I intensely dislike the recent work of Chris Hedges. His errors and windbaggery on the circuit are more than the ear and eye can take. But, I especially don't like his sloppiness with the facts and his puffed up brooding about human nature. ("The problem is the human heart.") His book Days of Destruction Days of Revolt was disfigured, not by the wonderfully rendered images or arresting personal stories by those left to rot in "sacrifice zones," but by Hedges' own strident and baggy rhetoric. Also, I can do without errors like these in his public statements:
1. Hedges called "New Atheists" Dawkins and Hitchens "culturally illiterate." To describe Dawkins, a BBC contributor with numerous popular science and cultural works on the shelf, this way is not only inaccurate it is just lazy. On par with a loudmouth who (as assistant literary editor at The Nation) told the interns that Sam Harris wrote "pseudo-science." But for a serious journalist like Hedges to describe Hitchens, a critic whose reading is indiscriminate (not "selective" as the sadly snarky David Runciman accused Hitchens of in a review), of being "culturally illiterate" is beyond lazy, it is contemptible.
2. To say that men like the "New Atheists" "embrace bigotry" through their condemnations of religion falls into the recent craze for the term "Islamophobia." To criticize religion does not make one fearful of it. Martin Amis said he was not an "Islamophobe" but he could be called an "Islamismophobe." but why does anyone who makes an intellectual critique of a totalizing worldview and modern right-wing political ideology a bigot?
3. To say that atheists believe in the "perfectibility of society" because they don't indulge in the hokum of tired myths and ancient stories is ridiculous. How many hours did Hedges waste of his life as a believe pouring over the dead desert tomes looking for meaning? Calling out religion for its extremes and the written brutality in its texts does not mean that one claims religion can be extirpated from the human character. Hitchens said he wouldn't eradicate it if he could. (See the film Collision). Even Dawkins admitted religion was ineradicable. (After which, amazingly, Margaret Atwood lazily mocked the scientist at a Nashville event, accusing him of telling people "they can't have it.") Dawkins has stated that he felt it was his duty as a scientist and a free-thinker to fight back with reason to the stultification of education and the energized anti-scientific religious forces.
4. Hedges admitted ignoring the "New Atheists" but then was compelled to read their work by their increasing popularity. So the rushed nature of his critiques are admitted as well as evident: He called Sam Harris a "great propagandist for the war in Iraq." Well, in fact, Harris opposed the war. Hedges also inaccurately accused Harris of promoting torture and nuclear war. Here's a link of Harris defending himself against Hedges' strange and demonstrably untrue statements. : http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy25. Hedges called Hitchens and Harris "bullies." In a meeting in an internship at The Nation the same was said by Vivian Gornick of men she "couldn't stand," Alexander Cockburn and Hitchens. Bullies by definition pick on those weaker than themselves. Who did Cockburn ever pick on but those writers he felt made excuses for the powerful (lazy liberals) and the sinister forces at the helm of the finance industry? When I posed this question to the brilliant and lovely Katrina vanden Heuvel she said that she was the target of the two polemicists and was, at the time, an editor at America's oldest liberal weekly. How does being attacked as an editor mean you were "bullied"? It doesn't. She agreed. To slash at the powerful with decorous wit and a bit of contempt is as old as the written word. To call polemics "bullying" is an obvious refuge for someone who can dish out inaccuracies but not accept a sharp word of truth in return.
6. Hedges claimed that the "New Atheists" "look down upon the less educated." No. These men are consciously working to educate people about their respective fields and shake the comfortable, often to the gratitude of the religious who want nothing more than to debate! Through writing readable and engaging books (try reading a page of Hedges' emissions) which are often praised by the religious for presenting tough and serious arguments and travelling into the American interior on speaking tours, the "New Atheists" are challenging the assumptions of the faithful while bringing new ideas to a broader audience. And with measurable results: people with no identifiable faith are the nation's fastest growing minority! And as for the subject of "looking down upon the less educated" I give you Hitchens in one of his last public debates on religion:
"I'm asked, why wouldn't you like to meet Shakespeare? Because I can meet him. He is immortal in the works he's left behind! When Socrates was sentenced to death for his philosophical investigations and for blasphemy and sentenced to death for challenging the god's of the city. He accepted his death and said if I am lucky, I'll be able to have a discussion with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters, too. That the discussion of what is beautiful, what is noble, and what is pure, and what is true could always go on. Why is that important? Why would I like to do that? Because that is the only conversation worth having. Now whether that goes on after I die, I don't know. But I do know that it's the only conversation I'd like to have while I'm still alive. And it means to me that the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can't give way is the offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk that I don't know anything like enough yet. That I haven't understood enough. That I can't know enough. That I am always hungrily operating on the margins of a great harvest of a future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn't have it any other way. I urge you to listen to those who tell you at your age that your'e dead until you believe as they do. What a terrible thing to be telling children! And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. don't think that as a gift. Think of it as a poisoned chalice. push it aside however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way."
I've studied alongside very sharp students who felt Hedges was truly on the Left, the necessary columnist to succeed Cockburn, and view him as the truth-teller who was sacrificed by the New York Times for his criticisms of their coverage of the Iraq War. If you're interested, here is the conclusion of a debate in which Hitchens is confronting Hedges on his positions and attacks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiMzQGWMKvo
"The decline of the secular left has been evident....[especially those]who makes excuses for suicide murder and tries to trace them to a second-rate sociology. Is George Bush on a Christian crusade in Iraq? Obviously not. Anyone who has studied these things no knows...and hopes...that the future is staked on the hope that federal secular democrats can emerge from this terrible combat and that we can offer them help while they do so. We know that the're there and that we're their friends....these men and women who you sneer and jeer at and snigger at [while] making excuses for suicide bombers. [All this while] people are guarding you while you sleep."
Later, Hitchens attacked Hedges conflating Islamism with the despair of the Palestinian cause:
"Evil nonsense...that suicide bombers are driven to it by despair. These are people in a state of religious exaltation. These people are in a state of adulation for their evil mullahs and their filthy religion thinking it gives them the right to suicide murder....it is to excuse the filthy forces of Islamic jihad and to offer any other explanation than it is their own evil religion and teaching and own vile racism that makes them think they have the right to go to paradise to kill everyone in this room."
And he concluded by going right after Hedges again on suicide bombing and fundamentalism. (Hedges wrote a book called American Fascists about Christian fundamentalists.)
"It's made up ala carte and cherry-picked by mediocre pseudo-intellectuals...very surreptitious form of absolutism only capable of describing as "fascistic" the comical forces in the United States who I've condemned up and down the hill my entire life. But [Hedges] can't use the term "totalitarianism" about the religion that actually conducts jihad, actually organizes totalitarianism, actually inflicts...despair on millions of people. A perfect picture has been given you of the cretinous relationship between sloppy moral relativism, half-baked religious absolutism, and the journalism that lies in between."
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