The Myth of Human Progress

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Chris Hedges: The Myth of Human Progress

By Chris Hedges on 01/14/2013

Illustration by Mr. Fish

Clive Hamilton in his ”Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change“ describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power-for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in ”The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in ”Human Impact on Ancient Environments“ and Ronald Wright in ”A Short History of Progress“ have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada. “They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”

“If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later,” he said. “If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”

Wright, who in his dystopian novel ”A Scientific Romance“ paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.

Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book ”What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.

“The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever,” Wright said. “It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.”

And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.

“Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away,” Wright said. “There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable—the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun—would disappear.”

“We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring,” Wright said. “It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we are letting oil and gas exploration rip when we know that expanding the carbon economy is suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.”

“If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea,” Wright said.

Article By Chris Hedges | © Sabbah Report: http://sabbah.biz/mt/?p=16513

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The World As it Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress

Monday, September 26, 2011

Author: Chris Hedges

Publisher: Nation Books (April 12, 2011)
Print Length: 368 pages
Page Numbers Source ISBN: 156858640X
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
Language: English
ASIN: B004OVEYOO

Product Description

Following the news of the killing of Osama bin Laden by US Navy Seals, veteran journalist and author Chris Hedges spoke at a fundraiser for Truthdig (http://www.truthdig.com) where he is a columnist. Commenting on the news of bin Laden’s death he said, “The expansion of military occupation that took place throughout, in particular the Arab world, following 9/11 – this presence of American imperial bases, dotted, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Doha – is one that has done more to engender hatred and acts of terror than anything ever orchestrated by Osama bin Laden.”

Drawing on two decades of experience as a war correspondent and based on his numerous columns for Truthdig, Chris Hedges presents The World As It Is, a panorama of the American empire at home and abroad, from the coarsening effect of Americas War on Terror to the front lines in the Middle East and South Asia and the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Underlying his reportage is a constant struggle with the nature of war and its impact on human civilization. War is always about betrayal, Hedges notes. It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of cynics by idealists, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians. Society’s institutions, including our religious institutions, which mold us into compliant citizens, are unmasked.

Hedges argues that the gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although the right may well inherit power. Instead, the threat comes from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.

"You can't sustain a democracy in an oligarchic state. The writers on Athenian democracy understood that 2000 years ago," says Chris Hedges, whose new book The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress explores the problems of a crumbling empire, inside and out. Chris joins Laura in studio for a conversation about the death of Bin Laden and the continuing concern over terrorism, the end of empathy in the U.S., and what avenues are left for progressives to fight back. "The elites are not going to help us," he warns, "We're going to have to help ourselves."

Watch the Video: http://blip.tv/grittv/grittv-chris-hedges-the-world-as-it-is-5155794

The World According to Chris Hedges
Reviewed By Lee Linderman

For decades, acclaimed writer Chris Hedges has worked as a journalist, author, and war correspondent, specializing in Middle East and American politics and wartime societies. He spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, including working with a team of reporters in 2002 that won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of global terrorism. He has taught at many of the United States’ top undergraduate schools, such as Columbia University, New York University, and Princeton University. In 2002, his best-selling book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning was chosen as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Needless to say, the man’s pedigree is impressive for its prestige and longevity.

So it was with great anticipation that I picked up his newest publication, The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress, a collection of essays written by Hedges for Truthdig.com between 2006 and 2010 compiled into one neatly packed anthology. The book spans a wide range of subjects and partitions each broad topic into its own subsection. Specifically, Hedges includes 24 essays under the Politics heading (titles range from “Buying Brand Obama” to “This Country Needs a Few Good Communists”), 12 essays discussing Israel and Palestine (including “Israel’s Barrier to Peace” and “Israel’s Racist-in-Chief”), six entries on The Middle East broadly (such as “A Culture of Atrocity” or “Opium, Rape, and the American Way”) and finally 15 essays packaged under “The Decay of Empire” (including “We Are Breeding Ourselves to Extinction” and “The American Empire Is Bankrupt”).

My eagerness for the book quickly soured. Hedges takes little time to alienate many readers, calling his columns “sermons” and himself a “minister” and noting that “sermons, when they are good, do not please a congregation. They do not make people happy … I write not with the anticipation of approval but often of hostility.” To that end, he derides contemporary media members as “lacking a moral compass,” calling them “nothing more than courtiers to the elite, shameless hedonists of power, and absurd court propagandists.” Ironically, because his book is filled with unconditional language and an I’m-right-you’re-wrong attitude, he’s the one who comes across as myopic.

Hedges spends most of his book espousing in absolute terms doomsday prognostications for the United States’ future. In the first few pages he spews fear-mongering rhetoric: “Our way of life is over,” “poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague,” “our empire is dying,” “America is devolving into a Third-World nation,” etc. He subsides on controversial vocabulary like “totalitarianism,” “propaganda,” “corporate elitism” and “puppetry.” The much-too-strong language holds Hedges back from being taken seriously, which is unfortunate, because a close read reveals that his criticisms are not partisan or incoherent (as may be true of others who write in a similar style). Indeed, he caustically attacks both Democrats and Republicans, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, The New York Times and Fox News, and so and on. While this is a refreshing dose of nonpartisan criticism, it comes across as bombastic and self-righteous rather than helpful or illuminating. It’s Hedges’ way or the highway. Perhaps this impression results because the book is comprised of isolated blog entries — oftentimes written months apart — crunched together, one after another. That is, in small doses Hedges’ near-radical language may very well be tolerable and indeed could derive strength from its brevity. But when several strong, repetitive entries are presented as one, the work as a whole suffers and becomes more of an assault on the reader’s sensibilities.

That’s not to say the book is meritless. Hedges writes with clarity and skill throughout. When he’s not prophesying about the downfall of America, Hedges reveals the journalistic prowess that garnered him awards. One particularly striking chapter is “Israel’s Barrier to Peace,” which comes midway through the book in the “Israel and Palestine” section. The chapter is bold and riveting: Bold because it is staunchly un-American in championing the Palestinian cause while casting Israel’s treatment of erecting a wall along the West Bank in an arguably evil light; riveting through its graphic and human portrayal of the Palestinian lives affected by the wall. Hedges expertly explores and weaves together the human stories often lost in discussions about the longstanding conflict. His beautifully tragic descriptions of the landscape and heart-wrenching stories of lost homes and lives prove poignant and memorable. Unfortunately, these engaging and profound chapters are few and far between, hidden among the repetitive radicalism that saturates the rest of the work.

Excerpt: The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street protests, strikes, and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time. When things start to go sour, when Barack Obama is exposed as a mortal waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could plunge into a long period of precarious social instability.

At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.

*Lee Linderman holds a J.D. from the University of Southern California and degrees in creative writing and history from Northwestern University. In August, he begins a judicial clerkship with the Hon. Christina A. Snyder in the Central District of California.

About the Author

Chris Hedges is a cultural critic and author who was a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades for The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. He reported from Latin American, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He is a Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute and writes an online column for the web site Truthdig. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.

http://www.iranreview.org/content/Documents/The_World_As_it_Is_Dispatches_on_the_Myth_of_Human_Progress.htm