Political Immorality and Personal Immorality

“Power doesn’t corrupt. Power attracts the already corrupt.”

I actually think you’ve one-upped Lord Acton.

I’ve long thought Acton was giving himself, others, an out with that frame. Where the bread is buttered the checks are usually, one way or another balanced…in the mails. Ha.

Think too that naive “idealists” (quote locked since such a fundamental misreading of the frame cannot be aligned with anything close to idealism), like Ron Paul (if I am not just misreading him benefit of doubt) bought the line, the hook – & sunk. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington…ever seen it?

Redemption…. I don’t *believe.* Or at the least “strenuously” minimize belief (not really, those muscles have been worked & developed for decades now…tho not overtly & consciously & recognized as such, early on, as a goal to pursue – just another side effect of process) .

I am in favor (came that way, from the factory) of doing the work, & of the work being fun, enjoyable, pleasurable, curiosity itch-scratching. Then doing it a little better on the next lap. Then a little better still.

Or at least being motivated to try to do it a little better – every lap does not see improvement, some laps are worse than the previous one, some laps you crash. Then you get back on the bike (if it, &\or you, didn’t get broken, in which case, time to pit).

It’s craft, art, & it is worked for its own sake, not for the results, which are side-effect of that process…checkered flags are good (like being understood, Wip), but not the point.

Sidelines observers reactions – appreciation, opprobrium, whatever – has nada to do with it, either. Better by far to buy yourself than to sell it to others.

Started reading John Gray’s “The Silence of Animals – On Progress & Other Modern Myths” last night. Familiar stuff, written a different way, using different allusions, references – a better, improved, lap (& notice the date of Conrad’s recognition. Not new, nor is the longing for ‘long ago’ Pottersville scenes new.) :

“Joseph Conrad wrote ‘An Outpost of Progress’ in 1896, & it is a story at least as ferocious and disabused as his later & better-known novella *Heart of Darkness.* Conrad describes how Kayerts ‘sat by the corpse [of Carlier] thinking; thinking very actively, thinking very new thoughts. His old thoughts, convictions, likes & dislikes, things he respected & things he abhorred, appeared in their true light at last! Appeared contemptible & childish, false & ridiculous. He reveled in his new wisdom while he sat by the man he had killed.’ But not all of Kayerts’s old convictions have vanished, & what he still believes in leads him to his death. ‘Progress was calling Kayerts from the river. Progress & civilization & all the virtues. Society was calling to its accomplished child to come to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be judged, to be condemned; it called him to return from that rubbish heap from which he had wandered away, so that justice could be done.’

In setting his tale in the Congo, where he had observed the effects of Belgian imperialism at first hand when he visited the country in 1890 to take command of a river steamer, Conrad was making use of a change he had himself undergone. Arriving with the conviction that he was a civilized human being, he realized what in fact he had been: ‘Before the Congo, I was just a mere animal.’ The animal to which Conrad refers was European humanity, which caused the deaths of millions of human beings in the Congo.

The idea that imperialism could be a force for human advance has long since fallen into disrepute. But the faith that was once attached to empire has not been renounced. Instead it has spread everywhere. Even those who nominally follow more traditional creeds rely on a belief in the future for their mental composure. History may be a succession of absurdities, tragedies & crimes; but – everyone insists – the future can still be better than anything in the past. To give up this hope would induce a state of despair like that which had unhinged Kayerts.

Among the many benefits of the faith in progress the most important may be that it prevents too much self-knowledge. When Kayerts & his companion ventured into the Congo the aliens they met were not the indigenous inhabitants but themselves.

‘They lived like blind men in a large room1, aware only of what came in contact with them (& of that only imperfectly), but unable to see the general aspect of things. The river, the forest, all the great land throbbing with life, were like a great emptiness. Things appeared & disappeared before their eyes in an unconnected & aimless kind of way. The river flowed though a void. Out of that void, at times, came canoes, and men with spears in their hands would suddenly crowd the yard of the station.’

They cannot endure the silence2 into which they have come: ‘stretching away in all directions, surrounding the insignificant cleared spot of the trading post, immense forests, hiding fateful complications of fantastic life, lay in the eloquent silence of mute greatness.’ The sense of the progression of time, which they had brought with them, begins to fall away. As Conrad writes towards the end of the story, ‘Those fellows, having engaged themselves to the Company for six months (without having any idea of a month in particular & only a very faint notion of time in general), had been serving the cause of progress for upwards of two years.’3 Removed from their habits, Kayerts & Carlier lose the abilities that are needed to go on living. ‘Society, not from any tenderness, but because of its strange needs, had taken care of these two men, forbidding them all independent thought, all initiative, all departure from routine; & forbidding it under pain of death. They could live only on condition of being machines.’

The machine-like condition of modern humans may seem a limitation. In fact it is a condition of their survival. Kayerts & Carlier were able to function as individuals only because they had been shaped by society down to their innermost being. They were:

‘two perfectly insignificant & incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities & their audacities, are only their expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions & principles; every great & 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 & it morals, in the power of the police & of its opinion.’

When they stepped outside of their normal surroundings, the two men were powerless to act. More than that: they ceased to exist.

For those who live inside a myth, it seems a self-evident fact. Human progress is a fact of this kind. If you accept it you have a place in the grand march of humanity. Humankind is, of course, not marching anywhere. ‘Humanity’ is a fiction composed from billions of individuals for each of whom life is singular & final. But the myth of progress is extremely potent. When it loses its power those who have lived by it are – as Conrad put it, describing Kayerts & Carlier – ‘like those lifelong prisoners who, liberated after many years, do not know what use to make of their freedoms.’4 When faith in the future is taken from them, so is the image they have of themselves. If they then opt for death, it is because without that faith they can no longer make sense of living.

When Kayerts decides to end his life he does it by hanging himself on a cross. ‘Kayerts stood still. He looked upwards; the fog roled low over his head.He looked around like man who has lost his way; & he saw a dark smudge, a cross-shaped stain, upon the shifting purity of the mist. As he began to stumble towards it, the station bell rang5 in a tumultuous peal its answer to the impatient clamour of the steamer.’ Just as the steamer is arriving – showing that civilization is still intact – Kayerts reaches the cross, where he finds redemption in death.

What has the cross to do with progress? Conrad tells us that it had been put up by the Director of the Great Trading Company to mark the grave of the first of his agents, formerly an unsuccessful painter6, who ‘had planned & had watched the construction of this outpost of progress.’ The cross was ‘much out of the perpendicular’, causing Carlier to squint whenever he passed it, so one day he replants it upright. Wanting to make sure that it is solid, he applies his weight to it: ‘I suspended myself with both hands to the cross-piece. Not a move. Oh, I did that properly.’ It is on this tall, sturdy structure, which appears to him as a dark, smudged stain in the mist, that Kayerts ends his life.

In the story that the modern world repeats to itself, the belief in progress is at odds with religion. In the dark ages of faith there was no hope of any fundamental change in human life. With the arrival of modern science, a vista of improvement opened up. Increasing knowledge allowed humans to take control of their destiny. From being lost in the shadows7, they could step out into the light.

In fact, the idea of progress is not at odds with religion in the way this modern fairy tale suggests. Faith in progress is a late survival of early Christianity, originating in the message of Jesus, a dissident Jewish prophet who announced the end of time. For the ancient Egyptians as for the ancient Greeks, there was nothing new under the sun. Human history belongs in the cycles of the natural world. The same is true in Hinduism & Buddhism, Daoism & Shinto, & the older parts of the Hebrew bible. By creating the expectation of a radical alteration in human affairs, Christianity – the religion that St. Paul invented from Jesus’ life & sayings – founded the modern world.

In practice human beings continued to live much as they had always done. As Wallace Stevens wrote:

She hears, upon the water without sound,
A voice that cries, ‘The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering,
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.’
We live in an old chaos of the sun.

It was not long before a literal expectation of the End was turned into a metaphor for a spiritual transformation. Yet a change had taken place in what was hoped of the future. Many transmutations were needed before the Christian story could renew itself as the myth of progress. But from being a succession of cycles like the seasons, history came to be seen as a story of redemption & salvation, & in modern times salvation became identified with the increase of knowledge & power – the myth that took Kayerts & Carlier to the Congo.

When Conrad used his experiences of the Congo in *Heart of Darkness (1899), he was not telling a story of barbarism in faraway places. The narrator tells the tale on a yacht moored in the Thames estuary: barbarism is not a primitive form of life, Conrad is intimating, but a pathological development of civilization8. The same thought recurs in *The Secret Agent* (1907), Conrad’s novel of terrorism & conspiracy, which is set in London. The anarchist Professor, who travels everywhere with a bomb in his coat that he intends to detonate if arrested, wants to believe that humanity has been corrupted by government, an essentially criminal institution. But, as Conrad understood, it is not only government that is tainted by criminality. All human institutions – families & churches, police forces & anarchists – are stained by crime9. Explaining human nastiness by reference to corrupt institutions leaves a question: why are humans so attached to corruption? Clearly, the answer is in the human animal itself.

Conrad shows the Professor struggling with this truth: ‘He was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an immense multitude; but all around him, on & on, even to the limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind & orderly & absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror too, perhaps.’

The Professor continues to dream of a future in which humans will be regenerated. But what he truly loves is destruction10: ‘the incorruptible Professor walked, averting his eyes from the odious multitude. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin & destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable – & terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness & despair to the regeneration of the world.’ If Kayerts hanged himself because he no longer believed in progress, the Professor is ready to kill & die in order to show that he still has faith in the future.

The myth of progress casts a glimmer of meaning into the lives of those who accept it. Kayerts, Carlier & many like them did nothing that could be described as significant11. But their faith in progress allowed their petty schemes to seem part of a grand design, while their miserable deaths achieved a kind of exemplary futility their lives had not possessed.”

1 Those blind wizzers of hindustan & the large elephant.

2 “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. ” ― Blaise Pascal

3

4 Brooks was here. So was Red. ~ carved into the ceiling beam, “Shawshank Redemption”

5 Asking for whom it tolls is a wasted question…an attempted evasion.

6 Hitleresque

7 Allegory of the cave

8 Rousseauesque

9 Sympathy for the Devil ~ Rolling Stones

10 Sounds like some locals. But not just local yokels. Everywhere….

11 The “we did it” – civilized white westerners shtick…us uber, ya’ll unter…which bestows special privileges & dispensations upon us•erers.

I don’t like her but I’d be damned if I advocated for her removal. I don’t like silencing people. I don’t see TBP as a blog that shuts people out. There are plenty here that can take turns in a cage match with her. I’m sure sure there are people who wouldn’t mind silencing the Jew Question. I’ll just ignore her until she can find a way to respond to the things people are actually saying to her. She seems blind to anyone’s help or response.

I do think it’s a shame because I still think she could find this a great place to be. All anyone is kind of demanding is that she stop promoting her blog. I think. That’s all I want her to stop doing.