shoppers.” That’s pretty much what the first half of White Noise adds up to. There’s more of these dreary lists in the book, and plenty of tin-eared dialogue to boot, as evidenced in this exchange between Gladney and his wife:

“It’s not the station wagons I wanted to see. What are the people like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men in hacking jackets? What’s a hacking jacket?”

“They’ve grown comfortable with their money,” I said. “They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.”

“I have trouble imagining death at that income level,” she said.

“Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.”

“Not that we don’t have a station wagon ourselves.”

“It’s small, it’s metallic gray, it has one whole rusted door.”

Or this moment—the most famous in the book—when Gladney’s school-aged daughter talks in her sleep:

She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant.

Toyota Celica.

A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform.

I suppose for a certain type of person, this is a scream, gold-shot and looming. I’m not that type of person.

It’s the phoniness of White Noise I can’t let go of. The excuse of “it’s a satire” does not forgive the writer from grasping and depicting the reality of a situation. The power of satire is to capture the genuine and turn its underbelly over to tickle it—to reveal its absurdities in both premise and execution. DeLillo never accomplishes this. Professors don’t inventory their students’ goods from afar; husbands don’t tell their wives that the station wagon has a junky door (when any wife would full-well know this); and if a daughter was repeating a car make and model in her sleep, no one would declare it a religious experience. The absurdity of White Noise is not the mindless consumers populating it, but that this novel somehow is considered a smart skewering of them.

Compare the above to George Carlin’s ridiculing of American materialism in his infamous “Stuff” sketch:

DeLillo’s range-finding jabs are timid compared to Carlin’s honed wit, from the basic observation that homes are just lockboxes for our precious objects, to the game-theoretic anguish of weighing which personal goods make the cut for an overnight excursion. He even indulges in his own Consumerland-like list (“Afrin 12-hour decongestant nasal spray”) that is far briefer, funnier, and better-curated than DeLillo’s weary catalogs. The laughs aren’t merely at Carlin’s on-stage antics, but in the gnawing sensation that we’re guilty of what he’s describing—and Carlin’s tacit admission that he’s guilty of it, too. Meanwhile, in White Noise, we’re supposed to be chortling at the mindlessness of our inferiors. DeLillo is othering America—for whose benefit? Why, Americans like him: Americans who deny their American-ness.

(In this sense, I suspect the Netflix adaptation will execute much like Adam McKay’s smug Don’t Look Up, a spoof also predicated on an America stupefied by cable television and fast food.)

It’s not merely the elitism that fails to connect. Gladney’s field of “Hitler studies” is never really fleshed out. It could have been a fascinating device (although it risked from page one falling into the trap of Godwin’s Law). As the book wears on, the Hitler studies thing feels like a gag DeLillo thought would reap comic gold, and only realized chapters in that the idea had run out of gas. The best he can do is have Gladney deliver a lecture comparing Hitler to Elvis Presley—there’s your Godwin’s Law at work. When Gladney admits he’s only recently learned German, you realize how thin the satire really is: This is not a real professor of Hitler studies.

When I say “Gladney is not a real professor of Hitler studies,” I don’t mean it in the same way that W. H. Auden said Shrike is not a real newspaper editor in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. Auden meant that Miss Lonelyhearts is not about newspapermen or journalism—the premise of a man taking a position as an advice columnist is merely a convenience to place the book’s heart-wrenching confessional letters into his hands. Gladney’s field is very much intended to satirize him and academia, but the joke is never explored and left unfulfilled. It becomes a shingle to hang around Gladney’s neck, doing precious little to inform his worldview or way of life.

The main course for White Noise, though, is the American bourgeoisie. The metaphysics of supermarkets are discussed by the book’s characters (always with a straight face). Death is discussed in excruciating abstractions and legalistic terms. The book concludes with Gladney looking out over a hazy dusk, the air thick with toxic chemicals, and admiring its beauty. (No—really.)

White Noise by Don DeLillo

What’s the problem with Netflix adapting the book? In truth, I don’t care much one way or the other. What stunned me—and motivated those posts on social media—is that White Noise was always intended to be a sharp poke in the eye for middle America, with plenty of scorn reserved for major corporations and the mass media.

In other words, White Noise satirizes the type of corporation that’s adapting it into a movie, mocks the people that corporation will be marketing the film at, and despises the corporation collecting its profits as the mindless mob watches on from the comfort of the sofas in their McMansions, with their living rooms, their family rooms, their bedrooms, their candy rooms, their office rooms, their great rooms.

Why do they have great rooms?

What is a great room?


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