Socially networked, but literate?

In an opening chapter called "The Illusion of Literacy," (and in a book partly sub-titled "The End of Literacy"), Hedges has surprisingly little to say about the subject, almost as if he's not particularly interested in the possibility of literacy as a remedy for cultural mindlessness. There's a scant couple of paragraphs citing an approximately 40 per cent functional illiteracy rate in North America, but nothing about the decline of book reading, especially among young people, nor anything about other "knowledge deficits" in history, geography, science and civics, and really not much about how the Internet is actually used by its consumers (9 out of ten of young people's most visited sites are devoted to "social networking"). For that sort of information you have to go to books like Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation, Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason or Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur.

The paucity of literacy discussion in a book that advertises itself as being about that topic is only part of a larger problem. The "illusion of literacy" chapter is followed by others that explore the "illusions" of love, wisdom, happiness and America itself. There's a lot about porn, the pretensions of higher education, pop psychology, and the dismaying condition of a pseudo-democracy. Most of what Hedges says is factually true, yet I found myself periodically surfacing from the account of cultural and political sludge to mumble, "Yes, yes, but this isn't what all of life is about or how I experience it." At least in some monastic corners of the world, the kid who's playing Modern Warfare is also reading Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar. That Hedges thinks bleak catastrophe is indeed the whole of contemporary life appears to be Hedges' own illusion.

It's never quite clear who Hedges is writing for nor what he wants his readers to do. Certainly, his unrelieved polemical essay is not aimed at the benighted masses watching Ultimate Fighting Challenge and poker on TV, clicking onto YouTube or YouPorn, "friending" strangers on Facebook, or blowing up imaginary worlds on Grand Theft Auto and Modern Warfare video games. It's not for them, since they're not reading at all.

So, it's a book about rather than for the unwashed but shampooed masses whose minds are inundated by junk culture. Hedges must be writing for the rest of us, the -- let's be generous -- 10 or 20 per cent of us who read books, participate in politics and civic culture, and who keep a worried eye on the CO2 counts in the atmosphere. But most progressive middle-class intellectuals already know most of this stuff, and some of them have even read theoreticians like Guy Debord on "situationism" and Jean Baudrillard on "simulacra" (neither of whom is mentioned by Hedges), both of whom early on spotted "the triumph of spectacle." Moreover, Hedges' intended intellectual audience, while dimly aware of most of the phenomena Hedges excoriates, live lives that only peripherally partake of mass popular culture. Given that his readers likely pay only corner-of-their-eye attention to the details, maybe Hedges' intention is to present mass culture to us as a form of at-home exotica.

Porn as cruelty

The chapter on the "illusion of love," which is entirely devoted to a journalistic visit to a pornmakers convention in Las Vegas, is characteristic of Hedges' perspective. Beginning with an epigraph that offers a lurid passage from the late Andrea Dworkin's Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Hedges hews to her particular version of feminism, presenting an Inferno-esque, "graphic" account of heterosexual commercial porn that emphasizes its increasing violence and degradation of women. Interviews with porn performers, peddlars, and recovering porn actors reiterate the sadistic nature of this particular illusion, and in case we're unfamiliar with its contents, Hedges provides extended snatches of porn video dialogue and detailed descriptions of how tab A is slotted into inserts B, C, etc., in such productions. After a few pages of this, you realize Hedges isn't planning to go beyond the confines of the commercial sex industry, and you idly wonder why the chapter isn't billed "the illusion of sex," since it doesn't seem to have much to do with love or any similar affectional state.

This cinema verite presentation builds to the climactic message that "porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society. This is a society that does not blink when the industrial slaughter unleashed by the United States and its allies kills hundreds of civilians in Gaza or hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan." Mr. Hedges goes on (and on). Porn is soon linked to the plight of the mentally ill and the unfairly imprisoned, as well as the dangers of gun ownership, obnoxious nationalism and "rapacious corporate capitalism." Predictably enough, porn is soon equated to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and we're assured that "torture and pornography inevitably converge."

I'm puzzled by the rhetorical overkill, both here and throughout Hedges' tract. While it's reasonable to sharply criticize both the content of hetero porn and the conditions under which it's made, it's not immediately clear what the purpose is of a hyperbole that insistently ties porn to all of the world's assorted ills. It's as if, in the name of some form of radicalism, Hedges' intent is to crush all possible discourse about the subject. In this leftist vision of liberation, one can sense the mirthless commissars just over the horizon.

In any case, Hedges' edicts about the meaning of porn seem designed to render any further discussion of sexual representation either trivial or irresponsible, or both. A question like, "Momentarily leaving aside the egregious conditions and content of contemporary pornography, is there a moral objection to the representation of sex between people and the viewing of such representations by other people?", becomes irrelevant or even blasphemously incorrect. Why would one want to ask such a question?

Where's the debate?

Well, for one thing, the question challenges some North American attitudes about sex. While porn may represent commercial views about sex, a dominant religious attitude among Christian fundamentalists (and perhaps the view is held more broadly than merely as a religious tenet) is that sex ought to be strictly regulated -- preferably, within heterosexual marriage and utilized primarily for procreational purposes. The debate about attitudes toward, and practices of, sex had a lot to do with both feminist and homosexual political struggles in the last half century. None of that will be found in Hedges' Empire. Nor, when it comes to cruelty and wanton killing, will readers find anything about porn-deprived jihadis, who manage a good deal of slaughter and torture without the aid of salacious imagery.

Maybe Hedges just isn't a very good sociological writer. In service to agitprop, Hedges excises anything that complicates his "correct line." In my experience of gay porn, while it's true you can find niches for everything from S&M to foot fetishism, mainstream homo porn is overwhelmingly focused on the vanilla sex of "twinks" (18-21-year-old, more or less clean-cut, late-teen beauties). While one can probably criticize the conditions these boys endure while making porn, and can cite the ways in which porn sex distorts ordinary real sex, the behaviour of the boys is generally friendly and non-violent -- there's lots of kissing and gestures of affection, they use condoms in the name of "safer sex," and the sex, apart from being hot (if you're inclined to find such sex hot) is pretty inoffensive unless you find the whole thing offensive. I'm not offering a brief intended to mitigate the sexist horrors of heterosexual porn, I'm just suggesting that the world is more various and complicated than Hedges, in the grip of an ideology, allows.

Subsequent chapters on higher education and positive psychology are similarly uneven. Hedges opens his chapter on the "illusion of wisdom" by saying, "The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredding of Constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the door of institutions that produce and sustain our educated elite. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Toronto and the Paris Institute of Political Studies... do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think. They focus instead... on creating hordes of competent systems managers... The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry... They organize learning around specialized disciplines... [they] have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement, and information systems are the only things that matter." Naturally, Hedges doesn't want to lay at the door of those elite universities such things as the end of slavery, free speech, civil rights, notions of ethnic and gender equality, sexual orientation, or even the attempt to reform health care in the U.S.

No fun with sexbots

But if elite universities are that bad, it makes me almost glad to be teaching in a non-elite, marginal, backwater university where we're still allowed to read Italo Calvino and modestly rant about the mindless culture foisted on the young by the capitalist Axis of Evil that manufactures those Modern Warfare videogames. Since I'm likely to be accused of frivolity anyway, I might as well confess upfront that at the end-of-the-semester "Goodbye Class" in ethics, where one of the students, Veronika, provided us all with cupcakes that she'd stayed up baking the previous night, we spent a rollicking hour discussing the morality of David Levy's Love and Sex with Robots (2007), a review of which was the subject of Veronika's final essay of the semester. Having debated the ethics of everything from abortion to vampires, it was fun to imagine "sexbots" at the end. The class and I found the discussion pretty hilarious, even educational. Mr. Hedges would perhaps think otherwise.

If Hedges can offer sweeping, half-true, generalizations about elite education, he's also capable of astutely pointing out that in our "deteriorated educational landscape," it's the case that "there has been a concerted assault on all forms of learning that are not brutally utilitarian. The Modern Language Association's end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature and foreign languages dropped 21 per cent for 2008-09 from the previous year, the biggest decline in 34 years. The humanities' share of college degrees is less than half of what it was during the mid-to-late '60s... Only eight per cent of college graduates, about 110,000, now receive degrees in the humanities." There have been precipitous declines in all fields, from English to mathematics to social sciences. "Bachelor's degrees in business, which promise to teach students how to accumulate wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-71 have risen from 13.6 per cent of the graduating population to 21.7 per cent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 per cent to 8.2 per cent, as the most popular major." All true, too true, but this isn't the place for a full-scale dissertation on the plight of the shaping of the educated mind.

Hedges is much better when he gets to the "illusion of happiness." That's where he skewers various self-help gurus peddling "positive thinking" and punctures the intellectual pretensions of various psychology departments to put "Positive Psychology" on a scientific footing. Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009) does a more extensive and thorough job on the topic, but Hedges' acerbic view of the matter ought to be enough to get you to stash your "Smiley" buttons and shelve your copy of Rhona Byrne's The Secret.

'Only the shell remains'

The worst is saved for last. It's Hedges' chapter on the "illusion of America," and clearly the one he was most itching to write. As is his wont, the screed is unrelieved, but tinged with bitter affection for a land that once was. "The country I live in today uses the same civic, patriotic and historical language to describe itself... but only the shell remains," Hedges laments. "The America we celebrate is an illusion. America, the country of my birth, the country that formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my father's father and his father's father... is so diminished as to be unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return, even as I pray and work and strive for its return."

In place of the recognizable America, "our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of the moneyed interests... During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to success, prosperity and happiness were waiting just around the corner."

Hedges makes it clear that Barack Obama and the "bankrupt Democratic Party" is not the "hope" he "can believe in." About the only closing-line relief Hedges can offer is "love," whose power is greater than the power of death. "Love will endure," Hedges asserts, "even if it appears darkness has swallowed us all, to triumph over the wreckage that remains." Hmm, bleak stuff.

Somewhere in the course of Hedges' final sermon (he was trained, he remarks in passing, as a seminarian), I think I figured out who he's writing for. The intended readership, I suspect, is left liberals and social democrats, and Hedges' polemic is designed to persuade moderate progressives that they don't fully understand the gravity of the situation. In failing to understand the situation, the moderate leftists become, in Hedges' view, the real enemy, more culpable than the right wing conservatives, because they prop up the shell of the system, even when they should know better. If that's what's going on here, it echoes the 1920s Communist Party's verbal and physical assault on social democrats as "social fascists," and at least some of us remember where that revolutionary strategy led.

A modest alternative

Hedges' Empire of Illusion is a difficult book to deal with because much of it contains more than a grain of truth. Even if he could persuade left liberals and social democrats to repent and see the light, I'm not sure what he wants them to do. Become cadres in the true Revolutionary Party and set off to free the masses from their illusions? I don't recall that working the last time it was tried.

It might be more helpful to see the situation as one of a divided polity, a divided culture in the midst of "culture wars," in which there are left-of-centre Democrats and social democrats, Obama included, and right-wing Republicans and angry anti-government libertarians and self-proclaimed "independents." That perspective at least makes possible an answer to the question, "What is to be done?" What we should do is continue to teach people to read books and to criticize the gadgets and content of capitalist pop culture. We should continue to try to reform health care, regulate and restrain capitalism and attempt to save the planet. We should do the little things in our neighbourhoods, and we should join political parties and other organizations and try, as we used to say, to change the world.

This modest program is admittedly less spectacular than Hedges' despairing vision of spectacle and decline. But what's the alternative? I saw an ad on TV the other day advertising the latest apocalyptic movies and games, the screen filled edge to edge in high definition exploding objects. The voice-over punchline said, "The end of the world never looked so good."