Somehow, I evaded The Lord of the Flies, the young adult dystopian novel by William Golding, while in high school, which is when many Americans encounter it. The ominous aura surrounding this little book always made me hesitant to pick it up. That’s now changed. The book arrested me this past week and had me almost panting by the end of it; this gorgeously written book about a group of schoolboys who crash on an island on the cusp of the third world war is as shimmering in detail as it is horrifying in its theme.

The overly optimistic, including those who believe new technologies like artificial intelligence will drastically improve (and possibly even perfect) the human being and the human experience, might be vexed by The Lord of the Flies. The island these boys chance upon is basically the garden of Eden, overflowing with boundless fruit and lagoons. Plump pigs run free, ripe for the killing. The image defies the notion that a perfect environment will produce a perfect person; this is no manifesto for Rousseau. Living in bounty does not ensure an unblemished soul. If anything, the opposite is true in Golding’s bleak vision; the human heart is creative in its endless capacity for darkness, cruelty, and barbarism. Civilization might give a patina, an illusion, of stability, but it only checks and reproves the underlying will to power.

The book is sobering not only because these boys, suddenly free from parental and social constraint, devolve into tribalism and violence, but because it starkly reveals the problem of evil, which can’t be dismissed by perfecting one’s physical environment. If Golding (and so much of history, not least of all the shocking evil of some of the most “civilized” people of the 20th century, like the Nazis) has a point, then the problem of evil cannot be solved by engineering the perfect “technological society,” as Jacques Ellul would put it. It’s worth asking whether technological progress is the answer to the dysfunction of the human person, and whether the problem of evil can be solved through material means. If we reach that perfect society where AI does everything for us and all the old human tasks are automated, would that magically stop all wars? Would it heal our traumas and regulate our impulse to envy and strive and fight? I’m not sure it would.

It was interesting to read this book during a time of technological acceleration. As Google Gemini reminded us, human programmers are still behind the computers, which means that the algorithm isn’t neutral. It might be used for manipulation instead of clarity, terror instead of peace, division instead of unity. In such times, the wisdom of the past and a collective humility about our own propensity for wrongdoing can help temper the optimism over technological progress.