Great article. Timely, in light of our recent discussion about art, the arts,
their place and value in society…
I think this excellent article demonstrates quite clearly the reason I
recommend reading other sources. No matter how eloquent any of us here may or
may not be, none of us is in Hedges’ league.
I particularly draw attention to his distinction between the pseudo and the
true artist, intellectual, politician, an important and valid distinction.
I am not sure I agree with Hedges entirely about Sanders. Note, please, I say
I’m not sure…
The T..S. Eliot quotation reminds me of something I read recently that cracked
me up at least a little:
Knowledge is realizing that a tomato is a fruit.
Wisdom is not putting it into a fruit salad.
Philosophy is contemplating whether or not ketchup is a smoothie.
Alice
On Jan 11, 2016, at 11:14 AM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Great Forgetting
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_great_forgetting_20160110/
Posted on Jan 10, 2016
By Chris Hedges
Hillary Clinton during a rally in January in Sioux City, Iowa. (Jae C.
Hong / AP)
America's refusal to fund and sustain its intellectual and cultural heritage
means it has lost touch with its past, obliterated its understanding of the
present, crushed its capacity to transform itself through self-reflection
and self-criticism, and descended into a deadening provincialism. Ignorance
and illiteracy come with a cost. The obsequious worship of technology,
hedonism and power comes with a cost. The primacy of emotion and spectacle
over wisdom and rational thought comes with a cost. And we are paying the
bill.
The decades-long assault on the arts, the humanities, journalism and civic
literacy is largely complete. All the disciplines that once helped us
interpret who we were as a people and our place in the world-history,
theater, the study of foreign languages, music, journalism, philosophy,
literature, religion and the arts-have been corrupted or relegated to the
margins. We have surrendered judgment for prejudice. We have created a
binary universe of good and evil. And our colossal capacity for violence is
unleashed around the globe, as well as on city streets in poor communities,
with no more discernment than that of the blinded giant Polyphemus. The
marriage of ignorance and force always generates unfathomable evil, an evil
that is unseen by perpetrators who mistake their own stupidity and blindness
for innocence.
"We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion-quite apart from the
contents themselves that could be lost-would mean that, humanly speaking, we
would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human
existence," Hannah Arendt wrote. "For memory and depth are the same, or
rather, depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance."
Those few who acknowledge the death of our democracy, the needless suffering
inflicted on the poor and the working class in the name of austerity, and
the crimes of empire-in short those who name our present and past
reality-are whitewashed out of the public sphere. If you pay homage to the
fiction of the democratic state and the supposed "virtues" of the nation,
including its right to wage endless imperial war, you get huge fees, tenure,
a television perch, book, film or recording contracts, grants and prizes,
investors for your theater project or praise as an pundit, artist or public
intellectual. The pseudo-politicians, pseudo-intellectuals and
pseudo-artists know what to say and what not to say. They offer the veneer
of criticism-comedians such as Stephen Colbert do this-without naming the
cause of our malaise. And they are used by the elites as attack dogs to
discredit and destroy genuine dissent. This is not, as James Madison warned,
the prologue to a farce or a tragedy; we are living both farce and tragedy.
"The withdrawal of intellectuals from political concerns is itself a
political act," sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote. "Which is to say that it
is at best a pseudo-withdrawal. To withdraw from politics today can only
mean 'in intent'; it cannot mean 'in effect.' For its effect is to serve
whatever powers prevail, even if only by distracting public attention from
them. Such attempts may be the result of fear or fashion; or of sincere
conviction-induced by success. Regardless of the motive, the attempted
withdrawal means to become subservient to prevailing authorities and to
allow the meaning of one's own work to be determined, in effect, by other
men."
Amid the swelling disparity between reality and reality as the corporate
state seeks to have it portrayed, the idiocy and mendacity of the elites and
their courtiers grow more ludicrous. The institutions that educated the
public and fostered the common good are even more fiercely attacked,
defunded and rendered anemic. The dumbing down of the country-fed by the
crippling of the safe spaces where ideas, dissent and creativity could be
expressed, where structures and assumptions could be questioned-accelerates.
Presidential candidate Donald Trump may be boorish, narcissistic, stupid,
racist and elitist, but he does not have Hillary Clinton's carefully honed
and chilling amoral artifice. It was she, and an ethically bankrupt liberal
establishment, that created the fertile ground for Trump by fleecing the
citizens on behalf of corporations and imposing the neoliberal project. If
she is elected, Trump may disappear, but another Trump-like figure, probably
even more frightening, will be vomited up from our cultural and political
sewer.
Trump and Clinton, along with fellow candidate Bernie Sanders, refuse to
admit what they know: Our most basic civil and political rights have been
taken from us, the corporate oligarchy will remain entrenched in power no
matter who wins the presidency, and elections are a carnival act. The
downward spiral of lost jobs and declining incomes, of shredded civil
liberties, of endless war, is unstoppable as long as we use the traditional
mechanisms of reform, including elections, to try to cope with the
existential threat we face. A vote for Clinton, in essence, is a vote for
Trump or someone as bad as Trump. Right-wing populism, here and in Europe,
is not the product of an individual but the disenfranchisement, rage and
despair stemming from the damage caused by globalization. And until we wrest
back control of our destiny by breaking corporate power, demagogues like
Trump, and his repugnant doppelgangers in Europe, will proliferate.
The institutions that make possible wisdom, knowledge, self-criticism and
transcendence are in ruins. Public radio and public television, created to
give a voice to those not beholden to the elites, are now echo chambers for
the privileged and the powerful. The arts, like public broadcasting a victim
of massive cuts by government, have descended to the lowest common
denominator. Symphony orchestras are closing along with libraries. Music and
art have been removed from school curriculums. Theater, along with the film
industry, has been taken over by corporations such as Disney. Audiences on
Broadway and in movie houses participate in exorbitantly priced forms of
escapism that, at their core, celebrate American power and narcissism.
There was a time, a few decades ago, when the work and thought of
intellectuals and artists mattered. Writers and social critics such as
Mills, Dwight Macdonald, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X,
Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, Ralph Nader, Howard Zinn and Jane
Jacobs wrote for and spoke to a broad audience. Authors William Faulkner, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, Gore
Vidal, Toni Morrison, Ken Kesey, Russell Banks and Norman Mailer, along with
playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry,
Tennessee Williams, August Wilson, David Mamet, Ntozake Shange, Sam Shepard,
Marsha Norman, Edward Albee and Tony Kushner, held up a mirror to the
nation. And it was not a reflection many people wanted to see. Orson Welles
and Stanley Kubrick in film, Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka in poetry, Bob
Dylan, Curtis Mayfield, Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith in music shook the
social, cultural and political landscape.
These artists and intellectuals, who did not cater to the herd, were
nationally known figures. They altered our perceptions. They were taken
seriously. They sparked contentious debate, and the elites attempted,
sometimes successfully, to censor their work. It is not that new
independent, brilliant and creative minds are not out there; it is that
nearly all of them-Tupac Shakur and Lupe Fiasco having been two
exceptions-are locked out. And this has turned our artistic, cultural and
intellectual terrain into a commercialized wasteland. I doubt that a young
Bruce Springsteen or a young Patti Smith, or even a young Chomsky, all of
whom exhibit the rare quality of never having sold out the marginalized, the
working class and the poor, and who are not afraid of speaking truths about
our nation that others will not utter, could today break into the
corporatized music industry or the corporatized university. Sales, branding
and marketing, even in academia, overpower content.
T.S. Eliot, seven decades ago, warned of a condition that now enmeshes us.
In his "What Is a Classic?" address to the Virgil Society in 1944 he argued
that a civilization that did not engage with its greatest artists and
intellectual traditions, that did not protect and nurture its artistic and
intellectual patrimony, committed suicide.
"In our age," Eliot said, "when men seem more than ever prone to confuse
wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to try to solve
problems of life, in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a
new kind of provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history
is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and
been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living,
a property in which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of
provincialism is, that we can all, all the peoples on the globe, be
provincials together: and those who are not content to be provincials, can
only become hermits."
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
The Great Forgetting
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_great_forgetting_20160110/
Posted on Jan 10, 2016
By Chris Hedges
Hillary Clinton during a rally in January in Sioux City, Iowa. (Jae C. Hong
/ AP)
America's refusal to fund and sustain its intellectual and cultural heritage
means it has lost touch with its past, obliterated its understanding of the
present, crushed its capacity to transform itself through self-reflection
and self-criticism, and descended into a deadening provincialism. Ignorance
and illiteracy come with a cost. The obsequious worship of technology,
hedonism and power comes with a cost. The primacy of emotion and spectacle
over wisdom and rational thought comes with a cost. And we are paying the
bill.
The decades-long assault on the arts, the humanities, journalism and civic
literacy is largely complete. All the disciplines that once helped us
interpret who we were as a people and our place in the world-history,
theater, the study of foreign languages, music, journalism, philosophy,
literature, religion and the arts-have been corrupted or relegated to the
margins. We have surrendered judgment for prejudice. We have created a
binary universe of good and evil. And our colossal capacity for violence is
unleashed around the globe, as well as on city streets in poor communities,
with no more discernment than that of the blinded giant Polyphemus. The
marriage of ignorance and force always generates unfathomable evil, an evil
that is unseen by perpetrators who mistake their own stupidity and blindness
for innocence.
"We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion-quite apart from the
contents themselves that could be lost-would mean that, humanly speaking, we
would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human
existence," Hannah Arendt wrote. "For memory and depth are the same, or
rather, depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance."
Those few who acknowledge the death of our democracy, the needless suffering
inflicted on the poor and the working class in the name of austerity, and
the crimes of empire-in short those who name our present and past
reality-are whitewashed out of the public sphere. If you pay homage to the
fiction of the democratic state and the supposed "virtues" of the nation,
including its right to wage endless imperial war, you get huge fees, tenure,
a television perch, book, film or recording contracts, grants and prizes,
investors for your theater project or praise as an pundit, artist or public
intellectual. The pseudo-politicians, pseudo-intellectuals and
pseudo-artists know what to say and what not to say. They offer the veneer
of criticism-comedians such as Stephen Colbert do this-without naming the
cause of our malaise. And they are used by the elites as attack dogs to
discredit and destroy genuine dissent. This is not, as James Madison warned,
the prologue to a farce or a tragedy; we are living both farce and tragedy.
"The withdrawal of intellectuals from political concerns is itself a
political act," sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote. "Which is to say that it
is at best a pseudo-withdrawal. To withdraw from politics today can only
mean 'in intent'; it cannot mean 'in effect.' For its effect is to serve
whatever powers prevail, even if only by distracting public attention from
them. Such attempts may be the result of fear or fashion; or of sincere
conviction-induced by success. Regardless of the motive, the attempted
withdrawal means to become subservient to prevailing authorities and to
allow the meaning of one's own work to be determined, in effect, by other
men."
Amid the swelling disparity between reality and reality as the corporate
state seeks to have it portrayed, the idiocy and mendacity of the elites and
their courtiers grow more ludicrous. The institutions that educated the
public and fostered the common good are even more fiercely attacked,
defunded and rendered anemic. The dumbing down of the country-fed by the
crippling of the safe spaces where ideas, dissent and creativity could be
expressed, where structures and assumptions could be questioned-accelerates.
Presidential candidate Donald Trump may be boorish, narcissistic, stupid,
racist and elitist, but he does not have Hillary Clinton's carefully honed
and chilling amoral artifice. It was she, and an ethically bankrupt liberal
establishment, that created the fertile ground for Trump by fleecing the
citizens on behalf of corporations and imposing the neoliberal project. If
she is elected, Trump may disappear, but another Trump-like figure, probably
even more frightening, will be vomited up from our cultural and political
sewer.
Trump and Clinton, along with fellow candidate Bernie Sanders, refuse to
admit what they know: Our most basic civil and political rights have been
taken from us, the corporate oligarchy will remain entrenched in power no
matter who wins the presidency, and elections are a carnival act. The
downward spiral of lost jobs and declining incomes, of shredded civil
liberties, of endless war, is unstoppable as long as we use the traditional
mechanisms of reform, including elections, to try to cope with the
existential threat we face. A vote for Clinton, in essence, is a vote for
Trump or someone as bad as Trump. Right-wing populism, here and in Europe,
is not the product of an individual but the disenfranchisement, rage and
despair stemming from the damage caused by globalization. And until we wrest
back control of our destiny by breaking corporate power, demagogues like
Trump, and his repugnant doppelgangers in Europe, will proliferate.
The institutions that make possible wisdom, knowledge, self-criticism and
transcendence are in ruins. Public radio and public television, created to
give a voice to those not beholden to the elites, are now echo chambers for
the privileged and the powerful. The arts, like public broadcasting a victim
of massive cuts by government, have descended to the lowest common
denominator. Symphony orchestras are closing along with libraries. Music and
art have been removed from school curriculums. Theater, along with the film
industry, has been taken over by corporations such as Disney. Audiences on
Broadway and in movie houses participate in exorbitantly priced forms of
escapism that, at their core, celebrate American power and narcissism.
There was a time, a few decades ago, when the work and thought of
intellectuals and artists mattered. Writers and social critics such as
Mills, Dwight Macdonald, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X,
Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, Ralph Nader, Howard Zinn and Jane
Jacobs wrote for and spoke to a broad audience. Authors William Faulkner, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, Gore
Vidal, Toni Morrison, Ken Kesey, Russell Banks and Norman Mailer, along with
playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry,
Tennessee Williams, August Wilson, David Mamet, Ntozake Shange, Sam Shepard,
Marsha Norman, Edward Albee and Tony Kushner, held up a mirror to the
nation. And it was not a reflection many people wanted to see. Orson Welles
and Stanley Kubrick in film, Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka in poetry, Bob
Dylan, Curtis Mayfield, Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith in music shook the
social, cultural and political landscape.
These artists and intellectuals, who did not cater to the herd, were
nationally known figures. They altered our perceptions. They were taken
seriously. They sparked contentious debate, and the elites attempted,
sometimes successfully, to censor their work. It is not that new
independent, brilliant and creative minds are not out there; it is that
nearly all of them-Tupac Shakur and Lupe Fiasco having been two
exceptions-are locked out. And this has turned our artistic, cultural and
intellectual terrain into a commercialized wasteland. I doubt that a young
Bruce Springsteen or a young Patti Smith, or even a young Chomsky, all of
whom exhibit the rare quality of never having sold out the marginalized, the
working class and the poor, and who are not afraid of speaking truths about
our nation that others will not utter, could today break into the
corporatized music industry or the corporatized university. Sales, branding
and marketing, even in academia, overpower content.
T.S. Eliot, seven decades ago, warned of a condition that now enmeshes us.
In his "What Is a Classic?" address to the Virgil Society in 1944 he argued
that a civilization that did not engage with its greatest artists and
intellectual traditions, that did not protect and nurture its artistic and
intellectual patrimony, committed suicide.
"In our age," Eliot said, "when men seem more than ever prone to confuse
wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to try to solve
problems of life, in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a
new kind of provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history
is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and
been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living,
a property in which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of
provincialism is, that we can all, all the peoples on the globe, be
provincials together: and those who are not content to be provincials, can
only become hermits."
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