Jos. Conrad vs. "Progressives"

So long as Dreher continues to post good stuff, we'll continue to point to it.

Here he interviews Prof. Prior about her re-publication of some classics--and this interview concentrates on Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

Prof. Prior goes to the real insight of the novel:

...There are competing ideas about progress. The liberal narrative is that the human condition can improve—if only we have more education, more funding, more tolerance, more whatever. The fundamentalist narrative (which the Bible does not actually support) is that things are always getting worse, and that society is on a continuous decline. I think we can look at human history and see how we gain can ground in one area, (women can vote, own land, and go to college!) and decline in another (we kill unborn babies on a grand scale!). The human condition overall is constant. The particulars change, but it seems like for every step forward we take a step back.

Some of this false hope stems, perhaps, from the metaphor of the machine that has dominated our thinking since the Enlightenment. Machines are great—but human beings are not machines. The technological advances simply do not have parallels in human beings. Our failure to make that distinction has had many implications for how we think about education, especially higher education, and the humanities....

In the first red-highlight, Prior demolishes the Marxist (materialist) analysis of the human condition.  In the second one, she exposes Bill Gates' most significant flaw--the "machines" (or "systems") flaw.

The reality:  Original Sin.  But you won't find too much being said about that, even by Catholic Bishops.