Chris Hedges at Starr King
by: Dave Belden on May 21st, 2009 | 5 Comments »
I’m doubly lucky this week that my friend Be Scofield, who interned a while back at Tikkun, is now at Starr King seminary and invited me to hear Rev. Wright on Tuesday and Chris Hedges today.
I hadn’t realized that the former war correspondent and current hard-hitting opponent of both the Religious Right (or the heretical Christian Fascists as he would prefer that we think of them) and the New Atheists, one of the stars of the spiritual progressive world, had himself gone to seminary (Harvard Divinity School).
His talk to the seminarians today was alarming, about:
- the lack of literacy and critical thought in America
- the primacy of the image (TV and advertising) that works its manipulative emotional way with us however critical we are of it
- the nature of corporate “reverse totalitarianism” (in which ideology is subservient to profitmaking, unlike other totalitarian or theocratic states)
- and the likelihood that this round of stimulus will create a financial bubble that will burst and leave us in much deeper trouble, prey to pseudo-Christian fascist demagogues who will have a field day due to the bankruptcy of liberalism.
Much of this sounded convincing to me, and he had wise words about what to do about it. Our question should never be “How can we elect good people?” but always “How can we limit the damage done by mediocrities in power?” This to me is the essence of democracy, from Magna Carta onwards. Noone ever bothered to organize democracy, with all the conflict that entails, to deal with good rulers, only with mediocre and bad ones.
But I started to get confused when Hedges said, approvingly, that Dan Berrigan (the famous radical Catholic priest) had not been interested in the Obama/McCain election struggle last year because, Berrigan said, quoting his brother Phil, “If voting was that effective it would be illegal.” Hedges went into a riff about how the 60s Left failed because it was secular and therefore was seduced by power. It takes a religious Left to hold onto the ethical core. It’s not our job to attain power, he said, our loyalty is to another Power. He quoted Paul Tillich to the effect that all institutions are demonic.
This was too much for me. Hedges had already spoken approvingly of habeas corpus, slavery abolition and something he called “functioning democracy.” But history teaches us that those were achieved by the exercise of power, by people who thought it worth acquiring power in order to hold the mediocrities in power to account. To say that institutions, which are ubiquitous in human society, are demonic, is too close to saying human beings are demonic, for me. There is a power dimension to everything we do, every penny we spend, every speech we give to students, every relationship in our lives: if we can’t have a theology or psychology of the good use of power, then we are lost as a social species.
He said at one point that there could never be a moral institution in the same sense that there could be a moral individual. That rang purity warning bells in my head. I don’t think there can ever be an entirely moral institution OR individual: we are humans–clever, conscious, selfish, cooperative animals–neither perfect nor perfectible. Nonetheless some individuals are kinder than others, and some institutions are more accountable than others. Hedges talked a lot about kindness at the start, but this emphasis on some kind of purity of moral individuality that is spoiled by trying to gain power, that to me is all about purity and has nothing to do with kindness. Purity and kindness can and often are opposites, enemies.
I fear that his speech could be taken to be so apocalyptically doom laden about America, about our world, about all our institutions and about the very concept of trying to gain power to promote a kinder world, that kind-hearted idealists would wonder why on earth it would be worth taking part in public life, except to make symbolic stands that preserve their purity. That was not how habeas corpus, slavery abolition or functioning democracies were created, nor any of a thousand reforms that make life in some countries and institutions better than life in others.
So I was thoroughly confused. Did I misunderstand him? I’ll send him this blog, and ask for clarification.
What a futuristic picture of Chris Hedges — it looks like he’s being beamed down from a starship! I think you are right to be wary of discourses that identify moral purity as the goal. Discourses of purity lead too easily to situations in which people declare themselves the gatekeepers and paragons of goodness, thereby shielding themselves from calls to accountability. I’m much more excited about the idea of approaching institutions and individuals with the expectation that they will always be imperfect, they will never be truly moral. If we presume imperfection, we are more likely to open ourselves and our institutions to constructive scrutiny and redirection from each other and the community at large.
I tend to agree with Chris Hedges about institutions, which are really only organizations made by humans. It makes one feel insignificant to think that an institution might possibly outlive its founders and then become something entirely different. I think too that those people who have a vision to start a movement or an institution are the only ones who really feel the vision. Those that follow are less pure, if you will, and many will leave the institution or the movement if they do not receive enough salary. Those who surround the leader are often there because it is a place of power and they are the ones that chase away the children (“suffer the children to come unto me”). They are children too and don’t have the faith or understanding of the leader in that group. Much of it is driven by our fear and need to feel as though we can control what happens to us. The drive for control, however, makes many people simply drag their feet. They feel that is the only mode available to exert themselves.
Dave–beautiful commentary. I have seen this absolutist-purist aversion to power before (mostly among my New Age friends!), and it has always scared, worried and depressed me. I’m just surprised to hear that Chris Hedges thinks this way.
I’ve always seen Chris as wonderfully exemplifying what Tikkun does best: combining cultural-spiritual with political concerns. But the one thing that I think many ‘religions’ or ‘spiritualities’ get really wrong is that absolutist aversion to political power, exactly for the reasons you mention. Many religious people sometimes have this sense that moral goodness can be found only in ‘the individual’ and that the processes of human institutional life are an *inevitable* corruption of the foundational goodness of which only the human heart is capable.
But social institutions can hold, elaborate, articulate, manifest (and even magnify!) the goodness in the human heart in a beautiful way! They — and the power they wield — can even temper the raging best in the human heart. That’s what politics is all about.
Monetary literacy is such an important skill to show the youth. It is a shame that they don’t teach it in schools.
John, these are great points and I agree that all kinds of things go wrong with institutions. We need a sort of sociological taxonomy of things typically go wrong with religious and social change movements, so that we who start them or join them are alerted to the pitfalls, and are trained in ways to counteract them.
I love the story about how some aircraft accidents were analyzed as resulting from pilot error, and from the overly deferential behavior of copilots, who saw the error but did not speak up enough, and so lost their lives; and this led to specific training for copilots in how to stand up to authority and, in a real sense, speak truth to power.
We just need equivalent analysis and training in all aspects of running organizations: it’s a huge task, but much of it has been developed and is part of our culture already. It’s just that we have a long way to go. It’s the awareness of the failings of institutions that enables us to make corrections in them.