IAN WATT
111
During the eighties and nineties the main ideologies that sup–
ported this kind of belief were social Darwinism and Imperialism,
whose doctrines were closely related. Social Darwinism, of which the
most famous exponent was Herbert Spencer, supported the competitive
economic order at home, and Utilitarian theory in general, on the
ground~
that-to use his phrase in
First Principles
(l862)-the "sur–
vival of the fittest" was a law of nature, and led to human progress.
The same kind of thinking provided an ideology for colonial
expansion. Merely by occupying or controlling most of the globe, it
was assumed, the European nations had demonstrated that they were
the fittest
to
survive; and the accelerating exportation of their various
economic, political and religious institutions was therefore a necessary
evolutionary step towards a higher form of human organization in the
rest of the world.
It
was also widely thought-by Spencer, for
example-that the dominance of the white races was itself the result of
biological superiority, and this racial doctrine became particularly
useful in enlisting popular political support for the imperialist adven–
tures of the end of the nineteenth century. As Victor Kiernan has
written, the "mystique of race was Democracy's vulgarization of an
older mystique of class."
Conrad's own attitude to colonialism was complicated; but he had
been lucky, from a literary point of view, in finding an ideologically
perfect and patriotically unembarrassing example of the discrepancies
between colonial pretence and reality. It was a pure case: first, because
the Congo Free State was in theory international, and thus did not raise
the question of national loyalty; second, because unlike most other
colonies the Congo Free State was a conscious political creation; and
third, because the whole world had listened to public professions of
exalted educational, moral and religious purposes from its founders,
and then been forced to discover that these verbal pretences masked
what Conrad later described as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever
disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical explora–
tion."
During the two decades between Conrad's arrival in England in
1878 and the writing of
Heart of Darkness,
many leaders of thought
were becoming convinced that the Victorian world order was collap–
sing.
Heart of Darkness
is an expression of that conviction; and its
widely-shared rejection of earlier optimistic assumptions about pro–
gress is clearly echoed both in the literature and the evolutionary theory
of the period.
A
great many novels of the nineties have a note of apocalyptic
gloom. Grant Allen's 1895 novel,
The British Barbarians,
for instance,
