Man is a Cruel Animal

It was Joseph Conrad I thought of when I
read an article in The Nation magazine this month about white vigilante
groups that rose up out of the chaos of Hurricane Katrina in New
Orleans to terrorize and murder blacks. 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.

Conrad saw enough of the world as a sea
captain to know the irredeemable corruption of humanity. The noble
virtues that drove characters like Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness" into
the jungle veiled abject self-interest, unchecked greed and murder.
Conrad was in the Congo in the late 19th century when the Belgian
monarch King Leopold, in the name of Western civilization and
anti-slavery, was plundering the country. The Belgian occupation
resulted in the death by disease, starvation and murder of some 10
million Congolese. Conrad understood what we did to others in the name
of civilization and progress. And it is Conrad, as our society unravels
internally and plows ahead in the costly, morally repugnant and
self-defeating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, whom we do well to heed.

This theme of our corruptibility is
central to Conrad. In his short story "An Outpost of Progress" he
writes of two white traders, Carlier and Kayerts, who are sent to a
remote trading station in the Congo. The mission is endowed with a
great moral purpose-to export European "civilization" to Africa. But
the boredom and lack of constraints swiftly turn the two men, like our
mercenaries and soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, into
savages. They trade slaves for ivory. They get into a feud over
dwindling food supplies and Kayerts shoots and kills his unarmed
companion Carlier.

"They were two perfectly insignificant
and incapable individuals," Conrad wrote of Kayerts and Carlier, "whose
existence is only rendered possible through high organization of
civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of
their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the
expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The
courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles;
every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the
individual but to the crowd; to the crowd that believes blindly in the
irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of
its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated
savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and
profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of
one's kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one's
thoughts, of one's sensations-to the negation of the habitual, which is
safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is
dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive,
whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the
civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike."

The Managing Director of the Great
Civilizing Company-for as Conrad notes "civilization" follows
trade-arrives by steamer at the end of the story. He is not met at the
dock by his two agents. He climbs the steep bank to the trading station
with the captain and engine driver behind him. The director finds
Kayerts, who, after the murder, committed suicide by hanging himself by
a leather strap from a cross that marked the grave of the previous
station chief. Kayerts' toes are a couple of inches above the ground.
His arms hang stiffly down "... and, irreverently, he was putting out a
swollen tongue at his Managing Director."

Conrad saw cruelty as an integral part of
human nature. This cruelty arrives, however, in different forms.
Stable, industrialized societies, awash in wealth and privilege, can
construct internal systems that mask this cruelty, although it is
nakedly displayed in their imperial outposts. We are lulled into the
illusion in these zones of safety that human beings can be rational.
The "war on terror," the virtuous rhetoric about saving the women in Afghanistan
from the Taliban or the Iraqis from tyranny, is another in a series of
long and sordid human campaigns of violence carried out in the name of
a moral good.

Those who attempt to mend the flaws in
the human species through force embrace a perverted idealism. Those who
believe that history is a progressive march toward human
perfectibility, and that they have the moral right to force this
progress on others, no longer know what it is to be human. In the name
of the noblest virtues they sink to the depths of criminality and moral
depravity. This self-delusion comes to us in many forms. It can be
wrapped in the language of Western civilization, democracy, religion,
the master race, Liberte, egalite, fraternite,
the worker's paradise, the idyllic agrarian society, the new man or
scientific rationalism. The jargon is varied. The dark sentiment is the
same.

Conrad understood how Western
civilization and technology lend themselves to inhuman exploitation. He
had seen in the Congo the barbarity and disdain for human life that
resulted from a belief in moral advancement. He knew humankind's
violent, primeval lusts. He knew how easily we can all slip into states
of extreme depravity.

"Man is a cruel animal," he wrote to a friend. "His cruelty must
be organized. Society is essentially criminal,-or it wouldn't exist. It
is selfishness that saves everything,-absolutely everything,
--everything that we abhor, everything that we love."

Conrad rejected all formulas or schemes
for the moral improvement of the human condition. Political
institutions, he said, "whether contrived by the wisdom of the few or
the ignorance of the many, are incapable of securing the happiness of
mankind."

He wrote "international fraternity may be an object to strive for ... but that illusion imposes by its size alone. Franchement,
what would you think of an attempt to promote fraternity amongst people
living in the same street, I don't even mention two neighboring
streets." He bluntly told the pacifist Bertrand Russell,
who saw humankind's future in the rise of international socialism, that
it was "the sort of thing to which I cannot attach any definite
meaning. I have never been able to find in any man's book or any man's
talk anything convincing enough to stand up for a moment against my
deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world."

Russell said of Conrad: "I felt, though I
do not know whether he would have accepted such an image, that he
thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous
walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might
break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths."

Conrad's novel "Heart of Darkness" ripped
open the callous heart of civilized Europe. The great institutions of
European imperial powers and noble ideals of European enlightenment, as
Conrad saw in the Congo, were covers for rapacious greed, exploitation
and barbarity. Kurtz is the self-deluded megalomaniac ivory trader in
"Heart of Darkness" who ends by planting the shriveled heads of
murdered Congolese on pikes outside his remote trading station. But
Kurtz is also highly educated and refined. Conrad describes him as an
orator, writer, poet, musician and the respected chief agent of the
ivory company's Inner Station. He is "an emissary of pity, and science,
and progress." Kurtz was a universal genius" and "a very remarkable
person." He is a prodigy, at once gifted and multi-talented. He went to
Africa fired by noble ideals and virtues. He ended his life as a
self-deluded tyrant who thought he was a god.

"His mother was half-English, his father
was half-French," Conrad wrote of Kurtz. "All Europe contributed to the
making of Kurtz; and by-the-by I learned that, most appropriately, the
International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had
entrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. ...
He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of
development we had arrived at, 'must necessarily appear to them
[savages] in the nature of supernatural beings-we approach them with
the might as of a deity,' and so on, and so on. 'By the simple exercise
of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc.,
etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was
magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the
notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made
me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence-of
words-of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to
interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the
foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady
hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very
simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic
sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of
lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!' "