Thanks to alert reader Michael, I’ve made my first visit to the Dublin Review of Books site, where you can read a review of Christopher Hitchens’s last book, Mortality. The review is by Seamus O’Mahony, who seems uniquely qualified for the task:
Seamus O’Mahony is a physician with an interest in medicine and literature. He has written pieces on AJ Cronin, Axel Munthe and Somerset Maugham for a variety of medical journals.
O’Mahony’s essay is called “The Big D,” which I presume refers to “death,” and it’s simply the most bizarre critique of Hitchens I’ve ever read. We’ve all seen Hitchens attacked post mortem for his drinking, his promotion of the Iraq war, his “unthinking” atheism, and so on, but O’Mahony goes after Hitchens for—wait for it—being overly optimistic about surviving his cancer. Yes, the skeptic Hitchens, says O’Mahony, was not so skeptical about the odds of beating his disease; in fact, he supposedly acquired a kind of faith that he would survive. So, in the end, Hitchens was quasi-religious after all.
It’s a disgusting allegation, one that demeans anyone who wants to survive a deadly disease.
The interesting part of the essay is O’Mahony’s professional assessment of esophageal cancer, of the kinds of treatment Hitchens received, and of Hitchens’s odds (apparently only 3% of those having stage 4 esophageal cancer survive more than five years). As you’ll know if you’ve read Mortality or the Vanity Fair essays on which it’s based, you’ll know that Hitchens underwent a long regimen of surgery and chemotherapy, and even tried gene-based therapy with the help of his friend, Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health. It all failed. O’Mahony thinks that Hitchens should have had a better appreciation of the odds.
Here are a few snippets to give the tone of the review:
I am intrigued by Mortality for one main reason, which is this: Hitchens’s beliefs about his advanced cancer and its treatment were, for a man whose fame rested on his scepticism, uncharacteristically optimistic. I hesitate to use the word delusional, as he admitted that he would be very lucky to survive, but he clearly steadfastly hoped, right to the end, that his particular case of advanced cancer might lie on the sparsely populated right side of the bell-shaped curve of outcome statistics. He famously mocked religious folk for their faith in supernatural entities and survival of the soul after bodily death, yet the views expressed in Mortality are just as wishful and magical. “The oncology bargain [oncology is that branch of medicine which deals with the treatment of cancer],” writes Hitchens, “is that in return for at least the chance of a few more useful years, you agree to submit to chemotherapy and then, if you are lucky with that, to radiation or even surgery.” Years? I must now confess to a professional interest. I am a gastroenterologist in a large acute hospital, and I have diagnosed many patients with oesophageal cancer. “Years” is a word not generally used when discussing prognosis in Stage Four oesophageal cancer, “months”, in my experience, being a more useful one.
About Francis Collins’s suggestion that gene therapy might be tried:
[Collins]This great humanitarian is also a devotee of the work of C.S. Lewis, and in his book The Language of God has set out the case for making science compatible with faith.”
Ironically, it is the Christian who has to lower the expectations of the sceptical atheist. Hitchens proposes to Collins that his entire DNA, along with that of his tumour, be “sequenced”, “even though its likely efficacy lies at the outer limits of probability”. Indeed. Collins is circumspect, conceding that if such “sequencing” was performed, “it could be clearly determined what mutations were present in the cancer that is causing it to grow. The potential for discovering mutations in the cancer cells that could lead to a new therapeutic idea is uncertain – that is at the very frontier of cancer research right now.” Diplomatically put, Dr Collins.
It could be argued that [Hitchens’s] approach to his cancer treatment was at odds with much that he previously professed to believe (or not believe) in. In God Is Not Great, he coined the withering phrase “the tawdriness of the miraculous”. . . His wife, his friends and his doctors might wish to remind themselves of what Hitchens wrote in God Is Not Great: “Those who offer false consolation are false friends.” In his memoir, Hitch-22, he was scathing of such wishful thinking: “I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.”
And, finally, the last blow, implying that Hitchens was, at the end, not so very different from any religious believer:
As news of Hitchens’s cancer diagnosis first became widely known, evangelical Christians speculated on the internet about whether his illness would lead to a religious conversion. In Mortality, Hitchens scoffs at the notion. But in his time of “living dyingly”, he did find a kind of faith. This was not a return to the Anglicanism of his upbringing, or the Judaism of his mother’s family. Hitchens, the arch-mocker, the über-rationalist, the debunker of myth, found solace and consolation in the contemporary rites of genetics and oncology. Reviewing Arguably (Hitchens’s final prose collection), the philosopher John Gray observed: “That Hitchens has the mind of a believer has not been sufficiently appreciated.”
I find this manifestly unfair—in fact, a passive-aggressive claim that “Hitchens was religious, too!” masquerading as a dispassionate medical analysis.
Hitchens admitted openly that he didn’t want to die. He was only in his early sixties, and had tasks to do and children he wanted to watch grow up. His life was full, and I imagine must have been immensely fun. Under such circumstances, is it analogous to religion to think that you might be one of those rare survivors of cancer? After all, there is a nonzero survival rate, and 3% is a probability much higher than that of God’s existence.
And I can’t help but think that Hitch really knew his prognosis. Remember how often people asked him how he was, and his answer: “Dying, like all of us.” He was no slouch, and would have looked up the statistics. But if there might be a way to live, why not try it?
On top of all this, O’Mahony admits that Hitchens was certainly given false hope by his doctors:
Why did Hitchens harbour such unrealistic expectations? It is clear that his oncologists (he would appear to have consulted several) actively encouraged his misplaced optimism. Oncologists prefer the word “hope” to “delusion”. Over the years, I have witnessed many cancer patients, after protracted (and ultimately futile) therapies, facing death with all the preparedness of Carol Blue and Christopher Hitchens. These patients often experience a sudden deceleration in medical intensity from high-tech, invasive intervention to a side room, the morphine infusion and the chaplaincy service. Oncologists naturally tend to emphasise the positive, concentrating on the good news flashes, such as the “clear” scan. Most doctors will only impart the cold, bare facts when cornered and directly questioned, usually by patients with the necessary medical knowledge. As a profession, we are loath to appear “blunt” and “uncaring”.
Indeed, I experienced just this when my father died of lymphoma ten years ago. As an ex-Army officer, he was in Walter Reed hospital, and in bad shape. We all knew the end was nigh, and we considered putting him in hospice care. But hospices in Washington require that admitted patients be no more than roughly six weeks away from death. I tried to find out my father’s prognosis, and the doctors just shuffled their feet, hemmed and hawed, and talked vaguely about “well, it could be a few weeks, it could be months,” and so on. In other words, they talked about the tails of the survival distribution. But I needed something more for the hospice care. I went up through the chain of doctors, and finally cornered the head surgeon in an examining room. “Yes, I know there’s variation,” I told him. “But I want to know what the mean survival time is for someone in my father’s condition.” (I would have said “mode”, but that may have been too arcane.) He finally admitted that it was less than two weeks. My father died within a few days without ever having left the hospital.
Yes, I suppose patients should be given an honest assessment of their odds, and of the time that probably remains—if they want to know. As O’Mahony notes, doctors with a terminal disease die very differently from laymen: knowing the odds, physicians often abjure the last-ditch treatments and “go gently.” But Hitchens was not a doctor: he was a patient who didn’t want to die young. As most of us know who saw him or his videos, he bore his illness bravely, and, though he never said outright “I am going to die soon,” everyone knew that he would—including, I suspect, himself.
O’Mahony’s essay is worth reading for the medical details, but in the end it’s a mean-spirited and misguided attempt to drag Hitchens down to the level of religious believers. O’Mahony couldn’t do that by speaking about deathbed conversions, but he does it another way.
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People seem to confuse being human with a human outlook with their demands of faith..
That’s rich. Criticizing someone for not fighting for their life. I thought it was atheism that led to despair?
Oops. Let’s try that again.
That’s rich. Criticizing someone for fighting for their life. I thought it was atheism that led to despair?
1) Dr. Mahoney hesitates to call Hitchens thought process delusional?
Mahoney is using a term from psychiatric medicine quite loosely, irresponsibly, dishonorably as it (slyly) entertains a diagnosis of Hitchens as psychotic (as delusions are the sine qua non for psychotic presentation). To Dr. Maloney one should direct the question, did you entertain, albeit hesitatingly the use of an antipsychotic medication on Hitchens?
2) Dr. Mahony admits Hitchens did not fall back on his Anglican upbringing upbringing, or the Judaism of his mother’s family. But “he found solace and consolation in the contemporary rites of genetics and oncology.”
Dr. Mahoney is ah so clever, using the word rites. Two things to note here. Hitchens was employing contemporary lab procedures. (Dr. Mahoney, one should ask, Do you employ the contemporary “rites” in GI medicine such as endoscopy, CT?)
Several points beg consideration:
1) Contemporary is operational. This was a major thrust of Hitchens > to support modern science. The lab methodologies, imaging, gene studies simply weren’t available in the past – and the ones cited (but diminished as rituals) are the best we have to date. And Hitchens would be happy that Dr. Mahoney recognized his (Hitchens) utilization of these modern methods. He (Hitchens) even brought in Collins from the NIH for consideration of gene sequencing. Clearly T – Cells treatments are in consideration in the future for cancers based T cell typing.
Again Dr. Mahoney’s description of these as rites betray his (Mahoney’s) attempt to be ah so clever.
But IMO such usage betrays a strained attempt to be too clever by a half. Does a bit of narcissism taint Dr. Mahoney’s piece: He (Dr. Mahoney) will do what no one has done heretofore – he found Hitchens out!
(But only if you defame the man; entertain delusional or the possibility of delusional like thinking, and belittle the entire field of medicine. A field reliant on rite-like methods, as opposed for example to hard, uncompromising bench work.)
Furthermore the reliance of Bell curve methodology. (I am no mathematician, nor statistician but such methods in math only became available in the 19th century, after Gauss and Quetelet also Galton). The use of the Bell curve by Hitchens in an exacting manner is laudable. Redolent of Stephen Gould’s, “The Median is not the Messenger.”
Mahoney belittles this. “I hesitate to use the word delusional . . . He hoped that his case might be on the bell-shape curve of the outer statistic . . . ”
(BTW Dr. Mahoney where else could his case be? Not under the bell.)
Oh my god.
Of course, and since Hitch didn’t despair he can’t really have been an atheist, I think this is the foundation of this nonsense. That he may have had hope of his treatment succeeding on a scientific level, (ie 3% isn’t zero) is not an acceptable conclusion. Hope = religion for this slimy doctor.
This seems like an extension of a typical theist stereotype of atheists: we don’t think there’s an afterlife, so we’re pessimists. Skepticism = pessimism. Theists are optimistic that there’s an afterlife. Therefore, if you’re optimistic about anything, you’re a theistic believer.
Indeed.
Skepticism = pessimism = cynicism = nihilism = every bad thing.
It’s a corollary to the more general religious con that every good thing, love, appreciation of the beauty of a mountain, wonder, hope, comes from god/religion rather than from our common human nature.
Agreed. At the same time I don’t think that scepticism necessarily aligns with either optimism or pessimism. Skepticism isn’t just “doubting”. If it was, atheists really would be the sad sods were portrayed as; who knows maybe that’s part of the cause of the misconception?
I thought Hitchens said quite frankly during the Paxman interview that it would kill him (although I could be wrong). I thought his hope was that it wouldn’t be very soon.
Some Hitch quotes from the Paxman interview. Sorry about punctuation ~ I’m poor at it.
“…and the prognosis for that, if you lump it all together, if you leave out every other consideration, 5% of us live another five years so that’s not ideal. But, I have a strong constitution…”
“I have a feeling that’s why people propitiate it with bogus cures, terrible rumours, scare stories & so on and I’ve set my face to trying to demonstrate that it’s a malady like any other & it will yield to reason & science & that’s what I’m trying to spend my time vindicating”
“…it’s a certainty that’s what I’ll die from [that it will be] the proximate cause of my death and I’m lucky & unlucky enough to know it in advance – to takes its measure”
No need to apologise for anything mate. You did far better than I did. You dug out the actual quotes. I merely posted a vaguely remembered reference! 🙂
The “..it’s a certainty that’s what I’ll die from…” is the bit I was talking about. It doesn’t sound like someone whose “beliefs about his advanced cancer and its treatment were, for a man whose fame rested on his scepticism, uncharacteristically optimistic.”
Re punctuation. It is comforting for me to know that Hitchens was a bloody awful punctuationist [made up word]
If I’m ever in the same position in which Hitch found himself, I would try such treatments. Not in any real hope it might work, but because in my last days some knowledge might be gained that could benefit others. It would make me feel better knowing I would leave this world doing one last thing to help those who follow down the road.
If Hitch had simply shrugged his shoulders and done nothing at all, people like O’Mahony would have claimed being an atheist caused him to simply give up, because atheism robs one of hope and optimism (which those of us who are nonbelievers know is not true, but believers assume it to be the case).
O’Mahony and his ilk wouldn’t have dared to say anything were Hitch still alive, because they know he would have eviscerated them. Instead they take cheap shots now that he’s no longer around to respond.
If their goal is to demonstrate what repugnant cowards they are, then we should congratulate them. They’re doing a stellar job.
well said.
Most doctors I interacted with during my cancer treatments suggested you should know your odds, but you must go through treatment with the expectation that it will work.
The placebo effect works both ways, after all. If you concentrate on how you’ll likely die of your disease.. odds go up that you will do just that. Living with the expectation that it will work generally improves your quality of life while going through the treatment, too.
And, quite apart from the placebo effect, if you happen to survive you might as well be prepared for it. (Whereas, if death is coming soon, preparation is not going to make much difference in the long run)
That’s the attitude I try to take about the future of human civilization. Whatever the odds, live as if we can save it.
(But either way, it’s good to know there are other earth-like worlds; thanks Kepler!)
The review seems to confuse optimism in leading one’s life with a lack of skepticism.
As best I could tell, Hitchens was well aware of what faced him. He simply wanted to make the best of what remained of his life, and did not want to spend that remaining time brooding about his fate.
Hitchens used to say the chances of survival were 5%… I know that doesn’t agree with this particular oncologist, but it’s probably within the same confidence interval.
Hitchens used to remind people, with regard to his stage 4 esophageal cancer: there is no stage 5.
Hitchens said he was “living dyingly”.
Hitchens, when asked how he was, said “dying”.
If I had good reason to believe my chances of survival were 5% and I thought there was something that could up that from 5% to 5.1%, that is not faith, that is survival.
The bits of the essay by Seamus O’Mahony quoted here look like the most desperate attempt to talk about a deathbed conversion. Desperate, and demeaning.
Hope is not the same as faith.
Exactly. As usual, they’re equivocating. It’s amazing to think how much religious belief is based on sloppy thinking and bad analogies.
Having a secular form of “faith” in your doctor or hope for a better-than-average outcome is simply pragmatic reliance. If you have a specifically religious faith in your doctor or positive outcome, however, then there is nothing which could change your mind. You’ve primed yourself to make excuses — and would do so even if your doctor pulled out a shotgun and started shooting up the cancer ward … or you immediately die and “go to heaven.”
“But I want to know what the mean survival time is for someone in my father’s condition.”
Really? Check out Stephen Jay Gould’s essay “The median is not the message” (best-ever essay title)? Relating to his own cancer (not the one he later died of), he was surprised to learn that the mean survival time was 2 years or whatever. However, of the half who do survive 2 years generally lived much longer. In other words, the distribution had a long tail to the right. This is not uncommon: if you survive the first year or whatever, you’re probably OK.
It is almost 5 years since my last chemotherapy treatment for lymphoma. My life expectancy is probably about the same now as if I never had had the cancer.
Live long and prosper.
This Seamus guy is an Irish I guess. Remember, Ireland is currently the most religious country in Western Europe.
Here in Scandinavia (I am Norwegian)I suspect even most Christians would find this piece ugly (fortunately most Christians in Norway are genuinely decent people)
“Remember, Ireland is currently the most religious country in Western Europe. ”
The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church have been doing a fine job of remedying that situation over the last few years.
True. In fact I saw a piece on youtube about how the devout Catholics in Ireland complained about the fact that many Irish are now leaving the church.
Some good news:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/july-15-2011/decline-of-the-irish-catholic-church/9146/
Classic “Tu quoque” argument:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
Theists have no rational arguments in order to argue with atheist, so they switch to accusing their opponents of being guilty to the same problem.
A very unpleasant and unnecessary piece of writing, disingenuously hiding the real agenda. “Passive-aggressive” summarizes it well.
This review isn’t terribly impressive. Equating a desire to pursue a small chance at prolonging life with “hoping for a miracle” misses the point. Hitch wasn’t “hoping for a miracle”. Suggesting, as O’Mahony did, that Hitch was hoping that “the laws of nature have been suspended (in your favour)” suggests a profound misunderstanding of what Hume wrote (and Hitch quoted).
I do not believe that Ken Murray would have thought the same about Hitch, and it is a shame to link his very interesting piece about How Doctors Die http://goo.gl/jeiiG to this jeering account from O’Mahony.
I believe it to be fairly likely that if you had a complete goals-of-care discussion with Hitchens (and his family/friends to the extent he wanted them involved in it), that a completely-informed Hitchens would have chosen the route of continuing aggressive medical interventions. It isn’t as if he were going to a faith healer or trying “alternative” treatments with no plausible biologic mechanism.
——————–
It may be a little close to home to talk about, and I understand if you don’t really want to comment further, but…you’ve got many readers here as well.
You said, in talking about your father: “We all knew the end was nigh, and we considered putting him in hospice care. But hospices in Washington require that admitted patients be no more than roughly six weeks away from death.”
You may have meant “six months”, which is the requirement for the Medicare Hospice benefit. (Note that it doesn’t require that the patient actually happen to die within six months, just that two docs consider it likely.) If this is the case, then it’s a simple to fix typo.
If you were given to believe that the requirement was actually six weeks, then there is a problem. Something got lost in communication somewhere. (In addition to the failure of the health care team to effectively communicate with you about prognosis at all.) There is no “six weeks” criterion in place. Now when you say “admission” it is possible that you meant admission to an inpatient hospice unit and not admission to hospice. Individual hospices have some discretion about what their criteria are for inpatient hospice unit admission. <6 week prognosis doesn't seem to be a useful one, but I suppose some of them might have chosen it.
I can guarantee that I would not have given you a "mean" survival except under very limited circumstances. False precision. My language would have been "hours-to-days", "days-to-weeks", "weeks-to-months", or "months-to-years". When a doc does give a mean survival number, patients/families have a strong tendency to misinterpret what this actually means. (You wouldn't have made this misinterpretation, but other non-statistically minded family members might have.) I may have a selection bias working here (since docs know me and wouldn't choose to give the kind of impossibly precise estimate in front of me), but I very rarely see any physicians giving these non-ranged means. I think they are right to avoid them.
Huh. I remember reading in Mortality that Hitchens knew he would die but nevertheless hoped for at least a bit of a remission. In the end he died from complications of treatment (pneumia) not the cancer itself. Indeed, this is a reach from the writer.
I think the diagnosis depends on the physician. My dad had esophageal cancer but the kind in the lower esophagus (from chronic acid reflux – beware sufferers in their 60s & 70s – and the surgeons were often pretty up front but the stats would be confused often. Since he caught it early enough (though not early as would have been liked), he had a surgery to remove his stomach and tumour and was able to forgo the chemo and radiation (as it gave him a 15% survival rate after 5 yrs while taking the deadly poisons gave him only 5% more).
This is ridiculous. There is nothing irrational about not wanting to die, nor about hoping you’re one of the lucky cancer patients who beat the odds.
By all accounts, Hitch was painfully aware of his poor odds of survival, but chose nonetheless to keep trying to find a cure. And since some people in his situation do get cured, this is an entirely rational choice.
It’s not irrational at all. 3% isn’t nothing. If there is a 3% chance that your house will flood you’d likely be a fool not to buy flood insurance. There is evidence for these 3% survivors, you can meet them and talk to them and their doctors. As for frontier treatments, there are examples, though much fewer, of a those as well. He is rolling dice where we know that some rolls come up winners. There is nothing untoward about hoping that your roll comes up three sixes, even though you know that is unlikely.
It is irrational to believe in life after death, on the other hand, because there is absolutely no evidence of such a thing and, furthermore, everything we do know and have evidence for on the topic (e.g. the brain-mind identity + the decay of the brain) says that it’s impossible. It is irrational to roll the dice and expect it to come up three sevens, because investigation of the dice reveals that there is no seven.
What an odd commentary on Hitchens. As an atheist who was recently diagnosed as having a terminal illness, I have two monosyllabic words for O’Mahoney. He doesn’t warrant anything of more eloquence or effort.
Here’s hoping you’re on the tail, a new outlier even, of whatever cursed distribution you’ve found yourself on.
Yes, let’s hope that you are on the tail of the distribution curve and also that you’ll take advantage of whathever medical developments will be available to increase your chances. All the best!
Thank you both for the kind thoughts.
That was hard to read. He seemed to be gloating over Hitchens death. Just nasty.
Nasty and dense too. Nowhere does Hitchens apply any of the delusions of religion. There simply is no comparison. He did not pray, but used science and the slim margin of hope that it brings. Given he had regularly referred to himself as dying, I do not see do not see where he was overly optimistic. I see no evidence for that accusation.
Nasty indeed. And even if Hitchens had succumbed to irrational hope – which he did not – he had always warned of the possibility of his enemies trying to win an argument when he is dead or dying when they could not do so when he was healthy and in full rationality.
Glad you picked up on this Jerry. I saw it and thought `this guy does not know the difference between belief and hope`
At least in Pennsylvania, you can get hospice care inplace. My mother was in a nursing home, and late last year, when she was diagnosed as likely to die within several weeks, she was able to get hospice care at the nursing home. I hadn’t known about such services, until the doctor taking care of my mother called me.
The service sends hospice workers to the nursing home who attended to my mother, and who were available to talk with me about her condition. (I doubt that this kind of care was available widely when your father was at Walter Reed.) After her, death, the service continued to offer me grief counseling.
At least in Pennsylvania, you can get hospice care in place. My mother was in a nursing home, and late last year, when she was diagnosed as likely to die within several weeks, she was able to get hospice care at the nursing home. I hadn’t known about such services, until the doctor taking care of my mother called me.
The service sends hospice workers to the nursing home who attended to my mother, and who were available to talk with me about her condition. (I doubt that this kind of care was available widely when your father was at Walter Reed.) After her, death, the service continued to offer me grief counseling.
No, there is nothing “magical” about hoping medical treatments cure a patient’s cancer. The odds might be low, but they aren’t nonexistent. “Wishful,” sure, but not magical. Why would someone who believes in a magical sky fairy want to blur the line between a human emotion like hope and a childish concept like magic, I wonder?
Seamus O’Mahony reviews In Two Minds: a Biography of Jonathan Miller an entirely different kettle of fish.
Well worth a read if you’re interested in Miller. As O’Mahony puts it:- “…doctor, followed by theatre and opera director, television presenter and documentary maker, author and populariser of science, sculptor, photographer, public intellectual, humanist, and so on”
But….both Hitch and his wife stated that he had already lived longer than he had expected. He attributed it to his “strong constitution”. So he had some evidence, not faith, that he might be in the outlier region.
Hitch’s wife said that neither of them expected that he would die when he went into the hospital the last time, because he was still responding well to the cancer treatments. As was said, he died of pneumonia, hardly an illness with almost no hope of survival. People with pneumonia have a reasonable expectation that they might recover from it.
Typical theistic re-writing of the facts to fit their thesis.
The line about “the contemporary rites of genetics and oncology” is especially rich. You can tell you’re dealing with a dishonest, unserious, or simply dense person when they make arguments along the lines of “science is just another religion”. No, it’s not. Science demands no faith, but it works. Religions demand faith because they do not work.
Personally, I admire a strong determination in the face of uncertainty or terrible certainties like death. This article just increases the respect I have for Hitchens.
Taking advantage of the latest therapies in the hope of ending up in the happy tail of the curve should be far more characteristic of atheists than Christians, as the former know that death is, indeed, the end.
That it isn’t shows a crack in the Christian edifice.
I’m sure Dr. O’Mahony does his best to keep his own patients properly pessimistic.
No, the views Hitchens expresses in Mortality are nothing at all like “faith in supernatural entities and survival of the soul,” you deluded loon. That there is a fair, even comparison between Hitchens’ extremely slender and cautious reason-based optimism and the wishful, magical belief in ghosts and heaven is a fine bit of wishful, magical thinking on your own part, o cock-eyed physician.
Consider yourself mocked.
Jeez. As Mordanicus #15 wrote, this is simply a very lame and strained effort at a tu quoque, an “I know you are but what am I.” I actually feel embarrassed for O’Mahoney. This article is putting forth cringe-worthy apologetics in a desperate attempt to attach the label “religion” to any sign of human weakness … and then demand mutual forbearance from atheists.
That’s not going to work. It’s like someone demanding that scientists refrain from criticizing homeopathy because after all, scientists are in favor of vaccination. Those two things sorta kinda almost resemble each other enough to make us fellow believers, right? What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
What a maroon.
In his book “Bully for Brontosaurus”, in the essay “The Median isn’t the Message”, Stephen Jay Gould describes his encounter with abdominal mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer.
It turned out that his form of cancer had a median mortality of only 8 months after discovery but as an evolutionary biologist with a background in statistics he knew that what that meant was that half of that population would be dead within 8 months but the other half wouldn’t, so he did everything he could to be in that second half.
Given advances in cancer treatment, everything he could do to stay out of the first half increased his chances that new treatments would be discovered.
His cancer was was discovered in 1982 and he lived 20 more years after that, so he seemed to be reacting to his diagnosis in a realist manner.
Stonyground:
Many atheists have died and had religious liars claim that they had a last minute conversion. As far as I am aware Hitchens was writing right up to the moment of his death and so it was impossible for anyone to make this claim. So this vile and pathetic smear is the best that he could come up with.
Disgusting and low.
The odds of winning the lottery are far slimmer than those of surviving that type of cancer. I have played the lottery. Does that make me religious?
Or how about this: What are the odds of someone becoming a famous writer? They’re a whole lot less than 3%.
As long as the chances are not zero I don’t think it’s odd to hope for the best.
So much fail-making, quote-mining and cherry-picking in O’Mahony.
First, Hitchens were talking generally. In many cases the average time is years.
Second, there *is* a high tail on the very common bell-shaped curve. And a few events will fall there. How this compares with supernatural entities and souls, of which there is no evidence and a lot of evidence against, is a mystery to everyone except, it seems, O’Mahony.
And the cherry-picking is to put a quote-mine against O’Mahony’s fabrication on Hitchen’s behavior.
Hitchens already lived his life as if every day was his last far before his diagnosis with cancer.
What this hack is seeing is not a man who refused to acknowledge an imminent demise, but a man spitting in the face of death and making the fullest of every day he could grab.
Pearls before swine in this case.
O’Mahoney could have spared himself the dishonor of writing what sounds like a slanted and mean-spirited review if he would have acknowledged one simple fact: “skepticism” is not an antonym of “optimism.” That would be “pessimism,” and I’ve never heard Hitchens proudly proclaim his pessimism, or argue that more people should be pessimists. So where is the irony? The most honorable possible response to late-stage cancer is to acknowledge the incredible odds against you (skepticism) and hope that you will beat them (optimism). If O’Mahoney wants to fault someone for being realistic without being pessimistic, I’d say that says a lot more about him than it does about his subject.
It’s been seventeen years since my last chemo and I know a bit about the experience having had fourteen chemo sessions over a seven month period.
1. If you haven’t been through it, your witness may be suspect.
2. If you have been through it, your experience will be unlike others.
3. Your oncologist–if he or she is really, really, really good at it–will not mislead, but will offer comments and encouragement to ensure your best frame of mind.
I have absolutely no idea what Hitchens and his oncologist discussed, but, having a high regard for his writing, suspect he approached his situation as he did everything else.
The problem with O’Mahoney’s cancer statistics of <5% survival for "years" is that they are based on historical data when new cancer drugs and therapies are being approved all the time and superior outcomes or survival data has not yet been reflected in the statistics memorized by doctors like him. There are recently approved drugs such as Yervoy and Zelboraf for metastatic melanoma that are sure to improve survival statistics once more patients are treated. Then there is "compassionate use" of experimental cancer treatments specifically for patients with stage IV cancer that may theoretically help but are unproven as well as personalized medicine whereby a person's cancer cells are removed and treated ex vivo with various combinations and doses of existing cancer drugs to concoct a more efficacious drug cocktail. Sequencing a tumor can also be used to determine which medications will work best for which cancer cell mutations (eg. Ras or BRCA genes). I'd like to know how the good doctor knows which experimental therapies Hitchens used. What if Hitch's therapy provides 5 year survival for 30% of stage IV esophageal cancer patients and he just happened to be in the 70% who weren't helped? Still dire odds doctor? How would he know? O'Maloney makes it sound like NO ONE survives esophageal cancer. 5% sure beats the efficacy of prayer!
I can only imagine that Hitch's response to the accusation that his hope to survive cancer by submitting to state-of-the-art medical science is synonymous with religious wishful thinking (if he was alive to respond) would be an emphatic "F**k You!" I personally don't engage in such ad hominem attacks on a classy site like this one.
Even at 5% there’s one chance in twenty and, if he’s getting treatment at a research center like Sloan-Kettering, as two of my friends have, should you be on the wrong side of the odds, the medical professionals may gain insight to help them treat others in similar circumstances.
I find this bizarre. Anyone who’s actually read Hitchen’s book know perfectly well how he felt his own prognosis, as it is littered throughout; not very hopeful, yet positive attitude towards the past and present. He knew perfectly well the limits of his prognosis, and had no need to be further skeptic about his surroundings. It baffles the mind that this Seamus has even read the thing? Me think he was critiquing something he would never have found in the book to begin with, and, well, Hitchen’s can’t prove him wrong, so … 🙁
I don’t get this new “bash Hitchens” trend. While I personally love most of Hitchens work and was a sucker for his confrontational style, I think there is plenty of legitimate criticism that could be made about him. However, this new wave of Hitchens-bashing is just a bunch of bizarre baseless statements. First, the book coming up by his old publishing company. The excerpts I have read are horribly written, and it seems to be filled with accusations of plagiarism and “fake socialism” based on conjecture only. The “I have no evidence but it’s not impossible” argument.
But what is wrong with this reviewer? Doing all you can to stay alive a bit longer is now a delusion? Hitchens’ entire argument against religion was based on people acting on their false beliefs, and that the very concept of blind submission to authority was repulsive. Maybe he’d have a point if Hitch went fully homeopathic or something. Trying to survive with modern medicine will most likely lead to neutral or positive results. On the other hand, religious people imposing their beliefs in society is not exactly analogous. I’m not sure how you can equate sodomy laws with an individual fighting cancer with the best medicine available. But then I have a sneaking suspicion that the writer was more familiar with strawman Hitchens (frothing atheist who thought all religious people were dumb and inferior) than the actual Hitchens.
It is weird, isn’t it?
If we (members of Right-To-Die-Societies) prepare that we can end our lives, that kind of physicians not only lie, but try to prevent us from a painless and selfdetermined death with the penal law, and even in countries where suicide is legal, they try to put us in the loony bin so that our dying is long and horrible.
Widespread are also the claims that all old people “cost too much” – never mind the contradiction – we would not if we got our way.
And now, that 1 atheist was willing to try all scientific medicine would permit to try, because he had a strong will to live and still lots of things to write about – the faithhead invents some twist to make Christopher Hitchens look like a believer???
If I could be astonished by a slave of the “infallible”, I would now.
The low back biting from the pens of old white male, mean minded Christian bigots is just sickening. The fact that CH had, and still has, legions of fans and admirers is the inspiration for this type of jealous post mortem slander. Aren’t Christians anyway exhorted to never speak ill of the dead? This is just another rusty nail in the ugly corpse of a false religion. Cancer is not to be sneered at by anyone, those who have gone into remission and those who have not all deserve our quiet and humble respect.