What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

The above passage comes from Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business and is quoted in Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion: the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Hedges is not referring to literacy in a functional sense (i.e. can you identify and recite the words on the page and tell us their meaning?), but rather as a faculty of thinking, namely the ability to “read between the lines” and separate fact from fiction in the media that we consume. This is commonly referred to as critical thinking, determining what stands behind the material we read, hear and see, decoding its message and subsequently analyzing the meaning of its content.

At its very core, this type of critical literacy means not simply passively consuming something and taking it only at face value, but additionally understanding the structures and forces that put that message together and thus cutting to the reality of it. For a trivial example, imagine a book is released espousing the many wonderful benefits of smoking. Rather than simply accepting this as gospel, we might first want to know how the author reached his conclusion, namely what studies he employed and perhaps also who this author really is. Upon finding out that all the studies cited in the book were all sponsored by the tobacco industry and that the author was a shareholder in a major tobacco company, we might not take his conclusions so seriously after all. This is the faculty that Hedges fears we as a culture are losing, that of going beyond the image that we are fed and thinking deeply about what undercuts that image. Fearing the implications of this, and rightfully so, Hedges laments the power of the image in a society so inundated with media. On the very first page of his book, Hedges quotes John Raulston Saul, who states in Voltaire’s Bastards,

The electronic image is man and God and the ritual involved leads us not ot a mysterious Holy Trinity but back to ourselves. In the absence of a clear understanding that we are now the only source, these images cannot help but return to the expression of magic and fear proper to idolatrous societies. This in turn facilitates the use of the electronic image as propaganda by whoever can control some part of it.

Dividing his book into five chapters, with the title of each starting with “The Illusion of…” Hedges takes his thesis that we are inundated with superficiality and frivolity, which we are unable to counter with critical thinking, and covers the topics of literacy, love, wisdom, happiness, and America. Each of these chapters can very well merit their own independent examination given the detailed and multifaceted nature of Hedges’ writing. The most striking aspects of Empire of Illusion upon my reading, however, were the sections in which Hedges comments upon our obsession with celebrity culture and the farce that is mainstream journalism. The author subtly illustrates how celebrity culture and news reporting have in fact become virtually indistinguishable. Both of these horrid facets of our culture feed into one another.

While journalists have no interest in doing work that is anything more than superficial and kissing the collective ass of those in power, we the citizens seem perfectly happy to consume these inanities because we would rather be amused than informed or perhaps because we simply lack the ability to see said inanities for the farce that they are. The superficialities, rather than being something fed to us as the manifestation of a series of complex forces and actors with vested interests, simply become reality. Several examples from recent events serve to illustrate this.

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