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Hitchens not such a lovely little thinker
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“Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable” Christopher Hitchens intoned carefully, re-assembling the Monty Python Bruces philosophy song line by line. It was the end of the keynote address of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, run by the St James Ethics Centre, with Hitchens in the chair being lightly grilled by Tony Jones. The talk was in his “Religion Poisons Everything” Line, and Team Python might have been on his mind, because nothing has ever so closely resembled the “preaching” scenes from Life of Brian as that evening. You know the scenes. Where Brian emerges, having just shagged Judith from the Judaean Peoples’ Front, to be greeted with thousands of people hanging on his every word while his dong hangs out. “You’ve all got to think for yourselves,” he tells them. “You’re all individuals.” “YES,” they intone in unison. “WE’RE ALL INDIVIDUALS.” “You’ve all got to think for yourselves!” “TELL US HOW.” Hitchens simpered and mugged through an attack on literal monotheism that the crowd loved, laughing on cue at Old Testament absurdities, applauding a firm stand against the rape of children (dangerous ideas) and so on. The crowd weren’t there to be challenged, they were there to have their highly specific appetites and prejudices flattered. That belief system might loosely be called Darlinghurst secular-humanism. It believes in left-liberal politics, gay marriage, euthanasia and brunch. It is open to the depth of the aboriginal culture on display in the “welcome to country” — the “oldest living culture on earth” that included its fair-share of child marriage, as did every culture — but happy to giggle at the monotheistic culture it inherited, as ridiculous and oppressive. Hell it’s an audience of good people, maybe walked across the bridge, campaigned against mandatory detention, wear ribbons of various hue, but its belief in what is a set of given ideas (religion) and what is allegedly an independently-arrived at state of reason (p-mo secular humanism) is, to put it politely, asymmetrical. Though he subsequently got a few mildly forensic questions from Tony Jones in the Q and A, which were fairly easily deflected (“What about religious people who do good?” “Well if good is good it’s good because it’s good — it doesn’t need religion”) he never really got the central charge that could be made against militant atheists, that of GK Chesterton’s “someone who believes in nothing will sooner or later believe in anything”. For Hitchens, that relates his atheism back to his vociferous support for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — and his vague hints that “we” should invade other places such as Yemen, where fairly clannish and tribal values still govern gender relations, among other things. Hitchens, the man who said that the only problem with the attack on Fallujah was that not enough people had been killed, came to his support for the war with a near-religious fervour, not only off the attack on 9.11, but after the period of a long, withdrawing roar of anything that might resemble the Trotskyist left he had been part of for the best part of a decade or longer. The need for a meaningful struggle to pour one’s life into is pretty obvious in his writings from the time, as is his bizarre and endless attempts to retroactively justify the Iraq attack by finding “new” links to the story of Saddam’s secret yellowcake deals, meetings with Al-Qaeda etc. This urge to meaning caused him to go into alliance with a bunch of nutcake neocons and religious crusaders who belied that ‘their God was bigger than the enemy’s God’ and that was why they would prevail. The Iraq war was monotheism armed, and any assistance to it did more to advance the causes of the most primitive form of religiosity than a shelf of tracts could undo. So is Hitchens’s new campaign a mea culpa? An attempt to knock down something inadvertently built up? Is it partly a way of getting back the love and adulation of the liberal-left he was once adored by (although a straw poll of the audience suggested that several didn’t realise he was pro-Iraq-war and were shocked when I told them. We never found out, even though that argument would tell us more about the way religion works in our lives than the guffawing of an arch Englishman about what people believed in Palestine three thousand years ago. It must also be said that it was an ideal measure of what the conference meant by a ‘dangerous’ idea — by and large a self-congratulatory celebration of the profoundly safe. Of which more on the blog, as the Hitch recovers in a room or a plane (he was poured into a taxi from Chinatown at about 4am) from a hangover that is about much more than booze. A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he’s … |
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42 Comments
Good on Christopher Hitchens for having the guts to support the Iraq war. I was an enthusiastic member of the audience and I knew he supported the Iraq war. He even wrote a book about it. Anyone in the audience who didn’t know that has not been following Christopher Hitchens very closely.
If you think his speech was “the guffawing of an arch Englishman about what people believed in Palestine three thousand years ago”, you obviously haven’t met the religious right. They still believe it all now, in 2009.
And why should atheists not have a self-congratulatory celebration? Religious people do it all the time.
Be careful what you say about Darlinghurst secular-humanism, Guy; I hope you realise you’ve exactly nailed the stereotypical Crikey reader here as well.
Indeed Mark. There’s nothing wrong with Darlinghurst, although Elizabeth Bay is better.
Rundle is right, as usual - it’s the muddled moralising of Hitchens that is so alarming to we atheists: at least Dawkins did not support the Iraq war, for all his Darwinian brilliance and shrill ignorance of theology. And the smug toff attitude of Hitchens does nothing to reach across the social divide and convince poor less-educated people struggling to survive in Africa, South America or the middle East that atheism is a good idea, so religion will continue its divisive march, destroying the planet with human conflict and overpopulation. I’d much rather pay to hear a more nuanced atheist like Terry Eagleton.
Pure gold Guy. Cheered me up no end.
I was impressed by Christopher Hitchens’ performance on Q and A. Apart from the wonderfully thoughtful Wahid Ali, Hitchens was the only other person on the panel who gave any indication of deep and insightful analysis of the issue of monotheism. However, I expect that his considerable experience in making his case publicly has helped him to refine his arguments.
Michael, It’s not up to Christopher Hitchens to preach to the poor less-educated people struggling to survive in Africa, South America or the middle East. We don’t need atheist equivalents of missionaries. There are intelligent people in Africa, South America and the middle East.
When I hear a friend of mine call himself an atheist a piece of me dies and rots in the ground.
Paddy, that’s why I prefer to say ‘late breakfast’. ‘Brunch’ is that bit too pretentious.
Guy, I imagine this ‘festival’ seeks to foster diverse and subversive ideas - but not those sufficiently dangerous to leave the emergency services mopping up blood. You make a good case for your claim that Saturday evening’s ideas were not even a little challenging.
However, we do know only too well that ideas (such as martyring oneself to foster a cause dear to one’s god) can be very dangerous, and stereotyping the audience as lazy thinkers doesn’t do anything to support your other claim, that non-believers are at risk of becoming dangerously uncritical followers of any ideas (Chesterton) and that this view could or should have formed the central charge by Tony Jones in challenging Hitchens.
Many non-religious persons are very, very careful about what they believe - and also seek to buffer their young people from experiencing the extreme emotional stresses and commitment to irrational actions (intensive evangelism, avoiding certain places to avoid ‘contaminating’ them, consigning beloved family members to a future hell, not marrying a loved ‘outsider’, avoiding contraception, even suicide bombing) which may be required of them in their idealism, based solely on the patriarchal decree of an elder - alive or dead - hebrew, aboriginal, islamic, papal or other.
At present in NSW, parents whose children do not attend religious instruction have not yet won the right for them to have, instead, some time to think about ethics - and the impact of one’s ideas on behaviour, and one’s behaviour on others. This struggle reflects our history: a secular open public education system was a great and early achievement in NSW, but required some compromises - for which non-believers and their children must still pay.
The NSW church groups are actively opposing this option - ethics instruction as an alternative option - and seeking to hold their right to ensure it’s religious instruction or nothing in that one dedicated hour per week. The idea that religious belief can be poisonous (or even simply unnecessary) is clearly still seen as dangerous.
Jillian: As an emigre Pom in the USA Hitchens had a fine line to tread. Being an outsider, he could retail militant atheism in the States more freely than local liberals: a good career move. But it would have taken real guts to criticise the Iraq war 2002-2006. Hitchens’ militant warmongering opened many Gringo doors to the alcoholic migrant.
His personality hasn’t changed. Most Trotskyists of the 70s (and before) inverted, becoming militant rightists or joining the new corporatism through the boardroom or New Labour. They blithely pursue the current Correct Line with the same arrogance and ruthlessness as in the past. I knew most of these luminaries in London in the 70s. The bitter rivalry between IS, IMG and the rest shaped their brutal natures. Each was convinced they were on the verge of becoming major parties, obsessing about their membership figures and straining to recruit. Few of them could drive, so my van was essential to convey Trotpoms from pissup to pissup, from demo to demo, before shovelling them through the doors of their (as yet unrenovated) Islington terraces in the small hours. They were all men of course. Their wives/girlfiends dragged the dribbling sacks inside without a word.
The Trotpoms gave up on me: I was an incorrigible Meliorist. They’d mutter about omelettes and eggs. But I did have a driver’s licence…
Frank,
That was a beautiful word picture.
so you attack the audience because in their throng you perceive an alignment of values and ideas - that is very bloody nearly religion right there, having the same ideas as the guy next door - and you attack Hitchens because he holds views different to your own or possibly to the audience (or mine, indeed)
a belief system formed (by you) aggregate from the average ideas of a large crowd of individual thinkers does not a religion make
just the same as that atheism is not a system of belief, merely a shared disbelief
maybe the real dangerousness of this cacophony of slightly different ideas lies in the fact they are shared - offered up to comment, criticism and revision - rather than dictated, copied into a newspaper, sucked up and spat out without care or questioning
..fred
(on another point, militants or fundamentalists, i believe, should never be referred to by their chosen religious fodder (atheist or otherwise) - they are just parasites…. sociopathic parasites)
fred
no i dont attack hitchens for holding his views - i think the main problem with the evening was a lack of challenge, whether thru a respondent speaker, or tougher questioning from tony jones. as to the rest of it didnt have a clue what you were saying.
my argument is an interpretation of hitchens’ sudden militant atheism and a crtique, and a bit of ridicule, all quite legit.
One of the problems with hitchens’s speech is that so much of it is addressed to the US christian right - of whom we have very little here. even hillsong is more sophisticated than the US right.
Guy, can you drop the cliched expression “militant atheist”? Hitchens is arguing for change via intellect and reason not violence. You should rumble with some Christian and Islamic groups and gain some perspective on what “militant” means.
The subtext to the use of “militant atheism” is the wonder that atheists do exist and how dare they speak their mind. Why can’t they just shut up?
Frank:
That background is very interesting. I knew he had a history of being a Marxist/Trotskyist, but I didn’t know that level of detail.
In the context of the type of audience Guy Rundle is describing, it would take guts to support the Iraq war, but I accept that in the context of the US, it would be different.
So you seek to ridicule the secular humanist now Rundle? How “dangerous” is that?
I’m sure Bolt could’ve written the same article…
I went along to the talk on Saturday and was very impressed with Hitchens, I saw him on Q&A which was a very different side to him [aggressive, taking on - and winning arguments - against the audience and other panel members]. Saturday night was less aggressive as Guy notes, but that was just the format of the night.
I’ve read his book a while ago, and must say I was more impressed with Richard Dawkins take on atheism, which I found more measured and more intellectual. But Hitchens has a place, people need to be taken down aggressively at times to make a point.
His views on the Iraq war aren’t particularly relevant to a talk titled “Religion poisons everything”.
I must admit I live in a suburb that is right next to Darlinghurst.
Great to see Rundle quoting Chesterton, a great thinker, and Catholic convert. Should read his book ‘Orthodoxy’.
Hitchens, of course, is a profound embarrassment to Left-liberals because he realises that militant Islam must be confronted. Rundle and the guys think its all the fault of the Americans.
I remember being on campus when the Khymer Rouge swept towards control of Cambodia and hearing the Left praising their ” glorious revolutionary brothers”. Pilger, of course, continues the theme. Its all the Americans fault
Pol Pot learned his Marxism at the feet of Paris based intellectuals.
The liberal Left are guiding US foreign policy and its is salutory watching the confusion and weakness amongst Obama’s administarion as the Taliban and Islam show their contempt for the latte-sipping and condom-wearing set.
Darlinghurst is full of them.
A culture that believes in nothing cannot find within the strength to resist oppression.
Quoting one crusty old Englishman (Chesterton) to deride another (Hitchens) is way too easy, facile, and ultimately meaningless Guy. What does a Christian who finally converts to Catholicism mean by ‘believe in nothing’ anyway? (Should we go and ask Tony Blair…he did both, ie converted to RC and ‘sent’ troops to Iraq; he didn’t just ‘talk’ about supporting it like Christopher Hitchens!).
Chesterton’s idea of ‘believing in nothing’ would probably have covered anyone who didn’t at least adhere to some form of monotheism, so all you nihilists, agnostics, secular humanists and atheists out there, look out! You’re all just a couple of drinks away from fascism or worse!
What a load of cobblers GK, (and GR!).
Rubbish Hitchens for Iraq, (god knows I did, to anyone within earshot!), but please, let’s not drag out befuddled old Poms who wanted to lie on their death beds listening to Latin sacraments as even vaguely relevant.
Purleeeeeese!
John James, I don’t usually agree with you but you may be on to something here. There was nothing particularly rational about the article above. Maybe the underlying motivation was a reluctance to accept that militant Islam must be confronted.
“the latte-sipping and condom-wearing set”
Holy fucking shit. That is hilarious. Now I’m off to enjoy not having AIDS.
“amongst Obama’s administarion as the Taliban and Islam show their contempt for the latte-sipping and condom-wearing set.”
Yase.
guy…
i guess i was referring to the fact that you define the Darlinghurst secular-humanists as a loose group with broadly similar views / values, then lampoon them for the ‘asymmetry’ of the broad variety of those views… and then have a go (maybe attack wasn’t the right word) at Hitchens in straying from those views (rather than the views themselves..either way)
my point was - as clearly and bluntly as i can muster - there is no f**ing belief system
you made it up! i doubt all those who attended were from darlinghurst or some such
as i doubt that all those who try to separate their spiritual beliefs from their ethics (secular humanists) are part of the “latte-sipping, condom wearing set” (thanks john james…for nothing)
all those individuals thinking for themselves, with their own individual belief systems (known only to themselves) may appear to be believing in nothing…tangible - written down at least…..and as a group they certainly seem to be believing in any which thing!
the very mistake both chesterton and yourself, it seems, make
believing in nothing is not the same as not believing in something
you didn’t attack the ideas, you just played the man
myself, i am a non-practicing brunchermentalist
though i like the cakes, i just don’t have the time..
Well said John James. The problem the Left has today is that by constantly supporting those who America ‘suppress’, it ends up championing dictators like Saddam and terrorists like Hamas. Poor Guy seems to get confused when someone like Hitchins comes along because he and his ilk want to love him so, but then he stands up and says yep, we should have attacked Iraq. (actually, I don’t agree here - it was Iran that Bush should have attacked … but that’s another story) and that sems everyone into a spin.
The reality for many of us who enjoy a soy coffee while perspiring over pictures of Julia Gillard is that militant Islam doesn’t want to go to the dance with us and we can’t understand why. Hitchins, even when he is wrong, at least makes us think.
Thanks Walter. You have confirmed our suspicions. Surely the Left can see that militant Islam is coming from a totally different worldview that is not compatible with our society?
I should add here that, like Christopher Hitchens, I am not only talking about millitant Islam, but any militant religion.
Jillian, militant Islam is compatible with any society if Iraq, Pakistan and Indonesia are a guide.
Sorry should read “militant islam isn’t compatible…”
Shaun, I definitely agree with that.
It’s a pretty confusing line by Hitchens when we says on Q&A that Israel should definitely not attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, especially after all his efforts over these past years of trying to make the US invasion of Iraq a noble cause. Sorry, I don’t get it. Israel could at least make some argument for self-defence that looked a lot more convincing than GWB’s claim that Saddam put the world at risk.
But apart from that whopping inconsistency, Hitchens batted every question with moral conviction and clarity, which is a lot more than one could say for the bloviating drivel from some. Waleed Ali, mostly in agreement with Hitchens, was also pretty impressive too, but nothing makes my flesh creep more than glib Jesuits passing off some legalistic sophistry about ‘gay marriage’ when his tribe have been sending po-fters to hell for centuries (while harbouring pedophiles of the cloth, let’s add).
For my money Hitchens was the clearest and most cogent speaker on that show. How he tolerated the vacuous claptrap from one panelist…well, it was almost saintly. Instead of hiding behind a pile of dogma and moral hypocrisy, Hitchens has the guts to stand there ‘with his dong hanging out’ and tell people what ‘he’ believes is right, not parse bits of testaments. Or tell a young Iranian that she’s doing her sisters a disservice by not openly telling the truth about what is happening to non-conformist women in that country.
Courage.
I’d call that a very dangerous idea.
I agree Christopher. Speaking of Jesuits on Q&A, I found it disconcerting that Father Frank Brennan said that homosexuality is acceptable BUT in relation to the details of what sexual acts would be involved, that would require a pastoral discussion between the church member and the priest. Who would want to have a discussion like that with a priest??
That was one of the more creepy moments JB. But there were plenty of others, and they weren’t coming from Hitch.
At the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Hitchens was a sell-out. Still, he has been for a while. I should have taken my copy of the book “Blaming The Victims” he co-edited with Edward Said for him to place his signature on. The man is atheism’s answer to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
Dr Harvey M Tarvydas
Hey you all its been great reading your minds after watching that Q & A.
And Guy that fabulous Life of Brian defined the true individual when … as the huge crowd that filled the valley came to bay assertively “we are individuals !! …. we are individuals !! … we are individuals !! …. we are individuals !! … yes all those all beautiful perfect orgasmically scrumptious thousands of young human yummies …. then the camera panned to the cretinous ancient little long bearded underdressed bent bloke supporting himself with a twisted bent stick up on a ledge on the side of the hill away from the yummies when he said “I’m not!”
And yes Elizabeth Bay is better.
There’s always been the talkers and the doers. Humans have littered history with blood and other in converting great thinking into real action. There’s always something missing in the conversion.
Christopher Dunne: on an unrelated matter, what source(s) do you have for the statement:
“Or tell a young Iranian that she’s doing her sisters a disservice by not openly telling the truth about what is happening to non-conformist women in that country”.
What is the ‘truth’ in Iran?
KH, is that the ‘truth’ inside Evin prison, or the one promulgated by Ahmadinjad outside of it?
By the way, Harvey, could you please read my mind and tell me what I’m thinking!?!? (I could really use a helpful service like that…really.)
Hi i Sukio from japa n
hrello I am Sukio Sumura is pleased to mreet you we j apanses no do butif it
said theydoit when ans some man rike Hitchen fifht coloumn no good then they m ay as well or they out a
anatawa ima yoshinde hamora hamasaka i think is too
I lrike poltics in aussie but very similar in J apan am from osaka and 23 years old
working in Q eensland for tourist company and i rike aussie Guy
mY father he work for toyota 50 years he start at age 5 but he not satify w ith
his work effet and lose many sleep
bY from Sukio Sumura
Fair dinkum alcohol explains much and achieves nothing much at all. Thanks Frank, never heard of meliorism before.
As for terrorism - the cycle of violence, chicken and egg? Brendan Nelson here admitted expressly it was a war for oil.
Having said that I watched a DVD called Fires of Kuwait recently courtesy of ex human being Saddam: 700 of them taking 9 months to extinguish, initial predictions were 5 to 10 years. The fires turned day to night and were surrounded by unexploded ordinance with some 40 countries involved in the joint project, with 10,000 staff.
As one said, the best and worst of humanity on display in the same location.
I am genuinely asking you to provide the source of the information you on which you rely to quote Evin prison as a place where Iranian women’s human rights are violated.
If you haven’t got a reliable source, then I imagine you’ll attempt to fob me off with a glib retort.
It’s over to you….
Christopher Dunne:
I am genuinely asking you to provide the source of the information you on which you rely to quote Evin prison as a place where Iranian women’s human rights are violated.
If you haven’t got a reliable source, then I imagine you’ll attempt to fob me off with a glib retort.
It’s over to you