{"id":79198,"date":"2016-09-12T12:00:07","date_gmt":"2016-09-12T11:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=79198"},"modified":"2016-09-12T12:12:59","modified_gmt":"2016-09-12T11:12:59","slug":"the-intellectuals-we-abandon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/09\/the-intellectuals-we-abandon\/","title":{"rendered":"The Intellectuals We Abandon"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a transcript of a speech that Chris Hedges gave on 3 Sep 2016 at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Sheldon<\/a>

Sheldon Wolin, left, and James Baldwin.
(YouTube, photo at left, and Allan Warren \/ CC-BY-SA)<\/p><\/div>\n

Great writers and intellectuals give us a vocabulary that allows us to make sense of reality. They excavate depths that we, without their help, are unable to fathom. We are captive to systems of power until we can name the dominant myths and the intricate systems of coercion and control that extinguish our freedom.<\/p>\n

We are a society awash in skillfully manufactured lies. Solitude that makes thought possible\u2014a removal from the electronic cacophony that besieges us\u2014is harder and harder to find. We have severed ourselves from a print-based culture. We are unable to grapple with the nuances and complexity of ideas. We have traded ideas for fabricated clich\u00e9s. We speak in the hollow language we are given by our corporate masters. Reality, presented to us as image, is unexamined and therefore false. We are culturally illiterate. And because of our cultural illiteracy we are easily manipulated and controlled.<\/p>\n

The great writers\u2014Marcel Proust, Anton Chekhov, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Max Weber, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin and others\u2014knew that thought is subversive. They challenged and critiqued the dominant narrative, assumptions and structures that buttress power. They freed us. They did not cater to the latest fashion of the academy or popular culture. They did not seek adulation. They did not build pathetic monuments to themselves. They elucidated difficult and hard truths. They served humanity. They lifted up voices the power elites seek to discredit, marginalize or crush.<\/p>\n

Sheldon Wolin<\/a> was a writer of this stature. He gave us the words and the ideas to understand our corporate despotism\u2014what he called \u201cinverted totalitarianism.\u201d He did so by battling the dominant trend within university political science departments that, as he lamented, has seen them become de facto social science departments \u201caddicted\u201d to quantitative projects, chasing after an unachievable scientific clarity and refusing to take a stand or examine the major issues facing the wider society.<\/p>\n

This quantitative gathering of \u201cvalue-free\u201d facts may get you tenure. It may get you invited as a courtier into the machinery of power\u2014indeed, academic writing too often serves the ends of power. But these pursuits, as Wolin reminded us, are intellectual treason. Wolin was not afraid to ask the huge, esoteric, uncomfortable and often unanswerable questions that make the life of the mind and political thought vital and important. He called out corporate power for its destruction of our capitalist democracy. He railed against the commodification of the individual and the ecosystem. He unmasked the mechanisms of manipulation. He denounced our corporate coup d\u2019\u00e9tat. He upheld the integrity of the scholar. And he was often alone.<\/p>\n

I taught his \u201cPolitics and Vision\u201d<\/a> last spring in a maximum-security prison in Rahway, N.J., to students earning their B.A. degrees. Intellectuals in our society who are poor, especially those of color, are trapped in environments and schools, and too often prisons, that make learning difficult and often impossible.<\/p>\n

In prison these intellectuals, struggling against odds that most in this hall cannot imagine, convert their cells into libraries. My class was consumed by \u201cPolitics and Vision\u201d\u2014Machiavelli\u2019s advocacy of \u201ccalculated violence\u201d and call for the power elites to be skillful pretenders and dissemblers; Locke\u2019s ability to convert property into an instrument for coercing citizens into political obedience; Weber\u2019s understanding that the modern hero, unlike the classical hero battling fortuna<\/em>, had to struggle against a bloodless, faceless system \u201cwhere contingency has been routed by bureaucratized procedures\u201d and where \u201ceven charisma has been bureaucratized.\u201d The ideological mantra of corporate oppression\u2014sine ira et studio<\/em>, without scorn or bias\u2014is, as Weber knew, a weapon to crush those with the passion, outrage, courage and vision to effect change. Wolin warned in the book that \u201ceach individual bore the awful responsibility for choice at this ultimate level but each was denied anything like the scientist\u2019s sense of certainty.\u201d He quoted Weber, whom he loved: \u201cThe ultimate possible attitudes towards life are irreconcilable and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

This course expanded, at the requests of my students, from the required 12 class meetings to 24 and then 36. As they sat in a circle in the prison classroom week after week hunched over the text, my students began to discern that Wolin had another quality besides brilliance. He cared. And he cared about them. They were his demos.<\/em> When we finished Marx, the class fell silent. One of my students then lamented that they had been waiting all semester for Marx and now it was over. I promised that once we had completed the book I would give a final lecture on Marx. By then you could feel Wolin\u2019s presence in the classroom.<\/p>\n

One of the many cruelties of corporate capitalism is that it has abandoned the poor and, among them, the gifted intellectuals I teach. And even when they do manage to climb out of the deep black hole we have constructed for them, even when they are able to achieve academic success, they remain stigmatized as poor men and women of color with a prison record. The abject failure to provide an education to the poor, to nurture this potential and these intellectuals\u2014and by this I do not mean sitting on a scholarship committee but going to teach in the internal colonies and the prisons where our poor are trapped\u2014is one of the most damning marks on academia.<\/p>\n

One of my students, Boris Franklin, is here today. He is currently an honors student at Rutgers. I was waiting for him, with his mother, when he walked out of the prison gate after being incarcerated for 11 years. His first words to me\u2014remember he had just spent more than a decade in a cage\u2014were \u201cI have to rebuild my library.\u201d He had left 100 books behind in the prison.<\/p>\n

Or take the case of our friend Walter Fortson, who left prison to graduate magna cum laude<\/em> from Rutgers, won the university\u2019s first Harry S. Truman Scholarship in more than 10 years and received his Master of Philosophy in criminology from the University of Cambridge. But Walter, like Boris, like all my students, remains condemned in a criminal caste system, struggling with the poverty engendered by globalization, deindustrialization and neoliberalism and damned by white supremacy. Walter, who just got his final eviction notice, is about to take a course to become a truck driver. Boris, who knows what is coming, is making sure he will graduate with a contractor\u2019s license. We live in a despotism where Jean Valjean<\/a> is again reviled, hunted and persecuted.<\/p>\n

A couple of weeks ago I was in the windowless room of a halfway house in Trenton, meeting with one of my students, Ron Pierce, who is being released after 31 years in prison. When you leave prison it is the great giveaway. The few items in your cell\u2014sneakers, sweatsuits, plastic bins, water bottles, food and books\u2014cannot be taken with you. You walk out with only what you can carry. A halfway house official sat in on our conversation. When I was informed our two hours were up, I hugged Ron goodbye.<\/p>\n

\u201cCould you bring anything out with you?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d he said. \u201c\u00a0\u2018Politics and Vision.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for <\/em>The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and<\/em> The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at <\/em>The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper\u2019s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the <\/em>Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The <\/em>Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges\u2019 original columns in <\/em>Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009 and again in 2011. The LAPC also granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his <\/em>Truthdig essay \u201cOne Day We\u2019ll All Be Terrorists<\/a>.\u201d Hedges is a senior fellow at <\/em>The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 trutudig.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The great writers\u2014Marcel Proust, Anton Chekhov, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Max Weber, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin and others\u2014knew that thought is subversive. They challenged and critiqued the dominant narrative, assumptions and structures that buttress power. They freed us. They did not cater to the latest fashion of the academy or popular culture. They did not seek adulation. They did not build pathetic monuments to themselves. They elucidated difficult and hard truths. They served humanity. They lifted up voices the power elites seek to discredit, marginalize or crush.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[142],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}