I see no particular reason to call Christopher Hitchens a good person – anyone, as I have said, who leaves his wife when she is pregnant with their second child is safely distancing himself from all the more benign forms of respectability – but I must confess that despite the obvious – despite Greenwald’s pointing out that he probably harmed the world more than he helped it, despite Cockburn’s (transparently envious) observation that he was a bloviating egotistical careerist influence-peddler who ended up in D.C. the way leeches end up on the anuses of hippos – despite the general impression he gave on television, a fat, pussy toad squinting bloodshoteyed into the camera and rudely interrupting at every opportunity – despite all that, from a distance, I rather liked the man. He gave the impression of being deeply angry and perhaps sick, but anger has its uses and he found a few for his: having determined that the great enemy of the age was the principle of theocracy, found in some form in all religions, he viciously attacked them all, working especially against the totalitarian quartet, Islam, Catholicism, Zionism, and evangelical Protestantism.
In this I think he has done a great service to religion, which simply cannot endure as a broad social phenomenon – outside of the barbaric conditions in which it arose – if it is conceived of as an immutable legislative code or a power structure immune to error. The Christian religion is most dead where those ideas were most allowed to prevail in the past, and the Islamic world’s violent intimidation of free thinking is most likely an awareness that the religion, and with it an entire regional identity, is gravely imperiled by inquiry and liberty of the sort Hitchens represents. The religious totalitarianisms have all failed, and the catalogue of their atrocities may be found in the pages of history for those who suffer from odd bouts of sentimentalism. Imposition of religious law will now only retard progress. Where Hitchens’s arguments are most respected is where humanity will most flourish. This is not an insignificant tribute.
He wrote a book [my take on it here] on this topic, and it is a fun read, though not of any particular depth. Though he was a fine writer his excellence truly was in debate, where his astounding capacity for sententious summation, eloquent viciousness, and righteous rant found both an appropriately brief format and a defined target. Much of his excellence in debate may be attributed to his extraordinary courage of tongue – his freedom of speech, one might say. The normal instinct of any well-bred and nice person is to adapt words to the judgement of the listener; which Hitchens most emphatically did not do. Calling Jerry Falwell a “vulgar fraud and a crook” is the kind of indecorous honesty most people would voice only to their spouses or closest friends – Hitchens went on Fox News to say it, and said it in the teeth of opposition, ridicule, and incredulity. And in so doing he lost none of his poise, eloquence, or certitude. This is exceptionally difficult for normal people to do. Looking now at the slender portion of the world which it has been my fortune to know in my first thirty-five years, I believe that cowardice corrupts human potential more than any other vice. And that is why we look on Hitchens as so difficult to replace: he had not the herdish cowardice of a modern. Learning and eloquence are all very well, but they are not ornaments when flaccidity in the face of opposition makes them mute.
He, on the other hand, was the Attila of debate, the “scourge of God,” and his humiliation of public religious figures on the podium and in print was for their good, if only they would see it. His eloquence in debate and behind the keys was indeed astonishing, and I may say that of all the living writers I knew he was really the only one I respected as a writer; he knew the language and he knew how to use it. He had a rococco breadth of diction and figure, supremely suited to our tongue, which made the sentences of other writers and journalists look like the pre-fab tract slop it is.
That said, he was primarily a writer of sentences, and not of arguments or books. Sustained and systematic thought was not his milieu, and one never had the sense, even as he aged, that sustained examination of self and others was refining him (until perhaps the very end, where his gaunt face finally showed traces of vulnerability, and suffering softened him slightly and gave him great dignity – not at all, of course, to his own taste). This momentary habit of mind probably explains what appears to be a lack of political wisdom (utterly normal, of course, in an intellectual). He castigated Clinton, who in retrospect seems the rarest of things, a world hegemon who did scant harm, while soft-pedaling Bush, whose presidency may start the future textbook chapter “Beginning of American Decline.” Hitchens’s judgements were momentary and sententious, and apprising phenomena of great scope and magnitude was not his forte. In his defense, it may not be anyone else’s, but I am not alone when I doubt that theocracy is the great modern danger, the “existential” threat Hitchens felt it was. To me it would appear that Hitchens came to the fight a few hundred years late, and was hacking at the limbs of a giant whose head had long ago been cut off. And if theocracy does pose a danger, the danger might just as easily come from an imperialist Christianist America – from Bush and co. – which Hitchens found he could more or less work with, at least in its infancy.
About what strikes me as a far larger issue – man’s economic relationship to Earth – Hitchens had nothing of any significance to say, not even to convincingly persuade that it was of no concern. Economics, in general, was not a strong suit of his – an unusual failing for a modern, which probably gave him some of his retro charm – and he had all the appearance of a born European who had spent his entire life in sumptuous interiors built long ago, by very different sorts of men, which he could comfortably take for granted. Deep introspection and self-examination was not there; he was much as Plato describes the sophists, superior in argument and technique but without further skepticism as to the gap between technique and truth. He wrote of writing:
I owe a vast debt to Simon Hoggart of The Guardian (son of the author of The Uses of Literacy), who about 35 years ago informed me that an article of mine was well argued but dull, and advised me briskly to write “more like the way that you talk.”
This is good advice for certain sorts of writing – the sort he excelled at, in fact – but for Hitchens it was a principle as general as he had need for. He would not be introspective about whether this was the style of writing demanded in an age of celebrity. It worked for him, and further questioning was not necessary. And perhaps it was not. This too was part of his method: he saw things from his own perspective and that was enough for him.
He was always truly a commentator and critic at heart. Even as a critic one cannot trust his talents to dip too far into the past before something embarrassing might result: could he really have anything meaningful to say about Cervantes or Titian? Forget about Giotto or Augustine. Even Defoe and Goethe seem out of his range. He had not the sympathy to enter into the experience of others – and hence none of that truly creative vision seen in Shakespeare or Homer or Chaucer, or indeed any decent novelist. The same lack of imagination made him a poor philosopher and theologian – the sympathetic patience was not there. His reading of the Bible, a nearly infinite treasure trove to men like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky – who were not dumb – was as superficial and doltish as his hero Tom Paine and, ironically, the modern fundamentalists whose intellects he so despised.
It is easy enough to psychologize many of his failings. His mother committed suicide – in part for reasons of shame derived from a lack of sexual honesty (she had been having an affair, and entered into a suicide pact with her lover) – and he had to go to Athens as a young man to retrieve her corpse. This alone could demand a century of high-priced therapy. And one is rather inclined to be more morally skeptical of the long-term resident of Washington D.C. who does not become a misanthrope.
But he gives us excuse enough for excusing him by being lovable – as the many loving tributes from his friends in the past days have attested; how he was so lovable, when you do the math, is anyone’s guess. To leave the world loved is enough, I think. And he was very much loved, not only by his friends; his deeply felt and eloquently worded tirades against religion gave voice to an anger shared by many thousands of others, who loved him for speaking out against what they felt was an evil so large and so institutional they could never have any satisfaction from it. I can speak only of Hitchens’s public persona, which is rarely the best part of a man, but even that I find lovable. Pace Mr. Greenwald, I suspect that Hitchens was politically irrelevant in the invasion of Iraq and was merely another ill-advising commentator; his example for free thought and intellectual engagement is of more significance than his political conclusions. That this is true even for someone so manifestly unsatisfactory in other ways is proof that the kind of contemptuous dismissal of people on moral grounds, which Hitchens so specialized in, is not the way Providence or Chance or whatever you wish to call the pattern of the Whole finally operates. If I were God I would put him in heaven, just to have him around – and if the old refusenik wouldn’t go, then from time to time, just for the sake of his company, I’d go visit him in hell.
P.S. He apparently wrote an essay on Chesterton, which is forthcoming; it is impossible to be a thinking Christian and not be curious about such a document. I do not trust Hitchens’s diligence when it comes to so prolific an author, but since Chesterton, like Hitchens, seems to consist mostly in an attitude, it is possible that Hitchens may do him justice from only a few selected works. At the very least the two are equals in brains; I wished that Hitchens had spent more time dealing with intelligent religious people – most of whom, admittedly, are dead – rather than going on debating tours with the likes of Tony Blair. Sed factum est illud, fieri infectum non potest.
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