HITCH-22: A Memoir, By Christopher Hitchens, 2010

Christopher Hitchens (born 1949) is probably the Western world’s best-known ‘Public Intellectual’ and ‘contrarian’ (a term he doesn’t like, though he wrote a book titled Letters to a Young Contrarian). He describes himself as a ‘writer, whose promiscuous mandate is to be interested in everything…’ (424): he certainly has an ‘itch to scribble’ – and writes at least 1000 words for publication somewhere every day.

His (previous?) best-seller ‘God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything’ cemented his position as one of the five major advocates of the so-called New Atheism [1].

Time Magazine’s reviewer of Hitch-22 [2] suggests we Toss this one (rather than Skim or Read it), largely because of Hitchens’ tendency to name-drop. Well, he does that, and I think deserves to. The list of literary and political high-fliers he counts as friends (some of them spectacularly graduating to ex-friends) is astonishing. He also cultivates enemies. (One reviewer put it: ‘Hitchens has made a career out of assailing big fish, hook, line, and sinker, including Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, Noam Chomsky, and… God’ [3]. Two typical examples: Jimmy Carter is labeled a ‘pious born-again creep’ ; Freemasons are ‘mafia of the mediocre’.

Christopher Hitchens is your prototypical representative of the ‘Chattering Classes’: he’s very bright – a polymath – and something of a mumbler. (His response to the Proust Questionnaire’s prompt about what he dislikes about himself is his ‘Insecurity.’ (334))

There are two tear-jerking episodes in the book. The first happened in 1973, when, aged 24, he went to Athens, where his mother (the only woman in the book he writes about with affection) had just committed suicide. She had left Hitchens’ father to run away with a defrocked and mentally unstable Anglican priest. Police found that the hotel records showed repeated attempts to call Christopher’s London number, but she never got through.

The other: his description of the funeral of a bright young American soldier who was persuaded to volunteer for Iraq – and died there – as a result of something Hitchens had written.

But for the most part, Hitchens’ narrative is – let me count the appropriate adjectives – vitriolic, polemical, sometimes narcissistic, but always idealistic. I love this: ‘The hardest thing for the idealist to surrender is the teleological, or the sense that there is some feasible, lovelier future that can be brought nearer by exertions in the present, and for which “sacrifices” are justified… Humanity would be the poorer without that fantastically potent illusion. “A map of the world that did not show Utopia,” said Oscar Wilde, “would not be worth consulting”.’ (420)

Would I ‘Toss’ this book? No, I found it provocative/challenging – despite my disagreeing with just about everything Hitchens says about/against Christianity. Once or twice a month he has a public debate with someone about ‘god’ (sic) – you can find some of them on YouTube. His general approach reminds me of Bertrand Russell’s in Why I am Not a Christian: he takes the least plausible explanation of some religious practice or biblical passage and assails it as if it were mainstream thinking on that subject. Talk about demolishing straw men!

What generated such anti-religious animosity? One clue: he had to attend compulsory divine service at school every morning and evening for five
years… Later, with a friend, he’d sit upright while everyone else knelt for prayers, and brought books to read during the sermons. Sad…

But I agree with just about everything he writes about modern international politics. That includes the modern phenomenon of Islamofascism – a term he is supposed to have invented – ‘the distinctive elements of the new and grievance-privileged Islamist mentality [are] self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred’ (271). He doesn’t seriously address the issue about what happens when one pours oil on psychological flames and demonizes people who already have an inferiority complex: there may be other less-confrontational (a Christian would say, hopefully, ‘more loving’) approaches which work better in the short and long run…

But Hitchens is no ‘arm-chair theorist’: he goes at least once every year to a country ‘where things cannot be taken for granted and where there is either too much law and order or too little’ (349). In general: ‘To understand obduracy in places like… Northern Ireland… Lebanon, Gaza, Cyprus and several other spots… The local leaderships that are generated by the “troubles” in such places *do not want* there to be a solution. A solution would mean that they are no longer deferred to by visiting UN or American mediators, no longer invited to ritzy international conferences, no longer treated with deference by the mass media, and no longer able to make a second living by smuggling and protection-racketeering’ (145).

This book appeals on many levels. For those of us who inhabited a Western university in the late 1960s we’ll reminisce with him about the toing and froing of student debates and dissent in those years. And the general iconoclasm, not only in politics, but also sexual morality etc.

If you’re a wordsmith, Hitchens will tantalize you. Try these, for starters: sheerly, crepuscular, purulent, gigglingly, oleaginous, pointful, rebarbative… And if you find crudity/profanity interesting/funny, Hitchens is your man. It all brings to mind my years as a staffworker on our tertiary campuses, when I used to think ‘These debauched young people are going to be our future professionals!’ (But four-letter words seem to be du jour for many politicians, for example, when they’re not in church…)

Hitchens learned from his mother that ‘the one unforgivable sin is to be boring’. He learned that well.

Rowland Croucher
July 2010

[1] The others – Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Victor Stenger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_atheism

[2] Jim Frederick, June 14, 2010 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1993874,00.html

[3] http://www.flakmag.com/books/godisnot.html

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Yes , reactionaries ( “contrarian” if you want to pussyfoot) like Hitch don’t like the truth – the reminder that their ticket to ride (being noticed and read) is not authorship, but the use of someone else’s ideas as their bouncing off point ..Paradox there somewhere? – hitches a ride.

It seems to me that the moral justification for being contrary is that ” nothing is certain “, but such an argument doesn’t cut very deep( and goes to the heart of much modern confusion ?).

As he said on FTBookclub last night, he was reasonably certain that nothing is certain, and that fact ( der?) presumably that made him feel like he no longer needed to change his opinion and focus on that subject.
This old greek circular stuff may keep some brains ticking over , but it gives me, as a scientist who needs to come to a conclusion each hour, an unproductive headache -especially with concepts and big picture stuff . Give me a Hebrew starting point to the day anyday) http://thinkhebrew/ .blogspot.com