Heart of Darkness Essay
Civilization is a backwards way of going forwards as a society. It is, I believe, the source of the “darkness” as shown in Conrad’s story, Heart of Darkness. Without it, the men in the company would not have been in the company at all, and the people of the Congo would have been left alone from the taint that spread throughout the continent of Europe.
Without civilization, we would be simple people, as put by the harlequin in the book heart of darkness, in reference to the people of the Congo, they who had no sense of the sophisticated civilization of Europe. Life too would be simple. Civilization was made when the people of a society had leisure time, and had evolved from needing every second of the day to survive to now laying about, their daily chores and tasks done. Inevitably, as they seek activities to fill their newfound spare time, they turn towards bettering themselves, raising themselves above the other peoples. They who were “better”, as the people of the company in HOD consider themselves in relation to the blacks, now had leverage, they had something with which to coerce and manipulate others into doing what they had no love for. Alas, it did not stop at manipulating, but now that there is technology, something dreamed up by the intellects birthed by this civilization, there is an easier way to go about things. If you cannot make a person do such-and-such by giving them something of little-to-no value, there are guns. Voìla, no more risks.
In this book, there are two different types of “savages”. There are the savages of Europe, the men of the company, who are defined as savages purely through their actions: the way they treated the people of the Congo. They were liars, thieves, cheats, manipulators, greedy and selfish. They were men who came into the Congo speaking outwardly of “bringing the light [Christianity] to these mislead people” and inwardly only wanting to get rich fast by using the people of the Congo to suit their wants. They were unwilling to take any risks, instead forcing the blacks to take all of the risks. They spoke of others who were more violent than them as “ruining the company” but in reality wished that they had done it first. They made sure that they left the responsibility on someone else’s shoulder so as to move the blame before it came, as the Manager of the station did to Marlow on the steamboat, giving him the authority to move the boat, so that he later would not be blamed for not telling Marlow to go. These men saw themselves in best light possible, yet scorned all those whose backs were carrying the burden of the company and the ones actually putting in the effort. To sum up these men: they were hypocrites.
The second group of savages was simply the people of the Congo, fighting to survive and carry on their race and values on a day-to-day basis. They had a strict set of moral values, such as the rule to never harm your employer, as demonstrated by the group of cannibals on the steamboat, who although they had eaten nothing but some dead and rotten hippo meat on the whole journey and still did not eat the pilgrims or the Manager, simply because they were working for them. They may eat other people, and this is a main reason for the Europeans seeing them in a “savage” light, but they are eating them either for a food source, and to survive, not be malicious, or they eat them for ceremonial purposes, but that is usually within their own clan, and the person being served as lunch has already approved the menu. These so called savages had amazing restraint for being who they were portrayed as, and the significant thing separating the two different groups is civilization.
Naturally, when we have the time to cultivate a civilization within a society, we then have the spare time to undertake this “darkness” in us that needs to cheat people, be a hypocrite, to lie, etc... Sadly, is there any way to halt the process of our instilling this darkness within us, or does the answer lie dormant with the people of long ago, who saw a life much simpler than ours, today? I have oft said that technology is not advancing us forward, but backwards. Take Michael Crichton’s book, Jurassic Park, for example. Upon reading this book, I have decided that advances in technology, and ultimately our civilization, is not helping us as a people advance anywhere towards something worthy; it seems to move us towards our laziest years yet. And, as Crichton said in his book, a woman still takes a whole day to clean house, each day, just as she did a hundred years ago. So has it really helped? This civilization, this coveted element of our lives as American citizens, has integrated a darkness into our lives, and it seems inevitable that it shall continue to spread, covering, smothering, our existence, its taint clinging to us, and we suffer, from being a heart of darkness.
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