England’s ruling pathology; Boarding School Syndrome

They, or some of them, are “rescued” by a walking, talking symbol of an imperial army who justified its genocide and colonization as a “civilizing” force. Yet here are our lovely white sons, murdering one another under the shadow of a mighty military vessel their government built for the domination of isles like this and to enable the exploitation of its inhabitants, nod nod wink wink. It is at this point the naval officer gets his Alanis Morissette moment.

Avoided— not avowed

The horror movie The Lesson (directed by Ruth Platt) is an interesting commentary on Lord of the Flies: two schoolboys are imprisoned and tortured by a crazy teacher. (In the tradition of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Wolf Creek II, etc.)

As with many horror movies, you can tell how its going to end right from the start (especially given the Lord of the Flies references), but that doesnt detract from it.

It is or has been an essential feature of several social systems (Sparta comes to mind obviously) that the children of the ruling class are treated brutally so they would reproduce that brutality towards the lower classes and other enemies.

“How common is boarding school for the upper middle/upper class in England these days? (that’s a real question, not rhetorical – I have no idea.)”

I don’t have actual data to hand, but I do know boarding schools went into rapid decline in the 1990s and 2000s, as the children of people who grew up in the 60s and 70s reached the age. There are very few boarding-only schools, but a lot with a few boarders and plenty of non-boarders. Private school attendance has remained pretty constant though.

Eton College is about a 5 minute walk from Windsor Castle, but I imagine William and Harry boarded (probably to avoid the bloody security involved in getting into the Castle).

This assumes, of course, that the family automatically provides a more nurturing environment. As feminism is teaching us, bit by bit, that’s a huge assumption.

I assume we wouldn’t have to work too hard to generate a list of tyrants and authoritarians who grew up stable families, where one or both parents were abusive, and even where both parents were, as they say, “good enough.”

Ayn Rand grew up in a fairly stable-looking family, at least from on-line bios. Of course there was a revolution during her teens, so who knows?

I was sent to a prep school in the Peak District at the age of 8 in 1967. It was ferociously cold and we were expected to play outdoor sports wearing only 1 layer. The headmaster was replaced by his 27-year-old son after a sexual indiscretion with a matron within a few months of his arrival (it was a family business) and the new headmaster used corporal punishment a great deal. I think I received over 100 strokes of the gym shoe from him between 67 and 72. On one occasion in winter, when I accidentally hit a teacher with a snowball, I was knocked to the ground and kicked repeatedly on the floor by him and efforts were made to prevent me informing my parents. The very worst occasion was when a cleaner discovered that someone had shat in a bucket and the whole school was assembled so that the headmaster could demand that the culprit confess. No confession was forthcoming so we were all made to stand motionless in lines in the car park in the hot sun. Anyone who moved was taken from the line, beaten, and returned to it. All these children were aged 7-13.

The boarding school I moved to in 1972 was much better for me at least. I was never beaten (though others were), though the general appearance and ambiance was not unlike Lindsay Anderson’s If … Needless to say, in both schools there was a good deal of bullying among the boys and a fair amount of violence and torture. In the latter school, several teachers later went to prison for sexual offences against children and it was well known at the time I was there that some of them had a penchant for attractive boys. Fortunately, I wasn’t.

The pathology is larger than the boarding schools, which never trained more than a small fraction of the population. The other factor is: how did their pathology ramify throughout the ranks?

If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, then Trafalgar was won in the workhouses of London and Manchester. We must ask: what conditions of society made it possible to keep thousands of poor uneducated men in the penal and worse than penal conditions of serving in a man o’ war for months on end? Why was mutiny as rare as it was, given that life on shipboard had (as Dr. Johnson said) all of the discomforts of life in prison, with the additional danger of drowning? What was life on shore like, that men sometimes volunteered to serve?

So the story may start with the boarding schools, and they may have set the tone, but the full story is closer to the story of Sparta, where an entire society is geared towards domination.

@Chris

What a horrendous collection of stories! I’m so sorry for you.

Great post, Maria. Insightful posts like this are why I keep coming back to CT.

https://crookedtimber.org/2019/11/07/englands-ruling-pathology-boarding-school-syndrome/#comment-769421

I think Golding believed he was saying something eternal about the human soul.

Confirmed by Golding himself in the essay ‘Fable’, specifically dealing with questions about The Lord Of The Flies, in which he wrote that experience in the Second World War compelled the conclusion that men produce evil the way bees produce honey.

A hearty second on the terrific post Maria (if I may). But I have to say that many of these comments about boarding school are truly shocking to me, a product of Northern California public education that, while certainly not socially perfect, makes me more grateful than ever for it. And as I’ve said before, this is why CT continues my education even in retirement!

Without wanting to detract from the point of the OP (which I agree with) it’s worth bearing in mind that British non boarding schools (state and private) in the 1970s and 1980s were nasty and brutal and the British model of parenting at that time (children should be seen but not heard) was pretty loveless. Savile was roaming the halls of hospitals in the 1980s raping children and he wasn’t picking on the kids of the ruling class. So when we see damaged politicians today it’s not just boarding school that did it. (I say this as someone who went to state schools in the uk in the 1970s and 1980s then moved to oz in 1986 and the difference was huge).

Does anyone know if corbyn went to boarding school? Because on top of everything else he seems personally to be a decent guy.

As a further aside I would mention that the Golding view of society is also part of the reason that so many modern libertarians and liberals think that all laws and social norms are backed up by coercive power. Their entire education precludes then believing people might pay taxes or follow traffic laws because they want to cooperate with each other.

I’m a little surprised that no one has yet mentioned Orwell’s
“Such, Such Were The Joys”
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/joys/english/e_joys

As a long time schoolteacher in a northern Canadian community, I recognize the common culture of the English boarding school and our residential schools. The brutality, sexual assults and complacent do-gooding. Officially, good intentions, but the reality far messier. However a big difference is the racist assumption of :improvement”. But paramount was the fact that very young children were torn from families for years at a time, some never again seeing family.
The result is suicide, substance abuse and damaged childrearing capacity. Very different from cruel domination of the lower classes and colonial subjects.

An interesting side-note is that the people who actually built British ‘success’ were mostly not the product of boarding schools, but the sons of families much lower in the class stratum. The navy, the East India Company and the merchants of London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol were run by these, while the upper classes were often an incompetent but domineering veneer.

British penal institutions at the time were also notoriously brutal; sadism on the part of guards and administrators was the norm. That pupils and prisoners were treated alike could be ascribed to a mere lack of imagination.

Kipling’s “Stalky & Co.” gives an interesting, overly-flattering look at a boarding school that was a few social notches below Eton. (i.e. for 1%ers, not the 1% of the 1%ers)

It’s far too affectionate and gauzy, but absolutely clear-eyed about the link between the boarding schools and empire. The novel’s last chapter is set in Afghanistan, as I recall.

It’s one of those comical, “he just tweeted it out” situations, where the leftist suspicion that a social structure functions to perpetuate domination is rejected huffily by broad swaths off society, and simply affirmed with gusto by an arch colonizer.

What I find more interesting than the “Lord of the Flies as British boarding school” interpretation as such (which I’ve seen in a number of places and seems on pretty solid ground) is what this interpretation implies about the more typical reading of the book in the grade-school English literary canon, as a way of underscoring the book’s own critique on a meta level: not only is British upper/middle class education a factory line for the production of emotionally abused, emotionally abusive sociopaths to fill the ranks of the Empire’s nomenklatura, but this very same Anglophone pedagogical culture is also so narcissistic and un-self-critical that when it sees a trenchant attack on its own culturally specific pathologies, all it can perceive is a chilling existential glimpse into the amoral void that (in its view) sits at the very heart of universal human nature itself, a warning against the innate violent savagery allegedly being held at bay by the very same Western imperial institutions the book is actually critiquing. It’s the same high tier of social satire also reached by Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, where the oblivious mainstream cultural reception to the work ends up emphasizing the deeper critical message at least as powerfully as the work could ever hope to achieve on its own.

Semi-related, but in this context I can’t help but recall some earlier kerfuffles on CT over the use of “tribalism” as a middlebrow cod-social-scientific master signifier for everything that ails human society, which seems like another manifestation of this same tendency for Western imperialist discourse to depict its own narrow pathologies as innate and universal, then use this alleged innateness and universality as an excuse to clamp down even harder on anything it doesn’t already control, further entrenching the same pathologies and further justifying its own control in an ever-stronger ideological feedback loop. How interesting, then, that the most recent prominent pusher of the “tribalism” meme in Anglophone elite discourse has been Amy Chua, whose other bit of recent cultural buzz was thanks to her longstanding role at Yale Law as de facto procurer/groomer of hot young female law students to clerk for Brett Kavanaugh.

oldster at #16:

“We must ask: what conditions of society made it possible to keep thousands of poor uneducated men in the penal and worse than penal conditions of serving in a man o’ war for months on end? Why was mutiny as rare as it was, given that life on shipboard had (as Dr. Johnson said) all of the discomforts of life in prison, with the additional danger of drowning? What was life on shore like, that men sometimes volunteered to serve?

So the story may start with the boarding schools, and they may have set the tone, but the full story is closer to the story of Sparta, where an entire society is geared towards domination.”

Yes, this. And now let’s remember that the Americans working at Al Ghraib, civilian and military, were volunteers.

@38 How interesting, then, that the most recent prominent pusher of the “tribalism” meme in Anglophone elite discourse has been Amy Chua, whose other bit of recent cultural buzz was thanks to her longstanding role at Yale Law as de facto procurer/groomer of hot young female law students to clerk for Brett Kavanaugh.

Yes, and Chua, if I interpret her tiger parenting thesis correctly, is a similarly vocal proponent of authoritarian parenting and child education practices.

‘boarding schools went into rapid decline in the 1980s and 2000s’

According to this at least that subsequently reversed:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/04/29/boarding-schools-no-longer-need-harry-potter-effect-inspire/

As I understand it, the kings in Sparta did not have to undergo the agoge. Also, the Spartans were the Equals or Peers (of each other,) who had to invited into a syssition (usually translated “dinner club,”) which must have controlled much of their personal consumption. Also, Sparta educated its women (“flashing thighs,” etc.) The intimate relationship between foreign conquest and domestic democracy is hardly clearer. Whatever you may say about Spartan education, inadvertently turning out damaged snobs who take supervisory positions, whereupon they misuse their power to delight in cruelty doesn’t seem to be it. I think the other critique is that Sparta was primitive communisms (aka “barracks” communism,) and to be rejected as possibly appropriate to (technologically, though this is usually left unsaid,) primitive times.

Curiously I have managed to avoid Lord of the Flies despite it being nearly as important in high school indoctrination as 1984. As such, it seems to me the representative of the English ruling class is the officer whose disapprobation is not to be read as ironic in any way. At any rate, I suspect all those English teachers got it right, that this is a wisdom of the crowd situation.

C.S. Lewis may have had a horrible experience in a single-sex boarding school, but he strongly advocated it for others, in an apparent triumph of ideology over memory.“

This surprises me. Do you have a cite?

…this very same Anglophone pedagogical culture is also so narcissistic and un-self-critical that when it sees a trenchant attack on its own culturally specific pathologies, all it can perceive is a chilling existential glimpse into the amoral void that (in its view) sits at the very heart of universal human nature itself,

While the combination at boarding schools of removal from family, commonplace bullying, and sexual predation might be a particularly terrible English extreme, it’s going too far to believe that to be so without looking further, to deny common humanity by assuming that the situations in other places *must* be better. There’s plenty of bullying in China and Japan, it seems. I’m skeptical that English people, and these institutions, are so very special in their distinctive awfulness.

Philip @ 47

“He probably had some form of PTSD after WW2 and did use corporal punishment on my dad. However my dad always felt loved and grew up to have lots of admiration for his dad.”

I am firmly opposed to corporal punishment of children, and I am proud to have raised my boys without hitting any of them, ever.

But the connection between physical abuse and cruelty is complicated. I was psychologically cruel to my boys, and did things for which I can never forgive myself–ridicule, belittling, etc.. Those things left psychological welts, and forty years later, scars.

And I also know people whose parents spanked them, but who felt deeply loved and cherished, and never doubted their parents’ love. Warm, loving acceptance can make up for some smacks here and there, or at least that’s what some happy adults tell me.

I still would never hit a child, and the happy cases in which physical punishment left no estrangement or damage seem to me flukey enough that no one should attempt to reproduce them. But if I could do it again — without the sleep deprivation, without the poverty, without the desperate struggle to gain a foothold in my profession — I would try to do it without any psychological cruelty, either.

It’s complicated. And now I’m near to death, and will never have the chance to do better.

I have to put a pedant word in the navy. It inflicted brutal punishments and gave a wide arbitrary power to those in charge. So did almost all 18th and early 19th century institutions, in a society where physical violence and cruelty was routine. It also paid poorly. On the other hand, it was open to talent, it offered a career ladder, it fed you very well (and the captain got the same food as the common sailor – if he wanted something different he had to pay for it himself), and it was emphatic about the necessity of good relations between officers and men. Mutinies were quite common, usually took the form of refusing to take a ship to sea under an abusive captain, and were almost always met with an order from the Admiralty relieving the captain of his command (see NAM Rodger’s amusing ‘rules for mutiny’ in The Wooden World).

Neville Morley wrote: ‘anything we think we might know about the Spartan system can be doubted. What we can say with confidence is that such stories were told and repeated; what’s disturbing is that the people telling such stories generally did it because this seemed to them a utopia, a better and more virtuous society than their own democratic hellhole.’

Indeed. Hilarious, in a ‘life-is-a-comedy-to-those-who-think’ kind of way.

By chance, I came across this only recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfh9cQcC1Sk

There’s nothing in it about boarding school, and yet I feel it has some relevance to some of the foregoing discussion.

We shouldn’t forget there are also US equivalents, which educated many of the east coast “elites.” FDR went to Groton, JFK to Choate. I don’t know whether they quite matched their English counterparts for sadism, but they must’ve had an effect. I attended one for a single year and found the bullying common, though not thankfully the corporal punishments.

Mixed experience here as a boarder among 60 others at a county grammar school from 57-64. Fellow boarders I characterised as “waifs and strays or Army brats” (garrison town) .
For the first couple of years the bullying was horrendous and totally ignored/condoned by the housemasters who themselves largely just wanted the quiet life.
Post year 9 it improved massively, as did life elsewhere as it became (fanfare) the sixties.
I think the difference between going away at age 8 or 11 and at 13 is significant.
Eton is also an outlier because every boarder has his own room, something I only got in year 13.

Neville Morley@53 speaks of engrained pedantry, then (inadvertently) implies that Sparta was admired because not democratic. Democracy is always about “us” vs. “them,” the differences being in how “us” is defined. The role of elections, equality, etc. is about trying to make an “us” effective enough for war. The Spartans had ephors, two kings and a system that tried to make the majority of the citizens true equals. Like Robert Heinlein in Starship Troopers, true citizens were those who fought for their country. Sparta was another form of democracy than from Sparta.

Those who objected to Sparta seem to have objected to either making Messenians, fellow Greeks, into Helots, slaves, instead of foreigners, the proper form of forced labor. Others objections to the democratic hellholes were not just about poorer men having the franchise, but the unworthy rich using their wealth to effectively take liberties and privileges that should have belonged to the men of good families, who were in their eyes the best people. Or indeed the decadence of luxury.

If we insist on reading in terms of contemporary politics, then some of the Spartan love by outsiders was closer to Rousseau’s idealizing the simple life. Or to get even more contemporaneous, about how socialist countries have more equality, less consumerism, etc. But it seems even a Cimon was more admiring of how stable the Spartan version of democracy was and how useful an ally to Athens.

But if we do want to talk solely about psychological aspects, religious education in Sparta included the festival of Artemis Orthia, where boys and young men were whipped. I gather this festival continued into Roman times, and became a tourist attraction.

J-D@57 demands a citation from Peter T, ignoring that Peter T cited NAM Rodger’s The Wooden World. This seems particularly ungenerous.

“It’s long been clear to many that the UK is ruled by many people who think their damage is a strength, and who seek to perpetuate it.”

Which brings to mind Corey Robin speaking about Clarence Thomas’s view of racist police forces and a racist prison system.

“Black people have suffered worse in the past–and, by his lights, gained more because of it. Perhaps the same will be true in the future.”
p. 215, “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas”

Others have argued that time in the Gulag, toughened those who survived.

All nonsense to me. Kind of like saying that you can make a bird fly better by plucking out just the right number of feathers.

J-D @ 57

Citation provided. I could provide a page reference, but the book is adequately indexed.

Another point that occurs to me: while Piggy retaining his humanity relative to the other kids is treated as more or less a given in the novel, Ralph is treated as potentially susceptible to following a path like Jack’s, and the survival of his humanity is largely thanks to his connection with Piggy. This makes it especially significant that Piggy is coded as coming from a lower class upbringing relative to the others (even signifying this relative poverty with the same easy metonym as that other widely-read literary fantasy about British boarding school, a broken pair of glasses) because it implies a “Captain Courageous” style narrative device similar to what Slavoj Žižek talks about in Cameron’s Titanic, where the upper-class character faced with the soul-destroying prospect of a patrician lifestyle manages to retain their soul by vampirically leeching the soul of a plebeian companion, who inevitably ends up sacrificing his own life so his upper-class companion might survive. Or to take a slightly less vampiric comparison, it’s also similar to the Frodo/Sam relationship in Lord of the Rings, where the protagonist is a scion of minor rural landed gentry who forms a bond with his simple yet loyal lower-class manservant, and relies on this bond to help him retain his humanity even while those around him succumb to the devious temptations of modernity and decadence symbolized by the Ring of Power.

Gee, so many interesting angles open up for consideration as soon as we tune out from the banal old “innate savage Hobbesian state of nature red in tooth and blah blah blah” mantra, huh?

@steven t johnson #64: the suggestion that Sparta was admired because not democratic was not in the least inadvertent, but I could have put it more precisely: the Lakonophilia of 5th- and 4th-century Greeks, especially Athenians, which provides almost the entirety of our image of the Spartan system, was manifestly driven by a hatred of Athenian democracy. Sparta is presented as a true aristocracy, in which power is kept in the hands of a tiny minority who are supposedly fitted for rule by birth, wealth, rigorous training and full-time devotion to war; of course *they* can be regarded as equals (doesn’t seem to have worked in practice, but that’s the theory), because they are equally virtuous. All this is set up in contrast to places like Athens, which have made the terrible error of giving political rights to those ghastly people who have to work for a living, rather than having slaves or helots to do it for them, and so are incapable of virtue or good judgement – which does indeed also corrupt some of the upper classes, who start trying to serve their community rather than seeking to overthrow it.

Put another way: yes, Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. But you seem to be taking that as a positive thing.

I know a number of older Iranians. People who went to school before the 1989 revolution.
I have talked with them about bullying in school and they have said that not only have they never witnessed such behavior had it happened a teacher would not even have had to have gotten involved because the children themselves would have put a stop to it.
Ok all of these indidividuals came from wealthier families, upper level civil servents and college proffessors and doctors and engineers and such. That might have something to do with the expiriences that they had. Schools in villages might have been different.
Is this evidence that Anglo societies are warped?

Fwiw, I’ve been exposed, second-hand, in recent years to Italian American New York and/or New Jersey residents, apparently traumatized, readily sharing their encounters with Irish nuns in parochial schools.

@WLGR

Of course the British system not only educated future managers of the empire but also, at the univ. level (and prob. at least in several cases boarding/public school as well) some of those who would supplant those managers. A perfect example is Nehru who, in view of his British education (Harrow and then Trinity College, Cambridge), told J.K. Galbraith (then Kennedy’s ambassador to India) that “I am the last Englishman to rule in India.” (Quoted by M. Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation, 2015, p.17, citing B.R. Nanda, Jawaharlal Nehru: Rebel and Statesman, 1995.)

Curt Kastens (and WGLR)

Page 41 of a report by Unicef gives some results for a poll asking students how often they experienced bullying behavior; the proportion saying that this happened on a roughly monthly basis was about one out of three, for students in South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, and Australia, about one out of four, for Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and 18% down to 13% for Japan, Georgia, Korea, and Kazakhstan. Average student age was about 14. Meanwhile, in Mexicso and various countries in South/Central American and the Caribbean, at least a third of sixth graders (age 11-12) were bullied in the previous month.

So there *might* be higher prevalence in former colonies, specifically British ones, but it certainly happens elsewhere.

Confirmed by Golding himself in the essay ‘Fable’, specifically dealing with questions about The Lord Of The Flies, in which he wrote that experience in the Second World War compelled the conclusion that men produce evil the way bees produce honey.

In addition, there’s the evidence of his second (and personal favourite) novel, The Inheritors. The inheritors of the title are human beings, and they inherit through the displacement and destruction of their Neanderthal predecessors, who are depicted in the novel as lacking the evil inclinations of the inheritors. Whether or not his product matched his intentions, what the author intended in The Lord Of The Flies was to make a point about intrinsic and universal human propensities, not just about the effects of boarding school.

Peter T

Citation provided. I could provide a page reference, but the book is adequately indexed.

My error. I failed to grasp the intended significance of the citation. Sorry.

I searched for more information about the book, and the result was a report that it’s not to be found in any library near me, which complicates the idea of consulting the index. However, I did chance across this, for whatever it may be worth:

Despite a series of major single-ship mutinies, the British lower deck was defeated and their leaders executed. In reaction, mutineers in the home command planned a fleet-wide strike for the early summer of 1797, which is the subject of the first two sections of chapter 5. It was both the greatest victory and the most painful defeat of the decade. Over 30,000 seamen took control their ships, developed radically democratic institutions of self-government, and put forward a detailed and sophisticated program of political change that, if implemented, would have reconstructed the Royal Navy as a republican force. But the mutiny was crushed, and a reign of terror descended upon the navy.

http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/8491/1/frykmanne_etd2010.pdf

Bad Jim; good point about the effects on height of malnutrition. I just scrape 5’6”. I suspect that I would be even smaller— except that my pitiful scrawniness was spotted by a GP, who got me sent away convalescent for 3 months. I do think the nutritious regular meals made an inch or two difference to my fnal height. The freedom to run around in woodland, building dens, probably benefitted me too. I certainly did not miss home. If it had been my choice, I would have stayed there, in the Warwickshire countryside until I hit fifteen.
Upthread, someone mentions Irish nuns. I never had dealings with them, thank fuck! I am reminded, though, of Nancy Scheper-Hughes‘ ‘Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics’— in which she made the observation that the Irish are/were the only people to use severe corporal punishment on nursing infants. However, it is the ritualistic framing of sexual power relations which seems, to me, to constitute the English Vice. I like to think that the visibility of classroom punishment internet porn has made the reintroduction of caning untenable; but in these mad populist tines, who knows?

That said, I wouldn’t want to get caught in the trap of attributing too much “wokeness” to a midcentury elite-educated Englishman like Golding, which would probably be asking for disappointment in one form or another. I guess the other possibility is that Golding really did intend to write a critique of innate universal human nature or whatever, and the scathing critique of elite British imperial culture resulted inadvertently from his fealty to the maxim of “write what you know.” If that’s the case, the best thing that could happen to Lord of the Flies would be something like what happened to Heinlein in the Starship Troopers movie, where a filmmaker like Verhoeven seizes on the author’s accidental critique of his own ideology and exaggerates it beyond any reasonable ambiguity.

WLGR

I get the feeling that I have sacrificed clarity to conciseness and that as a result you have taken me to be making a point different from the one I intended.

In discussing The Inheritors, I avoided the term Homo sapiens because I was aware that there is disagreement among the experts about whether Neanderthals should be considered a separate species from that species, Homo neanderthalensis, or a separate subspecies of the same species, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. For greater clarity, therefore, I stipulate that in this comment I am using the term sapiens to refer to the distinct species or subspecies (as the case may be) which includes both ourselves and the ‘Inheritors’ of Golding’s title but does not include Neanderthals. In the additional interests of clarity, I note that the term ‘Neanderthal’ does not (naturally) occur in Golding’s text, but the main characters of the novel, who are distinguished from the sapiens of the title, can readily be understood (and I believe generally are) as a fictionalised version of the Neanderthals, and in any case distinct from sapiens as the Neanderthals (species or subspecies) were.

Nothing can be known of psychological differences between sapiens and Neanderthals, and I don’t think Golding can sensibly be read as intending verisimilitude in his portrait of Neanderthal nature. Therefore, I suggest, that portrait must be understood as a dramatic/narrative device to emphasise, by contrast, the point he’s making about sapiens nature. His point is that sapiens is like this (group of characters) as opposed to being like that (group of characters), and being like this and not like that results, in his own terms as previously cited, in sapiens producing evil the way bees produce honey. It’s not (I take him to be asserting) a result of being German, or of being Nazis, or of being British, or of having had a boarding school education, or of being primitive, or of being advanced, or of being white, or of being black, but rather a result of propensities of our nature which have (at a minimum) been universal since we (sapiens) took the place of the Neanderthals. The things he’s saying about the boys (and also the man, at the end) in The Lord Of The Flies are (he’s saying in The Inheritors) things that go back at least that far. The low-technology examples of sapiens in the The Inheritors and the high-technology examples of sapiens in The Lord Of The Flies have the same nature and the same propensities. If you wanted to find something different, you would need to go at least as far back as the Neanderthals.

To repeat myself, that’s what I take to be his intention: there’s nothing surprising about a book escaping its author’s intentions.