Christopher Hitchens, who died on Dec. 15, was like all of us: he embodied some of the best and also the worst of human nature. He did so, however, on a scale that was larger than the average life, on a very public stage, from his own bully pulpit. His vanity, his pomposity, his unshakeable conviction in the infallibility of his own opinions and in the judgment of his intellect offered a model of public discourse that was no different in essence from the fundamentalist circles he spent so much of his time deriding.
It was his life's work, he said, to combat superstition and religious totalitarianism. It is astonishing, then, that he, the arch-ironist, could not see the irony of his own absolutist position. And it was indeed a position, rather than a point of view -- a vehement, tub-thumping position -- that Hitchens always took as a matter of course, whatever the subject in hand. His blindness to his own righteousness reminded me in this regard of no one so much as Newt Gingrich, another champion of hubris over humility, who lambasted President Clinton for having an affair while he himself was busy with his own extra-marital dalliance.
But Hitchens the essayist and debater had far more in his arsenal than most politicians, preachers and mullahs. He had the benefit not only of a brilliant mind and a deep and also wide knowledge of literature and ideas. We was brought up through the English private school system and Oxford. That cast of Englishman lives in an environment where droll wit, cutting irony and the infamous put-down were requirements for survival, at least in the class of his generation.
Hitchens mastered them all, and put them to work, not on the English cultural stage, where they are part of everyday life and thus nothing out of the ordinary, but in America, which remains as yet something of an innocent in these dark arts. This is doubtless why their novelty still thrills here.
Add to these weapons the resuscitation of the old romantic trope -- surely long since shunted off into a back alley of history -- that writing, and certainly journalism, requires rage, alcohol and a bad boy posture if its voice is to be heard at all, and you have the makings of a grandiose figure in love with his own image and liable to turn violent, in speech if not in deed, if his pronouncements were crossed or questioned.
Hitchens loved to pronounce. He was as unbending and intransigent in his pronouncements as any of the objects of his scorn, those religious of any denomination who held to beliefs that he considered puerile. Thus my essential discomfort with most things Hitchens: He lived in a world of black and white, good and bad, right and wrong. To his mind, anything that was not rational was not only wrong but stupid. Evil and idiocy were always out there, in someone else. In externalizing evil, as George Bush did, Hitchens permitted the end to justify the means. He sanctioned the abuse and murder of others (in Iraq) in the name of reason.
Hitchen's fanatical faith in the power of reason transferred onto others the dark forces that Freud called the id. Fascists and totalitarians did the same throughout the 20th century. As long as we continue to project evil out there, onto some other tribe, nation, or belief system, we fail to see that evil is a product, not of any religion or people in particular, but of the human heart. That is where the danger to civilization lies -- as close to us as our own jugular vein.
If all religions were banished, evil would still exist; though perhaps by another name. The Hindus, for example, prefer to call it ignorance; by which they mean not the absence of rational knowledge, but the darkness of a mind that is absent the wisdom and insight that is available when we transcend our own self-importance.
In a debate with Hitchens a few years ago, the journalist Chris Hedges made the point that Hitchens fulminated against the irrational without admitting the existence of the non-rational. Faith, Hedges said, does not necessarily need a church, a mosque or a synagogue. It is a non-rational intuition of the truth, goodness and beauty that lie alongside the darkness in any human heart; an intuition that spurs us to actions that transcend our drive for personal gain and even survival. Faith transcends our mania for conclusions. It allows us to live with uncertainty, change and, ultimately, death -- not through a belief in a better place that awaits us, but in the faith that all is well with the human heart, in spite of everything, here and now, even in the darkest hour.
Hitchens, however, was all about conclusions, and his most common conclusion was that he was right and you were wrong, unless you agreed with him. And yet he often was right, and always courageous and eloquent enough to challenge received opinion and sacred cows (Mother Teresa for one, whom he called the Albanian dwarf famous for peddling an antiquated form of religious fundamentalism). He was courageous enough, too, to take the contrarian view against both right and left sides of the aisle, and to prise open many people's minds, including my own, to ways of thinking about a subject or idea that they had never considered before. We all need our assumptions questioned, and Hitchens did a public service in being willing to oblige.
Yet I believe his greatest public service was in the example he set in his utter devotion to, and, yes, faith in the power of literature and in reason itself to shape the unfolding human story for the better. He was passionate about words as few are passionate about anything; so much so that he was writing almost until his last breath. The reading and the writing were his love, his meaning and, finally, his means of transcending the trials of his last weeks and months with cancer.
Everything he wrote was an implicit song of praise to writing itself, the one god he knew and loved. Dedication in that degree would be the envy of any believer. Hitchens was, after all, a man of passionate conviction; and in his own way a seeker after truth. For all his posturing and bombast, Christopher Hitchens devoted his life to what he believed in, and that is as good a legacy as any.
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Christopher Lane: Two Ways Of Thinking About Agnosticism: Hitchens Vs. Dawkins
"also led him to support an amoral war"
Ah, now I see. Based on one's support of the Iraq War you think you can determine the whole character of a person. Never mind that Hitchens support of the Iraq War was driven by passionate moral convictions, for example against tyranny and militant jihad. And never mind that Hitchens has probably seen a bit more of the world than you have, his opinion wasn't based on ignorance and groupthink like most lay people's opinions, including on Iraq.
"most lay people with common sense could see was wrong"
Then why did so much of the public support the Iraq War in the first place or support reelecting Bush? I think by lay people you mean most liberal lay people and even then you are wrong. Most lay people supported the War before eventually concluding it was wrong.
-Christopher Hitchens, 25 seconds after his death
Also, all the evidence shows that our minds -- including memory, emotion, language, personality, and consciousness -- arise from the brain. When Hitchens body and therefore brain died, Hitchens died. There was no 25 seconds later.
You don't seem to grasp the full tragedy of Hitchens' death. There is no 25 seconds or 60 years later when I can have a conversation with Hitchens and continue to enjoy his insight and wit. Hitchens' is gone from our lives forever. How dare you suggest otherwise.
While it is impossible to know if there is life after death, one thing is for sure, death is a one way door. If there is life over there, the departed are not allowed to come back and spoil the surprise for the rest of us.
My comment flowed from trying to picture in my mind what Hitchen's reaction would've been if he discovered life moved on.
Personally if there is life after this one, I think we will all have two general reactions: "wow" as the prospect of a new adventure becomes apparent and "oh crap" as the prospect of our previous actions mattering.
And I proudly would wear the label of fundamentalist as frankly being a fundie has nothing to do with my arguments. I'm a fundamentalist, strident and extreme... so friggin what?! Does this ad hominem observation magically make my arguments wrong? Let's note that the problem with the Young Earth Creationists is not that they are fundamentalists or that they practice bad religion, as if there were good religion. The problem is that they are anti-science, they mistakenly think the Earth is young. We should attack the contents of people's beliefs, not just whether they are fundamentalists.
I'm a fundamentalist. So what?!
I don’t recall Hitchens deriding religious fundamentalists for their vanity, pomposity, unshakeable conviction in the infallibility of their own opinions, or overestimation of their own intellect. It was the beliefs they espoused and the political influence they sought. I think what the writer means here is that Hitchens demolished every religious person he ever faced in a debate, and it hurt.
Hitchens didn’t debate, not primarily anyway, the absoluteness of his adversaries’ positions either; again, it was the indefensible things they believed and espoused, and the wish of many, to one extent or another, for theocracy. Whatever you thought of the man, Hitchens's positions were wholly defensible and mostly unassailable.
Religious defenders, even the scholarly and erudite, rarely argue the points that erudite scholars like Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and the rest argue. They change the subject to religious acts of charity, or the atheist’s hubris or certainty—certainty among atheists seems to be the most threatening affront of all—or anything at all to divert attention from the myth, magic, and superstition of religion and the misery it wreaks, i.e., the subject at hand.
Even in death, score one more for Hitchens.
Calling atheists fundamentalists for our unshakeable defense of the laws of nature is, among other things, an attempt to put religion and science on equal footing. It's a silly contradiction, attempting to use science to justify faith. Non-believers never to the inverse.
The religious like to repackage the criticisms applied to themselves and then cast them upon those who criticize, as if that somehow immunizes their bankrupt worldviews.
Hitchens was an advocate of constant questioning and skepticism, particularly of the religious ilk who pretend to have an imaginary deity on their side.
So I'll take the weight of Hitchens' opinions over the fluff of articles like the one posted above any day.
Yes, please transcend self-importance as nothing could be nearly so self-important, self-aggrandizing, and facilitating of both as the view that supposedly there is a supernatural being not only deeply interested in our daily thoughts and behaviors, but also that it is an omnipotent being in whose image we are supposedly crafted.
"Faith transcends our mania for conclusions. It allows us to live with uncertainty, change and, ultimately, death -- not through a belief in a better place that awaits us, but in the faith that all is well with the human heart..."
Yeah, that is precisely part of the problem with faith. Ignoring problems tends to exacerbate rather than solve them, as the author himself seems to admit contrary to the quote above: "As long as we continue to project evil out there...we fail to see that evil is a product, not of any religion or people in particular, but of the human heart".
"To me, the offer of certainty, complete security, and an impermeable faith that can't go away is an offer I don't want to take. I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of knowledge and wisdom, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I'd look at the people who tell you - at your age! - that you're dead already and that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don't take that as a gift; look at it as the poison chalice that it is. Much more truth and beauty and wisdom will come your way if you do."
Your caricature seems rather silly after reading this, no?
Living with uncertainty is...livable. It's all good, there's always more to learn.
Let's add to the pile the self-importance inherent in the view that there supposedly is a supernatural being deeply interested in our personal affairs and thoughts, an all-powerful being whose 'image' many believe humans are made in, and to boot a being that is supposedly waiting to heap infinite reward upon us. I don't think anything could be so self-important, or facilitating of self-importance, as that.
Hitchens may well have believed that his study led him to correct interpretations which he was willing to vigorously defend. That does not make him a fundamentalist. Hitchens may well have been pompous. That does not make him a fundamentalist. While I agree that many fundamentalists are pompous, it is not that fault that makes them fundamentalists. Again, it is the source of their certain knowledge.
The strength or rigidity of belief does not define fundamentalism. I believe completely in the Law of Gravity and in the Existence of Atoms. That does not make me a fundamentalist gravitationalist or some such nonsense.
I object strenuously to the redefinition employed by some people attempting to vilify people of science for daring to demand that evidence be required for belief. The Scientific Method does not qualify as a fundamentalist tenet. The science we have painstakingly collected and tested and validated over the years does not qualify as religious text.
While I am not an atheist, I understand well the objections my atheist friends have to the soft, fuzzy incoherence so many cling to as they deny reality. The author's attributions of fundamentalism to Hitchens are without merit.
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Just because you "devote your life" to what you believe in, that doesn't make your legacy worth much. You could say the same of Osama Bin Laden, and an infinitely long list of scoundrels.
Hitchens was certainly an interesting and outsized character, and brilliant with a small "b". But if his excessive drinking didn't addle his brain, it certainly twisted his own inner compass.
His unabashed and enduring support of Bushco vis a vis Iraq was worthy of Henry Kissinger whom he despised. And his insistence that "religion poisons everything" was such an obvious bloviating overstatement that it overshadowed what should have been his actual (and noble) argument with bad religion.
Yes, the Bush people loved him - all the more because, like David Horowitz, he came to them from the far left. And yes, those with a penchant for militant atheism loved him as well.
But the rest of us mostly enjoyed his way with words, and didn't take him seriously at all.
Is this not a complete oxymoron? The defnition of reason requires open-mindedness, skepticism and critical evaluation - the very antithesis of fanaticism. Attacking Hitchens for advocating reason is a ridiculously self-defeating position to take.
Exhibit A would be his twisting himself into rhetorical knots in order to justify the unjustifiable when it came to being a Bushco shill for the Iraq war. If you think about it for a minute, that's exactly what the religious so often do when trying to justify the unjustifiable from the Bible or the Qu'ran.
The only real difference is that Hitchens' sacred text was the contents of his own brain.