Knowledge is not wisdom. Knowledge is the domain of scientific and intellectual inquiry. Wisdom goes beyond self-awareness. It permits us to interpret the rational and the nonrational. It is both intellectual and intuitive. And those who remained trapped within the confines of knowledge and pedantry do not commune with the larger world. They cannot see or speak the deeper truths of life. This is why we turn, especially in our moments of deepest despair or greatest joy, to artistic and religious expression. The expression of the sacred, part of the human desire to preserve and honor that which cannot be tallied and quantified, is what makes the liturgy of religious life powerful and real, despite the corruption of the institutions behind them.
Paul Tillich catches these truths when he writes, “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”
All this is being lost. The modern world, with its vast, soulless urban enclaves, is divorcing itself from the rhythms of nature and community. Our days are filled with mindless tasks, the drudgery of work and a gnawing loneliness. The mental pollution of sound bites, the dizzying and ceaseless chatter of television and computers, the constant assault of advertising seek to fill the void with a virtual, image-based illusion. This world is escapist. We are bombarded, thousands of times a day, with the emotional simplicity and terrible beauty of lies. And we believe them. We believe them because they make us feel, at least for a moment, better and empowered. We increasingly lack the intellectual and self-critical tools to disentangle this net of lies from truth.
Many who live in the United States, plagued by its consumer culture, waste their energy attempting to satisfy the insatiable demands of an all-consuming self. People have become cut off, engulfed in the fruitless search to find an unachievable happiness in the things they accumulate, the experiences and products they are sold, or the careers they have built. The promised self-fulfillment, of course, never arrives. Consumers are prodded with even greater urgency to seek solace in newer products, greater opulence and increased status. The frantic search for happiness is endless, “since,” as Proust wrote, “what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting-point for further desires.”
Our national obsession with with wealth, celebrity and power has become a soul-crushing disease. The incessant chasing after status and wealth has plunged much of the country into unmanageable debt. Families live in oversized houses with palladium windows, financed with mortgages they cannot repay. They seek identity through their Nike shoes or Coach handbags. They occupy their leisure time in malls buying things they do not need. They spend their weekdays in little cubicles, if they have stable jobs, under the heel of corporations who have disempowered the American worker, taken control of the state, and can lay them off on a whim. It is a desperate scramble. No one wants to be left behind. The epistemology of television has left us ignorant, without the vocabulary to express this awful transformation.
Television, as [Neil] Postman wrote, “is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business.” The danger we face is not an Orwellian 1984-style dictatorship, but Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where we waste our lives in the vain and impossible pursuit of a self-centered, universal happiness.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books,” Postman wrote:
What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one [my ital]. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. In short, Orwell feared what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
CHRIS HEDGES, I Don’t Believe in Atheists
