Christopher Hitchens In Memoriam

The death yesterday of Christopher Hitchens is indeed, as he himself noted in the remarkable Jeremy Paxman interview a year ago, a terrible waste. And so is, as he himself again added, the premature death of any individual who still has a lot to offer to his friends or maybe the world at large as well. The way he faced death has been remarkable. He was calm and humble before it, but in a supremely heroic way, not deigning to give an inch with respect to his atheism. I believe that this is a lasting and valuable legacy, whatever one may have to say about the substance of his various convictions and stances. There was an exemplary quality about him as a human being, especially towards the end. He may have declared in that interview that he does not particularly fancy the word "mellow". But I do think that he had mellowed indeed, primarily in relation to himself, without of course repudiating any of his polemical positions or his doggedly adversarial method.

Hitchens was immensely talented in the oratorical arts and his various turns of phrase on diverse matters are legendary (and mostly apt). A flood of words came out of him, most of the time in a brilliant, albeit somewhat overloaded, order. He had mastered perfectly the technique of eristics, out some kind of instinct it seems to me, although this did not preclude his attachment to principle. As a controversialist he dazzled, although it has to be said that he did it in the cocksure way that is the stamp of Oxford and which can be very annoying sometimes. For the problem with Hitchens was that he was absolutely convinced that he was right in all the positions that he took over the years -despite the fact that those of recent vintage simply butt heads with many of the earlier ones.

He was fundamentally misguided in his support of the invasion of Iraq. This was a miserable failure of judgment which he did not at all hedge or revise until the end. It constitutes a blemish that will now unfortunately never be erased. He subsequent friendship with unsavory neo-con characters such as Wolfowitz signified a further corruption of his moral mettle, upon which he himself placed so much value. His notion that the appalling civilian casualties subsequent to the invasion -casualties due to the arrogant sloppiness of that imperialist venture- do not go on the account of Bush and Co. is simply ludicrous. And so is his denial that the emergence and widening influence of Al Qaida in Iraq is again a result of American military and political brutishness-cum-incompetence in the matter. If one adds the mockery of international legality by the Bushies (do you remember Colin Powell lying through his teeth before the security council in February, 2003?), as well as the immense increase in the Iranian Ayatollahs' influence over Iraqi affairs, one can gage the blindness of the Hitchens position. Bush's murderous Iraq sideshow did immense damage to America and its people, a country that Hitchens rightly loved and defended with such vehemence.

In the matter of God, now, we will never know to what extent his mother's tragic end in Athens, as well as his dabbling in Greek Orthodoxy after his marriage to his Greek first wife is causally connected to the subsequent ferocity of his atheism. I suspect that it is, but I cannot prove it because it requires factual as well as psychoanalytic validation.

Let me summarize my opinion of his views in this department: firstly, he was absolutely right in his scathing demolition of the claims of churches, divines etc. to be custodians of the "word of God" and in his denunciation of the evil consequences that have historically flowed from these ecclesiastical conspiracies; secondly, he was absolutely wrong in thinking that these undeniable facts have any bearing whatsoever on the question of the existence of God or that they constitute grounds for impeaching the intellectual and/or moral quality of believers, today or in ages past.

Many people have been taken aback, and offended, by Hitchens' invective against Theresa of Calcutta, for instance. His language was tasteless in a vile way (that she was Albanian and extremely short -a "dwarf" in his expression- is just racist excrement with no bearing on the substance of the question). But, the core of his indictment of her is self-evidently true. This would have been obvious to a much wider public had he not chosen the despicable language that he used to express it.

He was also absolutely right in denying any kind of immunity to the Koran from the humanist and rationalist condemnation meted out against the pseudo-divine books of the other religions. Muslims, fundamentalists or moderates, in their own countries or in the West, are not entitled to any kind of deference on the part of free-thinking intellects (eastern or western) with respect to the absurdities comprised in their own "holy" fairy tale. We should be eternally grateful to Hitchens for trumpeting this very simple truth. This does not give license gratuitously to offend people's religious sensibilities, Christian or Muslim or Hebrew. It would, for instance be intolerable tyranny to force devout Muslims to imbibe alcohol or Jews to eat pork etc. -let alone to destroy their houses of worship or burn their books. But this is one thing, and another thing altogether to put a ban on criticism of the precepts enunciated in the Koran or the social norms prevalent in Muslim life (e.g. those pertaining to women) because those who believe in these things would be offended. This is totalitarian obscurantism -with murderous implications as was shown in the case of Hitchens' friend, the writer Salman Rushdie.

Hitchens was also right on the mark when he explained that Muslim fundamentalists (and I would add fundamentalists of all stripes, really) hate Western civilization not on account of the faults in it diagnosed by Western liberals and leftists. The hate the West on account of its positive and progressive traits, which Western liberals and leftists cherish and defend (or ought to, anyway), namely individual rights, the legal equality of the sexes, the freedom of conscience and speech and the separation of religion and the state. That is why the implicit and explicit ideological cover provided to Islamic fundamentalism by certain "anti-imperialist" elements in Western academia in particular is such a moral monstrosity. The glee with which these people and their flock greeted the destruction of the Twin Towers was an abomination that should never be forgotten. One half-excuses (but not quite) Hitchens for his ideological pirouettes post 9/11 if one understands them against such a background.

Having said all this, I must repeat that nothing that Hitchens, or his friend R. Dawkins, has said on the matter of God's existence per se, or on the status of religious faith in conscious life and the behavioral consequences from it has any value whatsoever. An atheist is just as likely as a theist to be moral or immoral, peaceful or violent, rational or irrational. Evil is not the exclusive preserve of the religious. Religion is not the central problem of our times. Politics is, including a politics stamped by a perverse construal of religiosity. Hitchens' carping mortally wounds the theologians, the ecclesiastical hierarchies and the theocrats of all religions. But it leaves unscathed those for whom religious feeling is an inner vocation and an existential commitment. To call these persons names (ignorant, anti-science, mindless, dupes etc.) just shows the paucity -precisely- of rational discourse that might somehow impinge upon their choices. It is mere bullying. Hitchens and Dawkins are not smarter than the sincere believer simply because they graduated from Oxbridge and they know their genetics. There is an insufferable kind of pompousness in this.

I may respect and need science, I may accept it as the truth about natural processes. But I may still find my existence immensely enriched by standing before Michelangelo's Sistine vision, and by living as if there were something behind it. Science cannot and may not outlaw poetic intuition. It has been the ambition of some hard-core scientism since the 17th century to do just that. It has not happened, simply because it cannot.

The cardinal value of the Enlightenment was tolerance of individual choice. The kind of crusading, hectoring Enlightenment that Hitchens and Dawkins represent at their worst is simply a self-defeating ideology, an extra infusion of hatred into the hate-filled cultural climate of our times.