REFLECTION POOLS

Chris Hedges continues his critique of American society at Truthdig. There are parallel developments in Australia.

Allowing for the broad generalizations and the failure to discriminate among different users of media options, there is something to what Chris Hedges has to say. Some of us, and I would like to think it an increasing number watch television and its cult of celebrity, although the entrenched assumption is that television is the primary source of political information. Some of us, imperfectly, seek to act an ethic of nonviolence. And some of us, as has been noted here at least once as a action of abject futility and effective ineptitude are engaged with print.

And yet Chris Hedges does not appreciate the possibilities for learning that the new non-print media present. Chris Anderson, via Nicholas Gruen at Club Troppo, at TED Talks reviews what he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation which he argues may be as significant as the invention of print. (Of course, what we have to do not is use the new technology to get our heads around, in part by recovering lost learning, to deal with the problems of food, energy and water security in the age of climate change.)

Rather that the promise that such learning represents, Chris Hedges is pessimistic about the the cultural change involved. He sees the devaluation of print culture with the rise of irrationality and therefore manipulation through the immersion in a screen-based entertainment culture. I just wish he would say somewhere that the world of the past subsumed by the new technologies was not perfect but in our uncritical embrace of the new, may be we are losing some qualities as well as gaining. To do that would be invoke one of the other elements of the trinity by having faith in people.

Prophecy is attribution. My problem with attribution is, at least it my experience, it can often be wrong. Sometimes systems do not behave as we think they do. Chris Hedges argues:

The role of knowledge and art, as the ancient Greeks understood, is to create ekstasis, which means standing outside one’s self to give our individual life and struggle meaning and perspective. The role of art and scholarship is to transform us as individuals, not entertain us as a group. It is to nurture this capacity for understanding and empathy. Art and scholarship allow us to see the underlying structures and assumptions used to manipulate and control us. And this is why art, like intellectual endeavor, is feared by the corporate elite as subversive. This is why corporations have used their money to deform universities into vocational schools that spit out blinkered and illiterate systems managers. This is why the humanities are withering away.

At least by this reasoning the corporate elite are not “blinked system managers” suggesting they possess intelligence if not humanity. But perhaps, when all say and done, however useful, intelligence is not enough and that it has to be informed to be effective.

As I have suggested, and it is easy to do, if we put aside our sunk cost investment in televisual entertainment media we can disengage. We can turn the noise off. Who am I to say that his final proposition could be wrong:

If we do not shake ourselves awake from our electronic hallucinations and defy the elites who are ruining the country and trashing the planet we will experience the awful and deadly retribution of the gods.