More than the divides of race, class, or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, our culture has been carved up into radically distinct, unbridgeable, and antagonistic entities that no longer speak the same language and cannot communicate.
— Chris Hedges
I’d be interested to hear how he’d define these “entities” if such terms as “race, class, or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state” aren’t useful.
brain chemistry. gotta be the brain chemistry.
I’m not entirely sure I follow where you’re leading, Jaybird. Hedges proposes that things like race, class, gender, rural/urban, believer/non, and Team Red versus Team Blue are all attributes of the divide he observes in the culture, and that the cleavage has resulted in blocs of behavior which are pretty much monolithic.
We can disagree with that proposition, and here in our collegial intellectual salon at LoOG, it’s easy to disbelieve that such a state of affairs really is the case. I’m not all that sure, though, whether his choice of the word “entities” was a result of the poverty in the language rather than a shortcoming of his own wordsmithing — Hedges in his book is a polemicist, but he is among the most eloquet polemicists I’ve yet read.
I’m not disagreeing that this is the case (well, not right yet, anyway) but he specifically said “more than the divides of…” and then he gave a list of things.
It seems to me that he’s saying that it can’t be encapsulated by race, class, or gender or urban/rural or red/blue… which is fair enough, I suppose. If the cultures are so very different to the point where they can’t communicate, is there a main thing that *IS* dividing these cultures?
Or is it race and class and gender and urban/rural and red/blue and a handful of je ne se quoises?
Chris Hedges needs a better editor. The second half of that book could have been thrown away entirely. The first half was an eloquent denunciation of much that is wrong with America but might have been tempered with a little optimism.
America will fail, given enough time but not soon and not for a long time. America should be criticized, early and often. But to criticize us as a people is to criticize humanity itself: alone among the nations of the world, we are from everywhere. Our nation came at the price of the civilizations we overran and the legacy of racism is still with us. We remain the only nation to drop nuclear weapons on another.
Lord-a-mercy does Hedges get tedious toward the end of Empire of Illusion. I am something of a connoisseur of sermons and most good ones end up on a hopeful note, a recapitulation of the line drawn between where we are and where’s we’re going. He spends forty unnecessary years in the wilderness and the Empire of Illusion never gets established in the Promised Land.