Chris Hedges vs. Christopher Hitchens: On the Ten Commandments

You.  Who are on the road.  Must have a code.  That you can live by. --"-Teach Your Children," Crosby Stills, Nash, and Young

In Christopher Hitchens' newly published collection of essays, entitled Arguably, one nine-page essay is devoted to the idea that the Ten Commandments include no such code.  Allowing only a fundamentalist interpretation to argue against, the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything wastes no time in dismissing the first commandments.  

Hitchens says that Thou shalt have no other gods before me only implies that God is jealous and that there are other gods to worship, and that Thou shall not make a graven image "appears to forbid representational art."  Hitchens gives us no enlarged discussion of false idols but instead allows only  a minimalist, fundamentalist interpretation.  

Chris Hedges, on the other hand--in his book, Losing Moses On The Freeway--takes a secular approach.  He sees the Ten Commandments as a guide to the way we should live, here on this material road.  To Hedges, God is love, a spiritual force rather than the material god that Hitchens argues against.  Hedges sees Americans errantly placing material riches above spiritual love, worshiping the almighty dollar, bowing to the gods of money, power, and celebrity.  False idols.

"It is the unmentioned fear of death and obliteration, the one that rattles with the wind through the heavy branches of the trees outside, which frightens us most, even though we do not name this fear.  It is death we are fleeing.  The smallness of our lives, the transitory nature of existence, the inevitable road to old age, are what idols tell us we can avoid."

We lose ourselves to the addiction to material things in an effort to seek control over death.  The more we obtain, the more we covet in a futile effort to fill the bottomless emptiness inside.  If only we had a different car, or a different house, or a different spouse.  Or we try to escape into drink and drugs, subordinating our free will to animal compulsions.  "These impulses, carefully manipulated, intoxicate us with patriotic fervor and a lust for war.  They lead us to support certain candidates or to buy certain products or brands.'

"Politicians, advertisers, social scientists, television evangelists, the news media, and the entertainment industry--all have learned what makes us respond.  It works.'

"We follow the idol and barter away our freedom.  We place our identity and our hopes in the hands of the idol.  We believe we need the idol to define ourselves, to determine our worth.  We invest in the idol.  We sell ourselves into bondage."

Hedges says, "The commandments are guideposts.  They bring us back, even as we stray, as we all do, to the right path.  They are our protection against the siren calls of glory, wealth, and power..." those illusionary idols that take us away from what is real and eternal.  Love itself.

Mindfulness Monday: A Separate Peace

Sunday I caught the tail end of a segment on Book TV, a rant given by an author of a couple of books on my "most beloved" shelves, Chris Hedges.  I've enjoyed them all, but his best two books, in my opinion, are  War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning and Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America.  I suspect that these two will last when the others are long out of print.


His two most recent books are Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and Death of the Liberal Class.  At the end of his talk, he fielded questions from the audience.  People wanted to know, What's to be done?

Chris Hedges wisely refused to take a stand on many things, said that he was simply an investigative journalist who had diagnosed the illness, not knowing a cure for the disease.  He said that he was anti-authoritarian by nature, but not one to start or join causes.


Indeed.  Liberals have no cause to join anyway.  The only cause in American life left to attract true believers, in the Eric Hoffer sense, is the Tea Party.  Initially manufactured by Fox News with the help of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and other demagogues in the fold of the Super Rich, it has now grown to a formidable force.  The main doctrine of the Tea Party is that laissez-faire capitalism is the American Way and should be fully implemented.  True believers, looking for a cause to join, flock to their side.  It's like Orwell's 1984, in that the ruling rich have thus created their own underground.

What's to be done?  There's no stopping them now, and the hard lessons of history will have to be learned all over again.  The Supreme Court may have sealed the new U. S. Plutocracy forever by recently decreeing that corporations were equal to citizens and that corporations might sponsor political candidates with unlimited funds.  Rule by the rich--that's what it amounts to.  It could be argued that we have always been ruled by the rich, but never before to such an official degree.

Hemingway Award-winning author Sean Murphy, in his satirical novel entitled The Time of New Weather (2005), envisioned a corporation buying out the United States Government.  Stands to reason, that if private enterprise is as efficient and government is as inefficient as Rush Limbaugh claims, then the government should naturally be run by private enterprise.

So what's to be done?  Nothing.  Just let it be.  You can still speak out against it, flamboyantly as Chris Hedges does in Death of the Liberal Class, or more quietly as Wendell Berry does in The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays.  But in the meantime, I recommend that you make a separate peace with the world as it is, and simply do what you can on a personal level to make the world a better place.

Like Wendell Berry (and Chris Hedges too), I'm not one for causes.  All causes eventually give rise to an anti-cause in opposition, and it becomes true believer vs. true believer, ditto heads vs. ditto heads.  You need to step out of the duality; and you do that with the realization that these people who seem malicious are merely ignorant, caught up in the duality of competing immortality projects--blindly giving lip service to freedom though it is not freedom they seek, it is substance to fill their emptiness, and control over death.

And it is both sides of the duality that seek this control, under the delusion that they are pursuing freedom and justice.  We should forgive our debtors, but the justice-seeking duality will not permit it.  It wants to even the score, and not only that, it demands payback and a pound of flesh besides.  Justice is not what we need; compassion is what we need.  Compassion and forgiveness.  You should read Margaret Atwood's masterful work on debt(pictured at left).

The first time I read Joseph Heller's Catch-22, I was very much with Yossarian, butting heads with the military/industrial establishment.  But the last time I read it, I was with Orr and no longer with Yossarian until the end of the novel, when he realizes that he had it wrong all along.  That his buddy, the laid-back Orr, had it right.  That the only way to deal with the duality of war was to step out of it and to make a separate peace.

The first time I read Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I was with McMurphy, bucking against the totalitarian Nurse Ratchet and the bureaucracy of the establishment.  But the last time I read the novel, I was with Chief Broom, the big Indian, who escaped and made a separate peace with the world.

The line containing "a separate peace" in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (where Henry escapes from the madness of World War I by going to Switzerland) was the source of the title of John Knowles' 1959 coming of age novel,  A Separate Peace (in which peace is finally achieved through forgiveness).