How to Think

How to Think

By Chris Hedges
Truth Dig
July 11, 2012

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 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 still remain
The true 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 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 is more important to its 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 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.


http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_to_think_20120709/?ln