Cultures that endure carve out a protected space for those who
question and challenge national myths. Artists, writers, poets,
activists, journalists, philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors,
directors and renegades must be tolerated if a culture is to be pulled
back from disaster. Members of this intellectual and artistic class, who
are usually not welcome in the stultifying halls of academia where
mediocrity is triumphant, serve as prophets. They are dismissed, or
labeled by the power elites as subversive, because they do not embrace
collective self-worship. They force us to confront unexamined
assumptions, ones that, if not challenged, lead to destruction. They
expose the ruling elites as hollow and corrupt. They articulate the
senselessness of a system built on the ideology of endless growth,
ceaseless exploitation and constant expansion. They warn us about the
poison of careerism and the futility of the search for happiness in the
accumulation of wealth. They make us face ourselves, from the bitter
reality of slavery and Jim Crow to the genocidal slaughter of Native
Americans to the repression of working-class movements to the atrocities
carried out in imperial wars to the assault on the ecosystem. They make
us unsure of our virtue. They challenge the easy clichés we use to
describe the nation—the land of the free, the greatest country on earth,
the beacon of liberty—to expose our darkness, crimes and ignorance.
They offer the possibility of a life of meaning and the capacity for
transformation.
Human
societies see what they want to see. They create national myths of
identity out of a composite of historical events and fantasy. They
ignore unpleasant facts that intrude on self-glorification. They trust
naively in the notion of linear progress and in assured national
dominance. This is what nationalism is about—lies. And if a culture
loses its ability for thought and expression, if it effectively silences
dissident voices, if it retreats into what Sigmund Freud called “screen
memories,” those reassuring mixtures of fact and fiction, it dies. It
surrenders its internal mechanism for puncturing self-delusion. It makes
war on beauty and truth. It abolishes the sacred. It turns education
into vocational training. It leaves us blind. And this is what has
occurred. We are lost at sea in a great tempest. We do not know where we
are. We do not know where we are going. And we do not know what is
about to happen to us.
The psychoanalyst
John Steiner
calls this phenomenon “turning a blind eye.” He notes that often we
have access to adequate knowledge but because it is unpleasant and
disconcerting we choose unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, to
ignore it. He uses the Oedipus story to make his point. He argued that
Oedipus, Jocasta, Creon and the “blind” Tiresias grasped the truth, that
Oedipus had killed his father and married his mother as prophesized,
but they colluded to ignore it. We too, Steiner wrote, turn a blind eye
to the dangers that confront us, despite the plethora of evidence that
if we do not radically reconfigure our relationships to each other and
the natural world, catastrophe is assured. Steiner describes a
psychological truth that is deeply frightening.
I saw this collective capacity for self-delusion among the urban
elites in Sarajevo and later Pristina during the wars in Bosnia and
Kosovo. These educated elites steadfastly refused to believe that war
was possible although acts of violence by competing armed bands had
already begun to tear at the social fabric. At night you could hear
gunfire. But they were the last to “know.” And we are equally
self-deluded. The physical evidence of national decay—the crumbling
infrastructures, the abandoned factories and other workplaces, the rows
of gutted warehouses, the closure of libraries, schools, fire stations
and post offices—that we physically
see, is, in fact, unseen. The
rapid and terrifying deterioration of the ecosystem, evidenced in
soaring temperatures, droughts, floods, crop destruction, freak storms,
melting ice caps and rising sea levels, are met blankly with Steiner’s
“blind eye.”
Oedipus, at the end of Sophocles’ play, cuts out his eyes and with
his daughter Antigone as a guide wanders the countryside. Once king, he
becomes a stranger in a strange country. He dies, in Antigone’s words,
“in a foreign land, but one he yearned for.”
William Shakespeare in “King Lear” plays on the same theme of sight
and sightlessness. Those with eyes in “King Lear” are unable to see.
Gloucester, whose eyes are gouged out, finds in his blindness a revealed
truth. “I have no way, and therefore want no eyes,” Gloucester says
after he is blinded. “I stumbled when I saw.” When Lear banishes his
only loyal daughter, Cordelia, whom he accuses of not loving him enough,
he shouts: “Out of my sight!” To which Kent replies:
See better, Lear, and let me still remain
The true blank of thine eye.
The story of Lear, like the story of Oedipus, is about the attainment
of this inner vision. It is about morality and intellect that are
blinded by empiricism and sight. It is about understanding that the
human imagination is, as William Blake saw, our manifestation of
Eternity. “Love without imagination is eternal death.”
The Shakespearean scholar
Harold Goddard
wrote: “The imagination is not a faculty for the creation of illusion;
it is the faculty by which alone man apprehends reality. The ‘illusion’
turns out to be truth.” “Let faith oust fact,” Starbuck says in
“Moby-Dick.”
“It is only our absurd ‘scientific’ prejudice that reality must be
physical and rational that blinds us to the truth,” Goddard warned.
There are, as Shakespeare wrote, “things invisible to mortal sight.” But
these things are not vocational or factual or empirical. They are not
found in national myths of glory and power. They are not attained by
force. They do not come through cognition or logical reasoning. They are
intangible. They are the realities of beauty, grief, love, the search
for meaning, the struggle to face our own mortality and the ability to
face truth. And cultures that disregard these forces of imagination
commit suicide. They cannot see.
“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,” Shakespeare wrote,
“Whose action is no stronger than a flower?” Human imagination, the
capacity to have vision, to build a life of meaning rather than
utilitarianism, is as delicate as a flower. And if it is crushed, if a
Shakespeare or a Sophocles is no longer deemed useful in the empirical
world of business, careerism and corporate power, if universities think a
Milton Friedman or a
Friedrich Hayek
is more important to its students than a Virginia Woolf or an Anton
Chekhov, then we become barbarians. We assure our own extinction.
Students who are denied the wisdom of the great oracles of human
civilization—visionaries who urge us not to worship ourselves, not to
kneel before the base human emotion of greed—cannot be educated. They
cannot think.
To think, we must, as Epicurus understood, “live in hiding.” We must
build walls to keep out the cant and noise of the crowd. We must retreat
into a print-based culture where ideas are not deformed into sound
bites and thought-terminating clichés. Thinking is, as
Hannah Arendt
wrote, “a soundless dialogue between me and myself.” But thinking, she
wrote, always presupposes the human condition of plurality. It has no
utilitarian function. It is not an end or an aim outside of itself. It
is different from logical reasoning, which is focused on a finite and
identifiable goal. Logical reason, acts of cognition, serve the
efficiency of a system, including corporate power, which is usually
morally neutral at best, and often evil. The inability to think, Arendt
wrote, “is not a failing of the many who lack brain power but an
ever-present possibility for everybody—scientists, scholars, and other
specialists in mental enterprises not excluded.”
Our corporate culture has effectively severed us from human
imagination. Our electronic devices intrude deeper and deeper into
spaces that were once reserved for solitude, reflection and privacy. Our
airwaves are filled with the tawdry and the absurd. Our systems of
education and communication scorn the disciplines that allow us to see.
We celebrate prosaic vocational skills and the ridiculous requirements
of standardized tests. We have tossed those who think, including many
teachers of the humanities, into a wilderness where they cannot find
employment, remuneration or a voice. We follow the blind over the cliff.
We make war on ourselves.
The vital importance of thought, Arendt wrote, is apparent only “in
times of transition when men no longer rely on the stability of the
world and their role in it, and when the question concerning the general
conditions of human life, which as such are properly coeval with the
appearance of man on earth, gain an uncommon poignancy.” We never need
our thinkers and artists more than in times of crisis, as Arendt reminds
us, for they provide the subversive narratives that allow us to chart a
new course, one that can assure our survival.
“What must I do to win salvation?” Dimitri asks Starov in “The
Brothers Karamazov,” to which Starov answers: “Above all else, never lie
to yourself.”
And here is the dilemma we face as a civilization. We march
collectively toward self-annihilation. Corporate capitalism, if left
unchecked, will kill us. Yet we refuse, because we cannot think and no
longer listen to those who do think, to see what is about to happen to
us. We have created entertaining mechanisms to obscure and silence the
harsh truths, from climate change to the collapse of globalization to
our enslavement to corporate power, that will mean our self-destruction.
If we can do nothing else we must, even as individuals, nurture the
private dialogue and the solitude that make thought possible. It is
better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an
outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us
and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of
the blind.
© 2012 Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com.
Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two
decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author
of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
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