Dan Dennett’s “eulogy” for Hitchens, “A lessons from Hitch: When rudeness is called for,” is up at the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” section. It’s about his experience with Hitch in a debate at the Ciudad de las Ideas conference in Publa, Mexico. I was that meeting, but had to leave right before the debate began. I’ll always regret that, for I missed my one chance to see Hitchens on the platform.
Dennett is known as the “nicest” of the Four Horsemen, but he sometimes regrets his lack of “rudeness” in debates. I’ll reproduce his last four paragraphs, for they ring so true:
We have all heard, endlessly, about how angry and rude the new atheists are. Take a good hard look at their work, at the books and talks by Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris, and you will find that they are more civil, less sneering, less given to name-calling than such religious apologists as Terry Eagleton or Alvin Plantinga or Leon Wieseltier. It is just that many people are shocked to see religious institutions, ideas, and spokespeople challenged as intensely as we expect banks, big pharma, and the oil industry to be challenged.
Of all the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” Hitchens was clearly the least gentle, the angriest, the one most likely to insult his interlocutor. But in my experience, he only did it when rudeness was well deserved–which is actually quite often when religion is the topic. Most spokespeople for religion expect to be treated not just with respect but with a special deference that is supposedly their due because the cause they champion is so righteous. Then they often abuse that privilege by using their time on the stage to misrepresent both their own institutions and the criticisms of them being offered.
How should one respond to such impostures? There are actually two effective methods, and I recommend both of them, depending on the circumstances: you can follow Hitch and interrupt (“Liar, liar, pants on fire!” or its equivalent). Or you can try something a little bit more diplomatic: You can call the person a faith fibber, my mock-diplomatic term for those who are liars for God. If you are sure your interlocutor is just another religious bully, go Hitch’s route: Call him a liar, and don’t stop until he stops. If you think your interlocutor may have been lured a little over the line of truth by otherwise commendable zeal, you can ask them if they aren’t indulging in a little faith fibbing. That works on occasion too.
The main point is this: Don’t let anybody play the God card in these discussions as if it were a “Get Out of Jail Free” card that excuses misrepresentation. Hitch would not hesitate to call out the pope, or Mother Teresa, or anybody else. Honor his memory by following his example.
> How should one respond to such impostures?
In honor of the Hitch, I’ve just thought of a reply: “If you’re going to be a Liar for Jesus, you should update your business cards.”
To Dennett’s Hitchens-esque rudeness when called for, I would suggest another arrow for the quiver: mockery.
“Gee, now that you put it that way, I completely agree with you that it was his atheism that inspired Stalin to murder those millions. If only he had abandoned his atheism and embraced the true passion of Quetzalcoatl! Now that I have seen the light, will you join me in sacrificing a few tens of thousands of Mesoamericans in celebration of this happy occasion?”
Or, “You’re right. It is indubitably true that Darwin’s inability to fathom how an eye could have evolved naturally is excelled only by your inability to read for comprehension. For, in Darwin’s case, his lack of imagination (detailed over the next few pages where he details ocular evolution) hardly compares to your inability to read more than a dozen consecutive words of his.”
Cheers,
b&
<sigh />
Subscribing, too….
b&
Quite right, Ben.
But consider the need for mockery to be of epigrammatic brevity. Hitchens had that gift too, when called for.
The inability to read for comprehension, or more than a dozen consecutive words at a time, or both, is widespread and rising.
‘consider the need for…brevity’…heh heh heh.
True, but that sort of brevity is damned hard to come up with. It’s taken me a while just to whittle Genesis down to a third-rate childish faery tale about an enchanted garden with talking animals and an angry giant.
Though Hitch was certainly fast on his feet, there’s also no doubt that many of his best turns of phrases were either practiced or had been percolating for a long time. “Celestial dictator” springs to mind, for example.
Cheers,
b&
And you know this how? Isn’t it possible that the brevity, the turn of phrase acumen, was Hitch’s real genius?
Regardless of his raw talent for language — and it was surely remarkable — make no mistrake, Hitch worked constantly to improve it. He was always practicing. Every essay he wrote, every debate he engaged in, even every casual conversation was for him an opportunity to experiment with words, to analyze the results, and to hold on to that which worked best. And he also observed what worked for others.
His “real genius” for language was that self-applied critical analysis that permitted him to always hone his wit, keeping it ever razor-sharp.
Cheers,
b&
What’s special about “celestial dictator”? I don’t follow.
Hitch used that phrase often, comparing Jehovah with Kim Jong Il ruling over a heavenly North Korea. As effective as it was, it was hardly spontaneous.
Cheers,
b&
I’m glad Hitchens was a vigorous defender of atheism. At the same time, all the Hitchens tributes are starting to cross the line to hagiography.
For some much-needed balance, here’s Glenn Greenwald on Hitchens:
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/17/christohper_hitchens_and_the_protocol_for_public_figure_deaths/singleton
You don’t read enough.
I’ve seen plenty of warts-and-all obits. The man was complex, sometimes maddeningly wrong, a bit of a dick at times.
Doesn’t mean you can’t admire him, or even to lightly gloss over some of the negatives when you’re talking about the entire body of work of a man who changed the world for the better. And laid the groundwork so that others could more-easily follow the same path.
Has anybody really said that nothing bad should be said about Hitchens as Greenwald alleges? Perhaps I haven’t read enough, but it does seem that if such a warning was made, it hasn’t been observed.
I think you have it backwards.
Hitchens was enough of a bad person–sexist, bullying, warmongering, racist–that I save my admiration for some of his arguments but not for the man.
In the end, unless we know any of these people personally, we pick and choose among what they were to exemplify our own values and attitudes.
And, for me, being a warmongering sexist dick is kinduva dealbreaker on admiring the person, even if I admire some of the writing.
Also a drunkard. Seriously. Not an admirable man. Had many admirable stances and arguments, though.
Looks like one of the liberal zealots from PZ’s site has found his way over.
who had alcoholism? Hitch?
It was pretty well established that Hitch had cut back considerably, without medical help, during his last couple of years. Alcoholics can’t do that. It’s all or nothing. There is a difference between a lush and an alcoholic. Alcoholics have to go to meetings.
Alcoholism is a permanent inherited brain impairment. Getting drunk a lot if just a symptom, not the disease. The disease is permanent brain damage and deteriorates with age and being drunk.
Self cures aren’t possible since there are other behavioral manifestations, eg, poor frontal lobe connections, social cues misreading, etc.
For example, people with alcoholism have a hard time understanding jokes, they mistake pretty much anything as a hostile attack.
Always getting drunk is just one symptom.
Better liberal than a fascist. /shrug
…yeah, I do agree Hitchens had issues. But I won’t go as far as the The Informant!’s hyperbole and vitriol. Hitch had also an incredible and credible amount of good to say as well. And you can’t simply go wrong with statements like “Religion poisons everything.”
“Hitchens was enough of a bad person–sexist, bullying, warmongering, racist–that I save my admiration for some of his arguments but not for the man.”
What a mendacious goof..
Can you quote Hitch making any racist or sexist comments? Excuse me, but the man repeatedly insisted that the only unfailing cure for poverty was the “empowerment of women”. What a misogynistic bully!!
And racist? This accusation is just plain fiction since it was perhaps his emotional attachment to the people of Kurdistan which spurred his determination to overthrow Saddam Hussein…
You can level a variety of charges against Hitchens, but those of racism and sexism are two I just won’t hear said.
There is an example of Hitchens’ sexism in the Greenwald article. He called the Dixie Chicks “fucking fat slags” for having the temerity to criticize Bush’s Iraq policy. Going straight to an irrelevant sexual put-down in a political disagreement with a woman is a pretty clear sign of sexism.
There’s more, of course: his absurd views on women and comedy, his penchant for referring to women (and gay men) as “sweetie” or “darling”.
And there’s this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpA7pfR0FIc
Benevolent sexism is still sexism.
But is it sexist if you’re right? I mean, women really don’t have a sense of humor. My wife never gets the joke when I stagger home at 4 a.m. wearing women’s underwear and stinking of Scotch.
I don’t know what you understand for “sexism”, but “fucking fat slags” (if that is indeed what he said), though it is admittedly boorish, tasteless and spiteful, is NOT sexist.
A sexist comment would be one which degrades the abilities or capacities of women with respect to those of men. So, no matter how filthy the slander, unless it contains the foregoing feature, it cannot be called sexist. Indeed most victims of Hitchens’ verbal venom have been men! So, unless you’re willing to make the absurd claim that Hitch is sexist agains men and women alike, will not be making any sense calling him sexist.
In the video adduced, Hitchens is VERY clear that women can work if they want and they should be free to do so, he just prefers to take financial care of His wife. A wife being a woman who VOLUNTARILY decides to marry Hitchens, I don’t see where the misogyny lies?
I don’t want to get into an argument with you about what counts as sexism. If you genuinely don’t think it’s sexist to attack a female political opponent by deriding their appearance and insinuating that they are promiscuous, I think the inferential distance between us is too large to be bridged in a blog combox.
I’ll just say this: It’s true that Hitchens often had vituperative things to say about men he disagreed with, but did he ever attack a man by calling him a slut or a whore? I doubt it. Why do you think that is?
katha knew him pretty well: http://www.thenation.com/blog/165222/regarding-christopher
Thanks, I liked to see both sides of the bully. Makes me glad he was so often right. =D
Thanks for that link.
I’m assuming that you’ve just thrown the “racist” accusation in their alongside the warmongering for effect. Given that Hitchens was much more a friend to different “races” than many liberals and given that people from other countries have shown up on comments threads to point out exactly this, your charge seems, at best, baseless.
*”in their” –> in there
I think the tenor of the Hitchens obits depends on what kind of sources you mostly read. Writers who are mostly concerned with atheism and secularism tend to act like he was flawless because they admire his staunch advocacy of atheism. Writers who are mostly concerned with liberal political issues tend to dump on him for his support of the Iraq War, hatred of all Muslims everywhere because of the actions of Muslim fundamentalists, and what they perceived as a history of misogynistic comments.
Greenwald seems to have mostly been reading mainstream media obits, including the tributes to Hitchens by his colleagues at Slate. He seems to believe that those sources have been fawning over him and glossing over his bad points to an unacceptable extent.
I think the tenor of the Hitchens obits depends on what kind of sources you mostly read. Writers who are mostly concerned with atheism and secularism tend to act like he was flawless because they admire his staunch advocacy of atheism. Writers who are mostly concerned with liberal political issues tend to dump on him for his support of the Iraq War, hatred of all Muslims everywhere because of the actions of Muslim fundamentalists, and what they perceived as a history of misogynistic comments.
Greenwald seems to have mostly been reading mainstream media obits, including the tributes to Hitchens by his colleagues at Slate. He seems to believe that those sources have been fawning over him and glossing over his bad points to an unacceptable extent.
I am not sure that Greenwald understands the consistency of Hitchens’ thought. The same revulsion he felt toward the totalitarian nature of religion he also felt for the totalitarian regimes around the world (and he spent time in such places as North Korea and Iraq). We may may not agree with his stand on Iraq (he was also a liberal interventionist in the former Yugoslavia) but I think Hitchens was not deluded or callous or self-serving – he sincerely believed that ridding the world of dictators yields benefits in the long run (even if the outcomes in Iraq prove him wrong). It is infantile to take the position that we can admire the minds of only those who agree with us in every instance. Greenwald does not change in the slightest my opinion that the world of ideas has suffered a great loss.
Hitch being “rude” (and absolutely called for!) on the evening of that huckster-charlatan Jerry Falwell’s death.
It’s a shame. There’s nobody left in our culture who will do this kind of thing now, let alone do it with such intellectual rigor and sense of honor or nobility for those Falwell harmed.
It is a shame that the police did not pick those shouting and take them outside one by one for obstruction of the presentation of the movie. Instead they did just nothing to enforce the law. This is so regrettable that bullies get upper hand in peaceful societies so easily.
Ups! this comment was to the other clip in this thread. Sorry!
There’s a lot of people left in our culture who will do this kind of thing now. Admittedly, a lot of them are teens/collegiates on internet blogs and discussion fora, who do so with less intellectual rigor. There are enough, however, that statistical distribution will leave some of comparable raw (though not developed) intellectual capacity. The solution would seem to be introducing competitive social pressure toward intellectual rigor.
In the language of classical mythology, the death of the dragon Hitchens has merely sown the field with his teeth.
(As I regard “honor and nobility” to be mostly be just a polite way of expressing one’s tendency to sociopathy, I place less importance on cultivating them — though I admit I prefer sociopathy retaining a veneer of politeness over when it is lacking the veneer.)
Thanks very much linking to this. I’ve always been on the shy and quiet side, but reading/listening to Christopher Hitchens and others has motivated me to be more outspoken, especially when it’s called for.
Here’s a fitting accommodationist comment I saw on Ross Douthat’s NYTimes article about Hitchens.
I don’t know why some people seem to think that beliefs must be respected merely because they are held. If you say something silly, you should expect people to call you on it.
(I also don’t know quite what to make of that last sentence in Douthat’s article.)
Where I agree that religious types shouldn’t get a “get out of jail free” card (an idea is not immune to critique just because it is religious), I don’t agree with shouting down.
Here is what this type of rudeness can lead to:
[youtube=http://youtu.be/lQQAWrIvBoI]
It is a shame that the police did not pick those shouting and take them outside one by one for obstruction of the presentation of the movie. Instead they did just nothing to enforce the law. It is so regrettable that bullies get upper hand in peaceful societies so easily.
As well as this.
You can find another more neutral commentary at http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/285992/christopher-hitchens-rip-john-derbyshire
What I find odd is that Greenwald explicitly and Corey Robin implicitly describe Hitchens as a neocon fanatic, while Derbyshire says he was a “court jester for the liberal elites”.
I’m not sure that either description is wholly accurate.
My own feelings about Hitchens agree with the long paragraphs in Derbyshire’s short commentary. I will remember him primarily for those merits where he was one of a kind and not for what I consider to be his shortcomings where he was in a rather undistinguished group.
it is actually Puebla, not Publa
Did you mean to say “I was that meeting”?
Principled folks have to stand up to bullies and “call their cons.”
Bullies will always call that “incivility” and rudeness and cry about what they cannot themselves deliver — principled, fact-based arguments.
If you let dishonest folks and bullies push you around — you are being suckered.
Free thinkers have had enough of that.
I agree completely.
Right below Dan Dennett’s eulogy are links including one by Francis Collins. I just read it and think he has a good portray of Hitch, although I don’t really like his ending.
( subscribing )
I apologize if it has already been mentioned, but apparently Francis Collins has also written an article on Hitchens in the Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/in-remembrance-of-my-friend-hitch/2011/12/18/gIQAHxMx2O_blog.html
Thanks for the link. I thought it was much better than the other eulogies I’ve read by Christians.
I found it very interesting that Collins seems to think that Hitchens is in Heaven. He said that he hopes Hitchens was wrong about the afterlife, and that would be sick if he believed atheists go to hell. Collins also hopes to talk to Hitchens again. Maybe Collins is more liberal than he lets on?
I was somewhat surprised to see that Collins doesn’t consider salvation to hinge on one’s acceptance of Jesus (since he seems to think that even nonbelievers get into heaven). I just assumed that this was a basic requirement of evangelical Christians, guess I was wrong.
Far worse requirements are ignored all the time… It’s impossible to conclude anything about what people in a church are supposed to believe based on what they actually believe.
Remember that most churches don’t discuss their creeds. Their priest preaches and I bet afterwards people will fail to regurgitate what was said minutes before.
It is remarkable that Collins cannot resist self-aggrandizement (mentioning Human Genome Project) while telling about Hitchen’s sickness and search for cure.
It is inappropriate to speak of Hitchens faults right now, and he had many. I really don’t care about his personal life as much as I care about what he stood for. Rude he was sometimes, but what’s wrong with being rude? I have a lifetime of insults and rudeness directed at me for being an atheist, not to mention the insults not directed at me but at all atheists in general. Poor sensitive believers, They will get over it.
Hitchens himself deplored the idea that it is inappropriate to speak ill of someone who has just died. He was on television the day Falwell died, rightly excoriating that charlatan. He criticized Mother Theresa and Reagan when they died.
There is a lot I didn’t like about Hitchens, but one of his traits that I really admired was his scrupulous honesty about his convictions, even in the face of societal niceties encouraging their suppression. Plainly expressing what one feels about him is, I think, a fitting tribute to the man.
A good way to look at him; thanks.
I think many people do not understand the difference between being rude and simply telling the unvarnished truth. If I tell my neighbor that religion is bunk, I am not being rude. I am telling him what it is. If he is free to say “Jesus loves me”, I am free to say “You are deluded”.
I just scanned the comments and don’t think anyone has posted what I think is the most import part of Dennett’s eulogy:
“But what Christopher showed me–and I keep it in mind now wherever I speak–is that there is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude, as rude as you have to be to stop such pollution of young minds in its tracks with a quick, unignorable shock. Of course I knew that as a general principle, but I needed to be reminded, to be awakened from my diplomatic slumbers by his example.” (my emphasis)
It’s intriguing that, aside from the occasionally ghoulish Christians who are saying “Good Riddance Hitchens, enjoy Hell!” that a lot of Christians (including even gnu-basher Catholic Philosopher Edward Feser and his minions) are expressing the sentiment “May God have mercy on Hitchens soul.”
This speaks right to Hitchens’ thesis of how religion poisons everything: that even a religious person’s best behaviour is poisoned by his religion.
It’s clear that many Christians admired Hitchens and don’t feel in their hearts that even Hitchens ought to be sent down the chute to eternal hell. They wouldn’t do it to him.
They clearly feel it isn’t right, which is why they “hope” that God doesn’t press the elevator button “down” on Hitch.
But…what if God DOES jettison Hitch to eternal damnation?
So much the worse for the Christian’s good feelings and compassion toward Hitchens. The sentiment that Hitchens would not deserve a sentence of eternal torment would be shown (on Christian grounds) to be no longer be “right” or “good.” Because God being necessarily “good,” whatever God decides to do to Hitchens will be the “good” thing to do.
And this is the poisoning of the religion. Right when the Christian is thinking rationally about justice, about how to treat people who disagree with you, about the virtue of compassion, feeling empathy…all the ways in which their reasoning comports with most notions of fair play and morality in civil society, they have swallowed the poison pill. That poison pill is their religious dogma: that their bible describes a Perfectly Good God and that if God sentences someone to Hell, they must accept that as The Good, Moral decision.
In order to find a “moral basis” they must twist their morality at it’s foundation, which makes a mockery of their otherwise moral sentiments.
Hitch was right.
Vaal
One of the encouraging things about religion is that most believers are better than the god they believe in.
“Because none of us are as bad as all of us”?
Jerry A. Coyne, Ph.D Wrote:
“Hitch would not hesitate to call out the pope, or Mother Teresa, or anybody else. Honor his memory by following his example.”
Perhaps Hitch was following the example of Jesus using physical force to Cleanse The Temple ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleansing_of_the_Temple
Hardly. There are other fictional heroes Hitch would have drawn inspiration from long before turning to the Zombie of Zion as a role model.
Cheers,
b&
I have to disagree with Dennett. Hitch was not the angriest of the “four horsemen”, he was the most outraged. Morally outraged–big difference. Hitchens would not stand to be insulted nor told that he was immoral nor hesitate to blurt out that God convicts you of thought crime.
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/20/i_knew_christopher_hitchens_better_than_you/singleton/
The link to Dennett’s article doesn’t go where it should. You may wish to update.