Consider the following passage:  

“Our return to an image-based culture means the destruction of the abstract thought made possible by a literate, print-based society. Image-based societies do not grasp or cope with ambiguity, nuance, doubt and the many layers of traditional motives and urges, some of them frightening, that make human actions complex and finally unfathomable. They eschew self-criticism for amusement. They build fantastic non-reality-based belief systems that cater to human desires and illusions rather than human reality.”

This, it seems to me, is an astute and very profound observation. For a long time now, I have been bemoaning to anyone who would listen this sad – not to say tragic – fact of modern western society, that is, the diminution in value of language as a tool for thought, communication and expression. The decline of language in our era has come about, not least, as a result of the cultural influences of capitalism and the mass media: capitalism because it is profit driven and mass media because it combines this profit motive with the necessity of speaking to the multitude. With the emergence of mass media and the rise of capitalism, consumerism raised its ugly head and resulted in the critical mass imperative which led to a “keep it simple, stupid” philosophy based on a “dumbing down” (rather than a “smartening up”) strategy in order to reach/target a mass audience for the purpose of selling to it. This, in turn, has led to an over-simplification and trivialization of just about everything – culture, education, thought – and the rise of popular culture as the standard and measure.

The French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, has observed how the practices of dominant groups in a society are legitimized to the disadvantage of subordinate groups. We see evidence of this in the increasingly widening gap between rich and poor in capitalist societies. The interesting paradox to be noted here is that the basis of capitalism is individualism but profit making requires a kind of economic collectivism. In modern capitalist societies, in order to perpetuate their advantage and increase their riches, the dominant group concocts a strategy of extolling the humanistic ideals of the enlightenment and the belief, the vision of a society made up of unique individuals healthily pursuing their individual interests while secretly sanctioning widespread conformism and acquiescence among the disadvantaged; the “dumbing down” strategy being executed by the advantaged for gain resulted in the progressively diminished capacity of the disadvantaged in the 21^st century.

We live, today, in a post-literate and post-intellectual society. Hence, the rise of the “image-based culture” observed by Hedges. A picture is a worth a thousand words and seeing is everything, even believing, these days. As a result of this shift in cultural emphasis from the verbal to the visual, along with the influences of the profit motive, mass media and the critical mass imperative, we witness in our time the ascendancy of a culture the most persuasive and pervasive values of which are drawn from the very bottom of the barrel. Eric Bentley once observed that “ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.” This has come about and is possible because we have lost our capacity for critical thinking and for discernment. So it is that we prefer illusion to reality, beautiful starlets to talented actors and happily convince ourselves that the tepid, the glib and the mediocre are the great, the beautiful and the true.  

There is so much more that can be said on this subject. We could trot out example after example as evidence of the lowering of standards that is undermining our modern culture – American Idol, for example, or the obscene salaries paid to professional athletes, or the fawning adulation that follows celebrities around the world as if it would make gods and goddesses out of these very mere mortals; and what about the fact that Harry Potter is being read by countless millions of young impressionable minds while the genius of Lewis Carroll languishes  and his books, much more deserving of readers, collect dust on library shelves around the world. It’s a sad state of affairs, in my opinion, but what’s to be done?

More Hedges in my next installment.

“I Don’t Believe in Atheists” is a cynical and deeply pessimistic book in places; in places, a confused and misleading book; a profoundly insightful book in places and, everywhere, a provocative and engaging book. I loved it most in the places that I most hated it. I came to this book on the side of the New Atheists but my loyalties are wavering and I blame Hedges. I have, for a long time now, been adamantly atheist and, though I’m not about to be born again, Hedges does have me questioning again, not what I believe so much as what I think, which, I suppose, is a good if bothersome thing.

Hedges biggest beef against the New Atheists is that theirs is a kind of secular fundamentalism as dangerously misleading as any religious fundamentalism and that it perpetuates a myth that is “no less fantastic, no less delusional than those preached from church pulpits”, that is, the myth that humankind is advancing morally, that Mankind is perfecting itself, and that we are the masters of our own destiny.  

In Hedges words “those who insist we are morally advancing as a species are deluding themselves. There is little in science or history to support this idea. Human individuals can make moral advances, as can human societies, but also make moral reverses. Our personal and collective histories are not linear. We alternate between periods of light and periods of darkness.” In Hedges view, this belief in the ever advancing moral advancement of humankind is “one of the most pervasive forms of self-delusion” and I can’t help but think that, on this point at least, he may be right. It just may be that this utopian vision of Man perfected is as absurd a belief as any belief in pearly gates or devils with pitchforks. All the names we have for paradise – Heaven, Nirvana, Arcadia, Canaan, Elysium, Shangri-la, Zion, Utopia – all are pretty enough thoughts, admittedly, but hardly a place to hang your hat. As ideas, not to say mere poeticisms, they are a comfort to our imagination and can serve to lighten our spirits at the end of a hard day but, surely, they are not the sort of thing to pin your hopes on.  

According to Hedges, “the greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.” Religious fundamentalisms comes in many shapes, sizes and colours, Christian, Islamic and Jewish included, to name the three that are most on the minds of the peoples of the western world at the beginning of the 21^st Century. But having survived the Age of Enlightenment and having learned from Nietzsche that “god is dead” and living, as we do or are suppose to be at least, in a secular age, might there be a new kind of fundamentalism emerging from out of the freethinking, New Atheist camp.

Might Hedges be right? Must we accept his version of human history as a series of advances and reversals and his vision of a perpetually imperfect future in which the pendulum swings between periods of light and darkness?

And could it be, as Hedges thinks, that absolute faith in human reason is as dangerous as any other absolute faith?