Facing Up to Our Times

In a lecture that may be found on YouTube under the title Chris Hedges on Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges details the massive corruption and social dysfunction that corporations have introduced into human society at the end of which he expresses no hope that mankind will avoid the abyss that it has created for itself.

There is, in Chris' judgment, a possible way to deal with our situation and that is to incorporate the poor of the planet into the wealth of the planet. This would avoid a class of millions of desperately poor people whose implacable resentment is the seed bed for the totalitarianism that will overtake us otherwise. Lest it be thought that Hedges is placing too much importance on the significance of the poor I suggest reading Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth which can provide some insight into the dimensions of massive poverty in a world of ostentatious wealth. Also, as Mike Davis in his Planet of the Slums notes, the U.S. Military is refocusing its combat training on the slums, the environment from which it expects the major conflicts of the future to emerge.

However, Chris says, this necessary redistribution of wealth will never happen in a world dominated by coporate capitalism. In consequence of this corporate power and intransigence Chris, being the tenaciously honest person he is, faces up to the despair his conclusion leaves him with. His recourse is to individual acts of resistance, justice and compassion that, while not changing the course of the vicious folly we face, will confirm the best that is in us. He closed the lecture with the last lines of W. H. Auden's poem September 1, 1939, written as Auden saw with despair the horrible implications of the German invasion of Poland, which touched off World War II.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Obviously Chris has asked himself and us, how will we live our lives in these times of crushing irrelevance and denial. It is a question that, in my judgment, every morally engaged person must ask themselves. 

Nevil Shute ends his novel On the Beach, which depicts the end of humanity as the radioactive fallout from a massive nuclear exchange in Europe circles the world by the prevailing winds, by portraying the mass of mankind either turning to religion or to a final great party as they anticipate their end.

In contrast, Chris Hedges writes for those relatively few who face the moral consequences of the demise of our species.

I dealt with this issue some time ago when I could see no way out for our species that has given me everything I value. Unfortunately,­ mankind's intelligence has been dominated by its primordial emotions throughout evolution. What is most unique to our species has been held hostage to its much earlier biological self. When faced with despair as to the fate of our species I find that “affirming flame” in mankind's unique ability to think and thereby understand. In that quest to understand, and perhaps help avoid the pitfalls of fear-driven passion, may there be those found in that pursuit should our species fail.

Bob Newhard