I enjoyed the two earliest chapters, but this book quickly became a slog to read. First, I’ll note the positives as it might be worth reading to some people but this is one of his weakest materials that I’ve read. I think that his criticisms of Christopher Hitchens’s supportive views on the 2003 War in Iraq were well-argued and Hedges’s was mostly right. I haven’t read it yet, but apparently Hitchens laid out his regrets for supporting the 2003 War in Iraq within his memoirs called Hitch-22. Hedges critique of Hitchens’s arguments is proven prescient given that this book was published in 2007. Hedges’s most accurate and worthwhile critique was that of Sam Harris. Every single word that Chris Hedges argued about neuroscientist and New Atheist author Sam Harris has proven increasingly prophetic due to Sam Harris’s own narcissistic actions. Moreover, Sam Harris’s inability to criticize either Israel or the power structures of the US oligarchs who run a government-mafia nexus throughout the US has shown what he truly values, even more than his subscription service changes. Chris Hedges saw Sam Harris for ultimately what he was and that’s just the truth. Sam Harris is a smart individual, his critiques on his expertise in neuroscience, and his harsh critiques of religion in general are great. However, he refuses to acknowledge Muslims as human beings, he refuses to recognize the genocide of Gaza, and he refuses to hold Israel to the same standards that he would hold our own country on. The only inaccuracy of Chris Hedges’s critiques on Sam Harris was the suggestion that Harris ever argued for human infallibility, when that was never the case. Sam Harris often discusses the limits of our human reason and why those limits are important to understand to fully grasp the lack of logical coherence within religion itself. Nevertheless, Chris Hedges’s critiques of Sam Harris’s narcissistic behavior is mostly on the mark and Sam Harris has only himself to blame for having become worse as a person over the years. Whereas Norman Finkelstein – regardless of what you think of him – will have engaged discussions with Chris Hedges, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Dr. Marc Lamont Hill; Sam Harris seems self-satisfied to call Candace Owens a nutcase without talking to her and says he’d never engage with her in a conversation. . . this is not surprising, since Sam Harris has never had a black woman on his Waking Up / Making Sense podcast in his thirteen years of podcasting. This is while he talks at Black women on how he knows better, while never inviting them on to listen to their perspectives, ever:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmGm8Yr7RjE
The same will never be said of Chris Hedges:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNww8gxLUU4
That said, everything else afterwards honestly failed to make any compelling point whatsoever. This is honestly the weakest of his works that I’ve read. Hedges wrongly insinuated the Nazi Holocaust had to do with Atheism, when Hitler made speeches promoting Christianity, the belt buckle of every SS soldier said “Gott Mit Uns” / “God with Us” and 99 % of the German population identified as either Protestant or Catholic. His point about Stalin’s gulags is better, but not by much. Even if we presume Atheism leads to no differences in terms of systematized mass slaughter of innocent people, that doesn’t give religious belief a positive argument; it simply means that the difference is immaterial to good moral behavior. In which case, why believe in mythology if it has no truth to it? How can you claim to be living an honest life then?
However, the dullest aspect of this book is that it reads like a lengthy dissertation or critique of some American theologian named Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr than it does critiquing the New Atheist arguments on their own merits. I don’t know much about Reinhold Niebuhr outside of this book’s arguments in favor of his approach, but most of the Reinhold Niebuhr critiques are against the idea of idealized, utopian visions for humanity. Okay, great . . . what the fuck does this have to do with New Atheism? None of the New Atheists claimed a utopian ideal endgame as their goal; I suppose Sam Harris came closest, but his argument was that science can answer moral questions and that it does so better than religion. This is not arguing utopianism, albeit I will concede that his views on Islam and racial profiling Muslims seem very close to that idea. Nevertheless, that was in the context of counterterrorism, he was being a bigot and a racist, and he should rightfully be called out for such behavior. However, this is not a utopian vision for the world, he was just reactionary fearmongering as a scared and ignorant White man afraid of brown people. Sam Harris didn’t have a vision for the endgoal after making his racist suggestions and I think Hedges may have been giving Sam Harris too much credit on this particular counterargument to him. When HuffingtonPost pressed Sam Harris on this point, Sam Harris responded that Islam wasn’t a race . . . which led to HuffingtonPost critics to counterargue that it makes no sense for Sam Harris to argue in favor of racial profiling of Muslims and then declare that Islam is not a race. How can Sam Harris’s arguments about racial profiling make coherent sense then? Moreover, Hedges’s critique cannot be applied to either Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, who never suggested supporting any such appallingly racist viewpoints like Sam Harris. I don’t know enough about Daniel Dennett to assess whether it applies to him, but I know enough about Dawkins and Hitchens that I don’t believe they had any such utopian notions. They just wanted to open public discourse to why supernatural beliefs are harmful . . . and they were right about that. Thus, the quotes from Reinhold Niebuhr carry little impact and weight because Hedges is attacking an argument that New Atheism never claimed about perfecting humanity.
For me, another aspect for why the Reinhold critique fails in applicability is that this man was completely wrong about human nature and Chris Hedges’s arguments ironically reinforce that he was just wrong. Erich Seligmann Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness and political scientist Brian Klaas’s book, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us, both corroborate from repeated documented research that hunter-gatherers don’t have the same murderous streak as humans living in civilizations, because civilizations are essentially humans putting themselves into captivity under the control of higher-status humans. Hunter-gatherers were largely peaceful, avoided violence, did not enslave other hunter-gatherers as it served no purpose, voted on their actions via direct democracy, based their societies upon a malleable hierarchy of competence because it was live or die scenarios in the wild, lived leisurely lifestyles because failing to obtain food for one day meant they could hunt the next day regardless, and they were monogamous with women holding slightly more authority than men in a mostly equal family unit. It was the social status of slavery in primitive civilizations where everything started to turn into a shitshow, and then of course social statuses of monarchs and other such creative ideas that weren’t associated with direct and hands-on competence within larger societies slowly emerged. The whole idea of the fantasy novel concept of Original Sin falls apart when examining archaeology and anthropology in honest terms. Moreover, if you truly believed in Reinhold Niebuhr’s views of the Christian tradition of Original Sin, then why bother trying to protest and change America for the better when you believe man is in a chronic fallen state where the basest of human impulses will always prevail? How is that a coherent view? Basically, what would be the point in fighting for justice at all, if it will always fail due to innate defects in humanity?
Chris Hedges’s example of the Nazi Holocaust forcing mostly Jewish people into squalid conditions to fight for basic necessities, while the more selfless and heroic of them were killed first by the Nazis, isn’t a damning indictment of human nature; it is a damning indictment of how humans have constructed modern civilization into a hellscape for their fellow human beings. It doesn’t reveal the true character of humanity to deprive people of all their needs, ignore the selfless ones who gave their lives to help others, and then say that a manufactured and industrialized system of death camps somehow reveals humanity’s true character. It is the social engineering itself that is responsible and behind that social engineering are the bigoted and hateful assumptions made about Jews that were fomented for over two-thousand years because of Christian theology. The reason I say that is because my upbringing has taught me to look at the inherent ideas, similar to what Sam Harris argued. That’s what Hinduism focuses on from concepts like Tamas (Ego and Ignorance) from the three Gunas (Three Qualities); I am really struggling with it right now, because I genuinely fear the US military merger with Israel will lead to an invasion by China to destroy our country, which is why I’m advocating for a nuclear strike upon Israel. I apologize for how that sounds, but at the end of the day . . . the only thing I care about is the survival of our country. The past cannot be used a narrative to exploit shutting down discussions of a global pedophile cabal that Israel has financed and created with the Rothschild Crime family’s help. It may seem evil, but I care about my country’s survival at the end of the day. You can call it evil . . . I call it maintaining sovereignty and power, and I would commit a nuclear strike to ensure America’s survival away from Israel, if need be. 340 million of my fellow Americans matter more to me than 10 million Israelis of Israel and I would say that regardless of their social and religious background or whatever narrative they use to argue about historical oppression. Power is everything, because power ultimately keeps everyone we care about safe from violence. I don’t want it to be this way, but because we live in modern nation-states, it will likely always be this way.
Chris Hedges’s penultimate chapter was more of the same regarding his critique of Sam Harris’s narcissistic attitudes; I think Hedges does do a great critique of Sam Harris’s failings overall throughout this book and I don’t want to be misinterpreted about that. It’s the finest argument that this book makes. However, his final chapter is filled with arguments that Sam Harris could easily and systematically demolish due to his neuroscience background. What Hedges refers to as the non-rational back in 2007 was found to be psychological phenomena judging from repeated clinical trials according to the 2011 book, Thinking Fast and Slow by Israel American psychologist, Daniel Kahneman with his partner Amos Tversky. Beyond that though, and even ignoring the ample critiques by Sam Harris on how erroneous freewill is as a belief, I personally repudiate Chris Hedges’s final chapter due to my Hindu bringing. If his quotes from Arthur Schopenhauer, Marcel Proust, and Reinhold Niebuhr are accurate, then I’m going to have to stand firm on my belief – further solidified based upon reading this book – that the Vedanta philosopher, Adi Shankara and the Existentialist philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche are both far more profound thinkers when it comes to offering meaningful discourse in their philosophies. For all the critiques about Western philosophical notions of image theory, Adi Shankara broke that down and pointed out the pros and cons in the first two chapters of his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. Every time I looked at the majority of Western philosophers outside of Nietzsche, I found stupidity and disappointment premised upon Biblical falsehoods. A typical Western philosopher, like the example of Reinhold Niebuhr, postulates deeper meanings coming from a Biblical fantasist perspective instead of a psychological, sociological, or anthropological one that would work better at fixing societal issues. Media critics like Hedges’s quote from Neil Postman only serve to reinforce this issue with reactionary commentary. Chris Hedges’s views of the self, which he tries to argue is beyond rational faculties, is something Sam Harris would have easily destroyed as an argument but it’s also something I’d firmly refute on the basis of both our modern understanding of consciousness and Adi Shankara’s critiques of the notion of the Self / Purusha. A Hindu viewpoint of this is that the Self / Consciousness is not an inherent emptiness like in the Buddhist context that Hedges uses, but rather experiencing the illusions within reality with everything we see, hear, touch, taste, and experience with our physical senses and even our attachments to fixed ideas in our minds. Whereas Buddhism sees consciousness as illusory with Hedges himself referencing the Buddhist concept of Shunyata, a Hindu can believe in jivanmukta and can still strive for selfless service towards others.
I suppose the crux of it comes from Chris Hedges’s usage of the term ‘Olam from the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes and his belief that everything is inherently an eternal emptiness and that human power is a vain self-delusion. Two problems with this: this fundamentally contradicts his notion that freewill exists, if human power is truly so worthless and empty then it cannot matter what humans choose to do. Second, Chris Hedges’s example of Koheleth / King Solomon lamenting vanity is completely disproven in the Bible itself in 1 Kings 11:3 onwards; Solomon took 700 wives and 300 slave-girls as his Jewish property as he reigned as the greatest Jewish King to ever live, he steadfastly abandoned YHWH to worship the polytheistic Gods of his royal wives and participated in intense sexual debauchery with his harem of 700 wives and 300 slave-girls, YHWH wrath in being abandoned and sending armies to destroy the polytheistic Jerusalem was defeated twice by King Solomon’s armies i.e. Solomon defeated and surpassed the arrogant YHWH twice as King Solomon showed that human perseverance can surpass that worthless God, and Solomon lived and died a polytheist in the most successful empire in all of Jerusalem’s Biblical history as written in the Bible! Do you deny the wisdom of the Bible? Do you deny Bible’s testimony of the awesomeness of the greatest Jewish man of the ancient world, King Solomon, who had a harem of 700 wives and 300 slave-girls happily serving him and ruled the most successful ancient Israelite Kingdom, and who defeated and surpassed that arrogant loser, YHWH? You used this specific figure of Koheleth in the Bible, after all. Surely, it is fair of me to present you what the Bible actually says about the most glorious and successful reign of the greatest of ancient Jewish Kings who abandoned that filthy, disgusting loser YHWH for polytheistic Gods and reigned successfully along with his son and grandson reigning successfully afterwards and thus disproving YHWH’s curse upon his line by YHWH falsely claiming his son would lose everything, when his son lost nothing as per “1 Kings 10 – 14”? Anyway, the point being, that even Chris Hedges’s example of ambition and human pursuits being vanity is based on falsehoods, the only reason Solomon is known is because he accomplished all that and maintained his kingdom according to the Bible itself; similar to the Prophets Moses and Mohammad who mass murdered, raped, and took slave-girls as their Abrahamic property through successful conquest. It makes no logical sense for Chris Hedges to use the quote about vanity and ignore that all these people are glorified mass murderers and rapists who sanctioned their violence using religion as a way to purify their image, and then became known in heroic and moral terms due to their widespread success in mass murder and organized rape campaigns. What do you think inspires people like Benjamin Netanyahu or various leaders of the Taliban to do what they do, when you have examples like these three whether they are mythologized or historically accurate? You may cut out the parts you dislike, but that’s just your interpretation. Someone else can interpret Ezekiel 25 to justify the mass genocide of the Palestinians by seeing them as the “Philistines” that YHWH has commanded Jews to genocide out of existence. The Bible always reduces morality to a circular argument with no actual moral reasoning to argue why genocide is wrong for those convinced it is justified under Divine Command theory. Chris Hedges can twiddle his thumbs about that, but I’m surprised he never realized that the Palestinians are the ones losing their lives because of every Christian and Jew having their own definitions of how to interpret their supposed “holy” book.
My final point is this: if utopian dreams and ambitions are truly so self-delusional, then why try at all? It seems like Chris Hedges didn’t think of how self-refuting this notion was. Thinking of ourselves as emptiness and everything as futile begs the question of why anyone should even try at all. Furthermore, not all dreams and ambitions are genocidal lunacy like Benjamin Netanyahu’s dream of Greater Judea, some are about making a better world. Martin Luther King Jr’s famous 1963 speech began with “I have a dream” after all. What matters is the idea behind the dream and then the methods and purpose to reach the dream. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s dream was achieved through peaceful civil disobedience; Benjamin Netanyahu’s is being achieved through genocidal conquest. What makes MLK’s dream any less of a utopian vision for the future? I think what should matter more is if equal rights and human rights more generally were taken into account to achieve one’s utopian dream goal. I think I just fundamentally disagree with Chris Hedges’s worldview, if he truly believes in this vague concept of emptiness and seeing everything in life as a farce or vanity. My own critiques in the hopes of making a better world with less violence ended-up being read by both people in India and, to my surprise, people in Pakistan and the result were pushing against Islamism in both countries. All I did was write an extensive critique to the best of my ability and share it on my blog and a subreddit I made. My critique did more than I thought was possible in my lifetime and it’s still helping people focus their attention on real social issues to fix them. It seems to me like Chris Hedges’s value judgments on Original Sin and veneration of Reinhold Niebuhr circumvent any faith that humanity can learn from mistakes, adapt, change, grow, or work towards fixing problems in any long-lasting way. And yet, people can value New Atheists like Sam Harris for his insights on why religion is problematic, and rightly reject his bigotry while standing in favor of Palestinian human rights:
Sources:
Muslims and religiously unaffiliated view Palestinians more favorably than other groups do