Cultural Issues in William Golding’s Lord of The Flies

R.Phinehash,
M.Phil Research Scholar,
Research Department of English,
St. John’s College Palayamkottai.

The research paper entitled “Cultural Issues in William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies” is the

researcher’s attempt to validate the cultural background with this work. This book is about a plane full

of boys escaping from the war happening in their society. They are unfortunately shot and they

crash`` down on an island. This plane contains boys coming back from school. When they finally

meet up together they choose there leader, Ralph, to maintain order and civilization, but that doesn’t

last for long.

Jack starts to build an army that hunts for wild pigs in the jungle. Also, he uses typical human

symbolism to build social cohesion: he uses facial war paint for himself and his “warriors”, dresses

differently and establishes the cult of a “jungle monster”. The hunting experience, the fear of the

monster and the strong emotional leadership that Jack provides remarkably alter how the boys use

their natural resources: they stop spear fishing and living by the coast, as it was custom in Ralph’s

group, but actively target the mammals in the forest. By creating a culture of hunters, a new

institutional setting emerges since the way of living as hunters provides relational structure and rules.

Notably, the functioning of Jack’s group becomes dependent on the population of pigs not only as

source of food, but as a source of socio-cultural value that nourishes the sacrificing rituals for their

monster cult and the sense of group belonging through hunting. It has been acknowledged in the field

of natural resource governance that ecosystem services are not bound to the mere physical benefits

they provide, but also extend to cultural benefits. For instance, Oleson et al. (2015) report that in

Madagascar coastal people put even more value on the bequest of their fishery as a source of culture

and way of living as on the payoff from fishing products. How sustainable is the new hunting culture

of the boys on the long term? This has much to do with their behavior towards the signal fire.
 Whereas Ralph had put much value on maintaining the large fire on top of the

island’s hill, Jack lets the fire diminish and rather spends the time with hunting and rituals.

Ralphs rule to implement fire wardens gets neglected and finally abolished by Jack, with his

followers embracing that the boring job of protecting the fire from going out is over. Thus,

any chance for being saved is foregone. At one point, Ralph shouts: “Face it Jack, you fucked

up! We could’ve been rescued.” Why does the group, apart from Ralph, lose its sight for the

long-term goal of their society, that is, to be rescued and to be able to survive for longer than

a few months? There is great parallel between the boys who get way too easily distracted

from their goal of being saved from the island and the struggling of our global community to

deal with climate change. As George Marshall describes in his book “Don’t even think about

it: Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change” (2015): climate change is an

environmental challenge that demands cooperation in its most problematic form: cooperation

of many actors, with tremendous uncertainty and extremely delayed benefits. We do not know

how climate will change, we do not know which countries will reliably invest in climate

protection and we will possibly see the results of our efforts in a century. That does not look

attractive. Thinking of the movie again, the boys are able to cooperate when they go hunting,

a challenge much less severe to our human social psychology, because the benefits of such a

form of cooperation are immediate (meat), the groups are small and cohesive (bound by

mutual control and a strong leader), and there is quite some certainty that pigs can be hunted,

because the boys gather experience with their task. All these aspects look totally different

when they have to cooperate for maintaining their signal fire: it is uncertain when and if they

will ever be rescued and the fire can be lost due to a single warden who does his job badly. In

a way, our long-term goal of avoiding climate change looks very much like the boy’s goal of

keeping up the fire. It is simply not a rational action to invest in this form of uncertain long-

term cooperation, given that there are much more incentives to reach short-term satisfaction.

With this perspective in mind, it is very ironic that when war and death start to corrode the

cadet’s island community, the boys come to the profound question: “We did everything just

the way grownups would have. Why didn’t it work?”

 looking at our interaction with environmental resources through this socio-cultural

lens, what can “grownup”s do to reach a more prudent way of acting sustainably as a society?

Culture is both, risk and chance: By changing our awareness, beliefs and values, social

learning processes can create cultural (r)evolution: For instance, once we internalize

cooperation for our climate as a valuable norm that people are willing to sacrifice for and

enforce, it can become an institution that locks us into a desirable path of development, since

it simply becomes “normal” (as, for example, vegetarianism has become quite normal in the

last decades). A normality that has nothing to do with any calculations about scientific

certainty and economic benefits. We shouldn’t forget that there are many religious people out

there who invest a lot in a very uncertain outcome called “paradise” or “reincarnation”,

simply due to strong cultural processes. I imagine a large role can be played by images,

movies, books and any form of communication to create similar cultural processes for the

means of nature conservation.