The Problem With Chris Hedges

(updated June 3, 2015)

I felt the need to make my case against Hedges here, mostly because he pretends to paint the "big picture" of world affairs while knowing very little about the way the world actually works. This blog is intended to investigate and discuss exactly that question and Hedges is an influential proponent for the idea that any such analysis is necessary or important (except for his of course). If you have never heard of Chris Hedges, count yourself lucky and skip this post.  If you want a taste, this is from an interview with Robert Sheer.

... let me begin. We are a deeply violent culture. We always have been. It is the nature of imperialism, which—of course, we colonized ourselves, and in a way that’s very different from Europe, with the subjugation and campaigns of genocide against Native Americans. The whole institution of slavery was one that was kept in force by coercion, and then the subjugation of African-Americans after emancipation through convict leasing, up to Jim Crow laws, up to the current system of mass incarceration, which of course targets, as Michelle Alexander has pointed out, primarily people of color, poor people of color. We have one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the industrialized world, 83 weapons, I think, per 100 Americans. I believe I have that figure right. Not only are there young African-American men that are killed week after week after week, even after these killings are caught on videotape and in most cases the police are not charged. I mean, since Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, we’d had 11 people shot dead in the St. Louis area. And that’s just writ large. We have these bizarre school shootings, largely carried out by people who come out of the white survivalist cult. It’s not violence by African-Americans. Adam Lanza’s mother was a survivalist. And then we have proto-fascist entities—the Christian right, Tea Party, militias, the Minutemen, and others who celebrate not only the gun culture, but celebrate or, I think, express those fundamental tenets of fascism, which is where you direct your rage and legitimate despair towards the vulnerable, towards undocumented workers, Muslims, homosexuals, liberals, intellectuals, feminists. 

And in a moment of breakdown—and I think we are headed for some type of breakdown—all of these groups are empowered to express themselves in our society through violence. 

And I think that especially having come out of disintegrating societies—I’ve covered the war in Yugoslavia or I covered the civil war in El Salvador—I’m cognizant of how swiftly societies can unravel, how quickly law and order breaks down, how fragile social, political, and cultural systems are, and how easily neighbor can kill neighbor, how swiftly human beings can be acculturated to carry out atrocities. That’s one of the most disturbing things that comes out of being a war correspondent. 

And I think in this last segment I’d like to have you look at, a little bit, that reality, the reality of American violence, our propensity for violence, and how, as things unravel, that may express itself within American society.

This is a typical Hedges rant. His point seems to be that America is a uniquely violent culture. Typically, he gets carried away with his own rant and cannot resist inserting his "credentials", which contradict his main point -- by mentioning the horrors in El Salvador. Typically of Hedges, he trips over his own rhetoric by mentioning the fact (is it?) that most of the soldiers exterminating the natives in North America were not actually American. What is the relevance of this? Well, it's something Hedges knows and you don't.

He has failed to mention the massacres in Ruanda, the Holocaust, the rape of Nanking or the horrors of Stalinist Russia or thousands of others that didn't involve Americans.  Sadly, America just seems to keep up. If there is a conclusion to be drawn it is that human beings have a propensity for violence - hardly an original observation.

In the first paragraph we are blasted with the Hedges trademark: a rapid-fire list of scary "factoids", supposedly meant to support his main point but actually intended to impress us (crush us!) with all the shit he knows. He's so smart, he must be right. From experience, I know that Hedges can go on listing "factoids" like this for more than an hour without pausing for breath. For me, it's not a sign of intelligence -- it's a sign of mental illness - the run-on ranting of a paranoid maniac. Many people can't keep up with this torrent of information -- for many, some of these factoids are actually news but, given in fire-hose fashion they create the impression of an impressive intellect. It's easy to miss that all this "information" doesn't actually support his one "theory": that things are getting exponentially worse, Armageddon is around the corner and it's all our fault. He just counts on his audience to get depressed and alarmed, then points the finger at (who?). The technique is not much different to the way that Hitler pinned all the problems of Germany on the Jews. Hedges' "Jews" are "the oligarchy", who, like Hitler's Jews, supposedly conspire to achieve total control of the world to crush the rest of us in the name of profit. We can all hope that Hedges is not as successful as Hitler.

It is wrong to characterize what Hedges is saying as a "theory" of history or current events. It's just extreme "fear". When fear ties virtually everything in the world into a massive ball of existential terror, we call it "paranoia".  As a medical condition, paranoia is also associated with a bizarre inflation of self-importance and the sufferer's belief that he a unique insight that must be shared with the world. Obsessive imaginary connections with other famous people is also a symptom. Hedges can hardly speak for 30 seconds without dropping the name of someone with whom he has (in his mind) an intimate and unique connection. In my opinion, the terror he feels is is the fear of his own loss of control. The Hedges we see now is notably more manic, disturbed and disoriented than the Hedges we saw in his earlier writing.

But after all, I'm not a psychiatrist. Hedges just seems crazy to me. For those who don't buy the mental illness theory, let me just for a moment treat Hedges as if he's sane. What is he actually saying?

Hedges is a walking encyclopedia of the world's scary problems, all indexed to ensure that the blame falls squarely on "them" - the "oligarchy". According to Hedges, humanity has already passed the "tipping point" and catastrophe is unavoidable. This assumption underlies all the speeches and writings of Hedges. In a nutshell, my response to Hedges (expanded below) is:

• Hedges is a Luddite, unfamiliar with technology newer than the printing press. This makes him more alarmed than he should be about things like NSA surveillance and less appreciative of the usefulness of technology in exposing and reversing many of the innovations that terrify him.
• Hedges is really in a state of despair and panic over change, all of which signals the immanent collapse of society. Failure to accept change as inevitable is a fundamental cause of human suffering. Hedges suffers from it and does his best to make sure others suffer with him.
• Although he is a proudly avid reader (claiming for example, that nobody has a right to an opinion about Marx unless they have actually read Marx), he tends to mass facts and references without understanding them, especially when he can be confident that his listeners have not visited the obscure volumes he claims to have read. To cite just one example, he seems to think that Marx foretold the collapse of "Capitalism" over a century ago. In fact, Marx was really dealing with the European class system (which has roots back thousands of years). He is nowhere regarded as an expert on modern economic theory. The problems Marx saw with capitalism arose out of the class system in his lifetime (and just about all lifetimes in history). Hedges treats Marx like an Old Testament prophet, conveniently ignoring the fact that "Capitalism" didn't collapse and the Marxist dialectic has been proven by history to be absolute bullshit (As I try to show in this blog, Marx was wrong about the source of the problems). Oh, and by the way, does Hedges actually believe in Marxism? Well no, the point is he's read Marx so he knows about capitalism and you don't. He has an intimate connection to Marx and you don't.
• Hedges is an ordained Presbyterian Minister. Although his actual religious beliefs are a bit fuzzy, his style is instantly recognizable as old fashioned fire and brimstone preaching. You Tube is his pulpit. His message is that "we" have sinned greatly and we are about to experience the wrath of ... (who?). It is important to listen to Hedges as a preacher or self-appointed prophet. As one who has "been there and done that" (I'm a trained preacher), I have an ear for the rhetorical style. It's strange to a lot of people who never darken the door of a church and paradoxically welcome to those who do.
• For all the bragging he does about the books he's read, he shows little appreciation for the sweep of history. For him, this moment is uniquely alarming. You really need a lot of alarmist spin to compare the problems in US politics to the conquests of the Gengus Khan, Terrors of the French Revolution or the Holocaust (to cite three of thousands of disasters). To Hedges, what makes this moment special is the fact that he's alive in it, so therefore an expert on it. Failure to step back and put things in perspective is a fatal flaw in someone whose bread and butter is commentary on current events.

Hedges gets his face on the Internet a lot by interviewing people who really do know what they're talking about. His techniques is boringly consistent. He agrees with the subject about all the horrors of the world (such as Chomsky's brilliant analysis of how the world works or Robert Sheer's lamentations about breaches of basic human rights), but then attempts to get the subject to agree that it's all hopeless. I have never seen anybody fall for this, but he keeps trying.

For example, Hedges claims that the US Constitution is dead, the courts serve only the oligarchy etc. Like most people, Hedges doesn't actually listen to himself. To make this theory work, he must rant against the "founding fathers", basically accusing them of being born in the 18th century and having 18th century ideas. This supposedly cancels out the fact that many of their ideas were startlingly modern and applicable to current issues surrounding human rights. This is another illustration of his inability to see the sweep of history. Our appreciation of human rights didn't happen suddenly, it's an ongoing process. For example, it includes the 1215 Magna Carta . It's worth noting that this document was an agreement among the oligarchy of the time to respect law over naked power. Centuries later, we are still holding the US President's feet to the fire over exactly the same issue.

NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right

Article 29 of the Magna Carta, still in force in British Law 

Bottom line: according to Hedges, there is no hope that we can curb the power of the oligarchy through the law. This utter bullshit is challenged by his boss, the editor of TruthDig, Robert Scheer. The discussion is so civil and polite, I wound up screaming at the screen: So, Hedges, you toss out the legal system - THEN WHAT? The big picture with Hedges is that he is totally married to his one idea: that every part of the "system" is broken beyond repair.  There is no hope. This is a religious conviction (or paranoia). It's a call for everyone to believe in the dark Gospel of Chris Hedges. You just gotta believe in your heart that the end is nigh. 

Hedges attracts attention by greatly over-stating the actual capabilities of the "military-intelligence" community (the truth is scary enough!). Of course, being a self-confessed Luddite, Hedges knows nothing about the issue, let alone the detailed problems and proposed solutions. Technology is just scary to him. What he constantly miss is the fact that technology provides powerful tools for people to fight back. Of course, in Hedges case, the historical blinders go on -- this is the end of history, no chance for security and privacy issues to be resolved. Hedges loves to cast himself as a voice crying in the wilderness. Of course, when it suits him to drop names and borrow a bit of limelight, he will quote people like Julian Assange, while simultaneously claiming that whistleblowers cannot effect change. He's currently scrambling to find rhetoric that works around the fact that NSA surveillance actually has been successfully challenged and rolled back.

Watch Hedges rant in this discussion with Robert Scheer. He jumps from one outrageous "theory" to the next (starting with the idea that everyone in America is to be blamed retroactively for everything that has ever happened in American since 1776). At every turn, Scheer shoots him down but the result is that Hedges immediately starts to rant on a slightly different subject, never once giving an inch or realizing that he's been exposed. Eventually he finds an area where he agrees with Scheer about the deterioration of the US education system. If you weren't listening closely you would think that he's finally made his "point". But he has no point. It's just pure, randomly directed outrage.

"A fanatic is someone who re-doubles his efforts when the aim has been forgotten"

- George Santayana

A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE

Let me tell you how I started to lose patience with the prophets of doom. In early 2015 was re-visting the disconcerting subject of climate change and quickly encountered the prophets of doom (they make their living by self-promotion and selling alarm - nobody sells books that says there is nothing to worry about). I got very upset and depressed for a few weeks while I continued my research with a bit of fact checking, including actually reading the sources for all the panic (The actual IPCC reports). I concluded that climate change is, in fact, extremely bad news for the planet but that the future depended critically on developing rational, fact-based policies. In contrast with the frequent assumptions of the doom-sayers, there is a vast and unprecedented effort to understand and combat the threat of climate change. As with any effort to combat serious systemic problems, the problem seems to get worse and more intractable as we struggle to understand it. It is clear that the effort will span centuries. The prophets of doom see only the negative impacts of climate change over centuries time scales. They don't see (and can anyone see?) the ultimate outcome as humanity pushes back. The IPCC report is not a catalogue of catastrophe. It's about living with climate change. Looking back, I saw the prophets of doom as actively discouraging rational discussion, spinning concerns into immanent threats and generally spreading panic.

I wrote a piece in my other blog to this effect. While this blog deals with interpretation of "world events", the other blog deals with the inner world -- how we find peace of mind and how we figure out what is really happening around us. My perspective in this blog owes something to my own struggle against mental illness and my extensive personal contact with people whose problems are "all in their minds". To me, sanity is precious and illusive. When sanity is lost,  people slip into their inner world without ever realizing that they have lost contact with the real world and the people closest to them. More and more, they behave in response to a fantasy world created in their minds. But their behavior is real. It affects the real world and the people around them, often in tragic ways.

This is why I tend to look beyond the "facts" and ask questions about our ability to interpret the facts and respond in an intelligible way. On a certain level, my beef with Hedges is a contest between a skeptic and a manic preacher spreading panic and despair. It is wise to be skeptical about all interpretations. Skepticism especially applies to elaborate, narrow, personal and preconceived interpretations. The problems of the world are much more likely to be traced to human stupidity than conspiracy. The solutions to our problems are more likely to be found by cultivating wisdom compassion rather than assigning blame. We're all in this together.

Climate change is a huge issue. Everyone should take the time to understand the facts, the predictions, the impact and what we can do about all of it. Listening to people like Chris Hedges on the subject definitely will not help - predictably, Hedges thinks that survival of the human race is in immanent peril and we can't do anything about it (you know, the oligarchy plans to prophet by destroying the planet). Hedges is like a guy shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre. To my mind, the responsibility of intellectuals is to research the issue and, to the best of their ability, help develop policies to deal with the dangers.

If we were on a sinking ship. Hedges would be screaming, it's all the fault of the capitalist owners! We're all going to die! Others would be calmly leading the way to the life boats. It is no defence for Hedges to claim that the ship might actually be sinking or that he has a theory about whose fault it is. Panic itself is the danger. Panic is contagious.