Limitation

[Tucker]

Here is one passage from another book that is consistent with Hedges's general opinion.

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Could it be that rejecting religion is about rejecting limits? Saying, "Don't tell me what I can and cannot do."
Limits, we like to think, are a thing of the past. Our parents and grandparents had limits....
Today we like to teach that there are no limits to what you can be, where you can live, what you earn, or what you can accomplish. If we just push hard enough, we can achieve those perfect lives....
But are there side effects of our limitless lifestyle? Yes, and that is what the kayaker discovered on that devastating day in the canyon.
Rabbi Jamie S. Korngold. God in the Wilderness: Rediscovering the Spirituality of the Great Outdoors with the Adventure Rabbi. New York: Doubleday, 2007. pp. 99-100.
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And here is the beginning of a rebuttal to Hedges's idea that we must not even try to improve the world because we are hopelessly limited:

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All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake, not because it isn't a good thing to improve the world if you know how to do it, but because striving and struggling is the worst way you could set about doing anything.
George Bernard Shaw. Cashel Byron's Profession (1886), Chapter 5. Quoted in Sen. J. William Fulbright. The Arrogance of Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. p. 17.
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[Tucker]

Hedges opposes optimism. A dissenting opinion on the importance of optimism:
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The idea of progress forms the backdrop to a society. In the extreme, without the possibility of progress of any sort, your gain is someone else's loss. If human behaviour is unreformable, social policy can only ever be about trying to cage the ape within. Society must in principle be able to move towards its ideals, such as equality and freedom, or they are no more than cant and self-delusion. So it matters if people lose their faith in progress. And it is worth thinking about how to restore it.
"Onwards and upwards." The Economist. Dec. 19, 2009. p. 37.
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[Daniel]

My sense from reading Hedges on a positive, forward looking awareness is not so much that we cannot improve or progress in some way. His leaning points to a greater sense--awareness of who we really are with our limitations with the current illusions that are comprised in dominant societal scripting (such as with the neo-atheist and religious fundamentalist), and the need to disengage from and relinquish of such scripts that do not really benefit our communities and world. Hedges may at times allude to alternative scripting, yet it is not monolithic, one dimensional or seamless. It seems rather more ragged and disjunctive, such as how he seeks to use his voice in with the current Occupy movement.

[Tucker]

Several years having passed since I first read it, I'd have to read the book again to re-analyze what Hedges thinks, but your interpretation sounds like a more reasonable and likeable position: improve oneself in various ways, as the times seem to require, without trying to plug into a predetermined ideological script of perfection.