Science in the City - Chris Hedges

McMaster University and The Hamilton Spectator sponsored a lecture by Chris Hedges a couple of nights ago that I attended. According the website intro and the extended bio presented before his talk, Hedges is a journalist, has taught at Princeton, won a Pulitzer Prize, and done a good many other impressive things.

The McMaster Innovation Park building was worth stopping by to see, the place was crowded, and it was a fantastic early fall evening. The introduction by a McMaster faculty member - didn't quite catch his name - was interesting but the lecture that followed was somewhat less so. Using a Michael Jackson motif to bolster his argument that we are (he was cleaerly US focussed and assumed us to be the same) a "celebrity culture" that is dead in our "moral nihilism" with the collapse of western civilization about to happen, next week if not sooner. Was Michael Jackson a "celebrity commodity"? Of course. No argument. Do countless PR people, marketers, wardrobe specialists, speech writers, and spin doctors of all sorts deeply shape our culture? Undoubtedly.

For the first half hour or so I was engaged in thinking through his assertions despite not agreeing with them wholesale. His argument that corporations use credit to pacify people the way Rome used bread and games to pacify its citizens is an intriguing idea. Big business does benefit a whole lot more from certain regulations and practices than do workers and consumers. Corporations mostly don't pay the price for their activites and oil companies and banks do rake in ridiculous amounts of money by exploiting people. Wages are not rising in keeping with the cost of living. Methane chimneys are venting greenhouses gases in large quantities. Rich people and wealthy corporations may have more to do with electing politicians than the public does - if you are poor, good luck running a competitive compaign.

What I grew tired of was a lack of specific examples sufficiently explained. He was far more dull and monotonous in the last half than I suspect is actually true of him. He should have stepped off his script sometime after the thirty-minute mark, provided more directly factual material, and offered more compelling ideas for innovating a better future. He repeatedly raised the spectre of the 'radical religious right' in the US in such a way that you wondered if he had ever given thought to the much more valuable contribution that religion has made to social life generally. Pointing to worse-case examples as sufficient grounds to dismiss the whole would be like concluding that Richard Dawkins militant brand of atheism is reflective of all atheists or agnostics. Any belief system has subscribers who are way off the edge. The lack of nuance evidenced made it difficult to focus on his other ideas. Given his other books, I guess the push toward a thought-stopping angle in these ideas gains attention, perhaps it will fuel strong debate.

The guy I was sitting next to whispered to me jokingly that after hearing all this, there wasn't much to do and we should just throw in the towel. Perhaps Hedges books taken together are more balanced. I wasn't tempted to buy one after the talk and can't offer any reflection on them. I'll try and get back for the October 13 lecture that features David Malone, President of the International Development Research Centre. It looks like his talk will be on agricultural productivity and water management.