Zeno Swijtink
05-13-2007, 10:30 PM
May 13, 2007
In God, Distrust
By MICHAEL KINSLEY
GOD IS NOT GREAT. How Religion Poisons Everything.
By Christopher Hitchens.
307 pp. Twelve/Warner Books. $24.99.
Observers of the Christopher Hitchens phenomenon
have been expecting a book about religion from
him around now. But this impressive and enjoyable
attack on everything so many people hold dear is
not the book we were expecting.
First in London 30 or more years ago, then in New
York and for the last couple of decades in
Washington, Hitchens has established himself as a
character. This character draws on such familiar
sources as the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn
Waugh and Graham Greene; the leftist politics of
the 1960s (British variant); and - of course -
the person of George Orwell. (Others might throw
in the flower-clutching Bunthorne from Gilbert
and Sullivan's "Patience," but that is probably
not an intentional influence.) Hitchens is the
bohemian and the swell, the dashing foreign
correspondent, the painstaking literary critic
and the intellectual engagé. He charms Washington
hostesses but will set off a stink bomb in the
salon if the opportunity arises.
His conversation sparkles, not quite
effortlessly, and if he is a bit too quick to
resort to French in search of le mot juste, his
jewels of erudition, though flashy, are real. Or
at least they fool me. Hitchens was right to
choose Washington over New York and London.
His enemies would like to believe he is a fraud.
But he isn't, as the very existence of his many
enemies tends to prove. He is self-styled, to be
sure, but no more so than many others in
Washington - or even in New York or London - who
are not nearly as good at it. He is a principled
dissolute, with the courage of his dissolution:
he enjoys smoking and drinking, and not just the
reputation for smoking and drinking - although he
enjoys that too. And through it all he is
productive to an extent that seems like cheating:
23 books, pamphlets, collections and
collaborations so far; a long and often heavily
researched column every month in Vanity Fair;
frequent fusillades in Slate and elsewhere; and
speeches, debates and other public spectacles
whenever offered.
The big strategic challenge for a career like
this is to remain interesting, and the easiest
tactic for doing that is surprise. If they expect
you to say X, you say minus X.
Consistency is foolish, as the man said. (Didn't
he?) Under the unwritten and somewhat eccentric
rules of American public discourse, a statement
that contradicts everything you have ever said
before is considered for that reason to be
especially sincere, courageous and dependable. At
The New Republic in the 1980s, when I was the
editor, we used to joke about changing our name
to "Even the Liberal New Republic," because that
was how we were referred to whenever we took a
conservative position on something, which was
often. Then came the day when we took a liberal
position on something and we were referred to as
"Even the Conservative New Republic."
As this example illustrates, among writers about
politics, the surprise technique usually means
starting left and turning right. Trouble is, you
do this once and what's your next party trick?
Christopher Hitchens had seemed to be solving
this problem by turning his conversion into an
ideological "Dance of the Seven Veils." Long ago
he came out against abortion. Interesting! Then
he discovered and made quite a kosher meal of the
fact that his mother, deceased, was Jewish, which
under Jewish law meant he himself was Jewish.
Interesting!! (He was notorious at the time for
his anti-Zionist sympathies.) In the 1990s,
Hitchens was virulently, and somewhat
inexplicably, hostile to President Bill Clinton.
Interesting!!! You would have thought that
Clinton's decadence - the thing that bothered
other liberals and leftists the most - would have
positively appealed to Hitchens. Finally and
recently, he became the most (possibly the only)
intellectually serious non-neocon supporter of
George W. Bush's Iraq war. Interesting!!!!
Where was this train heading? Possibly toward an
open conversion to mainline conservatism and
quick descent into cliché and demagoguery (the
path chosen by Paul Johnson, a somewhat similar
British character of the previous generation).
But surely there was time for a few more
intellectual adventures before retiring to an
office at the Hoover Institution or some other
nursing home of the mind. One obvious possibility
stood out: Hitchens, known to be a fervid
atheist, would find God and take up religion. The
only question was which flavor he would choose.
Embrace Islam? Too cute. Complete the
half-finished Jewish script? Become a Catholic,
following the path well trodden by such British
writers as Waugh and Greene? Or - most daring and
original - would he embrace the old Church of
England (Episcopalianism in America) and spend
his declining years writing about the beauty of
the hymns, the essential Britishness of village
churchyards, the importance of protecting
religion from the dangers of excessive faith, and
so on?
Well, ladies and gentlemen, Hitchens is either
playing the contrarian at a very high level or
possibly he is even sincere. But just as he had
us expecting minus X, he confounds us by
reverting to X. He has written, with tremendous
brio and great wit, but also with an underlying
genuine anger, an all-out attack on all aspects
of religion. Sometimes, instead of the word
"religion," he refers to it as "god-worship,"
which, although virtually a tautology (isn't
"object of worship" almost a definition of a
god?), makes the practice sound sinister and
strange.
Hitchens is an old-fashioned village atheist,
standing in the square trying to pick arguments
with the good citizens on their way to church.
The book is full of logical flourishes and
conundrums, many of them entertaining to the
nonbeliever. How could Christ have died for our
sins, when supposedly he also did not die at all?
Did the Jews not know that murder and adultery
were wrong before they received the Ten
Commandments, and if they did know, why was this
such a wonderful gift? On a more somber note, how
can the "argument from design" (that only some
kind of "intelligence" could have designed
anything as perfect as a human being) be
reconciled with the religious practice of female
genital mutilation, which posits that women, at
least, as nature creates them, are not so perfect
after all? Whether sallies like these give pause
to the believer is a question I can't answer.
And all the logical sallies don't exactly add up
to a sustained argument, because Hitchens thinks
a sustained argument shouldn't even be necessary
and yet wouldn't be sufficient. To him, it's
blindingly obvious: the great religions all began
at a time when we knew a tiny fraction of what we
know today about the origins of Earth and human
life. It's understandable that early humans would
develop stories about gods or God to salve their
ignorance. But people today have no such excuse.
If they continue to believe in the unbelievable,
or say they do, they are morons or lunatics or
liars. "The human wish to credit good things as
miraculous and to charge bad things to another
account is apparently universal," he remarks,
unsympathetically.
Although Hitchens's title refers to God, his real
energy is in the subtitle: "religion poisons
everything." Disproving the existence of God (at
least to his own satisfaction and, frankly, to
mine) is just the beginning for Hitchens. In
fact, it sometimes seems as if existence is just
one of the bones Hitchens wants to pick with God
- and not even the most important. If God would
just leave the world alone, Hitchens would be
glad to let him exist, quietly, in retirement
somewhere. Possibly the Hoover Institution.
Hitchens is attracted repeatedly to the principle
of Occam's razor: that simple explanations are
more likely to be correct than complicated ones.
(E.g., Earth makes a circle around the Sun; the
Sun doesn't do a complex roller coaster ride
around Earth.) You might think that Occam's razor
would favor religion; the biblical creation story
certainly seems simpler than evolution. But
Hitchens argues effectively again and again that
attaching the religious myth to what we know from
science to be true adds nothing but needless
complication.
For Hitchens, it's personal. He is a great friend
of Salman Rushdie, and he reminds us that it
wasn't just some crazed fringe Muslim who
threatened Rushdie's life, killed several others
and made him a virtual prisoner for the crime of
writing a novel. Religious leaders from all the
major faiths, who disagree on some of the most
fundamental questions, managed to put aside their
differences to agree that Rushdie had it coming.
(Elsewhere, Hitchens notes tartly that if any one
of the major faiths is true, then the others must
be false in important respects - an obvious point
often forgotten in the warm haze of ecumenism.)
Hitchens's erudition is on display - impressively
so, and perhaps sometimes pretentiously so. In
one paragraph, he brings in Stephen Jay Gould,
chaos theory and Saul Bellow; pronounces the
movie "It's a Wonderful Life" "engaging but
abysmal" (a typical Hitchens aside: cleverly
paradoxical? witlessly oxymoronic? take your
pick) in the way it explains to a "middlebrow
audience" Heisenberg's uncertainty principle; and
winds down through a discussion of the potential
of stem cells. Nevertheless, and in spite of all
temptations, he has written an entire book
without a single reference to Sir Isaiah Berlin,
the fox or the hedgehog.
But speaking of foxes, Hitchens has outfoxed the
Hitchens watchers by writing a serious and deeply
felt book, totally consistent with his beliefs of
a lifetime. And God should be flattered: unlike
most of those clamoring for his attention,
Hitchens treats him like an adult.
Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time magazine.
In God, Distrust
By MICHAEL KINSLEY
GOD IS NOT GREAT. How Religion Poisons Everything.
By Christopher Hitchens.
307 pp. Twelve/Warner Books. $24.99.
Observers of the Christopher Hitchens phenomenon
have been expecting a book about religion from
him around now. But this impressive and enjoyable
attack on everything so many people hold dear is
not the book we were expecting.
First in London 30 or more years ago, then in New
York and for the last couple of decades in
Washington, Hitchens has established himself as a
character. This character draws on such familiar
sources as the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn
Waugh and Graham Greene; the leftist politics of
the 1960s (British variant); and - of course -
the person of George Orwell. (Others might throw
in the flower-clutching Bunthorne from Gilbert
and Sullivan's "Patience," but that is probably
not an intentional influence.) Hitchens is the
bohemian and the swell, the dashing foreign
correspondent, the painstaking literary critic
and the intellectual engagé. He charms Washington
hostesses but will set off a stink bomb in the
salon if the opportunity arises.
His conversation sparkles, not quite
effortlessly, and if he is a bit too quick to
resort to French in search of le mot juste, his
jewels of erudition, though flashy, are real. Or
at least they fool me. Hitchens was right to
choose Washington over New York and London.
His enemies would like to believe he is a fraud.
But he isn't, as the very existence of his many
enemies tends to prove. He is self-styled, to be
sure, but no more so than many others in
Washington - or even in New York or London - who
are not nearly as good at it. He is a principled
dissolute, with the courage of his dissolution:
he enjoys smoking and drinking, and not just the
reputation for smoking and drinking - although he
enjoys that too. And through it all he is
productive to an extent that seems like cheating:
23 books, pamphlets, collections and
collaborations so far; a long and often heavily
researched column every month in Vanity Fair;
frequent fusillades in Slate and elsewhere; and
speeches, debates and other public spectacles
whenever offered.
The big strategic challenge for a career like
this is to remain interesting, and the easiest
tactic for doing that is surprise. If they expect
you to say X, you say minus X.
Consistency is foolish, as the man said. (Didn't
he?) Under the unwritten and somewhat eccentric
rules of American public discourse, a statement
that contradicts everything you have ever said
before is considered for that reason to be
especially sincere, courageous and dependable. At
The New Republic in the 1980s, when I was the
editor, we used to joke about changing our name
to "Even the Liberal New Republic," because that
was how we were referred to whenever we took a
conservative position on something, which was
often. Then came the day when we took a liberal
position on something and we were referred to as
"Even the Conservative New Republic."
As this example illustrates, among writers about
politics, the surprise technique usually means
starting left and turning right. Trouble is, you
do this once and what's your next party trick?
Christopher Hitchens had seemed to be solving
this problem by turning his conversion into an
ideological "Dance of the Seven Veils." Long ago
he came out against abortion. Interesting! Then
he discovered and made quite a kosher meal of the
fact that his mother, deceased, was Jewish, which
under Jewish law meant he himself was Jewish.
Interesting!! (He was notorious at the time for
his anti-Zionist sympathies.) In the 1990s,
Hitchens was virulently, and somewhat
inexplicably, hostile to President Bill Clinton.
Interesting!!! You would have thought that
Clinton's decadence - the thing that bothered
other liberals and leftists the most - would have
positively appealed to Hitchens. Finally and
recently, he became the most (possibly the only)
intellectually serious non-neocon supporter of
George W. Bush's Iraq war. Interesting!!!!
Where was this train heading? Possibly toward an
open conversion to mainline conservatism and
quick descent into cliché and demagoguery (the
path chosen by Paul Johnson, a somewhat similar
British character of the previous generation).
But surely there was time for a few more
intellectual adventures before retiring to an
office at the Hoover Institution or some other
nursing home of the mind. One obvious possibility
stood out: Hitchens, known to be a fervid
atheist, would find God and take up religion. The
only question was which flavor he would choose.
Embrace Islam? Too cute. Complete the
half-finished Jewish script? Become a Catholic,
following the path well trodden by such British
writers as Waugh and Greene? Or - most daring and
original - would he embrace the old Church of
England (Episcopalianism in America) and spend
his declining years writing about the beauty of
the hymns, the essential Britishness of village
churchyards, the importance of protecting
religion from the dangers of excessive faith, and
so on?
Well, ladies and gentlemen, Hitchens is either
playing the contrarian at a very high level or
possibly he is even sincere. But just as he had
us expecting minus X, he confounds us by
reverting to X. He has written, with tremendous
brio and great wit, but also with an underlying
genuine anger, an all-out attack on all aspects
of religion. Sometimes, instead of the word
"religion," he refers to it as "god-worship,"
which, although virtually a tautology (isn't
"object of worship" almost a definition of a
god?), makes the practice sound sinister and
strange.
Hitchens is an old-fashioned village atheist,
standing in the square trying to pick arguments
with the good citizens on their way to church.
The book is full of logical flourishes and
conundrums, many of them entertaining to the
nonbeliever. How could Christ have died for our
sins, when supposedly he also did not die at all?
Did the Jews not know that murder and adultery
were wrong before they received the Ten
Commandments, and if they did know, why was this
such a wonderful gift? On a more somber note, how
can the "argument from design" (that only some
kind of "intelligence" could have designed
anything as perfect as a human being) be
reconciled with the religious practice of female
genital mutilation, which posits that women, at
least, as nature creates them, are not so perfect
after all? Whether sallies like these give pause
to the believer is a question I can't answer.
And all the logical sallies don't exactly add up
to a sustained argument, because Hitchens thinks
a sustained argument shouldn't even be necessary
and yet wouldn't be sufficient. To him, it's
blindingly obvious: the great religions all began
at a time when we knew a tiny fraction of what we
know today about the origins of Earth and human
life. It's understandable that early humans would
develop stories about gods or God to salve their
ignorance. But people today have no such excuse.
If they continue to believe in the unbelievable,
or say they do, they are morons or lunatics or
liars. "The human wish to credit good things as
miraculous and to charge bad things to another
account is apparently universal," he remarks,
unsympathetically.
Although Hitchens's title refers to God, his real
energy is in the subtitle: "religion poisons
everything." Disproving the existence of God (at
least to his own satisfaction and, frankly, to
mine) is just the beginning for Hitchens. In
fact, it sometimes seems as if existence is just
one of the bones Hitchens wants to pick with God
- and not even the most important. If God would
just leave the world alone, Hitchens would be
glad to let him exist, quietly, in retirement
somewhere. Possibly the Hoover Institution.
Hitchens is attracted repeatedly to the principle
of Occam's razor: that simple explanations are
more likely to be correct than complicated ones.
(E.g., Earth makes a circle around the Sun; the
Sun doesn't do a complex roller coaster ride
around Earth.) You might think that Occam's razor
would favor religion; the biblical creation story
certainly seems simpler than evolution. But
Hitchens argues effectively again and again that
attaching the religious myth to what we know from
science to be true adds nothing but needless
complication.
For Hitchens, it's personal. He is a great friend
of Salman Rushdie, and he reminds us that it
wasn't just some crazed fringe Muslim who
threatened Rushdie's life, killed several others
and made him a virtual prisoner for the crime of
writing a novel. Religious leaders from all the
major faiths, who disagree on some of the most
fundamental questions, managed to put aside their
differences to agree that Rushdie had it coming.
(Elsewhere, Hitchens notes tartly that if any one
of the major faiths is true, then the others must
be false in important respects - an obvious point
often forgotten in the warm haze of ecumenism.)
Hitchens's erudition is on display - impressively
so, and perhaps sometimes pretentiously so. In
one paragraph, he brings in Stephen Jay Gould,
chaos theory and Saul Bellow; pronounces the
movie "It's a Wonderful Life" "engaging but
abysmal" (a typical Hitchens aside: cleverly
paradoxical? witlessly oxymoronic? take your
pick) in the way it explains to a "middlebrow
audience" Heisenberg's uncertainty principle; and
winds down through a discussion of the potential
of stem cells. Nevertheless, and in spite of all
temptations, he has written an entire book
without a single reference to Sir Isaiah Berlin,
the fox or the hedgehog.
But speaking of foxes, Hitchens has outfoxed the
Hitchens watchers by writing a serious and deeply
felt book, totally consistent with his beliefs of
a lifetime. And God should be flattered: unlike
most of those clamoring for his attention,
Hitchens treats him like an adult.
Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time magazine.