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© AP/Mahesh Kumar A.
People collect scraps from a garbage
dump in Hyderabad, India.
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Chris Hedges: Welcome to the Asylum
When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the
ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air,
soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied
of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be
thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites,
drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation,
speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We
live in an age when news consists of Snooki's pregnancy, Hulk Hogan's
sex tape and Kim Kardashian's denial that she is the naked woman cooking
eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including
presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they
campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. "At times when the
page is turning," Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in
Castle to Castle, "when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!"
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate
greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society's
version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to
exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a
collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the
self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those
who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the
lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as
exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health
Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States
suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression - which
seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective
suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash
product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of "primitive"
societies, those that were defined by
animism
and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that
respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only
ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those
who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who
structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather
than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within
the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust
for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical.
And as we race toward the collapse of the planet's ecosystem we must
restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.
The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged
by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a
people but a competing ethic. The older form of human community was
antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological
state and the demands of empire. This struggle between belief systems
was not lost on Marx. "The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx" is a
series of observations derived from Marx's reading of works by
historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions,
practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous
indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details
about the formation of Native American society, but also that "lands
[were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned
jointly by their occupants." He wrote of the Aztecs, "Commune tenure of
lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related
families." He went on, "... reasons for believing they practiced
communism in living in the household." Native Americans, especially the
Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American
colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel's vision of communism.
Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create
his workers' utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces
outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to
human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of
pre-modern societies. The Iroquois Council of the
Gens,
where Indians came together to be heard as ancient Athenians did, was,
Marx noted, a "democratic assembly where every adult male and female
member had a voice upon all questions brought before it." Marx lauded
the active participation of women in tribal affairs, writing, "The women
[were] allowed to express their wishes and opinions through an orator
of their own election. Decision given by the Council. Unanimity was a
fundamental law of its action among the Iroquois." European women on the
Continent and in the colonies had no equivalent power.
Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation
rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as
changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending
our dependence on fossil fuels. The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull
and Crazy Horse - although they were not always idyllic and performed
acts of cruelty including the mutilation, torture and execution of
captives - did not subordinate the sacred to the technical. The deities
they worshipped were not outside of or separate from nature.
Seventeenth century European philosophy and the Enlightenment,
meanwhile, exalted the separation of human beings from the natural
world, a belief also embraced by the Bible. The natural world, along
with those pre-modern cultures that lived in harmony with it, was seen
by the industrial society of the Enlightenment as worthy only of
exploitation.
Descartes argued, for example, that the fullest exploitation of matter to
any
use was the duty of humankind. The wilderness became, in the religious
language of the Puritans, satanic. It had to be Christianized and
subdued. The implantation of the technical order resulted, as Richard
Slotkin writes in
Regeneration Through Violence, in the primacy
of "the western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat
banker." Davy Crockett and, later, George Armstrong Custer, Slotkin
notes, became "national heroes by defining national aspiration in terms
of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked
down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust."
The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate
consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now
imploding. Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their
self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the
railroad magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants,
slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage
war throughout the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems,
foul the air and soil and gamble with commodities as half the globe
sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines
this single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the
"beast."
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.
In William Shakespeare's "The Tempest," Prospero is stranded on an
island where he becomes the undisputed lord and master. He enslaves the
primitive "monster" Caliban. He employs the magical sources of power
embodied in the spirit Ariel, who is of fire and air. The forces
unleashed in the island's wilderness, Shakespeare knew, could prompt us
to good if we had the capacity for self-control and reverence. But it
also could push us toward monstrous evil since there are few constraints
to thwart plunder, rape, murder, greed and power. Later, Joseph Conrad,
in his portraits of the outposts of empire, also would expose the same
intoxication with barbarity.
The anthropologist
Lewis Henry Morgan,
who in 1846 was "adopted" by the Seneca, one of the tribes belonging to
the Iroquois confederation, wrote in "Ancient Society" about social
evolution among American Indians. Marx noted approvingly, in his
"Ethnological Notebooks," Morgan's insistence on the historical and
social importance of "imagination, that great faculty so largely
contributing to the elevation of mankind." Imagination, as the
Shakespearean scholar Harold C. Goddard pointed out, "is neither the
language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium
of communion between the two. ... Imagination is the elemental speech
in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the
poets."
All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that
have the power to transform us, is being steadily extinguished by our
corporate state. Art. Education. Literature. Music. Theater. Dance.
Poetry. Philosophy. Religion. Journalism. None of these disciplines are
worthy in the corporate state of support or compensation. These are
pursuits that, even in our universities, are condemned as impractical.
But it is only through the impractical, through that which can empower
our imagination, that we will be rescued as a species. The prosaic world
of news events, the collection of scientific and factual data, stock
market statistics and the sterile recording of deeds as history do not
permit us to understand the elemental speech of imagination. We will
never penetrate the mystery of creation, or the meaning of existence, if
we do not recover this older language. Poetry shows a man his soul,
Goddard wrote, "as a looking glass does his face." And it is our souls
that the culture of imperialism, business and technology seeks to crush.
Walter Benjamin
argued that capitalism is not only a formation "conditioned by
religion," but is an "essentially religious phenomenon," albeit one that
no longer seeks to connect humans with the mysterious forces of life.
Capitalism, as Benjamin observed, called on human societies to embark on
a ceaseless and futile quest for money and goods. This quest, he
warned, perpetuates a culture dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy
and self-loathing. It enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages,
subservience to the commodity culture and debt peonage. The suffering
visited on Native Americans, once Western expansion was complete, was
soon endured by others, in Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the
Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The final
chapter of this sad experiment in human history will see us sacrificed
as those on the outer reaches of empire were sacrificed. There is a kind
of justice to this. We profited as a nation from this demented vision,
we remained passive and silent when we should have denounced the crimes
committed in our name, and now that the game is up we all go down
together.
