Appreciating Hitchens
Appreciating the body of work from Christopher Hitchens is no small task. Like any intellectual worth wrestling with, Hitchens positions have changed as he has encountered new experiences, facts and arguments which have necessitated doing so. His fallout from The Nation is only one example of the public disputes over political positions he believed needed to be reappraised and altered. To some Hitchens might be perceived as abrasive, but it would be unjust to label him as brittle. For many, changing opinions is a sign of weakness instead of a willingness to be open to new evidence which demands another response. Appreciating Hitchens involves an appreciation of intellectual honesty and a refusal to allow intellectual labels to prevent change.
Of all the reasons I appreciate Hitchens – his anti-clerical writing, empowered humanism, his defense of the original intentions for America’s split between church and state, his acerbic wit, and being so very lucid while supposedly so loaded – the fact that Hitchens has broken away from his “leftist” comrades and aligned with the neo-conservative movement may be why I hold his writing so near and dear to my heart. That I do not agree with his support of the Iraq War is forever a caution to my way of thinking, a reminder of why someone I hold so much in common with believes that going to war in Iraq was an intelligent choice, and what aspect of his argument deserves a response.
Born an Englishmen and now an American citizen, Hitchens has a unique perspective on the threat fundamental Islam represents. It is probably no accident that a fellow-former and now-current countryman Andrew Sullivan has rationalized his support of the invasion of Iraq along similar lines as Hitchens. Common lore has it that it was Hitchens’ first-hand experience with his friend Salman Rushdie, and the fatwa that was issued after Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses, which led Hitchens to see the threat to liberal democracy which militant Islam represented. While this may have personalized the issue for Hitchens, his overall body of work before the publication of the Verses shows his knowledge of the complexity and turmoil unique to the Middle East and its religious aspirations well before the issuance of the fatwa on Rushdie.
What Hitchens saw in the late 80s was not only the militant nature of Islamic fundamentalism, but the pallid response of his fellow “liberal” political ideologues. Because European culture understandably wishes to encourage an appreciation of other cultures, it wrestles with marginalizing and castigating portions of Muslim culture which seeks to blame the Western world for all its ills and ineptness. Bruce Bawer has powerfully made this point in his most recent book While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. Among his political companions at the moment Hitchens realized the inadequacy of Europe’s response were people infected with the post-modern tendency to disavow any family of ideas as better or worse than any other.
Hitchens has frequently remarked that always conscious in his mind is a realization that he is writing both for the contemporary reader and the historical record. Hubris aside – and the fact that he is probably right to have this thought – this statement comes from someone who believes that ideas actually matter. It should have come as no surprise to his former cohorts, friends and writers that he would change ideological orientation if he believed a particular set of ideas no longer provided efficacious responses to the challenges modernity presented. As someone who believed ideas actually not only mattered, but may matter most, Hitchens saw the terrible problem unfolding within liberal thinking in its inability to respond to the parts within Islamic fundamentalism which needed to be attacked, torn down, and responded to.
What Hitchens is right about is more important than what he was wrong about. He was wrong in choosing to support the war in Iraq; my suspicion is that this was a mistake unique to his academic bearing which a more pragmatic orientation would have prevented. He, as were many others, was wrong to justify the war on the basis of an imminent threat or ties to terrorism. He was profoundly wrong to believe that a Bush-led administration could pull off the type of delicate maneuvering necessary to engender democracy in post-invasion Iraq. He was probably wrong to elevate the very real promise of an empowered Kurdish republic above the civil war between Shia and Sunni which only Hussein’s iron fist kept in check. It is equally unlikely that history will look back at the action in Iraq as stabilizing and democratizing the Middle East, one of the essential justifications for going to war.
But Hitchens was not wrong to argue that the international body of laws represented by a host of Iraqi-violated UN resolutions required a response. More importantly, Hitchens was right to foresee that the battle of the next century will be between Islamic religious fundamentalism and an increasingly fragile set of European and American democracies who will have to fight not only the state-sponsored terrorists, but also the impulses from within their own citizenry to allow their special brand of religious fundamentalists loose in order to fight back. Hitchens was certainly right to understand that if international law is to mean anything, if we are to call religious extremism which disavows pluralism, personal liberty or societal freedom for the evil that it is, we must act to make these beliefs meaningful.
As a student and master of historical synthesis, Hitchens understands that humanity always walks the balance beam between enlightenment and darkness, and that certain factors play a role in pushing countries into one or the other. As he eloquently argues, the rise of religious extremism necessitates a response, but it necessitates the right one. Unfortunately for everyone, the administration of the war in Iraq may be the moment when Hitchens’ arguments were most publicly used and abused by an incompetent administrator. We will all be the worse off if Iraq proves to be Western civilization’s one modern-day bit at the Islamic apple.
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About MysteriousFaith
“If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.”
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