From: "Wahome, Kimamo" <WAHOMEK@uwec.edu> Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:22:40 -0500 Subject: Article: The False Idol of Unfettered Capitalism" Message-ID: <E3F0E607B3CF71418CE725F002B5F6047A4F0BB14D@CHERRYPEPSI.uwec.edu>
From Commondreams.org
Published on Monday, March 16, 2009 by TruthDig.com<http://www.truthdig.com
/report/item/20090316_the_false_idol_of_unfettered_capitalism/>
The False Idol of Unfettered Capitalism
by Chris Hedges
When I returned to New York City after nearly two decades as a foreign corr
espondent in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, I was
unsure of where I was headed. I lacked the emotional and physical resilienc
y that had allowed me to cope as a war correspondent. I was plagued by memo
ries I wanted to forget, waking suddenly in the middle of the night, my sle
ep shattered by visions of gunfire and death. I was alienated from those ar
ound me, unaccustomed to the common language and images imposed by consumer
culture, unable to communicate the pain and suffering I had witnessed, not
much interested in building a career.
It was at this time that the Brooklyn Academy of Music began showing a 10-p
art film series called "The Decalogue." Deka, in Greek, means 10. Logos mea
ns saying or speech. The Decalogue is the classical name of the Ten Command
ments. The director was the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski<http://ar
chive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/kieslowski.html>, who had ma
de the trilogy "White, Blue and Red." The 10 films, each about an hour long
and based on one of the commandments, were to be shown two at a time over
five consecutive weeks. I saw them on Sunday nights, taking the subway to B
rooklyn, its cars rocking and screeching along the tracks in the darkened t
unnels. The theater was rarely more than half full.
The films were quiet, subtle and often opaque. It was sometimes hard to tel
l which commandment was being addressed. The characters never spoke about t
he commandments directly. They were too busy, as we all are, coping with li
fe. The stories presented the lives of ordinary people confronted by extrao
rdinary events. All lived in a Warsaw housing complex, many of them neighbo
rs. They were on a common voyage, yet also out of touch with the pain and d
islocation of those around them. The commandments, Kieslowski understood, w
ere not dusty relics of another age, but a powerful compass with vital cont
emporary resonance.
In film after film he dealt with the core violation raised by each of the c
ommandments. He freed the commandments from the clutter of piety and narrow
definitions imposed upon them by religious leaders and institutions. The p
romiscuous woman portrayed in the film about adultery was not married. She
had a series of empty, carnal relationships. Adultery, at its deepest level
for the director, was sex without love. The father in the film about honor
ing our parents was not the biological father. The biological mother was ab
sent in the daughter's life. Parenting, Kieslowski knew, is not defined by
blood or birth or gender. It is defined by commitment, fidelity and love.
In the film about killing, an unemployed drifter robs and brutally murders
a cab driver. He is caught, sentenced and executed by the state. Kieslowski
forces us to confront the barbarity of murder, whether it is committed by
a deranged individual or sanctioned by society.
I knew the commandments. I had learned them at Sunday school, listened to s
ermons based on the commandments from my father's pulpit and studied them a
s a seminarian at Harvard Divinity School. But Kieslowski turned them into
living, breathing entities.
" ... For 6,000 years these rules have been unquestionably right," Kieslows
ki said of the commandments. "And yet we break them every day. We know what
we should do, and yet we fail to live as we should. People feel that somet
hing is wrong in life. There is some kind of atmosphere that makes people t
urn now to other values. They want to contemplate the basic questions of li
fe, and that is probably the real reason for wanting to tell these stories.
"
In eight of the films there was a brief appearance by a young man, solemn a
nd silent. Kieslowski said he did not know who the character was. Perhaps h
e was an angel or Christ. Perhaps he represented the divine presence who ob
served with profound sadness the tragedy and folly we humans commit against
others and against ourselves.
"He's not very pleased with us," was all the director said.
The commandments are a list of religious edicts, according to passages in E
xodus and Deuteronomy, given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai. The first four
are designed to guide the believer toward a proper relationship with God.
The remaining six deal with our relations with others. It is these final si
x commands that are given the negative form of "You Shall Not ... ." Only t
wo of the commandments, the prohibitions against stealing and murder, are i
ncorporated into our legal code. Protestants, Catholics and Jews have compi
led slightly different lists, but the essence of the commandments remains t
he same. Muslims, while they do not list the commandments in the Koran, hon
or the laws of Moses, whom they see as a prophet.
The commandments are not defined, however, by the three monotheistic faiths
. They are one of the earliest attempts to lay down moral rules and guideli
nes to sustain a human community. Nearly every religion has set down an eth
ical and moral code that is strikingly similar to the Ten Commandments. The
Eightfold Path, known within Buddhism as the Wheel of Law, forbids murder,
unchastity, theft, falsehood and, especially, covetous desire. The Hindus'
sacred syllable Om, said or sung before and after prayers, ends with a fou
rth sound beyond the range of human hearing. This sound is called the "soun
d of silence." It is also called "the sound of the universe." Hindus, in th
e repetition of the Sacred Syllable, try to go beyond thought, to reach the
stillness and silence that constitutes God. Five of the Ten Commandments d
elivered from Mount Sinai are lifted directly from the Egyptian "Book of th
e Dead." No human being, no nation, no religion, has been chosen to be the
sole interpreter of mystery. All cultures struggle to give words to the exp
erience of the transcendent. It is a reminder that all of us find God not i
n what we know, but in what we cannot comprehend.
The commandments include the most severe violations and moral dilemmas in h
uman life, although these violations often lie beyond the scope of the law.
They were for the ancients, and are for us, the core rules that, when hono
red, hold us together, and when dishonored lead to alienation, discord and
violence. When our lives are shattered by tragedy, suffering and pain, or w
hen we express or feel the ethereal and overwhelming power of love, we conf
ront the mystery of good and evil. Voices across time and cultures have str
uggled to transmit and pay homage to this mystery, what it means for our li
ves and our place in the cosmos. These voices, whether in the teachings of
the Buddha, the writings of the Latin poets or the pages of the Koran, are
part of our common struggle as human beings to acknowledge the eternal and
the sacred, to create an ethical system to sustain life.
The commandments retain their power because they express something fundamen
tal about the human condition. This is why they are important. The commandm
ents choose us. We are rarely able to choose them. We do not, however hard
we work to insulate ourselves, ultimately control our fate. We cannot save
ourselves from betrayal, theft, envy, greed, deception and murder, nor alwa
ys from the impulses that propel us to commit these acts. These violations,
which can strike us or be committed without warning, can leave deep, often
lifelong wounds. There are few of us who do not wrestle deeply with at lea
st one of these violations.
We all stray. We all violate some commandments and do not adequately honor
others. We are human. But moral laws bind us together and make it possible
to build a society based on the common good. They keep us from honoring the
false covenants of greed, celebrity and power that destroy us. These false
covenants have a powerful appeal. They offer feelings of strength, status
and a false sense of belonging. They tempt us to be God. They tell us the t
hings we want to hear and believe. They appear to make us the center of the
universe. But these false covenants, covenants built around exclusive comm
unities of race, gender, class, religion and nation, inevitably carry withi
n them the denigration and abuse of others. These false covenants divide us
. A moral covenant recognizes that all life is sacred and love alone is the
force that makes life possible.
It is the unmentioned fear of death, the one that rattles with the wind thr
ough the heavy branches of the trees outside, which frightens us the most,
even as we do not name this fear. It is death we are trying to flee. The sm
allness of our lives, the transitory nature of existence, the inevitable ro
ad to old age, are what the idols of power, celebrity and wealth tell us we
can escape. They are tempting and seductive. They assure us that we need n
ot endure the pain and suffering of being human. We follow the idol and bar
ter away our freedom. We place our identity and our hopes in the hands of t
he idol. We need the idol to define ourselves, to determine our status and
place. We invest in the idol. We sell ourselves into bondage.
The consumer goods we amass, the status we seek in titles and positions, th
e ruthlessness we employ to advance our careers, the personal causes we cha
mpion, the money we covet and the houses we build and the cars we drive bec
ome our pathetic statements of being. They are squalid little monuments to
our selves. The more we strive to amass power and possessions the more into
lerant and anxious we become. Impulses and emotions, not thoughts but mass
feelings, propel us forward. These impulses, carefully manipulated by a con
sumer society, see us intoxicated with patriotic fervor and a lust for war,
a desire to vote for candidates who appeal to us emotionally or to buy thi
s car or that brand. Politicians, advertisers, social scientists, televisio
n evangelists, the news media and the entertainment industry have learned w
hat makes us respond. It works. None of us are immune. But when we act in t
heir interests we are rarely acting in our own. The moral philosophies we h
ave ignored, once a staple of a liberal arts education, are a check on the
deluge. They call us toward mutual respect and self-sacrifice. They force u
s to confront the broad, disturbing questions about meaning and existence.
And our callous refusal to heed these questions as a society allowed us to
believe that unfettered capitalism and the free market were a force of natu
re, a decree passed down from the divine, the only route to prosperity and
power. It turned out to be an idol, and like all idols it has now demanded
its human sacrifice.
Moral laws were not written so they could be practiced by some and not by o
thers. They call on all of us to curb our worst instincts so we can live to
gether, to refrain from committing acts of egregious exploitation that spre
ad suffering. Moral teachings are guideposts. They keep us, even when we st
ray, as we all do, on the right path.
The strange, disjointed fragments of our lives can be comprehended only whe
n we acknowledge our insecurities and uncertainties, when we accept that we
will never know what life is about or what it is supposed to mean. We must
do the best we can, not for ourselves, the great moralists remind us, but
for those around us. Trust is the compound that unites us. The only lasting
happiness in life comes with giving life to others. The quality of our lif
e, of all life, is determined by what we give and how much we sacrifice. We
live not by exalting our own life but by being willing to lose it.
The moral life, in the end, will not protect us from evil. The moral life
protects us, however, from committing evil. It is designed to check our da
rker impulses, warning us that pandering to impulses can have terrible cons
equences. It seeks to hold community together. It is community that gives o
ur lives, even in pain and grief, a healing solidarity. It is fealty to com
munity that frees us from the dictates of our idols, idols that promise us
fulfillment through self-gratification. These moral laws are about freedom.
They call us to reject and defy powerful forces that rule our lives and to
live instead for others, even if this costs us status and prestige and wea
lth.
Turn away from the moral life and you end in disaster. You sink into a mora
ss of self-absorption and greed. You breed a society that celebrates fraud,
theft and violence, you turn neighbor against neighbor, you confuse presen
tation and image with your soul. Moral rules are as imperative to sustainin
g a community as law. And all cultures have sought to remind us of these ba
sic moral restraints, ones that invariably tell us that successful communit
ies do permit its members to exploit each other but ensure that they sacrif
ice for the common good. The economic and social collapse we face was presa
ged by a moral collapse. And our response must include a renewed reverence
for moral and social imperatives that acknowledge the sanctity of the commo
n good.
The German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein <http://plato.stanford.edu/entri
es/wittgenstein/> said, "Tell me 'how' you seek and I will tell you 'what'
you are seeking." We all are seekers, even if we do not always know what we
are looking to find. We are all seekers, even if we do not always know how
to frame the questions. In those questions, even more than the answers, we
find hope in the strange and contradictory fragments of our lives. And it
is by recovering these moral questions, too often dismissed or ignored in u
niversities and boardrooms across the country, laughed at on the stock exch
ange, ridiculed on reality television as an impediment to money and celebri
ty, that we will again find it possible to be whole.
(c) 2009 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com<http://www.truthdig.c
om>. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two d
ecades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of
"American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.<http://www.
amazon.com/dp/0743284437?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim>"