by Chris Hedges
By the 1980s, the political sterility of the New Left found its academic expression in the embrace of French poststructuralist literary and cultural theory. The charade of protest was matched in the university by the charade of radical analysis. French theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes were adopted by American academics, who jettisoned the political projects that had influenced the work of the French academics, retreating instead into what they termed the science of language and meaning. They deciphered texts. They shifted Marxist analysis away from economic departments, most of which had been taken over by free-market ideologues anyway, to disciplines within the humanities, where Marxist critique would not threaten systems of power.
Marxists now became culture and literary critics. These theorists invested their energy in multiculturalism, with branches such as feminist studies, queer studies, and African American studies. The inclusion of voices often left out of the traditional academic canon certainly enriched the university. But multiculturalism, rather than leading to a critique of structures and systems that consciously excluded and impoverished the poor and the marginal, became an end in itself.
“Stripped of a radical idiom, robbed of a utopian hope, liberals and leftists retreat in the name of progress to celebrate diversity,” Russell Jacoby writes. “With few ideas on how a future should be shaped, they embrace all ideas. Pluralism becomes a catchall, the alpha and omega of political thinking. Dressed up as multiculturalism, it has become the opium of disillusioned intellectuals, the ideology of an era without an ideology.”
Political debate was replaced by multicultural discourse. Public values were subordinated to torturous textual analysis. There was nothing worth investigating, these poststructuralists insisted, outside of the text. This new group of “radical” theorists, including Gayatri Spivak, a postcolonial theorist; Paul Bové, the editor of the journal boundary 2 and an English professor at The University of Pittsburgh; J. Hillis Miller, then of Yale; Gregory Ulmer of the University of Florida; and Marxist cultural historian Frederic Jameson, typified the trend. They wrap ideas in a language so obscure, so abstract, so preoccupied with arcane theory that the uninitiated cannot understand what they write. They make no attempt to reach a wider audience or enrich public life. Compared to the last generation of genuine, independent public intellectuals—Jane Jacobs, Paul and Percival Goodman, William H. Whyte, Lewis Mumford, C. Wright Mills, and Dwight Macdonald—they have produced nothing of substance or worth. Their work has no vision, other than perhaps calling for more diverse voices in the academy. It is technical, convoluted, self-referential, and filled with so much academic jargon that it is unreadable. This is a sample of what poststructuralists, in this case Jameson, believe passes for lucid thought:
In periodizing a phenomenon of this kind, we have to complicate the model with all kinds of supplementary epicycles. It is necessary to distinguish between the gradual setting in place of the various (often unrelated) preconditions for the new structure and the “moment” (not exactly chronological) when they all jell and combine into a functional system. This moment is itself less a matter of chronology than it is of a well-nigh Freudian Nachträglichkeit, or retroactivity: people become aware of the dynamics of some new system, in which they are themselves seized, only later on and gradually.17
While it seems on the surface to be a movement for social change, the campaign for cultural diversity, does little to perturb the power elite. It does not challenge economic or political structures that are rapidly disempowering the working class. Making sure people of diverse races or sexual orientations appear on television shows or in advertisements merely widens the circle of new consumers. Multiculturalism is an appeal that pleads with the corporate power structure for inclusion. The appeal was achieved politically with the election of Barack Obama. It has seen the establishment of multicultural departments in many universities. But it is a call, as Jacoby points out, for “patronage, not revolution”18:
The radical multiculturalists, postcolonialists and other cutting-edge theorists gush about marginality with the implicit, and sometimes explicit, goal of joining the mainstream. They specialize in marginalization to up their market value. Again, this is understandable; the poor and the excluded want to be wealthy and included, but why is this multicultural or subversive?19
These radical theorists have internalized the rule that governs academia: write and teach what you want, but if you take a public stand that defies conventional mores and established structures, you risk your career. As long as academics write in the tortured vocabulary of specialization for seminars and conferences, where they are unable to influence public debate, they are free to espouse any bizarre or “radical” theory. The new Marxist academics, determined to adhere to a “scientific” analysis, have as much time for moral imperatives as the professors in the business schools with whom they share a faculty dining room. Universities hire by committee. It is not scholarship or ideas but collegiality and conformity committees prize most. And those who do receive tenure, after an average of seven years, long enough to integrate into the dominant culture, are rewarded for being conformists, not iconoclasts. “The trouble is that professors get their tenure by suppressing the expression of unpopular expression, not in order to express unpopular opinion,” Jacoby writes. “The modern university, by its conservative inertia, has become the most hostile place for pursuing truth. And tenure, once deemed precious, has become the most wasted, irrelevant principle.”20
Tenured academics are going the way of unionized steel workers. There are fewer and fewer tenure-track jobs—only about thirty-five percent of current academic positions offer tenure—and this percentage is declining. The scramble by desperate academics to placate the demands of college administrators and the university presses that will publish their work so they can get tenure, has only grown as the number of secure jobs diminishes. The majority of academics are itinerants who may teach in a series of schools over a career, or at two or three schools at a time, with no job security. Adjuncts are usually hired on contracts of a year or less. They are considered part-time employees and are ineligible for benefits. Many earn as little as $1,000 a course. The lack of job security further inhibits any propensity to write or speak about topics that have political or social relevance. It is better for one’s career to stay away from politics and wallow in the arcane world of departmental intrigue and academic gibberish.
The media, like the university, are required to stay aloof from the issues of the day. The media, too, must assume the role of disinterested and impartial observers. This was, for those of us reporting on the wars in Central America, the Middle East, and the Balkans, an impossibility. It is difficult to witness human suffering and not feel. But to express these emotions in the newsroom, to express outrage at the atrocities committed by Salvadoran death squads, the killings by Bosnian Serbs, or especially the brutality of Israeli soldiers in Gaza, was to risk being reassigned or pushed aside by editors who demanded emotional disengagement. Those who feel in newsrooms are viewed as lacking impartiality and objectivity. They cannot be trusted. And the game I and others played was to mask our emotions and pretend that, no matter how horrible the crime, we were only clinical observers.
I spent seven years in the Middle East, five of them with the New York Times and four as the Middle East Bureau Chief for the paper. I spent months in Iraq during the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, entered occupied Kuwait in the first Gulf War with the U.S. Marines, and then covered the long aftermath, when U.N. inspectors destroyed far more military equipment and stockpiles of weapons than were destroyed in the war itself. Those of us in Iraq after the first Gulf War understood that while Hussein was certainly a tyrant, he was not a threat to us or to Iraq’s neighbors. The ruthless, secular Iraqi regime brutally disposed of Islamic militants and detested al-Qaida. It was a country so torn by ethnic antagonisms that any notion of creating a unified functioning democracy following an invasion and occupation was laughable. It w
as clear to all Arabists, including those in the State Department, the intelligence community, and the Pentagon, that we would not be greeted as liberators if we invaded, that the oil revenues would never pay for the reconstruction, and that democracy was not going to be implanted in Baghdad and radiate outward across the Middle East.
But to repeat these simple truths, which I did repeatedly in public forums before the war began, inflicted career wounds that saw me expelled from the New York Times, one of the liberal class’s most revered institutions. My public stance against the war, repeated on national programs from Charlie Rose to NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, angered the editors who argued that, as a news reporter, I had a duty to remain neutral.
The final confrontation with the Times was sparked by events in Rockford, Illinois, at Rockford College, where I had been invited to give the 2003 commencement address. I stood before about one thousand guests in May and spoke about the war. George W. Bush, decked out in a flight suit, had landed on the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln a couple of weeks before and spoken under a banner that read “Mission Accomplished.”
The address, built around my book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, was a harsh critique of empire and war. I walked to the podium at the end of the line of faculty. I wore a black academic gown and a borrowed hood with enough crimson in it to approximate my Harvard Divinity School colors. It was a windy day. I clutched the papers of my talk. The students, in the front, and the audience behind them sat in neat rows of folding chairs. There were black speakers mounted on poles to broadcast the talk.
“I want to speak to you today about war and empire,” I began.
The killing, or at least the worst of it, is over in Iraq. Although blood will continue to spill—theirs and ours—be prepared for this. For we are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige, power, and security. But this will come later as our empire expands. And in all this we become pariahs, tyrants to others weaker than ourselves. Isolation always impairs judgment, and we are very isolated now.
We have forfeited the goodwill, the empathy the world felt for us after 9/11. We have folded in on ourselves, we have severely weakened the delicate international coalitions and alliances that are vital in maintaining and promoting peace. And we are part now of a dubious troika in the war against terror with Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon, two leaders who do not shrink in Palestine or Chechnya from carrying out acts of gratuitous and senseless acts of violence. We have become the company we keep.
The censure, and perhaps the rage, of much of the world—certainly one-fifth of the world’s population which is Muslim, most of whom, I will remind you, are not Arab, is upon us. Look today at the fourteen people killed last night in several explosions in Casablanca. And this rage, in a world where almost fifty percent of the planet struggles on less than two dollars a day, will see us targeted. Terrorism will become a way of life.
At this point the crowd, restless and uneasy, began to mutter protests. There was a shout of “No!”
And when we are attacked, we will, like our allies Putin and Sharon, lash out with greater fury. The circle of violence is a death spiral; no one escapes. We are spinning at a speed that we may not be able to halt. As we revel in our military prowess—the sophistication of our military hardware and technology, for this is what most of the press coverage consisted of in Iraq—we lose sight of the fact that just because we have the capacity to wage war it does not give us the right to wage war. This capacity has doomed empires in the past.
“Modern western civilization may perish,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr warned, “because it falsely worshipped technology as a final good.”
The real injustices—the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, the brutal and corrupt dictatorships we fund in the Middle East—will mean that we will not rid the extremists who hate us with bombs. Indeed, we will swell their ranks.
There was now a chorus of whistles and hoots.
“Once you master a people by force,” I said, “you depend on force for control. In your isolation you begin to make mistakes.”
“Where were you on September 11?” a man yelled.
“Fear engenders cruelty,” I said. “Cruelty . . . fear, insanity, and then paralysis.”
There were more hoots and jeers.
“Who wants to listen to this jerk?” someone cried out.
“In the center of Dante’s circle,” I said, “the damned remained motionless.”
Horn blasts were unleashed.
“We have blundered into a nation we know little about and are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand,” I continued:
We are trying to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among other things, by the division of Earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship, in a land where the belief in a secular civil government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they occupied it in 1917. It will be a cesspool for us, as well.
“God bless America!” a woman cried.
I continued: “The curfews, the armed clashes with angry crowds that leave scores of Iraqi dead, the military governor, the Christian Evangelical groups who are being allowed to follow on the heels of our occupying troops to try and teach Muslims about Jesus, the occupation of the oilfields.”
The microphone went dead. I stood looking out at the angry crowd, the wind whipping down the hillside. There were some people standing in the front. One woman was weeping. The crowd grew more agitated and several people rose to sing “God Bless America.”
“Who wants to listen to this jerk?” a woman shouted.
I had to cut short my address and was removed by security before the awarding of the diplomas. The event dominated the broadcasts of the trash-talk right-wing commentators, from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News analysts. Clips of me being heckled and jeered, taken from home videos, were played repeatedly on the cable shows. The Wall Street Journal published an editorial denouncing me as an elitist and a pacifist and condemned my talk. The local paper, the Rockford Register Star, reported my address with the headline “SPEAKER DISRUPTS RC GRADUATION.”
War, and especially war in the Middle East, were not abstractions to me. I spoke out of a reality few Americans understood. But my editors at the New York Times were furious. I had crossed the line once too often. I had dared to feel, to make a judgment, and to think independently. I was called into the Times offices at 229 West 43rd Street by an assistant managing editor, Bill Schmidt, and given a written reprimand for “public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper’s impartiality.” The procedure meant that, under the rules established with the Newspaper Guild of New York, the next time I spoke out against the war I could be fired.
If I had repeated the mythic narrative of America—the narrative embraced by the power elite and the liberal institutions that serve them—the talk would not have attracted notice. If I had told the graduates that America was a great and noble country, that we were spreading democracy and virtue throughout the world, that globalism was empowering and enriching the world’s poor, and that American soldiers were sacrificing their lives for our freedom and security, none of it would have been deemed controversial or political. The public statements of support for the invasion of Iraq by fellow reporter John Burns did not see him ousted from the paper. The approved mythic narrative is “neutral” and “apolitical” because it serves the empowered classes. Those who honor these myths remain valued members of the liberal class. Those who do not are banished.
The media are as plagued by the same mediocrity, corporatism, and careerism as the academy, the unions, the arts, the Democratic Party, and religious institutions. The media, like the academy, hold up the false ideals of impartiality and objectivity to mask their complicity with power. They posit the absurd idea that knowledge and understanding are attainable exclusively through vision, that w
e should all be mere spectators of life. This pernicious reduction of the public to the role of spectators denies the media, and the public they serve, a political role. As John Dewey has pointed out, public opinion is not formed when individuals possess correct representations of the government, even if such representations were possible. It is formed through discourse and discussion. But the reduction of the media and the public to the role of passive spectators cuts off the possibility of a conversation.21
Truth and news are not the same, as James W. Carey wrote. News is a signal that something is happening. It provides, in Carey’s words, “degenerate photographs or a pseudo-reality of stereotypes. News can approximate truth only when reality is reducible to a statistical table: sports scores, stock exchange reports, births, deaths, marriages, accidents, court decisions, elections, economic transactions such as foreign trade and balance of payments.”22
“The divorce of truth from discourse and action—the instrumentalization of communication—has not merely increased the incidence of propaganda,” Carey wrote. It has also “disrupted the very notion of truth, and therefore the sense by which we take our bearings in the world is destroyed.”23