Our Mania for Hope Is a Curse
By Chris Hedges
May 25, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Truthdig"
- The naive belief that history is linear, that moral progress accompanies
technical progress, is a form of collective self-delusion. It cripples our
capacity for radical action and lulls us into a false sense of security. Those
who cling to the myth of human progress, who believe that the world inevitably
moves toward a higher material and moral state, are held captive by power. Only
those who accept the very real possibility of dystopia, of the rise of a
ruthless corporate totalitarianism, buttressed by the most terrifying security
and surveillance apparatus in human history, are likely to carry out the
self-sacrifice necessary for revolt.
The yearning for positivism that pervades our corporate culture ignores human
nature and human history. But to challenge it, to state the obvious fact that
things are getting worse, and may soon get much worse, is to be tossed out of
the circle of magical thinking that defines American and much of Western
culture. The left is as infected with this mania for hope as the right. It is a
mania that obscures reality even as global capitalism disintegrates and the
ecosystem unravels, potentially dooming us all.
The 19th century theorist Louis-Auguste Blanqui, unlike nearly all of his
contemporaries, dismissed the belief, central to Karl Marx, that human history
is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality. He warned that
this absurd positivism is the lie perpetrated by oppressors: “All atrocities of
the victor, the long series of his attacks are coldly transformed into constant,
inevitable evolution, like that of nature. ... But the sequence of human things
is not inevitable like that of the universe. It can be changed at any moment.”
He foresaw that scientific and technological advancement, rather than being a
harbinger of progress, could be “a terrible weapon in the hands of Capital
against Work and Thought.” And in a day when few others did so, he decried the
despoiling of the natural world. “The axe fells, nobody replants. There is no
concern for the future’s ill health.”
“Humanity,” Blanqui wrote, “is never stationary. It advances or goes backwards.
Its progressive march leads it to equality. Its regressive march goes back
through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right
to property.” Further, he wrote, “I am not amongst those who claim that progress
can be taken for granted, that humanity cannot go backwards.”
Blanqui understood that history has long periods of cultural barrenness and
brutal repression. The fall of the Roman Empire, for example, led to misery
throughout Europe during the Dark Ages, roughly from the sixth through the 13th
centuries. There was a loss of technical knowledge (one prominent example being
how to build and maintain aqueducts), and a cultural and intellectual
impoverishment led to a vast historical amnesia that blotted out the greatest
thinkers and artists of the classical world. None of this loss was regained
until the 14th century when Europe saw the beginning of the Renaissance, a
development made possible largely by the cultural flourishing of Islam, which
through translating Aristotle into Arabic and other intellectual accomplishments
kept alive the knowledge and wisdom of the past. The Dark Ages were marked by
arbitrary rule, incessant wars, insecurity, anarchy and terror. And I see
nothing to prevent the rise of a new Dark Age if we do not abolish the corporate
state. Indeed, the longer the corporate state holds power the more likely a new
Dark Age becomes. To trust in some mythical force called progress to save us is
to become passive before corporate power. The people alone can defy these
forces. And fate and history do not ensure our victory.
Blanqui tasted history’s tragic reverses. He took part in a series of French
revolts, including an attempted armed insurrection in May 1839, the 1848
uprising and the Paris Commune—a socialist uprising that controlled France’s
capital from March 18 until May 28 in 1871. Workers in cities such as Marseilles
and Lyon attempted but failed to organize similar communes before the Paris
Commune was militarily crushed.
The blundering history of the human race is always given coherence by power
elites and their courtiers in the press and academia who endow it with a meaning
and coherence it lacks. They need to manufacture national myths to hide the
greed, violence and stupidity that characterize the march of most human
societies. For the United States, refusal to confront the crisis of climate
change and our endless and costly wars in the Middle East are but two examples
of the follies that propel us toward catastrophe.
Wisdom is not knowledge. Knowledge deals with the particular
and the actual. Knowledge is the domain of science and technology. Wisdom is
about transcendence. Wisdom allows us to see and accept reality, no matter how
bleak that reality may be. It is only through wisdom that we are able to cope
with the messiness and absurdity of life. Wisdom is about detachment. Once
wisdom is achieved, the idea of moral progress is obliterated. Wisdom throughout
the ages is a constant. Did Shakespeare supersede Sophocles? Is Homer inferior
to Dante? Does the Book of Ecclesiastes not have the same deep powers of
observation about life that
Samuel
Beckett offers? Systems of power fear and seek to silence those who achieve
wisdom, which is what the war by corporate forces against the humanities and art
is about. Wisdom, because it sees through the facade, is a threat to power. It
exposes the lies and ideologies that power uses to maintain its privilege and
its warped ideology of progress.
Knowledge does not lead to wisdom. Knowledge is more often a
tool for repression. Knowledge, through the careful selection and manipulation
of facts, gives a false unity to reality. It creates a fictitious collective
memory and narrative. It manufactures abstract concepts of honor, glory,
heroism, duty and destiny that buttress the power of the state, feed the disease
of nationalism and call for blind obedience in the name of patriotism. It allows
human beings to explain the advances and reverses in human achievement and
morality, as well as the process of birth and decay in the natural world, as
parts of a vast movement forward in time. The collective enthusiasm for
manufactured national and personal narratives, which is a form of
self-exaltation, blots out reality. The myths we create that foster a fictitious
hope and false sense of superiority are celebrations of ourselves. They mock
wisdom. And they keep us passive.
Wisdom connects us with forces that cannot be measured
empirically and that are outside the confines of the rational world. To be wise
is to pay homage to beauty, truth, grief, the brevity of life, our own
mortality, love and the absurdity and mystery of existence. It is, in short, to
honor the sacred. Those who remain trapped in the dogmas perpetuated by
technology and knowledge, who believe in the inevitability of human progress,
are idiot savants.
“Self-awareness is as much a disability as a power,” the
philosopher John
Gray writes. “The most accomplished pianist is not the one who is most aware
of her movements when she plays. The best craftsman may not know how he works.
Very often we are at our most skillful when we are least self-aware. That may be
why many cultures have sought to disrupt or diminish self-conscious awareness.
In Japan, archers are taught that they will hit the target only when they no
longer think of it—or themselves.”
Artists and philosophers, who expose the mercurial
undercurrents of the subconscious, allow us to face an unvarnished truth. Works
of art and philosophy informed by the intuitive, unarticulated meanderings of
the human psyche transcend those constructed by the plodding conscious mind. The
freeing potency of visceral memories does not arrive through the intellect.
These memories are impervious to rational control. And they alone lead to
wisdom.
Those with power have always manipulated reality and created
ideologies defined as progress to justify systems of exploitation. Monarchs and
religious authorities did this in the Middle Ages. Today this is done by the
high priests of modernity—the technocrats, scholars, scientists, politicians,
journalists and economists. They deform reality. They foster the myth of
preordained inevitability and pure rationality. But such knowledge—which
dominates our universities—is anti-thought. It precludes all alternatives. It is
used to end discussion. It is designed to give to the forces of science or the
free market or globalization a veneer of rational discourse, to persuade us to
place our faith in these forces and trust our fate to them. These forces, the
experts assure us, are as unalterable as nature. They will lead us forward. To
question them is heresy.
The Austrian writer
Stefan Zweig, in his 1942 novella “Chess Story,” chronicles the arcane
specializations that have created technocrats unable to question the systems
they serve, as well as a society that foolishly reveres them. Mirko Czentovic,
the world chess champion, represents the technocrat. His mental energy is
invested solely in the 64 squares of the chessboard. Apart from the game, he is
a dolt, a monomaniac like all monomaniacs, who “burrow like termites into their
own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly
individual image of the world.” When Czentovic “senses an educated person he
crawls into his shell. That way no one will ever be able to boast of having
heard him say something stupid or of having plumbed the depths of his seemingly
boundless ignorance.”
An Austrian lawyer known as Dr. B, whom the Gestapo had held
for many months in solitary confinement, challenges Czentovic to a game of
chess. During his confinement, the lawyer’s only reading material was a chess
manual, which he memorized. He reconstructed games in his head. Forced by his
captivity to replicate the single-minded obsession of the technocrat Czentovic,
Dr. B too became trapped inside a specialized world, and, unlike Czentovic, he
became insane temporarily as he focused on a tiny, specialized piece of human
activity. When he challenges the chess champion, his insanity returns.
Zweig, who mourned for the broad liberal culture of educated
Europe swallowed up by fascism and modern bureaucracy, warns of the absurdity
and danger of a planet run by technocrats. For him, the rise of the Industrial
Age and the industrial man and woman is a terrifying metamorphosis in the
relationship of human beings to the world. As specialists and bureaucrats, human
beings become tools, able to make systems of exploitation and even terror
function efficiently without the slightest sense of personal responsibility or
understanding. They retreat into the arcane language of all specialists, to mask
what they are doing and give to their work a sanitized, clinical veneer.
This is
Hannah Arendt’s
central point in “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” Technocratic human beings are
spiritually dead. They are capable of anything, no matter how heinous, because
they do not reflect upon or question the ultimate goal. “The longer one listened
to him,” Arendt writes of the Nazi
Adolf Eichmann on trial, “the more obvious it became that his inability to
speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think
from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him,
not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all
safeguards against the words and presence of others, and hence against reality
as such.”
Zweig, horrified by a world run by technocrats, committed
suicide with his wife in 1942. He knew that from then on, the Czentovics would
be exalted in the service of state and corporate monstrosities.
Resistance, as
Alexander Berkman points out, is first about learning to speak differently
and abandoning the vocabulary of the “rational” technocrats who rule. Once we
discover new words and ideas through which to perceive and explain reality, we
free ourselves from neoliberal capitalism, which functions, as
Walter Benjamin knew, like a state religion. Resistance will take place
outside the boundaries of popular culture and academia, where the deadening
weight of the dominant ideology curtails creativity and independent thought.
As global capitalism disintegrates, the heresy our corporate
masters fear is gaining currency. But that heresy will not be effective until it
is divorced from the mania for hope that is an essential part of corporate
indoctrination. The ridiculous positivism, the belief that we are headed toward
some glorious future, defies reality. Hope, in this sense, is a form of
disempowerment.
There is nothing inevitable about human existence except birth
and death. There are no forces, whether divine or technical, that will guarantee
us a better future. When we give up false hopes, when we see human nature and
history for what they are, when we accept that progress is not preordained, then
we can act with an urgency and passion that comprehends the grim possibilities
ahead.
Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign
correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He
has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian
Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York
Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
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