And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.

Those are the first words that Marlowe speaks in the heart of darkness, Marlowe being the

narrator of that story.

Technically the narrator, there's an anonymous narrator, but it's in Marlowe's voice that

we hear about the voyage up the Congo River to retrieve the remarkable Mr. Kurtz.

And given that this is the concluding episode of entitled opinions for the fall season, and

that the winter solstice is very close upon us, I thought I would deal here with the heart

of darkness.

We're in the mood for that kind of work.

If this were the spring equinox, which is when entitled opinions is coming back on air,

topic might have been different.

When Conrad has Marlowe say that this was once one of the dark places of the earth, he's

suggesting an analogy between the savagery of Africa's jungles and England's own prehistory.

Marlowe is in fact sitting on the deck of a boat anchored in the Thames River.

Very nice description.

The sea reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable

waterway.

In the offing, the sea and sky were welded together without a joint.

And in the luminous space the tan sails of the barges drifting up with a tide seem to stand

still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnish spirit.

A haze rested on the low shores at ran out to sea and vanishing flatness.

The air was dark above grave sand.

And farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over

the biggest and the greatest town on earth.

That biggest and greatest town on earth being London.

But I would also draw attention to graves sand.

The air was dark above graves sand.

I think that place name is of special significance.

We might get into that a bit later.

So Marlow is thinking of the time when the Romans arrived in Britain and confronted the

savagery, disease and death of the British Isles.

And now two millennia later it's the British and their European kinsmen who carry the torch

of empire to the uttermost ends of the earth as he puts it.

And in truth no one could have imagined more vividly than Conrad, the state of England

in pre-historical times because during his long seafaring career he had firsthand experience

of the remote frontiers of forested worlds in their wild state.

He had seen also how those same worlds had become European colonies.

And he had also witnessed the western conquest of the earth as he put it.

So Conrad exercises a special authority when he declares that I'm paraphrasing here.

When he declares that the western races are under the impulse of a moral imperative,

that they know how to overcome the Sylvan wilderness, how to rise above its gloom, how

to seek out the open radiance of a luminous ideal.

We are worshipers of the light, are we westerners, believers in ideas, lovers of the open horizon,

we are strong and indomitable western races who subdued the forest long ago.

And now western enlightenment spreads abroad, bringing its blessings to places like Africa,

which have yet to conquer the darkness.

The light of that torch is fueled by the European virtues of faith, heroism, and self-sacrifice.

And yet there is a difference between the Roman conquerors of Britain and the modern European

colonizers.

The difference is that we in the West, perhaps because we've been Christianized for two millennia,

have an innate need to believe a kind of necessity to believe or daydream about the moral

goodness of our projects and ventures and enterprises.

The Romans had no need to tell themselves that they were bringing blessings to the rest

of the world.

The way Marlow puts it, they were no colonists, the Romans.

Their administration was merely a squeeze and nothing more, I suspect.

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force.

Nothing to boast of when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from

the weakness of others.

They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be gut.

It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at

it blind as its very proper for those who tackle a darkness.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different

complexion or slider, flatter noses in ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into

it too much.

What redeems it is the idea only, an idea at the back of it, not a sentimental pretense,

but an idea, and an unselfish belief in the idea, something you can set up and bow down before

and offer a sacrifice to.

So there we have it.

This devotion to the idea is a distinctly modern phenomenon that distinguishes us somewhat

from our Roman forebears.

Now, the colonial enterprise in Africa was a prime example of the West's need to tell itself

that its mission was fundamentally a moral one and a civilizing one, and one of bringing

enlightenment to the dark.

And by a way, reconstructs very briefly this situation at the end of the 19th century,

it was a time when the major powers in Europe were vying over control of Africa, and

they were indeed involved in carving up the continent between themselves, trying to avoid

going to war with each other over conflicting claims in different parts of Africa.

Bismarck in the 1880s called a famous conference in Berlin where he and the other nations,

were talking about the French, the British, the Dutch, and the Portuguese.

These are the major powers there in Africa.

They came up with a set of rules of engagement as it were, and made an effort to avoid open

conflict and hostility between themselves, and make sure that everyone was happy with

their vast piece of the pie that they got in Africa.

Sitting a little bit on the sidelines was one of the great villains of the story, which

is the king of Belgium, Leopold II, and he had his eye on a part of Africa, equatorial

Africa, known then as the Belgian Congo, which had not been depreated by the slave trade,

and he claimed the Belgian Congo really for himself as a private individual, believe it

or not, not even for his nation.

In fact, he willed the Belgian Congo to the Belgian state in his last will before he died,

and he was a very ambitious man, and he had an endless lust for money and wealth.

And he wanted to use the resources of the Congo in order to enrich himself as much as possible.

He made concessions to various trading companies, gave them the rights to go to the Belgian

Congo and set up trading stations, and bring back to Europe various resources, the most

popular of which at the time was ivory, actually, and he claimed for himself a substantial

percentage of all the profits that were made in his so-called independent state of the

Belgian Congo, ironically named, but of course Leopold was typical of the European colonial

enterprise in Africa for the hypocritical and deceptive rhetoric that he used publicly

about the mission.

And I'll read to you from a statement he made in 1898, which is exactly the time that

Conrad is writing the heart of darkness, where he says the following.

The mission which the agents of the state have to accomplish on the Congo is a noble

one.

They have to continue the development of civilization in the center of equatorial Africa,

receiving their inspiration directly from Berlin and Brussels.

Place face-to-face with primitive barbarism, grappling with sanitary customs at date

back thousands of years, they are obliged to reduce these gradually.

They must accustom the population to general laws, of which the most needful and the most

salutary is assuredly that of work.

The great virtue of work, he wanted the native peoples of the Congo to be taxpayers in order

to pay taxes, they had to become workers and in order to become workers, they had to

be whipped into service and their labor, which amounted really to nothing but slave labor,

was washed over by armed centuries and involved a great deal of brutality and outright

murder, all very vividly described in Conrad's heart of darkness, which is based on Conrad's

own experience as a sea man who was sent to the Belgian Congo in order to command

Dura ship, which he actually found disabled when he arrived, but he did go a second in

command on another ship called Lu Haudebelge, down up the Congo River to Stanley Falls

and his experience there is what lies at the foundation of this story that Marlow tells

us.

If you've ever read the heart of darkness, you, I think, will be persuaded already

that the heart of darkness is juxtaposition of civilized Europe with the wild forests of

Africa actually suggests that barbarism lurks not so much in the African natives as in the

behavior and the hearts of the Europeans who conceal a savagery of greed and violence

beneath their public colonial rhetoric about saving the savages from their benign ways.

And as it moves deeper and deeper into the dark interior of the Congo, that wilderness

at the west had presumably long ago turned into the centers of modern enlightenment, Marlow's

narrative suggests that in fact, the African so-called savages are intrinsically more civilized

than their self-appointed saviors.

Now, what do I mean by that?

By civilization, I mean that they are intrinsically more possessed of moral virtues, the primary

one of which is the capacity to exercise restraint upon their immediate desires and needs.

I believe, along with other theorists of the time, that restraint is the founding principle

of all morality.

And if you read the heart of darkness, what you'll find is that the only positive heroes

in this somber story are, in fact, the cannibals on board Marlow's steamboat.

Because when the white crew throw all this hippo meat overboard because it had begun to

rot and was stinking the place up and they really couldn't live with the smell of dead

hippo, the cannibals were left with nothing to eat.

And for several days, and perhaps even weeks, they remained calm and unrebellous, even

though they outnumbered the crew to a great extent, and Marlow is actually astonished that

they didn't go for the white men and make a meal of them.

And that's because they had, for some inexplicable reason, restrained themselves from

that act.

And the only other people who show any restraint in this story are the natives who are

in thrall decerts at the inner station of the trading company.

Because as the steamboat approaches the station, they shoot little wooden arrows, not in order

to massacre.

The people who have come to take their great chief away, but only in order to warn them

off.

So they, too, show a certain restraint.

The idea here is that decadence begins with the loss of restraint.

And what we have as a consequence of this is a new kind of barbarous, a Western barbarous.

And it calls to mind the theories of an Italian theorist of the 18th century named

Jumbatista Vico wrote in his book The New Science, which explains the evolution of human

cultures from primitive clearings in the forest of primary families to little huts and

then villages and then cities and then empires.

And finally, when he Vico is discussing the decline of empires into decadence, he evokes

a scenario that when this decline reaches a certain extreme and those nations that are in such

decline are not conquered by better nations from without or don't agree on a monarch

from within, then the process unfolds all the way in a by way of decree of providence

that through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into

the forest and the forest into dens and layers of men.

In this way, right, Vico, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the

misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts, made more

in human by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism

of sense.

The difference between the two being that the barbarism of sense put forward a generous kind

of savagery against which one could defend oneself, whereas the barbarism of reflection

is fundamentally treacherous because it knows how to manipulate appearances and make falsehood

appear in the guise of truth and vice versa, and therefore it was fundamentally ironic.

It belonged to a reflective consciousness.

Shakespeare's tragedies are famously populated with such barbarians of reflection,

Edmund in King Lear, for example, or Yago.

These are people who know the art of treachery and the presenting of external facade

that does not correspond to the inner intention.

So the loss of restraint results from an even more grave and serious loss, speaking for

Conrad here, which is the loss of faith.

In several moments of the narrative, Marlow insists that only on the basis of an unshakeable

faith can a modern European withstand the jungles of Africa and exercise restraint under

conditions of extremity.

Principles won't do, he declares.

Acquisitions close, pretty rags.

Rags that would fly off at the first good shake, know what you want is a deliberate belief.

But instead of such a deliberate belief, Marlow discovers, among the African colonizers, its

conspicuous absence.

He discovers a spiritual void, a kind of everlasting deep hole of nihilism.

And it's rather frustrating for readers and critics of Conrad to realize just how vague

and deliberately vague Marlow is about the nature of the redemptive faith to which he makes

an appeal.

It doesn't seem to be a religious faith per se.

And the following passage, rather long one which I'll read, is addressed not only to

a Marlow's fictive audience on board the boat, but also to the cosmopolitan reader of

heart of darkness and to us, of course.

And it contains a masterful exercise of vague illusion.

You can't understand Marlow's, as how could you with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded

by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between

the butcher and the policeman, and the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic

asylums?

How can you imagine what particular region of the first ages of man's untrammled feet

may take him by way of solitude?

Under solitude without a policeman, by the way of silence, utter silence, where no warring

voice of a kind neighbor can be heard whispering public opinion.

These little things make all the difference.

When they are gone, you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity

for faithfulness.

Of course, you may be too much of a fool to go wrong, or you may be such a thunderingly

exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights

and sounds.

Then the earth for you is only a standing place, and whether to be like this is your loss

or your gain I won't pretend to say, but most of us are neither one nor the other.

The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds,

with smells too by jove, breathe dead hippo so to speak and not be contaminated.

And there, don't you see, your strength comes in, your power of devotion, not to yourself,

to an obscure, back-breaking business.

We'll be right back.

We'll be right back.

I'm into the close road, well, I'm on my knees.

I have a lot of time I miss it, they put body, be pleased.

Even in Spanish the closed road?

I draw the finger around

Standing across road I draw the finger around

Standing across road I draw the finger around

In an advance even to me

Everybody passed me by. In a distance I'm going down one. I'm going to get me out.

♪ Yeah! ♪

♪ Well, that's not gonna end! ♪

[cheerful music]

♪ I haven't got no navigation meanwhile, I'm addicted ♪

♪ They'll even see in my head ♪

[cheerful music]

♪ You can run, you can run ♪

♪ They'll my friend for I would a crowd ♪

[cheerful music]

♪ I don't understand it's a crossrobot ♪

♪ I believe I'm second down ♪

♪ Little Robert Johnson never heard anyone ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

♪ I'm not sure if I'm gonna do it ♪

cavity, what we call, what we could call, kind of spiritual hole of nihilism, and delves

into it in historical dimensions and go through moments where the image or figure of the

whole pops up in the heart of darkness.

And as I've suggested, this whole question comes to represent something like the

Western, the failure of a redemptive idea in the West's project of the colonization

at the dawn of the new century.

So of one of the agents at the central station, Marlow says, "I let him run on this paper

"mache, methistophiles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger

through him and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt maybe."

So this is an image of moral bankruptcy to be sure, but there's more to it than that.

The loose dirt suggests to me that this soul is not only empty, not only hollow, you can

understand why T.S. Eliot was so taken with Conrad's heart of darkness when he wrote

the hollow man, but that this paper-mache, methistophiles is also a soul that has been somehow

unearthed.

And or better, it's because this individual belongs among the emissaries of the enlightened

West who have come literally to unearth the African continent that we find nothing but a

little bit of loose dirt inside him.

The unearth hole or cavity is like a festering wound at the heart of darkness and it symbolizes

for Conrad the colonial enterprises a hole.

Marlow is exposed to this cavity the very moment he first steps foot on the African

continent. "I avoided a vast artificial hole somebody had been digging up on the slope, the

purpose of which I found impossible to divine."

It's been remarked by a number of critics that heart of darkness is primarily symbolic

in its literary articulation.

And one could say that this vast artificial hole is a symbolic gateway into hell, into

the hell that is the European presence in Africa.

And it's dug up senselessly by the colonists, by the colonizers, and it's through the symbolic

gateway of that senseless hole that Marlow will descend deeper and deeper into the interior,

not only the interior of Africa, obviously, but symbolically speaking into the interior

of Western, the Western nihilistic soul.

And at the very bottom of this hole, the inner station of the trading company up the Congo

River, Marlow will meet Mr. Kurtz, the remarkable man whose voice our narrator has been so

anxious to hear, hoping for a redemptive idea within the folds of Kurtz's eloquence.

He had heard a lot about Kurtz's eloquence and had read some of the statements he had made.

Statement sets sound strangely reminiscent of King Leopold II.

But this darling of Europe, Kurtz, and of the trading company, all Europe had contributed

to the making of Kurtz, Marlow wrote.

Is it true genius?

He came to Africa with progressive ideas, a moral mission, and an exalted rhetoric of

enlightenment, but in the African interior Kurtz discovers that his true genius lies neither

with his ideas nor with his eloquence, it lies rather in his ability to dig up the earth

in search of ivory.

In Kurtz, Marlow meets the most unearthly of colonial unearthrs.

Ivory, I should think so, heaps of it, stacks of it, the old mud chant he was bursting

with it.

You would think there was not a single tusk left above or below the ground in the whole

country.

Mostly fossil the manager had remarked disparagingly.

It was no more fossil than I am, but they call it fossil when it is dug up.

It appears these niggas do bury the tusk sometimes, but evidently they couldn't bury

this parcel deep enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate.

If Marlow couldn't understand the purpose of that artificial hole he almost fell into

his arrival, it was because he had still not discovered the purpose of the European presence

in Africa.

He was still under the illusion that it had to do with the heroism of exploration and not

what he called in a letter, the vilest scramble for loot to have ever disfigured human

conscience and the history of geographical exploration.

But at the heart of darkness, at the inner station, the purpose of that hole now reveals its

purpose, the unearthing of the earth yields resources and in this case, ivory.

But by virtue of perverse symbolism Kurtz, as he digs up the earth for ivory delves

into the moral cavity of his European genius and uncovers its skeletal nihilism.

By the time Marlow sets eyes on him, this gifted man looked strangely like the bone of

disintered ivory himself.

It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its

hand with menaces at the motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze.

I'm insisting on motif of unearthing, uncovering and digging up what has been buried

because I think it is part of a logic of irony or juxtaposition that we have to get a

handle on if we really want to understand the deeper moral vision or moral despair at

the heart of darkness.

Because at the end of his journey, or his nightmare, as he calls it, Marlow will in fact

go and visit Kurtz's intended, or fiance, his ex-fiance, because Kurtz is now dead.

Who lives in Brussels?

Like London, Brussels is a metropolis of the European Empire, and it too, like London,

is juxtaposed to the jungles of African, the heart of darkness.

In this case, the juxtaposition is symbolized by the ironic relationship between Kurtz

and his intended.

Kurtz has been dead a year when Marlow goes to visit the mournful fiance, but his memory

lives on both in her and in Marlow's minds.

Since Marlow had assumed responsibility for Kurtz's burial, burial in the ritualistic and

spiritual sense, because Kurtz's body was buried unceremoniously in some muddy hole along

the banks of the Congo River.

Since he had assumed that responsibility, he now has to go visit the intended in order

to consign once and for all the still disintared, interred memory of Kurtz.

To consign it to the majestic tomb of this woman's grief, mourning and devotion to him.

The last ritual in Marlow's task as caretaker leads him to a "high and ponderous door"

between the tall houses of a street as still and deckerous as a well-kept alley in a cemetery.

End quote.

The setting is appropriately described because Marlow has consistently referred to Brussels

as the "sypulcral city."

He could just as easily have spoken of a "sypulcral Europe."

If the forests of Africa are the place of naked unearthing, of disintermment, of the

disclosure of an abyss at the heart of the Savior civilization, the European city is the

place where that abyss is obscured, covered over and buried.

Only at the end of the novel, in fact, do we fully understand why London, at the beginning,

was enveloped in a brooding gloom that evoked, where evokes the same jungle landscape as

the Congo? That gloom is "sypulcral, finereal and mournful."

If Kurtz knew how to unearth the African continent and delve into the cavity of his own

nihilism, his intended nose had a berry, what has been left exposed.

Kurtz and the intended belong intimately to one another like the duplicity of iron

itself, like the duplicity of the barbarism of reflection itself.

The intended embrace as Kurtz's rhetoric of greatness, she believes in it, she believes

in his genius and his sacrifice, but she has the special privilege of being spared the

trial that would put its eloquence to the test.

She too is an idealist, but like Kurtz and Jim of Lord Jim, and like the world and epoch

to which she belongs, she cannot bear very much reality.

Face to face, with this creature of earnest illusion, Marlow himself cannot bear to witness

the collapse of yet another ideal, the extinguishing of yet another light, the light which

in the dusk has gathered around her white forehead, very beautiful description, the

end of heart of darkness about how once all the light in the dusk hour has disappeared,

her white forehead is still luminous.

When she asks Marlow about Kurtz's last words, Marlow lies to her, and this deliberate lie

that Kurtz's last word was his her name and not that infernal whisper, the horror, the

horror, consummates a nightmare.

Marlow conspires with the intended self-deception, because only by virtue of the lies

power to conceal, to cover over, to bury the truth, can the fragile fabric of a self-deceived

civilization hold together.

Marlow's lie conspires with the irony of the Sepulcral City, for Marlow to have spoken

the truth would have amounted to a dangerous lack of irony, and I say dangerous because

in the final analysis irony is what safeguards the more complex and paradoxical truth of the

age.

The truth of the age being that we cannot live with the truth of who we are and what we do,

that we need to lie to ourselves about it, because as I said earlier, we have this innate

need and necessity to believe in the moral loftiness of our civilization and of our own personal

behaviors and ambitions.

But Marlow's lie is the most disturbing of conclusions to this story, if only because nothing

is more disgusting to Marlow than a lie.

But you know I hate detest and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest

of us, but simply because it appalls me.

There is a tank of death, a flavor of mortality and lies, which is exactly what I hate and

detest in the world, what I want to forget.

It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.

Marlow is a man for whom irony is a rotten fruit that he is forced to bite into, for nothing

else offers itself to feed on at this extremity of knowledge.

Irony is the innermost truth of a civilization that knows how to lie to itself about itself

or how to bury under deceptive veils, a truth that would otherwise destroy it.

So Marlow succumbs before a fatality necessity, before the recognition of the decaying nature

of the civilization that enlisted Kurtz in its mission of conquest.

His lie is at once a renunciation as well as an impotent act of protest.

It bites into the rotten fruit, conspiring with the principle of decadence.

Yet it also revolts against mendacity and exposes it, at least within the economy of the

narrative for us readers, exposes it as the ongoing strategy by which the West lives with itself.

So the juxtapose relation between the jungles of Africa and civilized Europe or between

the kurtz and the intended or between the two poles of irony, between an external facade

and an inner intention.

This juxtapose relation is at once analogical and topographical.

The African jungles are literally remote from Europe, yet their wilderness provokes

the most intimate cultural confession when the Europeans set foot on that soil.

A confession about a failure in the power of devotion, a failure of the idea, a failure

in essence of European morality.

In Heart of Darkness for us, an Africa appear as the place and locus of this revelation.

What the jungles reveal is what remains concealed under the gloom that broods over the

metropolis of Europe, namely Western Nileism at the turn of the 20th century.

The Red's Heart of Darkness, both within and without, exposes Nileism not so much as the

savagery and greed that lie beneath the humane postures of colonialism, but as the absence

of a redemptive idea in the West's conquest of the Earth.

What I think is where Conrad reveals himself as essentially a moralist of the 19th century.

During his career as a seaman, he had witnessed the brutal scene of global conquest, the

world over, and he had written works like the Heart of Darkness at the threshold not only

of a new century, but also of a new epoch of planetary conquest which had not yet amassed

the unprecedented means of a totalized dominion over the Earth, but Conrad had a foreboding

that something very unearthly was at work here, and he was at a loss to how to account

for it in moral terms.

He was at a loss before the global magnitude of the phenomenon, and hence he was unable

to conceive of an idea at the back of it, perhaps because the kind of global planetary

conquest that would unleash its destructive forces in full during the 20th century is

something for which any idea is lacking or falling short of.

Certainly such an idea whether it's moral or spiritual is not forthcoming in Conrad's

entire work, and its absence is conspicuous above all in a story like Heart of Darkness.

That's why I'm tempted to conclude that Conrad remained not only a pessimist, but also

a nihilist with regard to the global future that was taking place or taking shape at that

moment in history.

He knew that the older ideas and faiths were inadequate superfluous and superannuated,

and that there was something unprecedented about the modern conquest, so unprecedented

in fact that it rendered any analogy between the ancient Romans and the modern Europeans

inadequate, but he did not have a response to what he saw and witnessed in his first-hand experience.

This sort of corrosive irony that consumes the end of Heart of Darkness was profoundly offensive

to Conrad.

Yet I think that he finally had no choice but to resign himself to it because the unearthing

of the earth on a planetary scale really gives a hollow resonance to all prior rhetoric

either of the cross or of traditional codes of morality, or devotion to efficiency, or the

of ocean to the idea, the value of work, the virtues of faith, self-sacrifice, duty, all

these positive moral virtues that Conrad exalts in many of his novels, all these have

a certain kind of hollow resonance when you think of the planetary scale of the global

assault, all private conceptions about the good and the honorable fall short of it as well.

So the nihilism of a work like the Heart of Darkness lies primarily in the failure of

Marlow's private code of morals to achieve a credible reference to the global future of

the new century.

And the final analysis, Marlow and Conrad really could conceive of morality only really

in terms of a private code of behavior that would then be projected on to and expanded at

the national levels.

And that private code of morals is a personal ethic of work and proper conduct.

But it's exposed and is purely local and historically circumscribed and downright provincial

origins in Africa.

So at the end of his journey Marlow finds himself in a hopeless position precisely because

he cannot see clearly through the dark with the lens of his own moral wisdom.

That's why his ultimate gesture of lying to Kurtz's intended can only ironize the irony

that veils the truth about his contemporary civilization.

Now, his ability to finally to ironize his age and its presumptions perhaps indicates

a higher wisdom than he possessed before the journey began, but even this higher wisdom cannot

overcome the irony that revolts it.

And what is the difference between our historical moment over a hundred years later and

Conrad's when he was writing the Heart of Darkness?

At the time that Conrad was writing, European Western civilization still had an irrepressible

need to, if not believe, that at least make believe that its history and its projects and

its enterprises were promoting the moral good.

And it became increasingly more difficult to maintain this public rhetoric and this public

illusion. I think that what has changed most dramatically in our time is that if one looks

at the two kind of invederate vices of the West, at least I believe there are two invederate

vices, namely greed and self-deception, one examines the history whereby the resources of self-deception

have very often served to promote the cause and interest of greed and greed has often enlisted

our native capacity for self-deception in order to carry on its work under vails of benevolent

appearance, that what has changed in the meantime in the intervening century is that the powers

of self-deception have fallen short of the work of concealment and the burial of the truth

of the unredeemed greed and self-interest that drives planetary conquest, namely the search

and appropriation of the world's resources at any cost. So that we find ourselves in a position

where rather than being able to lie to ourselves about what we're up to, we are finally

at a point where we acknowledge the fact that there has been this other side to the story

all along and we have become skeptical if not cynical about all attempts to cover over

that story. That's why when the resources of self-deception start falling short, we're

really left with two options. Either we become brutally honest about the profane, venal,

indeed sinful nature of the civilization that has brought us this far in the first place,

or we realize that if we cannot live with that truth of who we are, we have to change

who we are and perhaps find a way to provoke the emergence of a new redemptive idea by

which the future can start organizing itself and articulating itself. The thing about redemptive

ideas is that one cannot just will them into being. And certainly, I think that before

a redemptive idea is going to make its appearance among us. There will have to be a long

and perhaps even prolonged historical period of acknowledgement and perhaps even of repentance.

Perhaps repentance would be the beginning of the emergence of a redemptive idea. A

repentance that would involve a kind of genuine shame not only on the part of the West

and its sins of the past, that's very easy to beat up on ourselves in that regard and put

our predecessors in a tribunal and accuse them of their own guilt. But rather, it kind of

shame and repentance on behalf of the species itself, for example, in its relations with

the earth and other living things. Certainly, some kind of genuine behumbling and sense

of contrition that itself would be the first step in opening up the possibility of a new kind

of power of devotion that would have something redemptive in it. So this has been Robert

Harris and for the concluding our monologue of entitled opinions. I remind you that we'll

be back with you in the spring. Thank you for listening. Bye bye.

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