Morality has moved on since Lord of the Flies

TLord of the Flies – William Golding’s classic story of marooned schoolboys descending into barbarism – has been met with incredulity. No one believes that little girls would start hunting each other.

Golding, briefly a schoolmaster, wrote his book partly in reaction to the too-wholesome children’s novel Coral Island. Let me show you, he was telling his readers, how boys would really behave on a desert island. We can’t imagine girls sliding so easily into sanguinary savagery.

My daughter played Piggy in a school play not long ago and, although her biased father thought she was brilliant, the feminisation of the story did make it harder to suspend disbelief.

But then, Golding’s entire view of human nature is slightly dated these days. Lord of the Flies was one of the dystopian novels written in the aftermath of the Second World War, along with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and

Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. The authors understandably reflected the angst of their generation. Mankind had just fought the two bloodiest wars ever. The presumed nuclear conflict from which Golding’s schoolboys were being evacuated was, in those days, widely seen as a matter of when, not if. Many intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, CP Snow and Carl Sagen, expected atomic annihilation.

In fact, Golding was writing at the start of the most peaceful era in history. It’s not just that nuclear weapons were not used in the ensuing 70 years. Violence fell on every measure: interstate conflicts, civil wars, murders, rape, torture. It may be democracy or the spread of trade or simply that we have widened our moral circles of reciprocity but, contrary to almost universal belief, we are becoming a more peaceful species.

Part of that change has been the rise in the number of women in politics. As wars have become rarer, the language once commonly associated with them – of virtue, manliness, trial – has become anachronistic. Maybe the new version will show the schoolgirls co-operating sensibly: bad for drama, but a neat image of how we have evolved since the 1950s.