I recommend Bill Moyers’ excellent recent interview with renowned journalist and author Christopher Hedges. They discuss Hedges’ research on the ways that corporations’ and the US government’s widespread, unchecked, and nearly invincible capitalist commitments, have reached a new and deeply troubling apex of wreaking economic, social, and political devastation in the United States. They also discuss Hedges’ “faith” and what resistance to the dehumanizing effects of greed in our society means today. Hedges comes around to what he calls a theological point: the neglect of “the neighbor” in this society.

Here is the interview:

In recent years, I have grown more persuaded by analyses like Hedges’, as I take further stock of the perpetual war economy, the aggregation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, the deep difficulties of most families in meeting basic necessities for surviving and thriving in life while maintaining a healthy family life, and the violence and human diminishment that our participation in the everyday economy–joining “us” to impoverished workers around the world–propagates.

Hedges calls for massive nonviolent resistance, and is untroubled by questions about its short-term effectiveness. He seems to return again and again to the question of duty, to what one must do in order not to betray oneself, whether or not the system is overturned in his/our lifetime. He also focuses continually on the matter of telling the truth about the world.

I think that however we construe the relationship between theology and music, the basic question about how we are being made

more able to tell the truth about our world, grounded in the sufferings of human beings and of the wider natural world, presents a “test” and a “limit” for the theology-music relationship. One “self-examination” question is whether our investments in music and religion/spirituality/theology make us more accommodated to the economic-political order that we have, or more heterogeneous to it.

As R&T readers know, the desire for human beings to take greater control of their own destiny, toward a future where all have what they need, is shared by many religions, for many reasons. R&T readers also can attest that different kinds of music instantiate and recreate that desire. What religious-spiritual-theological material is most important for you in helping clarify your relationship to capitalism? What role does music play in forming, informing, or transforming your theological stance?

For myself, whatever theological material assists in supporting the radical project of more access to life for more beings is what I want to support. Positively, this requires some sense that the “divine” or “more than human” nature of things “intends” that humans share social gifts/goods to help each other thrive. One problem is that this can often be a thinly anthropomorphized, or sometimes a mechanical, divinity, whose “essence” has been shown definitively through some revelation as “wanting” a certain type of economy and who will finally act (or will act in the interim) to make sure that that happens. I used to argue such things, but now take what I hope is a more modest view theologically: whatever divinity may be, we are best served to realize the character of interrelated human/creaturely/worldly life if we make our economy one in which all good that are essential for thriving are accessible to everyone. In other words, we are best situated to hear the “overtones” of the “more” in our lives, and to come to an interreligious and intersecular understanding of that “more,” when we are as undistracted, unmanipulated, and unhurt by the violence of destructive economies as we can be.

Negatively, it means resisting the powers that would rather see human beings remain fragmented, disempowered (politically and economically), and adrift (spiritually). Everyone can do something to resist. Everyone has a next step to take.

Musically, it means cranking songs like Rage Against the Macine’s “Guerrilla Radio” that quicken the energy and potential for action beneath my recurrent complacency, with the reminder that any sufficient politics will have to come from outside the current (USA) political order.

Here they are performing “Guerrilla Radio” at a protest at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. The song starts at 10:47. Another great live version is here.

This song frames it in terms from the 2000 USA presidential election : “More for Gore, or the son of a drug lord? None of the above. Fuck it. Cut the cord.”

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

1 Comment »

1. 

   Sometimes the most simple act can be the most profound. I remember Utah Phillips saying once that the most revolutionary act that one can perform is singing together.

   While I value the gifts of recording artists of all sorts, I especially value those moments when someone with no professional aspirations whatsoever simply “hoists a tune” for the simple pleasure of it or even sometimes for the power that doing so can bring to protest.

   Those songs and those singers who look to invite others to join in, sharing their voices and their verses, create sacred moments that seem to me to undermine the most intimidating “imperial consciousness.”

   I recall listening to field recordings on Folkways records of those marching from Selma to Montgomery. The hope and fear in each tune was palpable and sacred.

   Musical artists find ways to articulate the yearnings of people at a particular moment in history. Much of their work comes and goes but sometimes the best becomes a part of the consciousness of a community and serves as a touchstone that the community may return to again and again.

   I’ve come to believe that the very act of singing something yourself-or playing something yourself-is a profoundly revolutionary act.

   Comment by fred herron — August 2, 2012 @ 1:38 pm

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