I don’t know what to make of Chris Hedges. His social critiques often seem to lead to dead ends — to the conclusion that we might as well jump off a cliff and be done with it. But he’s a serious Occupy Wall Street supporter, and here and there in his gloom-ridden sermons are passages that make perfect sense:
The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction. The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor. They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering.
I always cringe when I hear about what “we” are going to learn. Far as I can tell, those who do the crime and those who pay for it are different groups entirely. It is precisely because diseased maggots like Paul Ryan never ever ever pay the consequences for their actions that they do what they do. As for the rest of us who keep learning “their” lessons for them, we are over-educated. Reminds me of a passage from Cat MacKinnon where she noted that the women who have the most to say are the last ones anybody heeds.