The state of nature

We at Grinwout's occasionally work outside of the interwebs box, in the world of high school debate. In that world, where students are introduced to serious philosophy for the first time, the idea of the State of Nature, as Hobbes called it, is the perfect starting point when you're thinking about organizing society. After all, there's "continual fear, and danger of violent death," and life is "nasty, brutish and short." How convenient for debate coaches that William Golding wrote a book that is the State of Nature delivered on a silver platter, and that that book is quite a favorite among younger readers.

Golding himself sounds like a fascinating character. Toward the end of his life, he looked like a biblical patriarch, a suitable style for a Nobel laureate. He lived on the remote west end of England, in Cornwall, because "people can't get us." When Nigel Williams set out to meet him, in aid of doing a theatrical version of Lord of the Flies, he described him thus: "His beard, his watchful eyes and his no nonsense walk all suggested a schooner captain who had just got in from the South China Sea after some pretty hard sailing."

Williams's story of working with Golding and creating the theatrical piece, is that sort of reminiscence that makes one wish one was a fly on the wall for all of it:

When we got to his house, though – a big square place in its own grounds, just off a main road – it turned out to be as neat and precisely laid out as a ship’s cabin. We went straight through to the kitchen. On the wall was a note in charmingly childish handwriting, congratulating Grandpa on his Nobel prize... He was about nothing less than the important task of showing how a slowly nurtured democracy can collapse in the face of the lust for power, how religious instincts can be perverted into becoming a cloak for brutality and how the competition for scarce resources can betray humans into revealing their fundamentally animal nature.

The article is William Golding: A frighteningly honest writer.