Chris Hedges' selective view of protesters

I like Chris Hedges a fair amount, including his honesty about how war reporting can get addicting.

I like that he doesn't like Gnu Atheists.

But, I don't like that he doesn't like atheists in general because of Gnu Atheists. And, I don't like that he can occasionally pontificate in general.

The latest specific example is here, with a piece about a Canadian family sitting on top of a pool of oil and trying to do some monkey wrenching. Actually, a whole lot of monkey wrenching.

I have several problems with his quasi-hero worship piece on the Ludwigs.

First of all, that's what it is. It's not a very critical piece, in the proper sense of that word. That said, he does note the Ludwig family eventually rejected violence they had employed for a while. But, he lauds the rejection of violence in a Christian-specific context.

That leads to the biggest problem — this:

"I do not share Ludwig’s Christian fundamentalism—his community was a rigid patriarchy—but I do share his belief that when human law comes into conflict with God’s law, human law must be defied."

Really, Chris?

I know you lump all atheists together, even though we're not the same, but your blindness is huge in this area. Per your statement, right-to-lifers are OK with all their harassment outside abortion clinics, etc. And, before you say, "but that's violent," a right-to-lifer can cite a "higher law" and say, that's why he or she is defying human law. As for the violence? Such a person could say the real violence is an abortion, and, even if they're violent, it's still a lesser violence. Or claim that anybody who is acting on god's law isn't actually being violent, no matter what the actual action is.

And, that leads to a related issue. Not everybody who is religious believes in the same god as Hedges does, and this is a Mack Truck-sized loophole.

Second is a possible bit of hypocrisy.

A lot of environmentalists (I'm one, but not part of this subgroup) talk about how good it is that, in almost everywhere in the world but the US, governments, not private individuals, own mineral rights, saying that the state is less likely to be exploitative than private business.

Until that argument gets undercut. As it does here.

I favor government ownership of mineral rights. But, Chris, you can't be selective about it. It's either right all the time or its wrong all the time. You think Canada's bad? Don't forget Russia, with its massive oil reserves, or China, with its upward estimate on shale gas reserves.

Third, on the violence and sabotage parts (pre-shooting of people) what's right about this and wrong about Black Bloc type stuff, Chris? (I'm not a personal fan of OWS, or of much of the Adbusters/Anonymous antics related to it, but again, it's a matter of logical consistency.)

Finally, I think some of this feeds into Hedges' seeing himself as a modern liberal Protestant Jeremiah. And, per my semi-snark, semi-straight comparison of him to P.Z. Myers, that's a real issue in and of itself.

Overall, the more I read of Hedges, the less I like him, or at least, his voice. Put more charitably, a little Hedges goes a long ways.

#ChrisHedges: The good, the bad, the ugly

All three attributes of much of Hedges' recent writing are encapsulated in his Truthout post about the Norway terror attacks, entitled, "Fundamentalism Kills."

The "good"? Yes, fundamentalism kills.

The "bad"? Claiming that most scientists practice "scientism."

The really, really "ugly"? A short sidebar screed against urbanization.

On the "bad," as in his anti-atheism book, Hedges simply fails to distinguish between a few scientists, or a few skeptics on the edge of science, just as he failed to distinguish between a few "Gnu Atheists" and the great many.

The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik.

Those two don't totally represent all Gnu Atheists, let alone all atheists in general.

Beyond that? Science isn't a second fundamentalism. "Scientism" may be, but science isn't. Ditto that "Gnu Atheism" may be a fundamentalism, but atheism in general isn't.

That said, the "bad" doesn't come out of nowhere. When a third "Gnu," P.Z. Myers, claims Hitch and Harris aren't conservatives, he refuses to face that Gnu Atheism has a messaging problem, fails to admit that this affects all atheism, and propagates both of those problems.

So, while Hedges is (once again) guilty of shoddy, shoddy thinking, I can understand his passion.

Beyond that, though, the bad leads into the ugly.

Here's Hedges on urbanism:

The Industrial Age has provided feats of engineering and technology, yet it has also destroyed community, spread the plague of urbanization, uprooted us all, turned human beings into cogs and made possible the total war and wholesale industrial killing that has marked the last century.

The problem of the evil side of urbanization, whether overstated or not, is mankind, not 'urbanization."

Otherwise, the invention of agriculture "uprooted' us from nomadism. And it turned humans into cogs more than 10,000 years ago.

It's also the only way the planet supports more than a few hundred million people, not more than 6 billion.

And that's why people like Hedges are more than a touch hypocritical. Does Hedges want to take a raft, kayak or Kon-Tiki to all his war journalism reporting? And, does he want to stop writing on the Internet? Stop taking his prescription medications, etc..

And, if we need to reduce world population by 90 percent as part of getting rid of "urbanization," is he volunteering to be part of that 90 percent?

Even if we concentrate on the last 100 years, urbanization has brought economies of scale, a flowering of the arts, etc. if Hedges doesn't like 'urbanization," he can move to North Dakota of his own free will. If he doesn't like that, he can join the "90 percent" that need to leave this planet.

Chris Hedges calls strawman ‘New Atheists’

First, he apparently think Chris Hitchens’ political beliefs apply to all New Atheists, assuming that Salon is correct when it says he says they are:

Conspicuously allied with the neocons on the subject of America's role in world politics.

To be honest, Hitchens is the only New Atheist I’ve heard express ANY political opinion beyond worrying about the Bush Administration’s, or some states’, folding, spindling and mutilating of the First Amendment through faith-based programs getting government money, school boards and state boards of education trying to teach intelligent design, etc. Hedges says Harris, in his first book, talks about a nuclear first strike on the Arab world, but you don’t have to be a neocon to believe in that – which I don’t, anyway.

Dawkins, and Dan Dennett, who apparently doesn’t even draw Hedges’ eye, are about as apolitical, otherwise, as you can get.

As for claims that New Atheists are secular utopians, some may be, others certainly aren’t.

That said, I will agree that Harris is intellectually shallow, and Hitchens is a performer.

Again, though, “New Atheists” are a lot more than these two.

It’s hard to believe that “I Don’t Believe in Atheists,” with its shallow diatribes, was written by the author of “War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.”

But, Chris Hedges, that’s OK. We don’t believe in you as a serious writer anymore, either. Maybe you’re dying for a war addiction fix or something.