There's a deep morality embedded in anything Hedges writes. We mustn't forget that he holds a Masters in divinity from Harvard U.
Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Tom Walker To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION Cc: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2012 9:52 AM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Where are we taking ourselves? I find Chris Hedges almost unreadable because of his melancholy apocalypticism, even though I concur with much of his analysis. On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 4:18 AM, Ed Weick <[email protected]> wrote: Interesting and scary piece by Chris Hedges on the state and future of modern capitalist society. http://www.alternet.org/story/155213/hedges%3A_how_our_demented_capitalist_system_made_america_insane?page=entire Examples: "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." and: "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." Ed _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework -- Cheers, Tom Walker (Sandwichman) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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