Joseph Conrad: Secular Faith in the Modern Age

In my early twenties—the early 2000s—I was at university studying literature and philosophy. As I progressed, I became increasingly disillusioned. I learned, sometimes the hard way, that the point of the university was not so much to generate and disseminate knowledge (and to champion the things that underpin this process, like reasoning, evidence and open discussion), but more to maintain a pseudo-intellectual world where people who have no special interest in the true and the good can build careers, and, in the worst cases, enjoy cruelty.

As the failings of the university became clearer, my work shifted into a meta-realm where, rather than trying to get at the true and the good myself, I sought to understand why things were as they were. I eventually learned that similar concerns occupy a fair chunk of the Western canon—amongst many others they are present in Plato, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Stendhal, Hugo, Tolstoy, Nietzsche and even the New Testament. However, Joseph Conrad was my first, and to this day, best ally.

Conrad’s writing, which started in the 1890s, signals the beginning of our secular age (yes, this can be debated). As John Marx puts it, Conrad’s work “announces that the modernist break has occurred”. But what, according to Conrad, is the nature of this new secular world? To help answer this, it is useful to consider one of Conrad’s almost contemporaries, Friedrich Nietzsche. If Conrad is the writer who inaugurates our secular age, Nietzsche is the philosopher.

Nietzsche’s declaration “God is dead” first appears in The Gay Science in 1882. For him, one consequence of God’s death is that humanity will be driven towards an existential void. We read things like, “Since Copernicus man seems to have stumbled onto an inclined plane—he is now rolling faster and faster away from the centre—whither? into nothingness? into the ‘penetrating feeling of his nothingness’?” However, in Conrad’s modern secular world people are not rolling into nothingness. Rather, whether or not they like it, or are even conscious of it, people are bound to their now-secular world, just as the most devout believer is bound to his or her God. The king is dead, long live the king.

Literary analysis is tricky—it’s often hard to know what an author is trying to say. However, Conrad was a letter writer too, and his letters clarify his worldview. The key letter was written to a Scottish radical, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, on December 20, 1897, not long before Conrad produced his most important works, Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900) and Nostromo (1904). In it Conrad says:

There is a,—let us say,—a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold!—it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider,—but it goes on knitting. You come and say: “This is all right: it’s only a question of the right kind of oil. Let us use this,—for instance,—celestial oil and the machine will embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold.” Will it? Alas, no! You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine … You can’t interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can’t even smash it … It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions,—and nothing matters. I’ll admit however that to look at the remorseless process is sometimes amusing.

The point is that Conrad conceives of society—the world—as something we are knitted into. This is a very different account from the cheery, liberal social contract, in which society is constituted by rational individuals giving up some freedoms—such as the freedom to kill or rob—in return for other freedoms—such as the freedom from being killed or robbed. There’s something to the ol’ social contract, but it’s not the full story. The tougher point Conrad makes is that not only are we all knitted into our world, the knitting machine has an implacable momentum that is insensitive to our aspirations (the “illusions”) and even our failings (“corruption”): it knits us out.

In Lord Jim the “knitting machine” appears as the “sovereign power” and “the spirit of the land”—Marlow the narrator speaks about both. These have nationalist overtones, and this is understandable, seeing as the nation is something to which people can belong; but ultimately for Conrad, the knitting machine is more ephemeral than the nation.

Conrad’s vision is sharpened in another letter to Cunninghame Grahame written on January 14, 1898, a few weeks after the previous one:

The machine is thinner than air and as evanescent as a flash of lightning. The attitude of cold unconcern is the only reasonable one. Of course reason is hateful,—but why? Because it demonstrates (to those who have the courage) that we, living, are out of life,—utterly out of it … In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement, for virtue, for knowledge and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances, as though one were anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a community of blind men.

First, we have the idea that you can barely detect the machine. Again, we could say that most of us are not aware of this thing to which we are bound. Second, reason—of which I am a fan—is hateful. Reason cannot hope to make things better, in the idealistic sense outlined in the previous letter; rather, it can only reveal how little control we have over our lives because we are knitted into the machine.

The crux of Conrad’s position is that our relationship with this knitting machine is existential. The best account of this appears in the novel Under Western Eyes (1911). Razumov, a university student, is wandering the snowy Petersburg streets deciding whether or not to betray a fellow student, Haldin, who has just told him of his part in the assassination of a corrupt government official. Razumov is struggling with whether he should show compassion for Haldin or be loyal to the state. He chooses the state, and in the following remarks by the novel’s narrator we find his reason for doing so:

Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.

In my arrogant opinion, no concept is more important than moral solitude. Our inability to solve many social problems or even know ourselves—which sometimes are the same thing—can be traced to our inability to face it. But it is not an easy concept to grasp, precisely because we so rarely experience it; though glimmers of it reveal themselves at various times, as when someone breaks a taboo by speaking the unspeakable.

The concept of moral solitude appears repeatedly in Conrad’s works; though the phrase itself is not used again. Early in Lord Jim Marlow speaks of stumbling against “the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct”. About it he says, “It is the hardest thing to stumble against; it is the thing that breeds yelling panics and good little quiet villainies; it’s the true shadow of calamity.” Later we read, “We exist only in so far as we hang together.” Another powerful account of moral solitude appears towards the end of the novel. After hearing about a man who had abandoned his partner—a woman—for his own shadowy devotion to the knitting machine, Marlow reflects on the “horror” of the woman’s story—she died weeping:

It [the woman’s story] had the power to drive me out of my conception of existence, out of that shelter each of us makes for himself to creep under in moments of danger, as a tortoise withdraws within its shell. For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive. But still it was only a moment: I went back into my shell directly. One must—don’t you know?—though I seemed to have lost all my words in the chaos of dark thoughts I had contemplated for a second or two beyond the pale. These came back, too, very soon, for words also belong to the sheltering conception of light and order which is our refuge.

It is interesting that words, which we can use to reason and thus reveal our bondage to the knitting machine (as Conrad himself does by writing), also protect us from moral solitude. We must be nimble with our thinking!

To finish this part of the discussion, I want to say a little more about the nature of our bondage to the knitting machine. One of the many horrors in Lord Jim is that Jim, the troubled young adventurer, abandons the daughter of the woman just mentioned (history repeats). About this, Marlow says:

She [Jewel, the daughter] had said he [Jim] had been driven away from her by a dream … And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and excessive devotion? And what is the pursuit of truth after all?

Another one of the many difficult propositions that Conrad leads us towards is that belonging and power are inseparable—we belong to the knitting machine by climbing the ranks within it. But darkest of all, for Conrad, the power we gain through the knitting machine—through our excessive devotion—is bound up with cruelty. Similar sentiments are present in Heart of Darkness. Marlow, who is also the primary narrator of this novel, reflecting on colonisation and conquest, says, “What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.” Cruelty. Sacrifice.

Let me draw it all together. We have the knitting machine. We are knitted into it by adhering to a fixed standard of conduct (ideas and actions); though rebellion too is knitted in. The knitting is inseparable from feeling that we are good. The knitting also involves pursuing power, where this power entails cruelty or sacrifice. And while reason can reveal the truth—the horror—of it all, this revelation drives us towards moral solitude, which is intolerable, so we retreat from our reason and paper over the abyss with words. Royal Roussel nails it when he says that Conrad’s novels are concerned with “the self’s alienation from the source of its own existence”.

Ultimately, Conrad helps bring into focus one of the most challenging aspects of the human condition: that we are often struggling with our fidelity to two different classes of good. The first class is the good that comes with being knitted in. The second includes things such as truth and human connection (friendship and love), which are, for Conrad, often sacrificed for the first.

While Conrad’s position is compelling, it’s a touch too black and white for my liking. Let’s return once more to Nietzsche and to one of his most important comments—I’ve heard Jordan Peterson discuss it. Nietzsche, despite his remarks about the death of God, is clearly aware of the problem of secular faith. He’s also aware of the challenge of being faithful to the likes of reason:

Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the “truth” one could still barely endure—or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.

While it is likely we are all subjects of Conrad’s evanescent knitting machine—it is human nature to belong—some have stronger wills than others: some can better endure moral solitude and thus get closer than others to the good and the true (the good and the true that exceed the knitting machine). Conrad is himself one such person, but so too are genuine leaders (Plato’s “philosopher kings”?), or even the people forgotten by history who see the corruption of the world and choose to live quieter lives where they focus on doing good in their immediate circle.

Second, some societies are better than others. The scientific method has helped many to rise above earlier dogmas. And more broadly, the liberal systems we have developed have allowed us to enjoy better lives by, amongst other things, championing merit, and going some way to removing cruelty from justice. (Though I also think that our liberal democracies are a mixed bag: it’s hard to see many people’s atomised lives as being healthy.) But the point remains that in better societies, people are less alienated from the source of their own existence: the ways they bind themselves to their society, including their work, relationships, and what they consume, contribute to their flourishing, not their degradation. Religion, at its best, achieves this; for example, through sanctifying the family.

Returning to my concerns about universities, using Conrad’s nomenclature, universities are very much of the knitting machine. They are places of secular faith, where weak-willed academics adhere to their fixed standards of conduct (their faux rebellions) to push back the spectre of moral solitude, climb the ranks and sometimes enjoy cruelty. Because of this there is nothing more egregious for many academics than reason. Indeed, it is the people who attempt to reason that are sacrificed to academics’ evanescent secular god.

It’s no surprise that universities have come to be dominated by postmodernism and identity politics. In postmodernism, there is, ultimately, no truth to be sought, and reality cannot be apprehended. The degradation of reasoning (and evidence and open discussion—the stuff of thinking) is axiomatic to postmodernism. Similarly in identity politics, truth is not got at using reasoning; rather, the extent of one’s access to truth is inversely proportional to one’s power: the more oppressed one is, the more truth one is able to apprehend. And notably, identity politics is a cruel worldview. It not only permits but encourages its adherents to hate people based on characteristics over which they have no control.

To conclude, Conrad reveals a foundational stratum of our humanity that so often is obscure to us. Namely, that regardless of how the world changes, we remain creatures of faith. And arguably, much of what we do can be thought of as indispensably reaffirming our faith. If we recognise this, then things such as work, what we consume and even sex appear in a very different light; especially if we also recognise that how we reaffirm our faith is often injurious to other parts of ourselves. When we are most wise, we attempt to build a knitting machine that minimises the injuriousness of how we reaffirm our faith. The key word is minimise—there are always trade-offs: the human organism is not infinitely mutable. And while sometimes we do need to look forward and modify the machine in new ways, at other times we need to look back and recognise that humans have been battling against the dark side of faith for ever, and that we smash what has gone before at our peril.

Jamie Q. Roberts teaches Politics and International Relations at Sydney University. With Caitlin Hamilton he is the author of Reading at University: How to Improve Your Focus and Be More Critical (2020), a book in Bloomsbury’s Study Skills series.