“Moby Dick”, by Herman Melville, is among America’s greatest novels. It is a prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a nation and perhaps a species. Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness, and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. Melville’s description of the ship’s captain, Ahab, is a description of the bankers, corporate boards, politicians, television personalities, and generals who, through the power of propaganda, fill our heads with seductive images of glory and lust for wealth and power. We are consumed with self-induced obsessions that spur us toward self-annihilation. Melville is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England, or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia.
Joining Chris to discuss Melville’s novel is Nathaniel Philbrick, author of “Why Read Moby Dick?”, as well as books such as “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleboat Essex”, “Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War”, “Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy”, and “The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and The Battle of the Little Bighorn”.
Chris Hedges interviews writers, intellectuals, and dissidents, many banished from the mainstream, in his half-hour show, The Chris Hedges Report. He gives voice to those, from Cornel West and Noam Chomsky to the leaders of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, who are on the front lines of the struggle against militarism, corporate capitalism, white supremacy, the looming ecocide, as well as the battle to wrest back our democracy from the clutches of the ruling global oligarchy.
Studio: Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino, Rebecca Myles
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"Just human nature " is an excuse I can no longer accept. We are not the ego, our associative memories, nor contained by a body. We are our environment and part of our world. No more excuses..
These guys sound insane
I think this piece illustrates humanity's inability to accept ourselves as we are with no illusions. Chris Hedges has always been good at capturing the good and bad of the human race.
Heart of the sea was a good read.
…it is the toxic masculinity of Ahab that conquered North America…
Interesting episode, sort of fun. Take good care of you, Chris, the guest, and TRNN.
Wonderful analysis, thanks for this enlightening conversation Professor Hedges.
Thanks to Chris Hedges for this and the other work he does and thanks to those who help in bringing it to us.
After I dropped out of college, running as hard as I could from my dad's academic career, I still felt obligated to read Moby Dick.
And I did, hating every page. But I found it gave me strange memories. In the rear view mirror, it's a weird thing to recall.
I'm profoundly unequipped to think or opine about it, but I feel like there's a through line from Blake's mystic liberalism to Melville.
Excellent discussion, thank you for your work such as this interview; this keeps our minds open and exploring our circumstance, which is good.
I enjoy listening to the articulate and clearly laid out narrative. He hits the spot in most important areas particularly the bankers and the generals. There is a moral bankruptcy in America. It has been there since the beginning but has metastised and is now on track for an inevitable violent crash landing. I'm unsure if his analysis of climate change is correct although our reliance on fossil fuel will end badly unless there is greater simplicity and a new way if living. The pestilence who are our leaders and regrettably I believe their grip from power will end violently. I will not shed a tear but will for the many innocents who will surely suffer.
As Eisenhower warned, the evil that plagues us comes from the corporate power elites who turned into political power elites and thereby increase their corporate power. Oftentimes they delegate their work to those who like to watch others' bloodthirst being quenched.
It coincides with white nationalism, like a white enemy whale gravely injuring the weaker for its own small short-term gains. It misjudges the intelligence of the human being. It does not realize that bullying is not a sustainable strategy in life. And nothing raises the passion and thought to great heights like witnessing injustice.
Great analysis.
I love the take on this. I originally read moby dick because of the existentialism take Hubert Dryfus talked about in his classes and book, All things shinning.
❤❤
4:33 "and be the white whale agent,or be the white whale principal,I will wreak that hate upon him". This is how I viewed the Cheney/Bush attitude towards Saddam Hussein and their obsession to 'get him' at all costs. Hussein found a work around to the oil sanctions and it drove them crazy with rage. He gnawed on the wrong leg and now must be punished.
The metaphor, of course, works on a political/social level, as we can see, with corrupt or vain political leaders leading nations to ruin, but it's also very relevant, I think, on a personal level. I've seen people become so obsessed with their hatred of Trump, Clinton, or, in the UK, Boris Johnson, that they're entirely consumed and obsessed with their enemy, and unable to have any perspective on the issues or culture that created them. The more we obsess with that which we oppose, the more it "drags us down to its level".
To Nathaniel Philbrick regarding his viewpoint that humans are humans I will say capitalism is not human nature and is not by nature human.
You speak about the evils of fossil fuel but it is the great taboo to speak truth about fossil fuel's evil twin the automobile industry. Both the automobile industry and the fossil industry became a crucial unholy alliance in the early 20th century. Now 100 years later most people in the US are enslaved to the automobile and fossil industry and have drive to work in order to work to drive and fill their car with gasoline and oil.
SOLUTIONS – this is the best I can do on u.s. education in 2022
WAYS to MAKE the United States GREAT AGAIN.
a.) Confiscate Wealth OVER $1,000,000,000.00 but not less than $999,999,999.99 cents
b.) Pay Off the National Debt.
c.) Create a Mandatory UNION Wage where any U.S. Company worldwide would pay Company Employees wages equal to those in the USA Irregardless of what country these companies are in or what purpose they are there for.
IT'S PRETTY SIMPLE….. THE RICH WANT THE VOTE…., all of them!
This is great! I requested in the comments that Chris do more book reviews and related history analysis. Here we are! Love it!
Wrote his own book…but nothing like Melvilles
If only the young would get off video games and read great books…🦉I don't think they'd regret it.
Well, I can't agree that Melville loved whales. In one chapter he argues that whalers shouldn't worry about depleting the species, since the whalers were less efficient in their killing than the bison hunters of the west who were obviously exterminating that species. He also argued that whales were mere fish and not mammals. But he did describe the killings of some whales emotionally, as though he regretted taking their lives.
"Terrorized" by Willie King and the Liberators is the theme song.
I graduated college two years ago having read Moby-Dick and being utterly convinced that Moby-Dick is the most important book anyone could be reading today in America. It’a hard not to see the continual ripples of life that continue to ebb and flow that make this book so relevant to the way we could understand this american experiment.
Big respect to Chris Hedges for being one of the few people that I know of in the broader culture hammering away the importance of Melville’s work.
Bartleby and Benito Cereno are just important and rewarding to read as well.
Spread love n knowledge
Listening to Mr Philbrick's analysis, it is quite astonishing to think that Herman Melville, in the mid 1800s, described the self-destructive, self-devouring nature of American capitalism. Some of it is drawing references from the novel as a narrative of the current malaise in the US, but it shows the fundamentals of societal corruption are largely common and repeated through history in different societies, hence the uncanny correlation of Moby Dick to early twenty-first century America.
Trumps latest speech in DC was chilling, he tells what he wants to do if he retakes power, rounding up the homeless into tent camps, military take over of democratic run cities, a militarized police force. It’s chilling the America the right wants to create.
That’s just angry (white) men, projection, and their death drive (usually bc daddy was mean).
On another note, Rich Rorty has incredible book on something similar — uses Twain and ? Another American classic to deconstruct America.
In a way we are a group of male chimps on a raid to destroy a neighboring group of chimps at all costs. When we aren’t raiding there is the false impression that all is well in the jungle and that we can sleep safely in our night nests in the tropical trees. In these chimp observances we humans feel safe and complacent assuming that we aren’t like those lower species of creatures which we observe unawares all the while denying our base impulses. Melville understood these analogies while sticking to his leviathan storyline.
Melville saw how the Polynesians lived without accumulation of wealth, with understanding of limits to resources on an Island, in a natural way…..then he returned to the avarice of civilisation.
Melville was ironically a "Young American", a reform movement of young people in the 19th century that promoted the production of uniquely American literature, on purely American subjects but also advocated the since much altered "manifest destiny" concept of John L. Sullivan, the beginnings of modern exceptionalism. Sullivan's concept initially did not demand conquest but was seen to have later in history. It believed expansion would happen solely on merits and the exceptional and transplantable nature of the American model. In this light, Moby Dick seems to be a direct criticism of Sullivan's Utopian design, though he may have been a starry eyed disciple in his youth. The movement dropped off considerably in the 1850's and Moby Dick might be Melville's documentation of disillusionment and a eulogy. You would think such a direct target of this principle would possibly be borne out of Melville's one time naive immersion in it.
Interesting how Quakers in Ireland became the most astute businessmen and landowners…..not heavily burdened with religious guilt.
J Assange is Amerika’s latest white whale
So grateful for this. I had read Toni Morrison,in an essay, considering this the first anti slavery novel. So rich in layers, as Philbank says -endlessly relevant. I just read it during Covid isolation. What a ride, I will continue to reread, the richness of metaphors, gives us so much.
Your attention to this masterpiece, and your points, for us today is so important. Thank you.
Bartleby the Scrivener, would be another great exploration.
Chris Hedges is a national treasure.
Gastonia police release video of veteran’s arrest that shows officer stunning dog | WSOC-TV
You do realize that 9-11 was perpetrated by the Bush's! Inside job of demolition!
never tell the full story,,lol,, ask a native and there wasnt just one whale
Chris is one of the greatest teachers of our age
Let's consider the nature of Ahab's father. 🌑
I feel exactly the same way even tho I'm older than Chris. Because a father is (ideally) the person you mist respect, and TRUST.
"Economic miracle" no such thing in Germany, and no such thing in usa.
Herman Melville great grandson is a corporate lawyer. He is one of the handsomest kindness men.
the brain of the whale is the oil.
B. Traven's The Death Ship