By Dennis Patrick Slattery
August 12, 2021"Information
Clearing House" - "Express-News"
When we take a well-earned break from the
onslaught of news that bombards us daily, we might
wonder, as we should, how fantasies of reality have
gained such strength and support in these past years
and seem to coagulate today with greater
concentration.
I returned to a book I had read in 2012,
published in 2009 by a foreign correspondent of 20
years and a New York Times writer for 15 years,
Chris Hedges: “Empire of Illusion: The End of
Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.” His cultural
diagnoses have become more prescient and more
ubiquitous with time.
On the inside dust jacket is a pair of steely
sentences: “A culture that cannot distinguish
between reality and illusion dies. And we are
dying.” His book then details carefully and with
abundant supporting sources how this stark
diagnosis can be grasped. His bibliography has
120 sources.
1. “We are a culture that has
been denied or has passively given up the linguistic
and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to
separate illusion from reality.” As an educator of
53 years, I have found the most challenging and
rewarding task with students is to encourage and
foster critical and imaginal levels of discernment
with the material we are studying. Reading and
thinking with discernment are both challenging and
rewarding gifts to ourselves throughout our lives.
2. In the vacuum created by the
point above, “television has become a medium built
around the skillful manipulating of images, ones
that can overpower reality.” It is not only our
primary form of mass communication, it is more: a
large segment of the audience receives not just
their news from television news but their reality as
well.
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3. In the engineered new power
center of our culture, “propaganda has become a
substitute for ideas and ideology.” For many, Hedges
continues, “it is the final arbitrator for what
matters in life.” Anyone who knows and enjoys the
rewards of reading understands the often-pale
representation of television over the written word,
where one can pause, consider, not be told what to
think and draw a conclusion from a baseline of the
material read.
4. “Feelings” become the acid
test of what is real and true. But we might ask if
one’s feelings are largely composed of assumptions,
fears, prejudices and fantasies that create a
virtual parliament of emotions that one construes as
a true reality and not a private feast of fetishes
and apprehensions.
5. Hedges proposes “it is style
and story, not content and fact, that inform mass
politics.” He goes on to cite another writer’s term,
“junk politics,” which “personalizes and moralizes
issues rather than clarifying them.” Again, the
emphasis is on the private feelings and baked-in
beliefs that largely have security and safety in the
end, whatever that might cost.
Such a posture can shield one from the ambiguous
and unknown future, as well as insulate one from the
past, history, the wisdom of our ancestors and a
more panoramic view of one’s present reality. Such a
condition can be reinforced, Hedges argues, by those
seeking power and self-interest to create an
appearance of intimacy with one’s supporters while
not actually possessing the qualities they boast
about possessing.
Lastly, an important question that any of us
thinking critically about these issues might ask:
Who, in fact, is creating or re-creating our “public
mythology” — Hedges’ term — and for what end?
Dennis Patrick Slattery is an author, poet and
core faculty member at Pacifica Graduate Institute.
He lives in New Braunfels.
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