39 thoughts on “Hitchens fête at Royal Festival Hall”

  3. You may note Stephen Fry has the beginnings of a moustache – this is for the charity Movember when men are encouraged to grow a moustache.

  4. Screw Hitchens. The only semi-nice thing to be said about him is that he had gifts, though he made them meaningless by wasting them. He could have provided a benefit, had he had a better character. It’s a shame. I’ll be glad when I don’t have to read all these sentimental tributes to a person who epitomized sophistry, and contributed to the senseless killing of hundreds of thousands of people. May he soon be forgotten.

        1. You’re right though. It is tasteless to complain in a thread like this, and though I don’t repute my feelings towards him, it was completely inappropriate to state them here. I apologize, sincerely, for being an asshole. I’ve suppressed my feelings, and they burst out untimely. I am very sorry to have posted what I did when I did.

          1. Sorry, just a little correction: please replace “refute” with “refpudiate” in my previous comment. Ima go to bed now.

          2. It’s alright! No one is obliged to be gushing. I have many liberal friends who would dislike him. I do not have an opinion on that as I do not know him well enough from his works, but I do think he is very smart & very good as a writer. I was impressed by God is Not Great though amazed there was no mention of the God Delusion in it or in the references (deliberate I assume rather than accidental). I would take him over his RC brother any day. And I expect that he would be good company, provided he is tolerant of well argued opinions that differ from his own. I suspect that he does not suffer fools gladly, so I would annoy him!

          3. He is very smart, I think, and has many positive characteristics. I certainly have enjoyed his writings and been impressed by his performance in debates. In a way, that makes it worse — harder to bear — when he supports what I think is so wrong. It is always harder to deal with someone who you respect, or who is generally on your side, but who acts against something that one values (i.e., the apostate). I hate a Bush or a Cheney less than an Obama or a Hitchens, because I feel no connection with the former, and feel the latter are betraying principles that we have in common. Of course, it is just an error on my part. I have misidentified these people as part of my “in-group”, when they are something other.

            Again, though, I am sorry to have brought this all up here. I don’t know Hitchens personally, and ought to have left this post alone. I plead drunken grumpiness, which, perhaps, Hitchens might forgive.

    2. I admire and like Hitchens, and so I prefer to focus on what I consider his admirable qualities rather than the (relatively few) positions he took that I think were wrong.

    3. No-one is right all the time. He was wrong on Iraq and his knowledge of science leaves a lot to be desired. But then, his natural enemies are the Weasel Lane Craigs of this world. They don’t understand science either.

  7. Of Hitch..

    “He has poured all his energies, talents and enthusiasm in a thousand directions. But always -always- with wit, with panache, with a sumptuously exquisite use of language, with a deep understanding that the connection between style and substance is absolute. A true thing, badly expressed is a lie.”

    Brilliantly put.

  10. Given the support Hitchens has given to the popular dissemination of the theory of evolution by natural selection, I find the general tone of this thread less than whelming.

    I identify two characteristics of his worthy of celebration.

    Firstly, and I don’t think it should be under-estimated, is his eloquence. How often do we hear of great orators or speakers in history whom we will never have the pleasure of listening to? Demosthenes, perhaps Socrates, Cicero, Dr. Johnson – I would have loved to hear them in the flesh; at least in youtube, Hitchens’ performances are in theory preserved until our extinction.

    Secondly, coming at the end of the era of deference shown towards the priesthood of whichever monotheism, he went one step further and claimed the moral high ground against them. If you have seen his withering disgust directed at a rabbi (rather old, grand-fatherly and sweet-looking, I do not know his name) for his light-hearted attitude towards male circumcision; if you have seen the rabbi’s shock at being told off like a naughty child, you will have seen the Emperor’s face when he realised he had no clothes.

    There is a parlour game which nominates the last human who knew everything. I have heard John Milton and von Humboldt suggested; it is of course a bit of fun. But I would say that Hitchens, who couldn’t know everything, but who is very good at connecting corollaries from different disciplines, synthesised the latest findings of science with a humanistic, anti-theist morality using the irony and wit, latent in reductio ad absurdum. And what’s wrong with that?

    1. All true, but in your catalogue of great orators for humanism, never neglect to include Ingersoll. Hitchens is certainly the closest thing to his like we have in this age. Let’s guarantee that torch stays brightly lit. I know that is the one ideal that Hitch holds above all others, that the freedom of the mind be defended to the end, and exercised without kowtowing to any bully.

      1. I must confess that after 51 years on the planet, I had never heard of Ingersoll until a few months’ back; perhaps he is more well known in the USA than here in the UK, or perhaps I am just too ignorant. His works are out of copyright and therefore freely available over the web.

        As he died in 1899, it is just possible that a recording of him exists. Our ex poet-Laureate Andrew Motion dug out recordings of Alfred Lord Tennyson (who died in 1892), no less, on which you can just make out his Lincolnshire accent. Maybe an early Allan Lomax decided to record America’s greatest orator. It seems like an obvious thing to do. Tantalising.

          1. Astonishingly, just a few Edison recordings (actually made by Thomas Edison), necessarily very brief, exist and can be found online. The delivery ios surprisingly flat and thin, and it may be impossible to recapture what it was like to hear him then. Still, I think a skilled actor would do well to recreate him on the historical lecture circuit. I was just reading from his collected “Prose-Poems and Selections” published in 1886, and the man touched on every anti-theist argument you hear today, more beautifully.

            Of course Charles Bradlaugh was sort of Ingersoll’s opposite number in Britain, though I don’t sense his oratory was anything like. In any case, Hitchens’ combination of intellectual agility, linguistic flair, historical recollection, and moral force echo that era.

        1. I quote from Cartomancer, a commenter over at Richard Dawkins.net, who quite rightly slapped me down for my badly worded post which mentioned Cicero.

          “Well, apart from his work as an advocate in many high-profile court cases he also introduced Greek philosophy into Latin with translations and distillations of the important Greek philosophers, and wrote his own works on philosophy, rhetorical theory and education, which soon became staples of Imperial Roman, late antique and medieval educational theory (especially the Tusculan Disputations, De Amicitia and De Officiis). He also managed his brother Quintus’s election campaigns, thwarted a plot to overthrow the Republic, acted as proconsul in Asia Minor, suppressed the rebellious Free Peoples of Mount Pindenissus with an army and pretty much organised the war effort against Marc Antony in 43BC single-handed. Oh, and he was a property magnate who rented tenements out in Rome and, if his classical biographer is to be believed, a truly prolific poet. If you want to stretch it a bit further then you could also make the case that he was instrumental in sparking off the Italian Renaissance, since it was Petrarch’s discovery of his personal letters in the fourteenth century that is traditionally regarded as the event which led to the quattrocento resurgence of interest in classical authors and classical thought.

          But yes, apart from all that, what did this Roman ever do for us?”

          1. Cicero had opposed the restoration of the democratic rights of the plebs and the restoration of the tribunes. In his first speech against Catalina he cites, with approval, an incident when the political opponents of Saturninus and Servillus Glauca trapped them in the senate house and stoned them to death.

            As for thwarting a plot to overthrow the republic, the first such plot was almost certainly a figment of Cicero’s imagination. Eventually Catalina did become a revolutionary leader and it is worth remembering that although he is portrayed by Cicero as being thoroughly disreputable and only in it for himself the revolutionaries were actually fighting for, among other things, freeing the slaves and the extension of the franchise to rural areas.

            Far from saving the republic, after Catalina was defeated, Rome entered a period of political turmoil that led to the civil war when Iulius Caesar and later the complete extinguishing of democracy under Caesar Augustus.

          3. Steady on, Bernard! I only said I would like to have seen Cicero speak!

            It’s pretty extraordinary that so much of his work made it through the Dark Ages; he seems like a what-if kind of guy, although I didn’t think so at 18, during the last millennium, wading through my Latin gerunds in ‘Pro Milone’.

            Suspect I will wander into the thicket of Cicero studies some time after genning up on Ingersoll. Thanks for the illustrative angle on the big C.

            All the best.

  11. I’ve found, quite easily, two recordings of Robert Ingersoll, by Edison, no less.

    Here is the link; astonishing.

    “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLapwIoEVI”

    1. I replied to the former, before I saw this latter. You see what I mean about thwe thin, flat delivery.

      1. Yes, I do; I suspect it was something to do with the advice that the engineers gave to the speakers. ‘Speak up, clearly and slowly, flatten the plosives, keep the pitch as level as possible’, or words to that effect. Didn’t the early telephone operators respond with ‘Ahoy, ahoy’? Gives you a general idea of what the pioneers thought was the appropriate register for the new sound technologies.

        Still, the quality of Ingersoll’s recording is better than nothing and a million times superior to that of Tennyson.

        1. By the way, Bruce; thanks for putting me on to Ingersoll. He’s my next little project and reading matter.

          1. I think you’ll be astonished, especially considering this is harking back a century and a half. What has become of us in the States?

          2. I’ve just skimmed “On the Holy Bible” by RI. It’s a real eye-opener, alters your conception of late 19th century U.S. Good to see that Mark Twain was a big buddy.

            Ditto your comments about intellectual agility, linguistic flair, historical recollection, and moral force applying to RI and Hitchens.

            Thanks a LOT for this.

            What has become of YOU in the U.S.? You may well ask; I just watched a snippet of Jerry’s post of that Iowa Republican Forum and had to stop. Unlike RI, sometimes words fail me.

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