Saturday, April 26, 2008
Hitchens Considered
[via Denis Dutton]
Christopher Hitchens' fertile, ideological mind, his contentious personality, his very need for provocation and conflict as a clarifying enzyme, makes articles about him ( article 1, article 2 ) fascinating. Hitchens' arguments themselves are those of ideas — ideas at a high level. Hitchens thinks like an educated ideologue with deep moral feelings; he sees history as unfolding. His brother said they both try to tell the truth though they get to the same place through very different routes — at least by the brother's estimate. This isn't the passive aggressive “I wouldn't tell you this if I weren't your friend…” type of truth, it is the effort to understand larger patterns and not be intimidated by politically correct fashion.
An anecdote in the article was illuminating about this man who seems to have all his energy entangled in a public life — Hitchens' better self, who writes on Proust so well, submerged to polemics. Hitchens overheard his mother say to his father that if there is an upper class in England, then Christopher should belong to it. This is perhaps explanatory. Hitchens befriends those in power, from many different viewpoints. This marks him as distinct from ideologues who keep to their own and despise those with whom they disagree (they won't say it, but you can tell from their tone). In the article it indicates that Hitchens would later in the day meet with Talabani's son, and then Sean Penn, whom Hitchens admires, “for his independence”. The former meeting is understandable on intellectual grounds, the latter only on the terms proposed by his mother — Christopher wants to know the players and in a media culture celebs are an upper class. (To label the feckless Penn as independent is risible.)
The vile denunciations of Hitchens are touched on as a phenomena, indicative of the reactionary left,
Thomas Cushman says, that “at the hands of his former comrades, Hitchens has been subjected not just to criticism, but to actual disparagement. He has been denounced and excommunicated, purged from the orbit of the left, and subjected to a plethora of what the sociologist Harold Garfinkel referred to as “degradation ceremonies.” … Hitchens is accused, variously, of being a racist; an alcoholic; a snob; dishonest; venal; overweight; unkempt; psychopathic; and a closeted homosexual. Hitchens has thus been, to paraphrase Garfinkel, “ritually separated” from the left; his former identity defamed as a sham. Marc Cooper is perhaps right: “Leaving the left can be a bit like trying to quit the mafia. You can’t get out without getting assassinated.”
This despicable aspect of extremist left wing ideologues makes it easy for not only Hitchens, but many of us who identified with the left, to seek a more independent course.
The price the ideologue pays is a lack of depth. The interviewer says,
Listening to him recite Macaulay on the English civil war is to be confronted by a riotous admixture of the revolutionary, the puritanical, the bacchanalian and the theological. Yet from this Hitchens derives unequivocal conclusions: progress, rights, atheism. The argumentative tactic is essentially that of splitting off the things he advocates from those he rejects, even if they have shared sources.
Thus does a complex mind become simple of volition.
Hitchens' militant evangelical atheism is jarringly contradictory:
“The belief that history is a directional process is as faith-based as anything in the Christian catechism,” [philosopher] Gray writes. “It is a myth created by the need for meaning.”
Attacking extremist and literalist interpretation on extremist and literalist grounds doesn't make you one of the Brights, as his friend Richard Dawkins labels their group. This might be a clue to Hitchens about the excesses in his position — he does discount the term.
But his depth of understanding about the bizarre unfolding of left wing thought is brilliant:
After what he calls the “high tide of the rogue left” had been reached in 1968, he says, “you started to hear the slogan: the personal is political. That was the worst legacy of the 1960s. And I just felt the most awful premonition when I heard it. What that proved to be was the midwife of feckless, narcissistic postmodernism; a pseudo-radical concentration on the self and that sort of thing. It’s now a curse from one end of every campus to the next: stultifying, boring, horrible—and, I think, part of the reactionary left. Suddenly the measure became how much you could talk about your own specific sense of grievance. People would begin sentences with ‘As a…’ Then it would be ‘woman, homosexual, Pakistani’ or something. It’s no longer what you think, or what you know, but how you feel and who you happen to be. As if these were achievements, that you’d done something to earn it. No, no, no. I hate that.”
The public discussion of important issues would be deeply impoverished without the voice of Christopher Hitchens.