Barbarism, The Heart Of Darkness, And Human Nature - The Reality Few Want To Face

Joseph Conrad wrote about Africa and its threatening primitivism. In The Heart of Darkness, Conrad tells the story of Kurtz, who according to the manger of the Central Station, was one of the new breed of colonists sent out by the Company, charged with both dominating the ivory trade and bringing civilization to the natives.  

Yet in his tragic end he became more African than the Africans. In arrogating divinity to himself through a manipulation of tribal beliefs; and by maintaining complete control over the natives because of this assumed power, he rules absolutely, amasses a fortune in ivory, and becomes an authoritarian ruler.  Yet his assumption of African demonic spiritualism has a price.

As he speaks his last words, ‘The horror…the horror’, he finally understands that having descended completely into the primitive, having abandoned all traces of Western moral civilization, he is far worse than the natives of the jungle..  While the Africans who carry out ritual sacrifice are doing so as part of a sophisticated cosmology, Kurtz, when he encourages such sacrifice and ritual cannibalism only to promote his own longevity and power, descends into a completely amoral universe.

Marlowe, the narrator of the story, sees Kurtz as a courageous man willing to abandon his Christian beliefs and to consider the power and primitive glory of African animism.

“The earth seemed unearthly”, Marlowe says. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one.

They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.

And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage—who can tell?—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder—the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore.  

Marlowe is right, and Kurtz is a Nietzschean Superman, one who has been able to look over the edge of humanity and see what it really is.  Yet as much as Marlowe rightly acknowledges Kurtz’s search for understanding and meaning in the most unlikely and threatening places – it indeed takes courage to peer over the edge and to look into one’s own ‘heart of darkness’ -  he does not see the frightening, existential horror that might come of this search.  

Kurtz looked over the edge but died with the terrifying notion that not only he but all of mankind was indeed primitive; that ‘civilization’ was nothing more than a balm, a protective veneer, or at best a restraining order to violence.

Marlow forgives Kurtz for his ‘unspeakable rites’, whatever they might be and he chooses not to know.  He overlooks his arrogance and delusional conceits; but he admires his indomitable will.  Not only has Kurtz survived in the savage, primitive jungle, he has thrived.  Unlike most Westerners, he not only has adapted to the jungle, but adopted, manipulated, and used its ways.

Most of all Marlow – and of course Conrad – admire his unflinching look into his own heart of darkness.  He knows what he has done and feels no remorse.  He only feels the terrifying horror of realizing what all men are capable of.  Kurtz has never looked away, accepted his vision, and died with its horror on his lips.

“The horror, the horror’, whispered by Kurtz just before his death, was his final acceptance of his untamed, primitive soul and the inescapable barbarity of it.   The wilderness was not just an environment, but something alive, a complete, integral organism both prehistoric and terrifying in which men who, equally primeval  and uncivilized, were reminders of humanity’s savage beginnings.

Kurtz never tamed the men or the jungle but ruled over both through fear, intimidation, and an expression of absolute and indomitable will.  As death approached he understood that he had neither civilized, nor exploited, nor governed; but by means of the same primitive savagery, he expressed the same  amorality of a universally violent, aggressive, and insatiable human nature as he found in the natives.

Despite millennia of human history to the contrary, American progressives have refused to look at human nature for the hardwired, innate, ineluctable force that it is - aggressive, territorial, and self-defensive. Despite thousands of years of universal war, civil strife, savage tribalism, and unholy terror, they insist that the tide can be turned.  Absolutes have no place in a progressive vision. There is no such thing as permanence. The worst of humanity can be brought within a humanitarian, compassionate, considerate community. 

Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot are not distant memories of ancient history, but features of the Twentieth Century.  Few centuries have seen the wholesale barbarism of Pol Pot who sent millions of Cambodians to their death in the killing fields, unmindful of their humanity and determined only to create a Maoist state. No century has seen genocide on the scale of Nazi Germany. Every other attempt at genocide or ethnic cleansing, such as that of Serbia in the recent Balkan war, or worse the Hutu campaign against the Tutsi is but a shadow of Hitler's campaign to exterminate the Jews. 

Stalin's Siberian gulags and Mao's forced marches killed millions in totalitarian regimes disingenuously claiming that collateral deaths were necessary in revolutionary times. 

Perhaps the most determined, savage, and barbaric leader in history was Genghis Khan who with his Mongol-Turkic army thundered out of the Central Asian steppes, slaughtering millions and extending his empire from Japan to Europe.  He was not the first violent leader in history for his campaign took place only in the 13th century.  He had plenty of historical ancestors in the Chinese dynasties and in Medieval Europe; but the intensity, scope, and scale of his barbarism was impressive by any standard. 

Violence of course extends far back into pre-history when the most primitive Paleolithic peoples killed each other for territory, hunting rights, and authority. 

There is a hilarious comedic riff on violence making the rounds on social media.  

The world hasn't gotten violent. It has been violent since the beginning. When Cain killed Abel there were only four people on the earth and he killed one of them.  He was responsible for killing one-quarter of the world's population.  No war, no genocide, nothing even comes close

 

That should do it for idealism, but those who want to believe in progress towards a more verdant, peaceful, accommodating world will do so regardless of the evidence to the contrary. 

'That is the miracle and mystery of humanity', said Robert Finch, Professor Emeritus at Duke University borrowing ironically from Dostoevsky who condemned humanity for buying Jesus's disingenuous claims of salvation and wanting only miracles, mystery, and authority.  

We are an adaptable, marvelously supple race, capable of change for the better.  There is no reason why now cannot be the time to once and for all tame the violent energies which have characterized us and turn them into utopian promise. 

Hope built on premise built on assumption - a familiar algorithm but unfortunately just whistlin' Dixie. Human nature will remain as is until recombinant DNA technology can extirpate the nasty bits and replace them with 'Jesus genes' as Professor Finch has called them.  However if history has shown us anything, it is that humanity is quite capable of messing things up. God only knows what a genetically modified, 'improved version' of human nature would look like. 

'There have been recent wars, no doubt', Prof. Finch goes on, 'but the savagery has been replaced by the Geneva Convention - our sane attempt to limit the horrors of war'. 

The Geneva Convention was not the panacea to horrific violence its promoters claimed that it would be. ISIS was as savage as they come, disemboweling and beheading to intimidate and instill mortal fear, thus paving the way for the march to an Islamic caliphate.  In so doing, they adopted the very techniques of Genghis Khan who impaled severed heads on stakes along the roadside leading into the next village in his path. Every major power on earth has stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

'We can't just sit by', said a peace activist in Washington; but to do what?  There have been few times of peace in history - the Cold War and Pax Romana, the first being thanks to a nuclear standoff, the second due to absolute rule of empire. 

Standoff is our best hope. Keep the missiles pointed at each other with the promise of mutually assured destruction at hand - that is giving peace a chance - and until and unless that parity comes about, be prepared for battle. 

Angola (LA) Maximum Security Prison up until recent, modest reforms, was as savage and primitive as Conrad’s jungle. It was an an inversion of society.  While same rules of human nature apply among inmates – survival, self-interest, and territorialism – since Angola is a maximum security facility where many inmates are serving multiple life sentences for murder, there are fewer consequences to the violent expressions of it.  In such a lawless environment, there is even more reason to lose whatever socialized patterns of regularized life on the outside. 



It is hard to imagine the brutality of a society without consequences.  The inversion is even more twisted, since the guards, faced with the pure, hateful menace of violent inmates who long ago shed the last vestiges of usual morality, also lose theirs:

In a remarkable hearing that explored torture practices at Angola, twenty-five inmates testified…to facing overwhelming violence in the aftermath of an escape attempt at the prison nearly a decade ago.   These twenty-five inmates -- who were not involved in the escape attempt -- testified to being kicked, punched, beaten with batons and with fists, stepped on, left naked in a freezing cell, and threatened that they would be killed. 

They were also threatened by guards that they would be sexually assaulted with batons.  They were forced to urinate and defecate on themselves.  They were bloodied, had teeth knocked out, were beaten until they lost control of bodily functions, and beaten until they signed statements or confessions presented to them by prison officials.  One inmate had a broken jaw, and another was placed in solitary confinement for eight years. (MR Magazine)

Not only did inmates subject each other to ‘unspeakable rites’, the prison guards were complicit in the amoral mayhem.

Although one might be quick to dismiss Angola prison as an exception –the violent, amoral men incarcerated there must be an exception – serious philosophers have doubted the essential goodness of human nature.

God destroyed the world in the flood because it has become an evil place. He acted again in Sodom and Gomorrah, but that devastation did nothing to quell the evil instincts of his Creation.  As a last effort, he sent his son to try to teach the world peace and goodness, and that too has failed.

So, there it is - violence is as common, universal, and perennial as ever.  Not a bad thing, just a thing.  If it weren't for aggressive territorialism and Darwinian competition,  civilization would not have progressed.  Look at it that way.