Lord of the Flies is on the decline. (p. 447)
It is natural to tire of familiar things and to pursue instead the excitements which come with novelty and the sense of discovery. But I wish to argue in behalf of Lord of the Flies, not because I have discovered something startling and new to abash the jaded scholars …, but because the decline of Golding's book is a symptom of a dangerous tendency in our academic and intellectual life…. [All] of humanity is involved in explosive crisis and is on the edge of disastrous violence. It is hard to look steadfastly at this general picture…. We must somehow overcome our myopia, with its attendant illusions of efficiency and power, and we do not like to face up to this any more than Ralph or Piggy does. Lord of the Flies forces us to recognize the likelihood of apocalyptic war as well as the wanton abuse and destruction of environmental resources on which an increasing population depends for survival. It also demands examination of the genesis of crisis and violence. The moral of the story is that crisis has grown out of our conditioned responses to existence and that we, like the boys on the island, must soon discover the means of rescuing ourselves from ourselves—a discovery which cannot be made through our habitual preoccupation with social techniques—before some bomb goes off and our little ship of fools sinks out of time altogether. (pp. 447-48)
