Chris Hedges: The Great Forgetting

[marmar]

from truthdig:



The Great Forgetting

Posted on Jan 10, 2016
By Chris Hedges


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. ...........................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_great_forgetting_20160110

[malaise]

1. Excellent

Rec

[anniebelle]

2. Spot on!

I try to tell my children this, my neighbors, anyone that will listen, but there are few left that are not buried in the rhetoric they hear constantly on t.v., radio, at their churches, at their schools, EVERY WHERE! It's so sad and depressing.

[Duppers]

5. That's the truth -- there are few.

It's soul deadening, isolating, and the main reason I need DU.

[Katashi_itto]

3. K&R! Down with 3rd Way, the Vichy Dems

[1StrongBlackMan]

4. Posted for later

[Duppers]

6. Mostly brilliant except for ...

He was brilliant up to the point he threw in religion and then added Bernie to his pile of negatives!!

[Katashi_itto]

8. True that.

[Nyan]

11. Bernie deserves admiration,

but he also needs to be challenged from unwavering critical mind such as Chris Hedges.
I think it's a good thing for him to face genuine criticism, and not the redbaiting BS about Bernie that we see virtually everywhere else.

[Duppers]

17. Do you think this accurately depicts Bernie's position?

"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."

I don't. In his speeches Bernie has repeatedly railed against the corporate oligarchy and has acknowledged that our rights have been taken.

[grntuscarora]

19. I don't either.

I had a problem with that paragraph, too. I don't accept that Bernie believes the corporate oligarchy will remain entrenched in power no matter who wins, or that he thinks elections are pointless. He wouldn't waste his time running if he felt it was hopeless.

[Nyan]

20. I do think he acknowledges some of the most important problems,

which is so fucking rare these days. Bernie's one in a million, and we should really give him a chance at presidency. Because that might just be our last shot before an armed insurrection (whether from the right or the left).
But I also think a healthy dose of skepticism is good thing, so that we can stay vigilant and not be complacent.
Whether elections turn out to be "carnival act" this time around (like they did in recent years), we'll have to see. And I would rather make sure that it will mean something. I think we should give Bernie and an institution called election, a shot.
On a side note, I think Bernie definitely felt a sense of urgency when he decided to compromise (for once) and join the Democratic Party for presidential campaign. Because he saw how dire things were. Chris Hedges has been a long-time proponent of 3rd party politics, so it's no wonder that it bothers him that Bernie compromised. And Bernie himself seems to have struggled with the idea at first.
But all in all, I think he made the right choice, because for one thing, the way DNC and the party establishment reacted to his successful campaign has been very revealing to a lot of people.
We could be looking at a party fraction afterwards, if Bernie doesn't win the primary, or he does win, and party establishment turns out to be intransigent and dismissive of him, his agendas, and supporters. Just a thought.

[ronnie624]

22. There is a tight framework for political debate in the US.

All national political leaders must tread carefully in certain areas when discussing the power system.

[bvar22]

24. Bernie has no friends in the Corporate Oligarchy.

Chris is wrong on this count.
Sanders wants to dismember the Corporate Oligarchy and get then jobs as WalMart shelf stockers
on the night shift.

[Odin2005]

7. One can see this on sites like Reddit and 4chan.

Both sites are full of "techie" STEM types (and people with "techie" pretensions) who believe themselves to be uber-rational, but any criticism of their naive libertarian technocratic utopianism, especially if that criticism is from the Humanities, leads to torrents of irrational hatred and abuse and incoherent rage at "PC Social Justice Warriors".

[zeemike]

9. Once again he holds up a mirror.

And we see what we truly look like.

[Proserpina]

10. The worst was destroying journalism as a profession and a product, turning it into propaganda

It made everything else possible.

[Dustlawyer]

13. True dat!

[bvar22]

25. Several things came together to produce that:

1) The Dumbing Down of America's Schools....teaching to the test.

2)The Rewriting of our History Books eliminating most of the struggles of the oppressed to gain rights.

2)The Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by 3rd Way Bill Clinton, making it possible for One or Two BIG Corporations to OWN all the US Media. That is when the "News" became "Infotainment", a source of PROFIT instead of a Public Service.

[Enthusiast]

12. The real owners of this country have an agenda. Quality education is an impediment to that agenda.

[Uncle Joe]

14. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.

[PatrickforO]

15. Chris is a pretty grim guy.

There is something to this, though. When more people can name the latest contestant on the Voice than the three branches of our government, we do have some problems.

[raouldukelives]

16. K&R It is no accident. Heck, now they are getting rid of cursive.

So when future people see those squiggly lines on faded, old parchments they will be as legible as hieroglyphs and require specialists to translate them.

[The2ndWheel]

18. That second paragraph doesn't really make much sense

When was there a time when people would just walk around interpreting who we are as a people and our place in the world? And is that really any less corrupted than before? Is it done any less than it may have been done?

Created a binary universe of good and evil? In the last few decades? Sounds more like from the start of civilization.

Society muddles on through the days. Some things change here, some things change there, and it's not always in a diagonal direction to the top right of the graph.

[ronnie624]

21. Several interesting comments following the piece.

One of them mentions that widespread acceptance of the fraudulence of capitalism is essential to social reform. I think this is correct.

As long as essential resources are exploited for the enrichment of a minority instead of providing for the welfare of civilization, the resulting injustice and instability makes social reform virtually impossible, and facilitates the current descent described by the author.

[niyad]

23. k and r and spot on.

[MisterP]

26. illiteracy AND technology-worship?

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

27. "America is the first country to have gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual intervening

"America is the first country to have gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual intervening period of civilization." Oscar Wilde

[bobthedrummer]

28. K&R#85 + an ongoing unforgetable cover-up

Chapter 21-Omaha
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016139460