Enemies of Promise

Looking back at Hitchen’s old essays is a salutary lesson: much as I agree with much of them even now, there is a brittleness of tone, a lack of warmth, and (most obvious now that the scales have falled from my eyes) nothing remotely resembling a sense of humour. Don’t get me wrong. There is a sense of wit. Hitchens can be witty, and he can sometimes play vaguely amusing word games (bombing Afghanistan out of the stone age etc.). But his wit is like George Bernard Shaw’s at its worst: it is shallow, not deep. His aphorisms never really give you a new view of a subject. If you share the assumptions which motivate them, you will find them ‘funny’, if you don’t you won’t. Compared to Oscar Wilde’s similar apercus it’s all pretty trite stuff.

A sense of humour, in the broadest sense of the phrase, necessitates being able to laugh at oneself, and to have a broad sense of empathy and solidarity with one’s fellow human beings (apologise for the pomposity, but it seems justified in this context), a sense that at the end of the day we all have to pay our taxes and sometimes can’t programme the DVD and have been known to send important emails to the wrong person.

There’s none of this in Hitchens, and there never was. Even at his best, he never forgets that he is, after all, Christopher Hitchens. His denunciations do not even have a hint of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. It’s no wonder that he hates organised religion (and Christianity) so much: one suspects that the Biblical injunction: ‘Judge not lest you be judged’ means little to him.

In Hitchens world, the ‘judge yourself’ bit was always done way before the essay was started, and the judgement is always: ‘You know what, mate? You’re alright!!’. The judgement of others can then go on without interruption.

And the reason I think, that Hitchens has no real sense of humour, is symptomatic of an even deeper flaw: he has no real sense of psychology. One is told, in Hitchen’s essays, about how evil certain people are (Kissinger, Mother Theresa, Bush senior, Osama Bin Laden). One never learns anything about why they have (presumably) chosen to be so evil or how they ended up that way. In fact, one suspects that this is a question that doesn’t really interest Hitchens much. Asking questions about their psychology might lead to awkward (or emotionally difficult) questions about his psychology, and one suspects that Hitchens has spent a lot of time, and a lot of gin, avoiding these questions. The idea that people are influenced by their society, that people create themselves using the tools society presents to them: in other words, all the discoveries of the 20th century sociological (and Marxist!!!) tradition are alien to him. One suspects that the thought that if he had been born a poor desert Arab living in the Sudan he might think that Osama was OK all thing considering, has simply never occurred to him. I suspect he doesn’t think it matters where he could have been born. He would still, after all, be Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchen’s case is a great example, perhaps the best available, of how far you can get by simply ignoring Socrates’ injunction to Know Thyself. Hitchens doesn’t know himself, he doesn’t want to, and perhaps he’s right to be worried what he might find out if he did.

Hitchens’ work is first rate journalism, but journalism per se can never be literature (as Orwell’s work certainly IS literature as well as being journalism). This suggests that like most journalism (but unlike literature, presumably) his work will not last. In two hundred years time when the names of George Bush and Tony Blair are largely forgotten, his work might be read by cultural historians to illustrate ‘what people thought’ but I suspect that’s as far as it will go. Yeats wrote: ‘Out of the quarrel with others, we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’. Hitchens only ever quarrels with others. His work is, therefore, rhetoric. Brilliant rhetoric, clever quick and sometimes amusing, but rhetoric still the same. And it always was.

Yup. Just, yup.

Henry, have you ever read the book Fooled By Randomness?

Well said, Brendan. Now that you mention it, that lack of self reflection in Hitchens’ writing really stands out.

What replaces it seems to be performing the role of “Christopher Hitchens” that he has created for himself – for example, labouring to create a witty line or a brilliant phrase, even when it might be more effective, because less ostentatious, not to do so – because, hey, that’s what “Christopher Hitchens” does…

Hitchens used to seem like a brilliant essayist when he agreed with Scialabba, but now seems anything but

I realize that this statement isn’t meant to be funny, but it of course is. Hitchens remains what he has always been: witty, dogmatic, and exceptionally ungenerous to his ideological opponents. When he attacked mother Teresa, Scialabba was fine, not so when he polemicizes against the geostrategy of Naomi Klein. Puzzling.

Likewise puzzling is what it means to be motivated by “a sensibility not a politics.” Does Katha Politt have a politics on this model? Does Charles Krauthammer? Or must one only read polemics by Michael Waltzer?

astrongmaybe

Yeah I didn’t point it out, but it’s pretty obvious from the way he writes and acts that Hitchens is what used to be termed a ‘male chauvinist pig’ (I don’t know whether he still does it, but he used to always refer to woman as ‘ladies’. As in ‘Ladies, I don’t think you understand …’etc.).

This makes his alleged deep concern for women’s rights under the Taliban etc. more than a little perplexing.

Goodness, all this intellectual farting around when what you really want to say is “May Hitchins-the-Apostate’s loins wither and his bones be filled with molten lead.”

“intellectual farting around”
“the art of self-awareness”

guilty as charged

One beautiful sentence. Henry? Anybody?

Thanks, Kevin. I’ll have a look.