Letters - 24 April 2026
From review to discipline and history
In review
Many thanks to Rosemary Field (Lord of the Flies review, 10 April) for citing my work with people who kill. There is always a powerful emotional motivation, of which the perpetrator is generally unaware.
Friends who are interested might like to download my latest philosophical venture into this troubled field, by searching the web for ‘Let’s cure violence’. In this paper, I print heartfelt acknowledgements to Friends at Manchester Central Meeting for their ongoing support of my explorations. I’m currently working on reinvigorating our peace testimony by replacing the opening line (‘We utterly deny’), with ‘We utterly affirm’ – that there is ‘that of God’ (or, for the nontheists among us, ‘that of Good’) inside every one of us, without exception.
Our troubled world desperately needs Quakerism. By comparison, the conventional notion of a ‘killer instinct’ emerges as blankly medieval.
Bob Johnson
In her review of the televised Lord of the Flies, Rosemary Field gives us some great insight. It is surely true that social political systems need checks, rules and order to guard against tyranny, and they should be sustained by compassion and empathy. This should serve to protect us from tyrannical leaders.
However, the great irony of the view of human nature presented in Lord of the Flies is that it encourages us to feel that ‘strong’ leaders and authoritarian systems are needed to protect us from our ‘natural’ savage urges. In point of fact not fiction, as Rosemary points out at the very end of the review, the one time a small group of boys has actually been abandoned on a deserted island, they fully cooperated to help each other until rescue came. So, in real life, boys did not behave as Golding asserted they would, suggesting we are hardwired to realise our true human natures through mutual care, not despite the removal of ‘civilisation’ but because of it.
I feel sure that fear of each other is encouraged by social systems and cultures that have evolved to keep us divided against each other, to control us, and to prevent a sharing, cooperative commonwealth based on love, trust, solidarity and equality. Evidence for the reality of these impulses in our human natures, even in our current world ‘order’, is all around us all the time, and I do wish works like Rutger Bregman’s Humankind were more widely produced and read.
Mario May
