The Moral Imperative of Revolt
by Chris Hedges, 2015
Chris Hedges is a challenge for progressives to read, because we keep working to study or reform rather than throw out the systems that oppress our people and the environment. He quotes Reinhold Niebuhr that liberalism “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say, fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. (It) is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”
However, Chris Hedges is our counterweight to caution, the spur to take the courageous actions for which we argue but rarely take whole-heartedly with our very lives at stake. Reading, meditating on, and discussing his book together could help us toward courage and cooperative movement.
Wages of Rebellion tells the stories of those who dared: Socrates, Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and more recently Cecily McMillan (an Occupy Activist), Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, whistleblowers, and many, many more, many of whom I’ve never heard of. Within the stories are the politicians, the prison system, the corporations, the laws and interpretations of laws that help keep oppression and greed in place. Hedges quotes Shakespeare, August Wilson, Vaclav Havel. . . . He writes,
Social and economic life will again have to be rationed and shared. The lusts of capitalism will have to be curtailed or destroyed. And there will have to be a recovery of reverence for the sacred, the bedrock of premodern society, so we can see each other and the earth not as objects to exploit but as living beings to be revered and protected. This recovery will require a very different vision for human society.
and “a fight for life” that “requires that we follow those possessed by a sublime madness” . . . “and in these acts we make possible a better world, even if we cannot see one emerging around us.”
