Chris Hedges: The Power of Imagination

[marmar]

from truthdig:


The Power of Imagination

Posted on May 11, 2014
By Chris Hedges


Those in the premodern world who hoarded possessions and refused to redistribute supplies and food, who turned their backs on the weak and the sick, who lived exclusively for hedonism and their own power, were despised. Those in modern society who are shunned as odd, neurotic or eccentric, who are disconnected from the prosaic world of objective phenomena and fact, would have been valued in premodern cultures for their ability to see what others could not see. Dreams and visions—considered ways to connect with the wisdom of ancestors—were integral to existence in distant times. Property was communal then. Status was conferred by personal heroism and providing for the weak and the indigent. And economic exchanges carried the potential for malice, hatred and evil: When wampum was exchanged by Native Americans the transaction had to include “medicine” that protected each party against “spiritual infection.”

Only this premodern ethic can save us as we enter a future of economic uncertainty and endure the catastrophe of climate change. Social and economic life will again have to be communal. The lusts of capitalism will have to be tamed or destroyed. And there will have to be a recovery of reverence for the sacred, the bedrock of premodern society, so we can see each other and the earth not as objects to exploit but as living beings to be revered and protected. This means inculcating a very different vision of human society.

Our greatest oracles have sought to impart this wisdom. William Shakespeare lamented the loss of the pagan rituals eradicated by the Reformation. When Shakespeare was a boy, the critic Harold Goddard pointed out, he experienced the religious pageants, morality plays, church festivals, cycle plays, feast and saint days, displays of relics, bawdy May Day celebrations and tales of miracles that made up the belief system during the reign of the medieval Catholic Church. The Puritans, the ideological vanguard of the technological order, would eventually ban or greatly weaken all of these, and they made war on the Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters for celebrating these premodern practices.

.......(snip).......

It is through imagination that we can reach the dark regions of the human psyche and face our mortality and the brevity of existence. It is through imagination that we can recover reverence and kinship. It is through imagination that we can see ourselves in our neighbors and the other living organisms of the earth. It is through imagination that we can envision other ways to form a society. The triumph of modern utilitarianism, implanted by violence, crushed the primacy of the human imagination. It enslaved us to the cult of the self. And with this enslavement came an inability to see, the central theme of “King Lear.” Imagination, as Goddard wrote, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two—as if the birds, unable to understand the speech of man, and man, unable to understand the songs of birds, yet longing to communicate, were to agree on a tongue made up of sounds they both could comprehend—the voice of running water perhaps or the wind in the trees. Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.” ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_power_of_imagination_20140511

[xchrom]

1. du rec.

[woo me with science]

2. K&R

[RainDog]

3. excellent n/t

[raouldukelives]

4. K&R Powerful piece. As always. nt

[merrily]

5. K and r

[marions ghost]

6. Thank you for posting this

excellent article.

Last paragraph:

"We are reminded...of the wonder of life and our insignificance in the vastness of the cosmos, reminded that, as Prospero said, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Too often this wisdom comes too late, as it does when Othello stands over the dead Desdemona or Lear over his executed daughter, Cordelia. This wisdom makes grace possible. Songs, poetry, music, theater, dance, sculpture, art, fiction and ritual move human beings toward the sacred. They clear the way for transformation. The prosaic world of facts, data, science, news, technology, business and the military is cut off from the mysteries of creation and existence. We will recover this imagination, this capacity for the sacred, or we will vanish as a species."

---------

Hedges has a point--for too many the business of making money and the worship of things--is what is sacred in our culture...what do you (we) replace it with?

[Orrex]

7. Hedges is often very strong in these articles

But this particular piece has a weird air of romantic cherry-picking that really undermines its potential strength.

Appeals to the wisdom o' the ancients must always be taken with a grain of salt. Hedges is curiously selective in targeting his praise, lauding those who are "disconnected from the prosaic world of objective phenomena and fact" while in other pieces he relies heavily on objective empirical data. When is it ok to throw fact to the wind, exactly? Why don't we cast aside empirical evidence when discussing climate change?

I have little patience for the wistful fetishizing of kooks and eccentrics for its own sake. Appealing to their "special wisdom" is in fact a failure of the very imagination that Hedges claims to value.


Not his best work.

[salib]

8. Thank you for that

This (almost) screed bothered me for similar reasons.

I like Chris Hedges generally.