The imagery of forests appears in David Brooks’ new column and Ralph Peters’ Weekly Standard article: in the former, the forest is metaphorical, part of the big, bad, disordered world, and in the latter he quite literally means forests as strongholds of the world of magic and local cults.  Interestingly, neither of them exactly suggests a St. Boniface-like approach to the forest-dwellers, since they may be aware of the sticky end that St. Boniface met.  Anyway, the “dark forests” fill the horizons of Brooks’ “jagged world”:

Now my mental image of the landscape of humanity is not made up of rolling hills. It’s filled with chasms, crevices, jagged cliffs and dark forests. The wildernesses between groups seem stark and perilous. 

I might make a suitably Balkan observation that wide chasms make good neighbours.  Contests between groups are never so intense as between those who barely differ from one another.  The vast and “perilous” wilds that separate cultures should be reassuring, in one sense, if for no other reason than that it should convince reasonable people to not try to cross that wilderness if they can possibly help it.

In Peters’ article, the real forests often represent the limits of expansionist religions and ideologies, as the peoples who dwell there prove less receptive to the new message.  It is perhaps not inopportune to recall that the great allies for good in The Lord of the Rings were the Ents, the guardians of the forest, which would make the proponents of the glaring invasion of progress something rather more like Saruman and the Orcs.  From this perspective, it is not the ancient copses and woodlands that are filled with darkness, but instead represent one of the last bulwaks against the shadow. 

This is not to overly romanticise or idealise forest tribes as stand-ins for the Ents or the Elves, which would be a bit much.  But it should cause us to ponder what to do with the knowledge that there are places and peoples in this world who have never really completely yielded to any foreign idea and the additional knowledge that this resistance exists in every people in the world to some degree.  Does this knowledge not tell us to leave well enough alone and generally mind our own business?  What is the compulsion, in Brooks’ case, to push on with the democracy project?  What is the rationale?  That democracy and “democratic habits” will smooth out the rough edges of the “jagged world”?  This is certifiable madness.  In the last two centuries since the advent of the beginnings of modern democracy, would any conclude that the world has become significantly less “jagged” in terms of cultural differences?  I know, I know, we’re supposed to believe that the world is flat and every man shall have his Lexus or some such thing, but back in the real world does anyone honestly believe that giving political power to the masses who have strong, powerful tribal and religious around the world will make the world more “smooth”?  It will undoubtedly make it more interesting and it will definitely make a mockery of people spouting off about the “end of history” or the “direction of history,” so at least there’s that small consolation, but it will also make the coming century as unstable as the last, and possibly more so.  Whether this will result in terrible conflagrations is difficult to say, since the same process that is heightening these loyalties is also breaking down the states that organise the massive violence of conventional warfare.  But that does not mean that there will be less conflict.  If anything, there will be much more of it on a small scale around the world as each tribe and branch of a tribe fights for its share of the pot.  We pretend that we here in America are immune to this at our own peril, as the world of tribes will be upon us before we know it.  This is not necessarily an entirely undesirable development to the extent that it will break us out of tepid and tiresome universalist sermons about “ideological” and “proposition” nations, but it will mean some reordering in everyone’s way of life as all those things that we have officially deemed irrelevant come back with a vengeance.