Amazing ...

... Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011 | Philadelphia Inquirer | 12/17/2011.

In a radically different assessment, journalist and political analyst Chris Hedges, who had taken on Mr. Hitchens in a public debate, described him as a man who squandered his talent in exchange for fame.

"The tragedy of Hitchens was that he had the intellect to do something great, but he used his creative gifts for self-promotion throughout his career," Hedges, author of Death of the Liberal Class, said. "He sacrificed nuance for the sound bite."

Adds Hedges, "I don't think he contributed anything to the nation's intellectual life."

Gee, thanks, Chris for providing the rest of us irrefutable proof that you are, if nothing else, utterly lacking in manners and possibly even common decency.


Postscript: Lincoln Hunter notes that Terry Teachout wrote somewhat unflatteringly of Johnny Carson when Carson died. Here is what Terry had to say afterward: Thumper's lament (I can't find the original article). "...  I didn't call him stupid or offensive or evil--in fact, I didn't say anything personal about him at all. My point was that his comedy was inoffensive and ephemeral, and that I suspected it wouldn't be remembered for very long."


I think the maxim about not speaking ill of the dead has to do with etiquette. Terry was merely reiterating a view of Carson's work that, presumably, he had long held. He did not suggest, as Hedges does about Hitchens, that Carson's work -- and by extension his life -- was fundamentally inauthentic. Hedges took the occasion of Hitchens's death to pass moral judgment on the deceased, something one should always hesitate to do:  "Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."


Post bumped.

Posthumous Hitchens ...

... The Reactionary - Magazine - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Virginia Kerr.)

The opposition is not between a small and a large concept in any case, Mr. Chesterton, sir: the United States is its own guarantee of some kind of noble scale in the business. How annoying it is that a certain kind of English voice seems so determined to condescend to Americans. No, it is the simple ingenuity (if I might be allowed a paradoxical locution) of the Jefferson/Madison religious signpost, with its clearly made pointer to Danbury, Connecticut, that is so graspable by the minds of the simplest as well as the most superior persons. Given time, the symbol of a simple wall of separation has fashioned and established itself inside our own crania, so that almost every American has an approximate idea that they are entitled to a great degree of “freedom of,” as well as a marked amount of “freedom from,” with a good deal of debatable latitude in between. This is not a small or inert legacy.

I wonder if Hitchens knew that, when the Constitution was adopted, about half-a-dozen states had established churches (Congregationalism wasn't disestablished in Massachusetts until, I believe, 1834). The First Amendment was designed, among other things, to protect those established state churches, it would seem.

Anyway, I found this piece diffuse, almost out of focus. That Hitchens could write it at all, of course, given his physical condition at the time,  is both amazing and immensely worthy of admiration. But anyone who wrote as much and, as often as not, as hastily as Chesterton did, is bound to make a fool of himself from time to time and Chesterton certainly did. The same is probably true of Christopher Hitchens.

This has it about right ...

Comment: Hitchens and Iraq : The New Yorker.

He and I argued a lot about the war. We had both supported it, but as Iraq disintegrated, my criticisms of the policy struck him as weak-kneed and opportunistic, an effort to curry favor with bien-pensant liberals. In turn, his brave talk of sticking by his “comrades” in Baghdad rang false to me. Who were they, after all? Exiled politicians whose sectarian agendas helped take Iraq into a terrible civil war. The only comrades worthy of the name that I knew were those who had risked their lives for the American effort—the Iraqis who were betrayed by Bush, and have been betrayed again by Obama.

Iraq led Hitchens to some of his worst indulgences—the propaganda trip to Iraq in Wolfowitz’s entourage, the pose of Byronic heroism. But perhaps the war and the enemies it made him helped give Hitchens the courage of his last years and months—the atheist in the foxhole. Hitchens was one of the very few people who could slash and burn you in print, then meet for drinks and talk in the true warmth of friendship, discussing a writer we both admired, garrulous to the very last. It was a sign of his essential decency that he didn’t make it personal.

Note to the politically religious: This is not about the Iraq War and its attendant complications. So save those comments for some other blog.

This is important …

… 

How we gave up on Salman Rushdie - UnHerd.

… the finest words of all, demonstrating how morbid it all was, came from a man dead for 10 years. In the first rounds of the fatwa, Christopher Hitchens had tirelessly stumped for Rushdie. Now, in this latest, unexpected round, Hitchens was summoned from his grave. All weekend, videos of him defending Rushdie were shared, videos where Hitchens spoke with an unimaginable frankness, videos where he spoke with more force, more intelligence, and more authority than anybody alive today.

More on Christopher ...

... Regarding Christopher | The Nation. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and there’s a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in women’s writing or women’s lives or perspectives. I never got the impression from anything he wrote about women that he had bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, let alone interviewing or reporting—the sort of workup he would do before writing about, say, G.K. Chesterton, or Scientology or Kurdistan. ... It wasn’t just the position itself, it was his lordly condescending assumption that he could sort this whole thing out for the ladies in 1,000 words that probably took him twenty minutes to write. “Anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour with a textbook on embryology knows” that pro-life women are on to something when they recoil at the idea of the “disposable fetus.” Hmmmm… that must be why most OB-GYNs are pro-choice and why most women who have abortions are mothers. Those doctors just need to spend an hour with a medical textbook; those mothers must never have seen a sonogram. Interestingly, although he promised to address the counterarguments made by the many women who wrote in to the magazine, including those on the staff, he never did. For a man with a reputation for courage, it certainly failed him then. (Years later, when he took up the question of abortion again in Vanity Fair, he said basically the exact same things, using the same straw-women arguments. Time taught him nothing, because he didn’t want to learn.)

We won't go into the boilerplate crap that precedes this about Hitchens's drinking. 

"I never got the impression ..." And never bothered to ask or investigate. "... that must be why most OB-GYNs are pro-choice and why most women who have abortions are mothers." I don't know about the latter assertion. I haven't seen statistics to that effect. Either way, it still comes down to an argument from authority vs. an assertion (Hitchens's) based on data.

It is odd that I find myself defending a fellow I didn't agree with on the most fundamental issue -- whether or not there is a God -- and whose writing often infuriated me. I wonder why these people didn't take on Hitchens while he was alive. And yet "he was my colleague for twenty years." How did she manage to work with him?

Well, no one can say ...

... I'm not thorough: 3quarksdaily: Remembering the Foolish and Brilliant Christopher Hitchens. (Hat tip, Cynthia Haven.)

But to reiterate my original point about all this. Hitchens was not always right -- who is? He was often gratuitously nasty. I confess to having been such myself from time to time, especially when I was young. My wife thought I was gratuitously nasty in my recent review of Ed King.
That Hitchens had grievous faults does not give anyone warrant to emulate those faults regarding him now that he is dead, least of all if one calls oneself a Christian. Our obligation as Christians is to display charity, not malice.

Sunday sermon (I) ...

... Hitchens’ Hubris. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

This is worth noting:

The main arguments that Hitchens offers against Christianity are that evolution explains the origin of life on earth, that portions of the Bible are not literally true, and that the four Gospels are not mathematical reproductions of each other. These arguments don’t get Hitchens where he wants to go. Many eminent Christians have seen no contradiction between evolution and their belief. John Paul II stated that evolution was “more than a hypothesis,” and Cardinal Newman wrote shortly after the publication of Darwin’s work that “Mr. Darwin’s theory need not be atheistical, be it true or not; it may simply be suggesting a larger idea of Divine Prescience and skill.” Newman also echoed the Thomistic belief that reason and revelation are complementary, not antagonistic, in words all Christians should take to heart: “if anything seems to be proved by astronomer or geologist, or chronologist, or antiquarian, or ethnologist, in contradiction to the dogmas of faith, that point will eventually turn out, first, not to be proved, or secondly, not contradictory, or thirdly, not contradictory to any thing really revealed, but to something which has been confused with revelation.”

And long before Newman or John Paul, such important figures as St. Augustine and St. Jerome looked to the Old Testament not primarily for historical or scientific knowledge, but to see how it pointed the way to Christ. Indeed, Augustine speculated that different species of animals were not the result of separate miraculous acts of creation, as a literal reading of Genesis would suggest, but the result of a process in which the conditions for life created by God gradually became operative.

Crying in the wilderness …

… PETER HITCHENS: We’re destroying the nation’s wealth – and the health of millions - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Eventually there will be an accounting for this. It ought to be soon, and I hope it will be. But if not, it will be important that protests such as mine were made and heard at the time. Nobody will be able to say, when the much-needed inquiry eventually sits in judgment on these times and on those responsible, that criticism is just hindsight and that nobody pointed out at the time that a grave mistake was being made.

No spoilers herein …

… The Faith of Christopher Hitchens | Books and Culture. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

…  For anyone interested in Christopher Hitchens' life, this book is a necessary one. For those who have had only a passing acquaintance with his writing, this book will nevertheless be fascinating. Students of apologetics could benefit from it. Ministers will be strengthened and evangelists encouraged. I still have some superlatives left, so I will simply conclude by saying that I wish more Christian books were like this one. Top drawer.

A sense of outrage …

… PETER HITCHENS: My suspicion is that the wrecking of the economy and the state-sponsored panic of these times has killed more people than Covid ever did - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A paper submitted to the Government’s own scientific advisory group, SAGE, estimated that 16,000 people had died up to May 1, thanks to missed medical care following the shutdown of the country. They suggested another 26,000 could die by next March for the same reason.

If these figures are right (and I believe they will be vindicated by hard research), the Government’s flailing panic killed two people for every three who died of coronavirus – and that is assuming the Covid death figures are not inflated.

Fame ...

... Press Man: Why They Wept for Hitchens - Commentary Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

... by the time of his death last December, Hitchens had achieved a measure of wealth and fame that no other Washington columnist for the Nation could ever have hoped for. How famous was he? He died on a Thursday, and by the weekend admirers had begun a little shrine outside his apartment in Washington. It was set up Princess Diana–style, with flowers, cards, bottles of liquor, handwritten poems and messages of thanks, the words bleeding melodramatically off the paper in the December drizzle. Justin Bieber shouldn’t expect as much.

Hitchens reviews Hitchens ...

... that is Peter reviews Christopher.

The best on this subject ...

... that I have seen: VDH's Private Papers:: Goodbye, Mr. Hitchens.

I was once in extremis with a ruptured appendix and peritonitis in Libya. I could make only one call before the ad hoc operation, and I left a brief message for my wife and son to give them the grim prognosis. For reasons I never quite fathomed, in desperation late at night they called one number of the many written on my desk: Christopher Hitchens. When I awoke after the operation in a dingy Tripoli Red Crescent clinic, there soon arrived a Libyan-American neurosurgeon (by happenstance there on vacation) to insist on proper antibiotics (hard to find then in Qaddafi’s Libya); later I was visited by the newly arrived American chargé d’affaires. Back home, I gathered that their presence somehow was the result of various phone calls Christopher made, though to whom and when he never quite disclosed.

In this corner ...

... Hitchens Debates Rabbi Wolpe on God.

Here's a link to the actual debate: Hitchens vs. Wolpe.

I just got a copy of Rabbi Wolpe's Why Faith Matters. I started reading it this afternoon and it's so good I'm probably going spend the rest of the night reading it. Here's a nice passage:

The more I understood about faith, the more it seemed to me built on searching as well as finding. The Hebrew Bible is full of warnings against idolatry but has none against atheism. False belief is dangerous, but the art of questioning is important if questions are honest, persistent, and deep. Faith does not ask, "What medicine will cure this disease?" but "How can I use the experience of illness to help others?" It does not map the orbits of planets but does ask over and over again about the inexplicable twists of the human heart.

The prelude that opens the book demonstrates that Rabbi Wolpe knows what he's talking about when it comes to using the experience of illness to help others.

Time for a Raven Revival? - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog

… Time for a Raven Revival? - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… his work is full of allusions which most of us will not get, to Homer as well as to Shakespeare, and many, many other lesser names once commonly read, now forgotten.  This is probably the last faint echo in our cultural life of the old Classical education which the Public Schools used to provide, melancholy, beautiful, contemplative, best suited to summer evenings as the shadows lengthen, or to autumn days by the river Cam as the yellow leaves begin to fall on sheeted, chained-up punts.

Encomia ...

... How Hitchens Is Great Even in Death - Commentary Magazine.

... POSTSCRIPT: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, 1949-2011.

(Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Questions of faith …

… Think on these things: A comparison of 'God Is Not Great', by Christopher Hitchens, and 'The Rage Against God', by Peter Hitchens.

 One of Peter’s main points of disagreement with Christopher is the latter’s assertion, in the opening chapter of God Is Not Great, that ‘Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith.’ On the contrary, writes Peter, the ‘new anti-theism is… a dogmatic tyranny in the making.’ Atheists ‘cannot admit that their... insistence that there is no God is in fact a faith’. He has elsewhere summarised the atheist position as ‘There is no God, and I hate him.’

Both theism and atheism are faiths, quite simply because one cannot prove or disprove whether or not God exists (actually, if there is a God, he doesn't exist; he simply is). One can have reasons for choosing one position or the other. But either way, faith is an adventure, not an axiom. Of course, when I die, if I turns out I was wrong and there is no God, I will never know that I was wrong. Were I atheist, when I died, if it turned out I was wrong, I would know.

Much in what he says …

… PETER HITCHENS: Is shutting down Britain – with unprecedented curbs on ancient liberties – REALLY the best answer? - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The former editor of The Times, Sir Simon Jenkins, recently listed these unfulfilled scares: bird flu did not kill the predicted millions in 1997. In 1999 it was Mad Cow Disease and its human variant, vCJD, which was predicted to kill half a million. Fewer than 200 in fact died from it in the UK. 

The first Sars outbreak of 2003 was reported as having ‘a 25 per cent chance of killing tens of millions’ and being ‘worse than Aids’. In 2006, another bout of bird flu was declared ‘the first pandemic of the 21st Century’. 

There were similar warnings in 2009, that swine flu could kill 65,000. It did not. The Council of Europe described the hyping of the 2009 pandemic as ‘one of the great medical scandals of the century’. Well, we shall no doubt see. 

More on darkness ...

... Hitchens on Mother Teresa's Dark Night of the Soul. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

This is pretty much right on the money: People like Hitchens and Dawkins and Dennett simply don't understand religion, which is why what they have to say on the subject strikes those with some understanding of it as so tedious.

The comments are quite good, and don't miss the link to Moonrise.

I love it ...

... Hitchens attacks Gore Vidal for being a 'crackpot'.

I with Hitchens on this. I have always thought Vidal was loathsome.