FOR good reason is William Golding’s 1954 dystopian novel Lord of the Flies considered amongst the most in-sightful works of the modern age.

It is a remarkable exploration of how human impulses conflict with the urge to aspire towards civilisation. This need is undercut

by humanity’s simultaneous need and greed for power, individualism and self- interest.

As each new horror unfolds, the lesson is unmistakable: moment to moment, humanity’s capability for savagery and cruelty — its heart of darkness, so to speak — must wilfully be overcome by the rational, ethical impulse, and the ability to do so is perhaps humankind’s greatest trait.

The book imagines a group of boys marooned on an island. Most of them are strangers to each other, and while they start off as well-educated children making a good effort to coexist, they soon hurtle down a spiral of savagery.

Far from civilisation, they regress to a primitive level, committing acts of awfulness that would have been thought beyond the ken of schoolboys and choirboys. All the characters in the book are boys, either in middle childhood or preadolescence.

The only even slightly adult-type voice is that of Piggy, who quotes his aunt frequently, serving in the book as a tool to remind the children of what the rules of civilisation were and how far behind they have left it. Piggy is also the character whose pitiful, violent death serves to remind readers of the end of innocence, to look deep within themselves and fear.

There’s a reason I provide this précis of a book that I hope most people would have read: there’s a reason why Golding might have chosen young boys as his characters.

It’s important that they are all preadolescent; some argue that it’s because children that age are not understood as being good or bad, that they are as yet untainted by the awareness, even cynicism, that comes with adolescence and adulthood.

I disagree. I think the writer might have chosen this age group because childhood, for all its wondrousness, is also a time of incredible self-interest.

Anyone who has spent any time around a child, or better still studied interaction between a group of them, will attest to that. At root perhaps, but certainly in the first few years of life, the human being is almost entirely selfish and will take the most obvious route to getting what he or she wants.

Without the direct intention, perhaps, that can be ascribed to an adult, children can be remarkably cruel.

Empathy, sympathy, the difference between right and wrong, these are all emotions — the building blocks of civilisation — that are the domain of more mature minds, more intricate thinking abilities.

Children have no rules; they are made to learn them — in most cases in the face of strong resistance, I’ve heard many parents argue. The more complex emotions come even later: pity, compassion, mercy, etc are linked to experience and circumstance.

Fortunately, children grow into decently sensitised adults and civilisation as we recognise it rubs along, on the whole.

But what happens if the circumstances under which a child is growing are such that he’s seen nothing but violence and death, and has not had the opportunity — or, perhaps, walked away from such opportunities — to familiarise himself with emotions such as mercy and compassion?

Perhaps you get peddlers of hate and destruction such as the individuals who comprise the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

The crimes various members and factions of this hydra-headed monster have committed are so barbaric as to be beyond the imagination of anyone who considers themselves civilised: burnings and beheadings? Public hangings and bodies strung up from lampposts?

(Of course death is death and the euphemistic terms that self-proclaimed bastions of civilisation use to mask murder, “surgical strike”, for instance, or “collateral damage”, are no more defendable; still, that a Swat intersection saw so many bodies as to be renamed khooni, or bloodied chowk is appalling.)

In the case of the Afghan Taliban that took over the country during the 1990s, the predominant age was in the 20s and early 30s. The foot soldiers were the children of war, born and raised and steeped in violence. Perhaps the same argument can be made, now, for many of the conductors of chaos here.

Consider the two TTP names most recently in the news: Hakeemullah Mehsud was not yet 35 when he died; Mullah Fazlullah is 39. The former was born the year the Soviets invaded and the ‘jihad’ rhetoric started taking shape; the latter was in his impressionable 20s when the World Trade Centre was brought down.

One’s experience of adulthood was in the post 9/11, awash with blood, Pakistan; the other was 33 when he took over Swat.

Further, the TTP is fuelled by men who, as is much discussed, received a madressah education. Whatever else that implies, here’s a basic ground reality: they were students who at a young age found themselves removed from a family setting — removed from contact with mothers, sisters, etc — and placed in an all-male environment devoid of any of the softer, empathy-creating things or situations in life.

So why would we expect people of this ilk to have any veneer of civilisation, to even have the impulse to cover their naked ambition and bloodlust with any sort of fig leaf? Why would they understand why it’s not ok to shoot a child, or that women have rights?

The incredible thing, in fact, is this: the murderers are absolutely clear about their pitilessness and their appetite for violence; how insane an entity is Pakistani society that it nevertheless refuses to recognise them for what they are and keeps thinking of them in terms such as ‘wayward’ or ‘misguided’?

The writer is a member of staff.

hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com