Confronting the Culture of Death
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Chris Hedges, an ordained Presbyterian minister, gave this sermon Jan. 20 at
Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria, British Columbia, in Canada.
The issue before us is death. Not only our individual death, which is more
imminent for some of us this morning than others, but our collective death.
We have begun the sixth great mass extinction, driven by our 150-year binge
on fossil fuel. The litany of grim statistics is not unfamiliar to many of
you. We are pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at 10 times the
rate of the mass extinction known as the Great Dying, which occurred 252
million years ago. The glaciers in Alaska alone are losing an estimated 75
billion tons of ice every year. The oceans, which absorb over 90 percent of
the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, are warming
and acidifying, melting the polar ice caps and resulting in rising sea
levels and oxygen-starved ocean dead zones. We await a 50-gigaton burp, or
pulse, of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost on the east Siberian
arctic shelf which will release about two-thirds of the total carbon dioxide
pumped into the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Era. Some
150 to 200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal are going extinct every
24 hours, one thousand times the natural or background rate. This pace
of extinction is greater than anything the world has experienced since the
disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Ultimately, feedback
mechanisms will accelerate the devastation and there will be nothing we can
do to halt obliteration. Past mass extinctions on earth were characterized
by abrupt warming of 6 to 7 degrees Celsius. We are barreling toward those
numbers. The mathematical models for this global temperature rise predict an
initial 70 percent die-off of the human species, culminating with total
death.
The corporate forces that have commodified the natural world for profit have
also commodified human beings. We are as expendable to global corporations
as the Barrier Reef or the great sequoias. These corporations and ruling
elites, which have orchestrated the largest transference of wealth upward in
human history, with globes richest 1 percent owning half the worlds
wealth, kneel, and force us to kneel, before the dictates of the global
marketplace. They have seized control of our governments, extinguishing
democracy, corrupting law and building alliances with neofascists and
authoritarians as the ruling ideology of neoliberalism is exposed as a con.
They have constructed pervasive and sophisticated systems of internal
security, wholesale surveillance and militarized police, along with
criminalizing poverty, to crush dissent.
These corporate capitalists are the modern versions of the Canaanite priests
who served the biblical idol Moloch, which demanded child sacrifice. And, as
in this ancient Canaanite religion it is our children who are being
sacrificed to these mute idols, as 1 Corinthians puts it. Their future is
being taken from them. These corporate forces are, in biblical terms, forces
of death. They will, unchecked, create more human misery and death than the
evils of Nazism and Stalinism combined.
Actually, I hardly feel constrained to try and make head or tail of this
condition of the world, Walter Benjamin wrote. On this planet a great
number of civilizations have perished in blood and horror. Naturally, one
must wish for the planet that one day it will experience a civilization that
has abandoned blood and horror; in fact, I am
inclined to assume that our
planet is waiting for this. But it is terribly doubtful whether we can bring
such a present to its hundred or four-hundred-millionth birthday party. And
if we dont, the planet will finally punish us, its unthoughtful
well-wishers, by presenting us with the Last Judgment.
Religious belief, to be relevant, must be grounded in this concrete and
bitter human reality. It must name radical evil, not as an amorphous
theological concept, but as Christ did when he named the evils of the rich,
the Pharisees and the Roman Empire. It must eschew self-preservation, for
only he who loses his life can save it, in the mortal struggle against the
forces of death. It must speak in a negative, critical voice, like the
Hebrew prophets, condemning the dominant corporate culture. The point of
faith is not to give us hope. It is to name and defy the forces of death.
Faith is not centered around the question How is it with me? This is part
of the narcissism of the dominant culture. Faith does not reside in
infantile fantasies about inevitable human progress or personal schemes for
unachievable happiness. Faith defies magical thinking. It defies our
cultural and historical amnesia. It is the counterweight to the conditioned
helplessness peddled by mass culture, the flight from reality that ensures
our capitulation and our immolation on the altar of Moloch. Faith, finally,
is about the belief, as Daniel Berrigan once told me, that the good draws to
it the good, even if all the empirical evidence around us says otherwise. We
demand justice not because we will win, but because we must.
Corporate culture, like all cultures of death, makes war on love, truth,
justice and beauty and numbs us to the questions about the search for
meaning and the struggle to face our mortality. It spreads the dark viruses
of hedonism, sexual sadism, greed, the cult of the self, the lust for power,
hypermasculinity and the glorification of violence. It seeks to crush the
transcendent. It lacks the capacity for empathy, awe and reverence. It is
the enemy of the sacred. Nothing in life has an intrinsic value beyond a
monetary value in this culture of death. All living entities are herded
toward Molochs altar. The only ethical and religious response is to smash
the idols and drive the high priests from Molochs temple.
The nothingness into which the West is sliding is not the natural end, the
dying, the sinking of a flourishing community of peoples, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer wrote in Ethics. Instead, it is again a specifically Western
nothingness: a nothingness that is rebellious, violent, anti-God, and
antihuman. Breaking away from all that is established, it is the utmost
manifestation of all the forces opposed to God. It is nothingness as God; no
one knows its goal or its measure. Its rule is absolute. It is a creative
nothingness that blows its anti-God breath into all that exists, creates the
illusion of waking it to new life, and at the same time sucks out its true
essence until it too disintegrates into an empty husk and is discarded.
Life, history, family, people, language, faiththe list could go on forever
because nothingness spares nothingall fall victim to nothingness.
Religion, as H. Richard Niebuhr wrote, is a good thing for good people and a
bad thing for bad people. And religion as seen in the Christian right, which
articulates and promotes white supremacy and Christian fascism, now rapidly
filling Donald Trumps ideological void, is anti-religious. The idol of a
personal god, one that caters to and promotes the interests of those who
profess homage to it, is the idolatry of Moloch. It is self-worship. It is
heretical. And one of the most egregious failures of the liberal church has
been its refusal to denounce these Christian heretics. The tacit toleration
of these Christian heretics gave them religious legitimacy. You do not need
to, as I did, spend three years at Harvard Divinity School to understand
that Jesus did not come to make us rich, did not bless the white race above
other racesJesus, after all, was a person of color; it was the Romans who
were whiteor sanctify the American Empires dropping of iron fragmentation
bombs for 18 years up and down the Middle East. This is the theology of the
Antichrist, as we heard in the reading this morning from the Book of John.
It speaks only to itself.
Those we battle as the society and the ecosystem disintegrate will
increasingly appropriate the language of religion. They will seek to
sanctify evil. These Christian fascists, like all idol worshippers, endow
themselves with absolute power and authority. They claim to speak and act
for God. They externalize evil. Evil, for them, is not the constant struggle
to combat the dark forces within our own hearts but is embodied in the
demonized otherMuslims, immigrants, blacks, feminists, artists,
intellectuals or homosexualsand once the other is eradicated, evil itself
will somehow miraculously be eradicated; except of course it wont, and
these Manicheans will, in frustration, oppress and kill new groups of
demonized human beings with an even greater fury. These beliefs, common to
all fundamentalists, who can come in secular form as we see with the New
Atheists, are the ideological cover for an emerging dystopia.
We will endure only by inverting the worlds values. To resist radical evil
saves us, as Søren Kierkegaard wrote, from slipping into that loathsome
void, that torment of despair. Hope comes by way of defeat. When we pit
ourselves against the culture of deathand this means performing acts of
civil disobedience and noncompliance, it means becoming an outlaw in the
eyes of the corporate statethen suffering, and even death, does not have
the last word.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago describes prisoners in his
camp organizing a work stoppage and hunger strike. He writes:
What the bosses would do no one could predict. We thought that perhaps they
would start firing on the huts again from the towers. The last thing we
expected was any concession. We had never in our lives wrested anything from
them, and our strike had the bitter tang of hopelessness.
But there was a sort of satisfaction in this feeling of hopelessness. We had
taken a futile, a desperate step, it could only end badlyand that was good.
Our bellies were empty, our hearts were in our bootsbut some higher need
was being satisfied. During those long hungry days, evenings, nights, three
thousand men brooded over their three thousand sentences, their families,
their lack of families, all that had befallen and would yet befall them, and
although the hearts in thousands of breasts could not beat togetherand
there were those who felt only regret, only despairyet most of them kept
time: Things are as they should be! Well keep it up to spite you! Things
are bad! So much the better!
This struggle to nurture and protect life, the sacred, has always been
Pyrrhic. But it is our call, the cross we are commanded to carry. It is what
makes us human. It is what sustains the dim, absurd compassion and human
kindness, love itself, which evil, with its machines and bureaucratic power,
its armies, its lies, its industrial violence, its wealth and its vast
megaphones, has never been able to crush and never will. It may not be a
battle we can win. But by fighting it we sustain our selves, we are
enveloped and absolved by the sacred, by God. We make faith possible. The
poet Linda Gregg writes [in Chosen by the Lion: Poems]:
In the museum print room today we looked
at their Blake engravings. All were
about a place that was not Paradise.
Everybody suffering. Men on their backs,
their faces upside-down and exposed,
legs raised and merging with the lines
that meant a mountain.
Women, unusually large, stood composed,
discerning, concerned over the general
condition of life. The curator said,
He cut directly into the metal,
Then inked it, I said. Yes, she said.
There was a spiral of mist
Filled with the shapes of lovers.
I looked close to see if any were happy.
At least two were. And in the sky,
A couple sitting, embracing.
(Something weeps in me all the time
All the time.) I said, at random,
Wouldnt it be nice if one of these
prints showed an angel crossing the border
Between heaven and this other realm.
Just the border.
(Jesus, you who are above all others,
I hurt constantly inside.
Bleared with loneliness.
Exhausted by keeping what I love safe.)
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers