How to Think

http://www.nationofchange.org/print/20876

By Chris Hedges

Cultures that endure carve out a protected space for those who question and
challenge national myths. Artists, writers, poets, activists, journalists,
philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors, directors and renegades must be
tolerated if a culture is to be pulled back from disaster. Members of this
intellectual and artistic class, who are usually not welcome in the
stultifying halls of academia where mediocrity is triumphant, serve as
prophets. They are dismissed, or labeled by the power elites as subversive,
because they do not embrace collective self-worship. They force us to
confront unexamined assumptions, ones that, if not challenged, lead to
destruction. They expose the ruling elites as hollow and corrupt. They
articulate the senselessness of a system built on the ideology of endless
growth, ceaseless exploitation and constant expansion. They warn us about
the poison of careerism and the futility of the search for happiness in the
accumulation of wealth. They make us face ourselves, from the bitter
reality of slavery and Jim Crow to the genocidal slaughter of Native
Americans to the repression of working-class movements to the atrocities
carried out in imperial wars to the assault on the ecosystem. They make us
unsure of our virtue. They challenge the easy clichés we use to describe
the nation—the land of the free, the greatest country on earth, the beacon
of liberty—to expose our darkness, crimes and ignorance. They offer the
possibility of a life of meaning and the capacity for transformation.

Human societies see what they want to see. They create national myths of
identity out of a composite of historical events and fantasy. They ignore
unpleasant facts that intrude on self-glorification. They trust naively in
the notion of linear progress and in assured national dominance. This is
what nationalism is about—lies. And if a culture loses its ability for
thought and expression, if it effectively silences dissident voices, if it
retreats into what Sigmund Freud called “screen memories,” those reassuring
mixtures of fact and fiction, it dies. It surrenders its internal mechanism
for puncturing self-delusion. It makes war on beauty and truth. It
abolishes the sacred. It turns education into vocational training. It
leaves us blind. And this is what has occurred. We are lost at sea in a
great tempest. We do not know where we are. We do not know where we are
going. And we do not know what is about to happen to us.

The psychoanalyst John
Steiner<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steiner_%28psychoanalyst%29>
calls
this phenomenon “turning a blind eye.” He notes that often we have access
to adequate knowledge but because it is unpleasant and disconcerting we
choose unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, to ignore it. He uses the
Oedipus story to make his point. He argued that Oedipus, Jocasta, Creon and
the “blind” Tiresias grasped the truth, that Oedipus had killed his father
and married his mother as prophesized, but they colluded to ignore it. We
too, Steiner wrote, turn a blind eye to the dangers that confront us,
despite the plethora of evidence that if we do not radically reconfigure
our relationships to each other and the natural world, catastrophe is
assured. Steiner describes a psychological truth that is deeply frightening.

I saw this collective capacity for self-delusion among the urban elites in
Sarajevo and later Pristina during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. These
educated elites steadfastly refused to believe that war was possible
although acts of violence by competing armed bands had already begun to
tear at the social fabric. At night you could hear gunfire. But they were
the last to “know.” And we are equally self-deluded. The physical evidence
of national decay—the crumbling infrastructures, the abandoned factories
and other workplaces, the rows of gutted warehouses, the closure of
libraries, schools, fire stations and post offices—that we physically *see*,
is, in fact, unseen. The rapid and terrifying deterioration of the
ecosystem, evidenced in soaring temperatures, droughts, floods, crop
destruction, freak storms, melting ice caps and rising sea levels, are met
blankly with Steiner’s “blind eye.”

Oedipus, at the end of Sophocles’ play, cuts out his eyes and with his
daughter Antigone as a guide wanders the countryside. Once king, he becomes
a stranger in a strange country. He dies, in Antigone’s words, “in a
foreign land, but one he yearned for.”

William Shakespeare in “King Lear” plays on the same theme of sight and
sightlessness. Those with eyes in “King Lear” are unable to see.
Gloucester, whose eyes are gouged out, finds in his blindness a revealed
truth. “I have no way, and therefore want no eyes,” Gloucester says after
he is blinded. “I stumbled when I saw.” When Lear banishes his only loyal
daughter, Cordelia, whom he accuses of not loving him enough, he shouts:
“Out of my sight!” To which Kent replies:

“ See better, Lear, and let me remain the ture blank of thine eye."

The story of Lear, like the story of Oedipus, is about the attainment of
this inner vision. It is about morality and intellect that are blinded by
empiricism and sight. It is about understanding that the human imagination
is, as William Blake saw, our manifestation of Eternity. “Love without
imagination is eternal death.”

The Shakespearean scholar Harold
Goddard<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Clarke_Goddard> wrote:
“The imagination is not a faculty for the creation of illusion; it is the
faculty by which alone man apprehends reality. The ‘illusion’ turns out to
be truth.” “Let faith oust fact,” Starbuck says in “Moby-Dick.”


“It is only our absurd ‘scientific’ prejudice that reality must be physical
and rational that blinds us to the truth,” Goddard warned. There are, as
Shakespeare wrote, “things invisible to mortal sight.” But these things are
not vocational or factual or empirical. They are not found in national
myths of glory and power. They are not attained by force. They do not come
through cognition or logical reasoning. They are intangible. They are the
realities of beauty, grief, love, the search for meaning, the struggle to
face our own mortality and the ability to face truth. And cultures that
disregard these forces of imagination commit suicide. They cannot see.

“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,” Shakespeare wrote, “Whose
action is no stronger than a flower?” Human imagination, the capacity to
have vision, to build a life of meaning rather than utilitarianism, is as
delicate as a flower. And if it is crushed, if a Shakespeare or a Sophocles
is no longer deemed useful in the empirical world of business, careerism
and corporate power, if universities think a Milton Friedman or a Friedrich
Hayek <http://mises.org/page/1454/Biography-of-F-A-Hayek-18991992> is more
important to their students than a Virginia Woolf or an Anton Chekhov, then
we become barbarians. We assure our own extinction. Students who are denied
the wisdom of the great oracles of human civilization—visionaries who urge
us not to worship ourselves, not to kneel before the base human emotion of
greed—cannot be educated. They cannot think.

To think, we must, as Epicurus understood, “live in hiding.” We must build
walls to keep out the cant and noise of the crowd. We must retreat into a
print-based culture where ideas are not deformed into sound bites and
thought-terminating clichés. Thinking is, as Hannah
Arendt<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/> wrote,
“a soundless dialogue between me and myself.” But thinking, she wrote,
always presupposes the human condition of plurality. It has no utilitarian
function. It is not an end or an aim outside of itself. It is different
from logical reasoning, which is focused on a finite and identifiable goal.
Logical reason, acts of cognition, serve the efficiency of a system,
including corporate power, which is usually morally neutral at best, and
often evil. The inability to think, Arendt wrote, “is not a failing of the
many who lack brain power but an ever-present possibility for
everybody—scientists, scholars, and other specialists in mental enterprises
not excluded.”

Our corporate culture has effectively severed us from human imagination.
Our electronic devices intrude deeper and deeper into spaces that were once
reserved for solitude, reflection and privacy. Our airwaves are filled with
the tawdry and the absurd. Our systems of education and communication scorn
the disciplines that allow us to see. We celebrate prosaic vocational
skills and the ridiculous requirements of standardized tests. We have
tossed those who think, including many teachers of the humanities, into a
wilderness where they cannot find employment, remuneration or a voice. We
follow the blind over the cliff. We make war on ourselves.

The vital importance of thought, Arendt wrote, is apparent only “in times
of transition when men no longer rely on the stability of the world and
their role in it, and when the question concerning the general conditions
of human life, which as such are properly coeval with the appearance of man
on earth, gain an uncommon poignancy.” We never need our thinkers and
artists more than in times of crisis, as Arendt reminds us, for they
provide the subversive narratives that allow us to chart a new course, one
that can assure our survival.

“What must I do to win salvation?” Dimitri asks Starov in “The Brothers
Karamazov,” to which Starov answers: “Above all else, never lie to
yourself.”

And here is the dilemma we face as a civilization. We march collectively
toward self-annihilation. Corporate capitalism, if left unchecked, will
kill us. Yet we refuse, because we cannot think and no longer listen to
those who do think, to see what is about to happen to us. We have created
entertaining mechanisms to obscure and silence the harsh truths, from
climate change to the collapse of globalization to our enslavement to
corporate power, that will mean our self-destruction. If we can do nothing
else we must, even as individuals, nurture the private dialogue and the
solitude that make thought possible. It is better to be an outcast, a
stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is
better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into
the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.



This article was published at NationofChange at:
http://www.nationofchange.org/how-think-1341922195. All rights are
reserved.


-- 
-Laye
==============================
"With fair speech thou might have thy will,
With it thou might thy self spoil."
--The R.M


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