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Promising for the future is an endeavor set for at least unqualified disappointments. The factors involved in the dynamics of reality cannot be totally controlled, oftentimes have their own lives or evolutionary stages to follow, to conform to someone’s idea of how things should be. The idea of ‘should be’ is a visionary’s dream and a realist’s joke.
The promise of imperialism in Conrad’s time and perspective as J. Hillis Miller understood it can either be a contrived promise from the imperialist power to deceive the dominated people into a trustful complacency of something ‘better’ coming in the future or a mistakenly interpreted promise of something when in truth there was no promise made at all. The seemingly prosperous and idealist offerings of philanthropy, like Kurtz’s (Miller 13), had a way of reinforcing a mask of an illusionary promise created to keep people in a state, or more accurately a taste, of euphoria while its national resources were continually ravaged and siphoned by an imperialist economy. The promise also attempted to keep a relative peace in the colonies, intending to prevent an arm-defined struggle that will disrupt the imperialist agenda always afraid that a sprout of the ideals of independence would eventually break the colonial grounds. Conrad (24) recognized these aspects of the imperialist intent and communicated it so.
The Marxist messianic promise of a new world embraced in a welfare state and won by militant struggle, which has bases in human history that “shook the Earth, dethroned kings, sent empires packing, and forced the construction of welfare states” (Nilsen and Cox 81), had taken advantage over the fact that the present order then in not written in stone. It, however, failed to realize that the new order of socialist ideology and of welfare states, the new present order, too is as uncarved in stone as the previous older was not. In effect, the promises that classical Marxism made were also subject to the factors of its own contexts and in the world’s, which are abundant of factors that even militancy cannot effectively suppress or subdue under a socialist government, an unrecognized but really a new form of imperialist governance and global motivation. The excursions of Soviet Russia, for instance, to subdue minor neighboring states were ones such imperialist expansionism, a purveyor of promises that the old order was through and the new one will persist into the future, an erroneous interpretation of reality its proponents rightly understood before. Apparently, the darkness of Conrad’s ‘it’ continued to hover through the centuries of continuing changes from old orders to the new, which continued to unfold as the new has gone old becoming itself vulnerable to the promises of still newer worlds.
Before Nazism, Germany had its own brand of imperialism, which brought down the First World War, which result into the Treaty of Versailles, penalizing Germany with its conquered French territories ceded back to France (Eggert 6). The War, however, brought depression and inflation into Germany, which was then managed with shameful inefficiency. The rise of Nazism drew strength from these painful national realities, promising to correct the dire political and economic situation of the time. That promise of another new world galvanized together the German ‘race’. That promise of another new world brought Germany into imperialist excursions into Poland and neighboring countries, leaving dead bodies along the way. Once again an entire nation were lulled into the dream of a new and better world of racial supremacy, ending up raising their hands as a nation to take the life of others’ in another.
Gordon Wood, in his book Revolutionary Characters (Penguin Press), contended that the eventual displacement of the revolutionary politicians of ideas, the generation of revolutionary leaders in the newly formed United States of America or the uncommon men of the colonies, resulted from the rise of the common man (Kakutani n. p.). Without intending to do so, they were not merely victims of the new circumstances, but the progenitors themselves of the new circumstances, which eventually destroyed the generation of greatness. In effect, unconsciously they willingly destroyed the conditions of their greatness. What they unleashed were new values – democracy, egalitarianism, paternalism, capitalism, etc. – which defies their elitist brand of leadership. In a sense, they have promised the new American citizens a New World, which became the undoing of the Old World where their generation belonged, replacing their generation with a new one. It was a promise that changed everything beyond their conception of that change; in fact, beyond their wildest expectations.
The impact of the rise of the common men did not escape the notice of political thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the common men, now referred to as the “masses”, became the favorite focus of socialists, democratic liberals and conservatives perceived the ‘masses’ as “unstable, impulsive, credulous, and irrational” (Baehr 12), which made them a threat to their political power. Arendt believed that the lack of political, municipal, or professional affiliations destined them to act as an enormous force that can bring down on all political institutions. In a sense, the “masses” created for themselves a new condition, which separated them from democratic politics and set them up to be transform into a totalitarian assembly or movement of the common men and women, which had the numerical power to colonize the elected parliament without the benefit of democratic elections other than the seize of power by sheer force of overwhelming numbers. Their move towards totalitarianism reflects a common desire for something new or different in government, both as a consequence of not receiving the fulfillment of democratic promise and a precursor of a common perception of something new that they believe can bring about with their totalitarian ideology and actions.
Heda Margolius Kovaly’s memoir, Under a Cruel Star, however, described the horror perpetuated by totalitarian power, another unfulfilled promise of the frustrated common men (the “masses”) who initially sought to correct their marginalization in a society of politic (Brown n. p.). The totalitarian regime that she encountered brought unimaginable horrors to the lives of the Jews in Europe perpetuated by Nazis in their concentration camps. In a sense, the cycle of promise and unfulfillment recreated itself in a different form with different promises and different disillusionments of unfulfilled promises. Cycles of continuing cycles swirled around centuries of human history in the United States and abroad, offering more promises and not realizing that it was historically beyond their power to fulfill those promises.
Jared Diamond (Esty n. p.) pinpointed isolationism as a core value that work well for Americans many centuries but no longer. He described it as a sense of being “protected from the rest of the world” or of being “fortunate to live in a land of plenty, of abundant resources.” This perception of the American reality (and he extended it ‘partly’ to the rest of the world) had become outdated and no longer true. He compared it to the starvation of the Norsemen in Greenland despite the bounty of fishes in the sea simply they revolt to the idea of fishing. He also extended the idea to the inherent desire of the people in the Third World countries to pursue the standard of living of the First World. He believed that for China, a Third World nation, to live the high-energy consuming lifestyle of the First World would mean using energy resources (i.e. oil) as high as the consumption of the Americans, which is 10 times more the ‘current’ consumption level of the Chinese. This scenario will increase the global consumption of oil by 106 percent, which the world’s natural resources cannot sustain after 15 years. His point centered on the clear failure of the United States to see the lessons of history, of insisting to behave in a naturally wastefully, which although worked in centuries, no longer work today in the same way that the Norsemen failed during their own time in the past.
One point that made Diamond’s discourse hopeful was his belief that the mistakes in history, or at least in the history of the Norsemen, were not inevitable (Esty n. p.). It is so because the Inuit (i.e., Eskimo) tribe, located not far from the Norsemen, refused to follow the actions of the Norsemen, or, in the case of the United States, the actions of the Germans who used only around half of the oil consumption of the United States as still the latter refused to learn the lessons of history. Another example that Diamond cites was the case of the golf courses and gardens in the virtual desert area of California where water availability is of perpetual problem. However, despite the obvious water problems, some people are creating golf courses and gardens wasting such a highly valuable commodity as water. And, by not learning so, a person is setting up herself to die just what happened to the Norse civilization. Diamond referred to the new value as “living in a more sustainable way.”
Equilibrium-based theories believes that a given set of conditions are expected to produce a given outcome (Philips 245). Thus, it is understandable that a one-to-one relationship between changes or no changes can lead to specific responses or outcomes. In this regard, by refusing to learn from another, the Norsemen has naturally set themselves along a path that leads inevitably to their death and their civilization’s demise, not because the outcomes was strictly inevitable but because the choices they made created a condition or conditions, which leads to only one outcome: death (i.e. their death and their civilization’s death). By living in a non-sustainable manner, the people in California who were facing water problems had set into motion a cause-and-effect reaction from the conditions they created by their choice. Thus, their choice to use the scare resource of water in watering their golf courses and gardens, and the consequent waste of valuable water that could have been used for better purposes (e.g. drinking, washing dishes, taking a bath, etc.), had set them up towards an inevitable direction of more severe scarcity of water as their rivers become more salinized and intruded by agricultural wastes products.
In a sense, as Diamond appeared to allude to, isolationism is the refusal of some group of people (e.g. Americans) to learn survival lessons from others because its outcomes are thought of as not inevitable. Moreover, this value can be changed if the American people are willing to do so. On the question on whether or not the Americans can change its core value, the answer is definitely a ‘Yes!’ However, since core values have often turned into a reflexively habitual way of behaving, the more meaningful question to ask is whether the Americans are willing to do it. There is some truths on the expected difficulty of barriers standing before a person’s or, in this case, a people’s way when they go against the current of their contemporary values. It will like trying something new with no certainty as to the outcome, which oftentimes dissuades people to either refuse to act or postpone acting until the conditions created forced them to confront the resulting outcomes with no other recourse.
Moreover, this notion of do-ability is not rooted at philosophical imaginings or theoretical discourses but is already a fact of life. For instance, Germany, which has the standard of living close to the United States, supports it with half the oil consumption that the United States uses. All people around the world and the Americans can emulate the German creative use of oil as an energy source. In a sense, it is doable if something is positively done about it. However, it is also as undoable as not doing what needs to be done beneficially.
Furthermore, in terms of the observed pursuit of the Third World people to live a First World standard of living, it is always bound to fail, unlike Miller’s concept of Ethiopian promises, because the natural resources of the planet cannot sustain the rate and extent of oil extraction when serving two largest world ‘consumers’ of oil. Somehow, some people may have to sacrifice their own personal consumption (i.e., choosing to live a less, or even much less, standard of living), so that others, like the United States, may continue to consume more than other nations or people can. In a kind of consequential balance, the First World high living essentially takes away from the Third World’s moderate living, indirectly forcing them to live a low standard of living that the planet may be preserved from a crucial natural resource disaster. In tragedy is that the Third World people prefers to care for the planet’s natural resources and supported that claim by self-sacrifice, without which everyone in the planet can end up destroying itself slowly but inevitably.
Works Cited
Baehr, Peter. “The ‘Masses’ in Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism.” The Good Society
2007, 16 (2): 12-18. Print.
Brown, Emma. “Heda Kovaly Dies; Czech Wrote Movingly of Persecution by Nazis and
Communists.” The Washington Post 12 Dec. 2010. Web. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/12/AR2010121203439.html>
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. [EBook].1898. PDF file.
Eggert, Kelsey. “An Unexpected Pair: The Nazis and the Environment.” Senior Capstone Theses
29 Apr. 2013, Paper 9: 1-31. PDF file.
Esty, A. “An interview with Jared Diamond.” American Scientist. Web. 7 May 2016.
<http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/jared-diamond.>
Kakutani, Michiko. “What the Founding Fathers Had That We Haven’t.” The New York Times
27 Jun. 2006. Web. <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/books/27kaku.html?_r=0>
Miller, J. Hillis. [Lecture]. Aarhus University, 1998. PDF file.
Nilsen, Alf Gunvald and Laurence Cox. “What Would a Marxist Theory of Social Movements
Look Life?” (63-82). In: Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky, and Alf Gunvald Nilsen (Eds.), Marxism and Social Movements. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Print.
Phillips, J.D. “Evolutionary Geomorphology: Thresholds and Nonlinearity in Landform
Response to Environmental Change” (244-269). In: Summer Banks (Ed.), Developmental Geography. Oakville, ON: Apple Academic Press, 2010. Print.
