So declares Chris Hedges at Truthdig. He would not be alone in that pessimistic judgment. We might at least consider the evidence.
The reference is to Joseph Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness, a novel I have not read, but I saw the movie which was set in Vietnam, not the Congo. So let’s see what Wikipedia says:
Throughout the novel Conrad dramatizes the tension in Marlow between the restraint of civilization and the savagery of barbarism. The darkness and amorality which Kurtz exemplifies is argued to be the reality of the human condition, upon which illusory moral structures are draped by civilization. Marlow’s confrontation with Kurtz presents him with a ‘choice of nightmares’—to commit himself to the savagery of the human condition, or to the lie and veneer of civilized restraint. Though Marlow ‘cannot abide a lie’ and subsequently cannot perceive civilization as anything but a veneer hiding the savage reality of the human condition, he is also horrified by the darkness of Kurtz he sees in his own heart. After emerging from this experience, his Buddha-like pose aboard the “Nellie” symbolizes a suspension between this choice of nightmares.
The objects of the exercise, more broadly Western Imperialism and the especially vicious form of exploitation and violence it assumed in the Belgian Congo, get to talk back. Wikipedia notes:
In a post-colonial reading, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe famously criticized the Heart of Darkness in his 1975 lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, saying the novella de-humanized Africans, denied them language and culture, and reduced them to a metaphorical extension of the dark and dangerous jungle into which the Europeans venture.
We ought to be sceptical about whether any straw man, however authoritatively and declaratively constructed can speak truth, or address the problems of humanity. Kurtz of the novel, is like certain political figures, who while having supposedly all the outward accoutrements of Western Civilization, descend into barbarism. They, unlike Kurtz, are safely remote from what they have wrought, as apparently, in their minds at least, free from the consequences of their actions required by the rule of law (I know the reference is Canadian, but the principle is universal).
Implicit in this description of human nature, is the notion that nonviolence is impossible or impractical. Notice that Chris Hedges describes Bertrand Russell as a “pacificist”, which is both accurate and derogatory – another straw man – since the connotation is of a weak person who responds to violence with passive resistance. Of course, throughout the course of history, human beings have done violent things, some more than others. And it largely true that violent societies have prevailed over nonviolent societies, and the militrarily powerful over the weak, from which the correct implication can be drawn with respect to most current societies. Violence is often not perceived, and equally nonviolence has to prevail, even if consciously that nonviolence has to be purchased by the threat of violence. Still, it is deeply ironic, even tragic that the society that spends more on defence than any other has a deep sense of insecurity, and coincidentally perhaps the largest prision population in the world. As we know the rule of law applies to some and not others.
Chris Hedges illustrates his case with the recently revealed vigalante violence that occurred following Hurrican Katrina in New Orleans. The process that happened there can be identified and understood in its broad dynamics, including the role of news reports in fanning violence, as distinct from merely normalizing it on a daily basis on the pretext of what breeds leads. Guns in this instance were a licence to kill, although notice the killing of the elephants for ivory goes unremarked in the novel. Furthermore, we might notice the irony of the claims of the gun lobby that the purpose is protect citizens against the State.
Perhaps state capitalism and corporate capitalism are alike in creating conditions of barbarism – the survival of the fittest. When the system topples, the financial system has to be supported, since mechanisms of capitalism have to supported is the system is to be maintained. Theoretically, I believe, that unfit organizations should be removed, but mergers and the identity of the interests and even personnel between the political process and the needs of corporate welfare solve that problem. In this case Karl Marx would argue that violence should be met with a cleansing and justifiable counter-violence, and predicted that the dynamic would work out. Chris Hedges observes:
It was Conrad I thought of when I saw the ominous statements by authorities, such as International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, warning of potential civil unrest in the United States as we funnel staggering sums of public funds upward to our bankrupt elites and leave our poor and working class destitute, hungry, without health care and locked out of their foreclosed homes. We fool ourselves into believing we are immune to the savagery and chaos of failed states. Take away the rigid social structure, let society continue to break down, and we become, like anyone else, brutes.
I do not know the answer as to the nature of human beings, although I suspect that the experience of motherhood makes a difference, as I notice the crisis of Conrad’s book that he has left women out of his picture. I hear the story of a person who faints after being told they no longer have a job, for which an abmulance has to be called, and a group of women who decide among themselves that so far as it is possible for them they will not let it happen to any other person. They argued that people have different intelligences, different talents. It seems to me, as it most always seems to the law, that we have choice between violence and nonviolence, and the choice happens long before we are faced with any specific circumstance. Part of the problem is that the efficacy and working out of nonviolence is not understood.