Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges at The New School

As a bit of distraction - and while I attempt to make Part 2 of the Untangling The Mesh series less rambling (hopefully much more so) than the first - I though I'd share this poignant and spirited talk by controversial speaker and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chris Hedges, delivered at The New School in New York on December 08, 2009. Well-known for his edgy and politically charged commentaries, Hedges writes for a number of rackets including The New York Times, Mother Jones, Foreign Affairs and The New York Review of Books. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, tracks the rise of a post-literate North-American society that craves fantasy, ecstasy, and illusion.

Below, Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: one, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world and can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth; the other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic where serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins.

Whereas at times his commentary comes off as a whole lot nostalgic and even quasi-conservative, Hedges does make some very cogent points about how media operates in capitalist-consumer culture, and warns of the dangers of creating a populous so divided - and how a lack of an effective and dispersed social solidarity can breed virulent new social forms and alliances. Leaders in the so-called civilized societies, it seems, will have to negotiate a very precarious future indeed. The talk runs about 1 hour and 22 minutes.

Chris Hedges is also author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, and is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Fellow at Princeton University. He often blogs at Truthdig.com.