JOLLY DAYS

Hitchens and Sharpton

I've been listening to a lot of Hitchens. His promotion of his book has him appearing everywhere. He is a natural debater and iconoclast, generating controversy without trying; with a combination of strong, many times over the top assertions, immense forensic skills and a wonderful if showy scholarship. He means to impress and does.

This long discussion with Al Sharpton was more interesting than I thought it might be. Although Sharpton is a character out of a Rocky movie, a self-satirizing media creation hard to take seriously, Sharpton actually did all right in the interchange. Later I read an interview with Hitchens in which he said that he had felt reluctant to be too tough with Sharpton because it was at Hitchens' request that Sharpton appeared at all in this venue — essentially aiding the promotion of Hitchens' book.

It is possible the lack of contest diminished Hitchens; his arguments were heavy handed, at one point gratuitously rude to a questioner, he seemed not “himself”, whoever that might be.

Sharpton took the tack that without religion there is no morality. Hitchens said that of course there would be morality — there is a genetic predisposition toward moral behavior because it aids the species; it is inborn, or as he put it better later, “incultured”. Sharpton could have responded, were he another human being, that the benefit religion confers is that it can institutionalize morality; a morality that engenders variants of the golden rule might not be so bad for a society. Politics can't legislate morality and Hitchens' expectation is only a withering hope: to rely on the kindness of strangers. Religious institutions can be a force for good. This makes a large assumption: that the Founding Fathers wish that religion and politics remain distinct is honored. Isaiah Berlin made it clear that strong intervention on the part of religion into the political sphere gets you Iran.

Hitchens seemed too often to set up straw men: literalist interpretations were taken as the standard for all spiritual interpretation. All to easy dismissive waving of the hand followed. Hitchens was disappointing in his misunderstanding of the complexities of the spiritual impulse.

There is one other issue about Hitchens that is apparent. He is a chain smoker and drinker and it is beginning to show. He is so valuable a public intellectual, saying so many things that matter with unmatched cogency — I sure hope those close to him intervene, not only for his value to public debate, but out of simple human concern. The golden rule.