He who lives by the suspect, sweeping generalization, as does Christ Hedges, is vulnerable to analytic close reading (pinpointing ill-defined terms) or the simple query: is this true, does this apply, what is the best context? Somehow I don't see how his annoyingly high level of abstraction advances the moral, political, even hortatory progress Chris Hedges seeks. See his most recent:
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/12823-the-science-of-genocide

I find his overwrought equivalence between categories hardly equivalent, except superficially, lower his credibility. To wit, the US was (presumably is) "as morally bankrupt as the Nazi machine" or "Soviet regime with which it was allied." Just how morally bankrupt were "the Nazi machine" is left wholly to our imagination, a default to the shadows of infinity. My mind blanks out when all the terms of a comparison blur so badly. The U.S. can be morally suspect without needing overused Hitler or Stalin put-downs in the mix.

Likewise, "the Japanese had been on the verge of surrender" is offered as if plain fact, rather than the controversial claim argued over by experts. Ditto: the "atomic blasts, ignited in large part to send a message to the Soviet Union, were a reminder that science is morally neutral." Put aside the message-making (not germane, hard to prove), if the atomic bomb showed anything, it was that high-tech science is/was anything but neutral, a clear contradiction to his claim. Likewise, later, Hedges claims science simply results "in collective enslavement and mass extermination." One fraction of science perhaps but not most, not all the medical breakthroughs, immunizations, food, chemical. and water safety monitors, even clean pipes and water treatment processes.

Some "government" weapons science is not neutral, in fact onerous, but the widespread applications of science and technology reflect many variables, such as: business organization, public policy, majority rule, and billions of daily consumer decisions. Hedges' overgeneralizations blur more than they clarify when one analyzes even first-order implications of his polemical claims.

And again, "it was science, industry and technology that made possible the 20th century's industrial killing," but also a higher, more comfortable, longer-lasting quality of life for billions. Check out the mortality rates from before 1900 and how the vast majority of the earthlings now live twice as long as the average baby born in the 1700s.

Finally, inspect more Hedges' sermonizing: "science has supplanted religion. We harbor a naive faith in the godlike power of science . . . it feeds our hubris and sense of divine empowerment. And trusting in its fearsome power will mean our extinction." In fact, all gains of knowledge add to our sense of empowerment but not all lead to blind hubris.

Speak for yourself, not everyone, not humanity, not the entire globe. Science doesn't mean automatic extinction but excessive use of machinery for hundreds of years by billions of users could. The enemy isn't merely the tools but the tool users, in the billions, making individual choices daily. Steven Pinker's work speaks to a mass reduction in organized killing nowadays, despite all that destructive science and population concentrations. Progress is not an entire illusion in today's high-tech world.

The point is that Hedges' sweeping generalizations, however useful as political war cries, totter against even the simplest logical challenges. To say science and industry equate with industrial killing is, frankly, to throw the baby out with the bath water. We also live better, with less pain and suffering, thanks to this immoral, criminal conspiracy called technology. What sane person refuses surgery after a ruptured appendix? Or prudent cancer removal? Or antibiotics for the myriad of infectious blights that are easily cured today and would have, only a century ago, wiped out thousands. Who refuses to use the phone or the computer because they could be the work of the high-tech, science devil?

Yes, we live in dark and dangerous times, and our politics are decidedly unhealthy. But do the times get brighter when we sacrifice logic, clear thinking and wider contexts to accept, with more passivity than we should, this kind of ominous, unhelpful overstatement? Not for me, thanks, whatever Hedges' real accomplishments. I respect his activism, but not his addictive fondness for historic and philosophic obfuscations.

Wit Paul Kibble, a shrewd, more sympathetic commentator, captures the Hedges "charm" and speak to my points:

"I find myself agreeing with Hedges on many issues from a general philosophical/political perspective, but disagree with him when it comes down to particulars. He tends to play fast and loose with alleged historical parallels and substitutes broad, high-flown rhetoric for logic. I am thus frequently put off by his more operatic pronouncements, which I think are a function of his formal training.

"He does, after all, hold a degree from Harvard Divinity School as well as a B.A. in English. Perhaps that accounts for the hortatory, or rather homiletic, tone of his writing: he is not so much trying to persuade as to convert, winning souls for the Good Fight. In structure and style his articles are not closely reasoned analyses of an issue but jeremiads, in the root sense of that word: he is like an Old-Testament prophet calling an erring nation to account, demanding that it repent lest it incur eternal damnation."