Christopher Hitchens – The Bully Pulpit

The real difficulty, I’ve found, in pasting passages from books here is that few paragraphs fully explain themselves. A paragraph is a vehicle taking you from one idea, the preceding paragraph, to the next one. So few are self-contained — they rely on what comes before and after. So few stand independent of context.

But the following paragraphs are worth reading with a sense of background. They’re from Martin Amis’s memoir about family, Experience. To set the scene:

Amis has just taken his best friend Christopher Hitchens to meet his friend and mentor, Saul Bellow, at Bellow’s summer house in Vermont. Expecting the two to get along swimmingly, Amis is surprised when, during a long dinner, Hitchens and Bellow (who share Jewish blood and an intense interest in the state of Israel) get into a fiery dispute about Edward Said and the future of Palestine. Amis and Hitchens leave the Bellow’s home in a polite but tense silence the following morning.

In returning to his vacation home on Horseleech Pond in Cape Cod, however, Amis is struck by a more shattering revelation: his marriage is dissolving and his life – his midlife – is in a state of crisis. This is a seismic moment: his world is shaking, shifting beneath him. So these paragraphs come at that point in the memoir, in a chapter called ‘Thinking with the Blood’.

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“I see [Saul] Bellow perhaps twice a year, and we call, and we write. But that accounts for only a fraction of the time I spend in his company. He is on the shelves, on the desk, he is all over the house, and always in the mood to talk. That’s what writing is, not communication but a means of communion. And here are the other writers who swirl around you, like friends, patient, intimate, sleeplessly accessible, over centuries. This is the definition of literature.

In one of his most stunning utterances Nietzsche said that a joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling…[And] feelings were being mourned: feelings about the first half of life. Youth can perhaps be defined as the illusion of your own durability. The final evaporation of this illusion parches the skin beneath the eyes and makes your hair crackle to the brush. It was over. There would be hell to pay. Dying suns of a certain size perform the alchemist’s nightmare: they turn gold into lead. And there we were, in 1989, heading towards base metal. Transmutation had come to him, and would soon come to me.

But here, for a little while longer, is the house on Horseleech Pond. Here are the trees where Christopher and I, at the age of thirty-six, stood posing for photographs with our sons in our arms: Louis, Alexander. The women taking the photographs were Antonia and Eleni. And there would be other births: Jacob, Sophia. All this is going to go. All this is going to disappear. This will fail. I will fail. I said to myself, Look at it: Look at what you’ve done. There is the rented car, a different rented car, in which you will drive alone to Logan. There is your wife, crying in the drive. Beyond her are your boys on the patch of grass, with that zoo of theirs – the frogs, the turtles.”

Amis and Hitchens, Cape Cod, 1985.Amis and Hitchens (with their sons, Louis, Alexander), Cape Cod, 1985.Amis, Brooklyn, 2012.

“Hitch: making rules about drinking can be the sign of an alcoholic,” as Martin Amis once teasingly said to me. (Adorno would have savored that, as well.) Of course, watching the clock for the start-time is probably a bad sign, but here are some simple pieces of advice for the young. Don’t drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food. Don’t drink if you have the blues: it’s a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood. Cheap booze is a false economy. It’s not true that you shouldn’t drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can’t properly remember last night. (If you really don’t remember, that’s an even worse sign.) Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed—as are the grape and the grain—to enliven company. Be careful about up-grading too far to single malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won’t be easily available. Never even think about driving a car if you have taken a drop. It’s much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don’t know quite why this is true but it just is. Don’t ever be responsible for it.”

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From A Short Footnote on the Grape and the Grain in the memoir Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens.

“Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as ‘England’ itself was becoming more of a nation-state and less an offshore dependency of Europe, an extraordinary committee of clergymen and scholars completed the task of rendering the Old and New Testaments into English, and claimed that the result was the ‘Authorized’ or ‘King James’ version. This was a fairly conservative attempt to stabilize the Crown and the kingdom, heal the breach between competing English and Scottish Christian sects, and bind the majesty of the King to his devout people. ’The powers that be,’ it had Saint Paul saying in his Epistle to the Romans, ‘are ordained of God.’ This and other phrasings, not all of them so authoritarian and conformist, continue to echo in our language: ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child’; ‘Eat, drink, and be merry’; ‘From strength to strength’; ‘Grind the faces of the poor’; ‘salt of the earth’; ‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’ It’s near impossible to imagine our idiom and vernacular, let alone our liturgy, without them. Not many committees in history have come up with such crystalline prose…

A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it [The Bible] or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. ‘Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,’ says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter? And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: ‘Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home. … Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.’

At my father’s funeral I chose to read a similarly non-sermonizing part of the New Testament, this time an injunction from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: ‘Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.’

As much philosophical as spiritual, with its conditional and speculative ‘ifs’ and its closing advice—always italicized in my mind since first I heard it—to think and reflect on such matters: this passage was the labor of men who had wrought deeply with ideas and concepts. I now pluck down from my shelf the American Bible Society’s ‘Contemporary English Version,’ which I picked up at an evangelical ‘Promise Keepers’ rally on the Mall in Washington in 1997. Claiming to be faithful to the spirit of the King James translation, it keeps its promise in this way: ‘Finally, my friends, keep your minds on whatever is true, pure, right, holy, friendly and proper. Don’t ever stop thinking about what is truly worthwhile and worthy of praise.’

Pancake-flat: suited perhaps to a basement meeting of A.A., these words could not hope to penetrate the torpid, resistant fog in the mind of a 16-year-old boy, as their original had done for me. There’s perhaps a slightly ingratiating obeisance to gender neutrality in the substitution of ‘my friends’ for ‘brethren,’ but to suggest that Saint Paul, of all people, was gender-neutral is to re-write the history as well as to rinse out the prose. When the Church of England effectively dropped King James, in the 1960s, and issued what would become the ‘New English Bible,’ T. S. Eliot commented that the result was astonishing ‘in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic.’ (Not surprising from the author of For Lancelot Andrewes.) This has been true of every other stilted, patronizing, literal-minded attempt to shift the translation’s emphasis from plangent poetry to utilitarian prose…”

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From Christopher Hitchens’s essay about the beauty of the King James Bible and the triviality of so many modern Biblical translations. When the King Saved God: a recommended read for anyone with an interest in Christianity, literature, history, words, language, or the church.

The photographs were taken on the Charles Bridge in Prague.

“‘Let’s just go in and enjoy ourselves,’ Yvonne [his mother] had said after a long moment when the Hitchens family had silently reviewed the menu — actually of the prices not the courses — outside a restaurant on our first and only visit to Paris. I knew at once that the odds against enjoyment had shortened (or is it lengthened? I never remember). ’You should be nicer to him,’ a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. ‘He has no friends.’ This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it. There are more robust versions of the same contradiction: a plug-ugly labor union/Cosa Nostra figure, asked at a Senate hearing if he thought his outfit was too powerful, looked around a couple of times and leaned into the mike before saying: ‘Senator: being powerful’s a bit like being ladylike. If you have to say you are, then you prolly ain’t.’ British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on uttering the words ‘Special Relationship’ to describe relations between Britain and America, lest the specialness itself vanish like a phantom at cock-crow. Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don’t introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar. ‘Martin is your best friend, isn’t he?’ a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.

The fragility of love is what is most at stake here — humanity’s most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed — but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one. Ian McEwan wrote a morally faultless essay just after the atrocities of 11 September 2001, noting that almost all voicemail messages from those on the doomed aircraft had ended with this very common trinity of words, and adding (in an almost but not quite supererogatory fashion) that by this means the murder victims had outdone and outlived their butchers.

But for me this Hays Office problem complicates the ancient question that Bertrand Russell answered (to my immense surprise) in the affirmative. If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: ‘Only if I did not know that I was doing so.’ To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean — even if it did build muscle — whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one’s learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period… the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.”

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From the memoir Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens.

“But the Jews of the Arab lands were expelled again in revenge for the defeat of Palestinian nationalism in 1947–48, and now the most evil and discredited fabrication of Jew-baiting Christian Europe—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—is eagerly promulgated in the Hamas charter and on the group’s Web site and recycled through a whole nexus of outlets that includes schools as well as state-run television stations.

This might license the view that the sickness [of anti-semitism] is somehow ineradicable and not even subject to rational analysis, let alone to rationalization. Anti-Semitism has flourished without banking or capitalism (for which Jews were at one time blamed) and without Communism (for which they were also blamed). It has existed without Zionism (of which leading Jews were at one time the only critics) and without the state of Israel. There has even been anti-Semitism without Jews, in states like Malaysia whose political leaders are paranoid demagogues looking for a scapegoat. This is enough to demonstrate that anti-Semitism is not a mere prejudice like any other: Sinhalese who don’t like Tamils, or Hutu who regard Tutsi as ‘cockroaches,’ do not accuse their despised neighbors of harboring a plan—or of possessing the ability—to bring off a secret world government based on the occult control of finance.

Paradoxically, then, there is something almost flattering about anti-Jewish racism. To have been confined in the ghetto for so long, and then to be held responsible for Marx, Freud, and Einstein, to say nothing of Rothschild… Yet the outcome is always the same: to be treated as human refuse and to be either deported or massacred. Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay profiling the anti-Semite has many shortcomings, but it’s hard to argue with his conclusion that such a person must necessarily carry a thirst for murder in his heart. Yet this is perhaps true of other racists as well. What strikes the eye about anti-Semitism is the godfather role it plays as the organizing principle of other bigotries. The Nazis may well have thought of Slavs and Poles as less than human, but it was the hatred of Jewry that cemented their worldview (and, horribly enough, gave them something in common with many of their Slavic and Polish victims).”

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From Christopher Hitchens’s short article Chosen.

Watch Hitchens give the annual Daniel Pearl lecture on anti-semitism below. This is one of the best speeches you’ll ever watch.

“A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’ except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so…

‘When people become older they become a little more tolerant,’ snaps the case-hardened Komorovski to the hot young idealist Pasha Antipov in Dr. Zhivago. ‘Perhaps because they have more to ‘tolerate’ in themselves,’ replies Antipov in what for many years I considered a very cutting return serve.

I sometimes feel that I should carry around some sort of rectal thermometer, with which to test the rate at which I am becoming an old fart. There is no point in pretending that the process doesn’t occur: it happens to me when near-beardless uniformed officials or bureaucrats, one third of my age, adopt a soothing tone while telling me, ‘Sir, I’m going to have to ask you…’ It also happens when I hear some younger ‘wannabe’ radicals employing hectoring arguments to which I have almost forgotten the answer. But that at least is because the arguments themselves are so old that they almost make me feel young again. From this kind of leathery awareness, nature itself protects the young, and a good thing, too, otherwise they would be old before their time and be taking no chances. Meanwhile, all of my children have negotiated the shoals of up-growing with a great deal more maturity than I did, and most of my moments of feeling that the world is not as bad as it might be have come from my students, especially the ones who decided in college that they wanted to join the armed forces and guard me while I sleep. (Meeting some of them later, after they have done a tour or two, has been particularly uplifting.) No, when I check the thermometer I find that it is the fucking old fools who get me down the worst, and the attainment of that level of idiocy can often require a lifetime…”

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From the memoir Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens.

Read other excerpts from Hitchens’s memoir here:

The Grape and the Grain

A Map of the World that Did Not Show Utopia

These Contradictions

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

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The famous soliloquy from the first scene of act three in Hamlet.

Here are Rabbi David Wolpe and Christopher Hitchens citing staves from this scene in their debate on the question of the afterlife. I’ve pasted the video here at the point just prior to when Hamlet gets brought into the mix, as it’s Sam Harris making a very interesting (and very relevant) point about our fear of death and how a parent could ever find consolation in the loss of a child.

For the record, I take issue with Harris’s implied point; namely, I think it’s death that is actually more upsetting — as an idea — than merely dying. The latter is a temporary moment of life, actually a part of our experience of the world. The former is not. As Larkin wrote, “Not to be here, not to be anywhere“: that’s what’s so horrifying to us. In his novel Metroland, Julian Barnes echoes this exact sentiment when he asserts, “I wouldn’t mind dying at all, as long as I didn’t end up dead at the end of it.” You have to admire the logic of the idea, as well as Barnes’s subtle repetition of the word end. But I’m getting carried away again…

By the way, if you want the No Fear Shakespeare (I hate that name — we should fear the Bard) version of the above soliloquy, it’s here:

To die, to sleep—to sleep, maybe to dream.
Ah, but there’s the catch: in death’s sleep
who knows what kind of dreams might come,
After we’ve put the noise and commotion of life
behind us. That’s certainly something to worry
about. That’s the consideration that makes us
stretch out our sufferings so long.
After all, who would put up with all life’s
humiliations—the abuse from superiors, the
insults of arrogant men, the pangs of
unrequited love, the inefficiency of the legal
system, the rudeness of people in office, and
the mistreatment good people have to take
from bad—when you could simply take out
your knife and call it quits? Who would choose
to grunt and sweat through an exhausting life,
unless they were afraid of something dreadful
after death, the undiscovered country from
which no visitor returns, which we wonder
about without getting any answers from and
which makes us stick to the evils we know
rather than rush off to seek the ones we
don’t? Fear of death makes us all cowards,
and our natural boldness becomes weak with
too much thinking. Actions that should be
carried out at once get misdirected, and stop
being actions at all.

“I’ll close on the implied question that Bill asked me earlier.

Why don’t you accept this wonderful offer? Why wouldn’t you like to meet Shakespeare, for example?

I don’t know if you really think that when you die you can be corporeally reassembled, and have conversations with authors from previous epochs. It’s not necessary that you believe that in Christian theology, and I have to say that it sounds like a complete fairy tale to me. The only reason I’d want to meet Shakespeare, or might even want to, is because I can meet him, any time, because he is immortal in the works he’s left behind. If you’ve read those, meeting the author would almost certainly be a disappointment.

But when Socrates was sentenced to death for his philosophical investigations, and for blasphemy for challenging the gods of the city — and he accepted his death — he did say, well, if we are lucky, perhaps I’ll be able to hold conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters too. In other words, the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure, and what is true could always go on.

Why is that important, why would I like to do that? Because that’s the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don’t know. But I do know that that’s the conversation I want to have while I’m still alive. Which means that to me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And I’d urge you to look at those people who tell you, at your age, that you’re dead ’til you believe as they do — what a terrible thing to be telling to children. And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poisoned chalice. Push it aside however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way. Thank you.”

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Christopher Hitchens’s improvised closing remarks at one of his final debates on faith and reason. This debate was against the very erudite and convincing William Dembski of Baylor University, and the entire contest is worth watching (and is on Youtube), but this particular segment is below.

I don’t wish any ill on any fellow primate or mammal of mine, so I don’t at all look forward to the death of Joseph Ratzinger, I don’t, or any other pope, not really, except for one tiny reason which I ought to confess and share with you. When he dies, there’s quite a long interval ’til the conclave can meet, and for that whole time, that whole interval — it is a delicious, lucid interlude — there isn’t anyone on Earth who claims to be infallible.

Isn’t that nice?

All I think, all I want to propose in closing is this: that if the human species is to rise to the full height that’s demanded by its dignity, and by its intelligence, we must all of us move to a state of affairs, where that condition is permanent. And I think we should get on with it.

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It’s the strange thing about the Catholic church, it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we with our permissive society, we are obsessed. No, we have a healthy attitude — we like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly, because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. And the only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that, in erotic terms, is the Catholic Church in a nutshell.

Do you know who would be the last person ever to be accepted as a prince of the Church? The Galileean carpenter. That Jew. They would kick him out before he tried to cross the threshold. He would be so ill-at-ease in the Church. What would he think! What would he think of St. Peter’s? What would he think of the wealth, and the power, and the self-justification, and the wheedling apologies?

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From Christopher Hitchens’s and Stephen Fry’s opening statements in their debate on the motion Is the Catholic Church a Force for Good in the World?. If you’re a Catholic, I wouldn’t recommend watching the debate — it’s one of the most decisively one-sided contests I’ve ever seen.

Today is Joseph Ratzinger’s final day as Pope.

Watch Fry’s engrossing opening statement below.

“It was mid-October 2001, and night was closing in on the border city of Peshawar, in Pakistan, as my friend – a reporter and political man of letters – approached a market stall and began to haggle over a batch of T-shirts bearing the likeness of Osama bin Laden. It is forbidden, in Sunni Islam, to depict the human form, lest it lead to idolatry; but here was Osama’s lordly visage, on display and on sale right outside the mosque. The mosque now emptied, after evening prayers, and my friend was very suddenly and very thoroughly surrounded by a shoving, jabbing, jeering brotherhood: the young men of Peshawar.

At this time of day, their equivalents, in the great conurbations of Europe and America, could expect to ease their not very sharp frustrations by downing a lot of alcohol, by eating large meals with no dietary restrictions, by racing around to one another’s apartments in powerful and expensive machines, by downing a lot more alcohol as well as additional stimulants and relaxants, by jumping up and down for several hours on strobe-lashed dancefloors, and (in a fair number of cases) by having galvanic sex with near-perfect strangers. These diversions were not available to the young men of Peshawar.

More proximately, just over the frontier, the West was in the early stages of invading Afghanistan and slaughtering Pakistan’s pious clients and brainchildren, the Taliban, and flattening the Hindu Kush with its power and its rage. More proximately still, the ears of these young men were still fizzing with the battlecries of molten mullahs, and their eyes were smarting anew to the chalk-thick smoke from the hundreds of thousands of wood fires – fires kindled by the multitudes of exiles and refugees from Afghanistan, camped out all around the city. There was perhaps a consciousness, too, that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, over the past month, had reversed years of policy and decided to sacrifice the lives of its Muslim clients and brainchildren, over the border, in exchange for American cash. So when the crowd scowled out its question, the answer needed to be a good one.

‘Why you want these? You like Osama?’

I can almost hear the tone of the reply I would have given – reedy, wavering, wholly defeatist. As for the substance, it would have been the reply of the cornered trimmer, and intended, really, just to give myself time to seek the foetal position and fold my hands over my face. Something like: ‘Well I quite like him, but I think he overdid it a bit in New York.’ No, that would not have served. What was needed was boldness and brilliance. The exchange continued:

‘You like Osama?’

‘Of course. He is my brother.’

‘He is your brother?’

‘All men are my brothers.’

All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother – by definition. Osama is not my brother.”

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From the opening of Martin Amis’s essay “The Age of Horrorism”.

I’d encourage any of you to read the remainder of this essay, as well as the larger collection it is published in, Amis’s tome on September 11th, terrorism and the West The Second Plane: Terror and Boredom.

By the way, Amis has since disclosed that the friend he mentions in this story is none other than his best pal, Christopher Hitchens.

Excerpts from Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis discussing Judaism and Antisemitism at Jewish Book Week in London in 2007:

“Saul Bellow once said to me, privately, that without Israel, Jewish manhood would be finished. I don’t think he meant Jewish men; he meant Jewish self-respect. But it was a sort of atavistic way of putting it. He felt that this idea that we’re going to bring about a scenario where the Jews cannot be put to death, and institutionalize that in a state — he upheld that notion.

And during last summer, when these unpleasant portents for Israel were emerging, there was a great efflorescence of antisemitism here in England. If you remember those middle-class whities waddling around under placards saying WE ARE ALL HEZBOLLAH NOW. And my response to them then and now is:

Well, enjoy it while you can, because Hassan Nasrallah wants to kill you.”

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“Antisemitism is a very, very serious cultural danger, and it’s only a fool who thinks that it is a threat only to Jews. Antisemitism is a very, very toxic threat to everything we can decently call ‘civilization’…

If someone says they don’t like West Indians, because of their — I don’t know what it might be — their music. Or they don’t like Indians because of the smell of their cooking. Or they don’t like Koreans for their Kimchi — whatever it might be. Every minority and majority in the world has a version of this kind of prejudice.

But, as Freud pointed out, they’ll all sink their differences when it comes to the Jews. And with the Jews it’s not their cooking or their sex lives or any of this, and it’s not just vulgar prejudice about skin color or smell.

It’s a theory.

It’s a paranoid theory that tries to explain quite a lot. It’s fascinated with gold, with secret documents, with missing codices in ancient treaties, with the idea of an invisible and secret government. It’s a very, very, very dangerous, pseudo-intellectual prejudice.”

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“We might just talk a little bit more about what antisemitism is. You’ve described it as paranoia, and it is — it belongs with those sort of shithead conspiracy theories. And there’s a marvelous quote from Hitler saying that, after the Frankfurter Zeitung said there was an exposure of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as being a fabrication; Hitler said, ’this alone proves it is genuine.’

Antisemitism is not quite a neurosis, it’s not quite a psychosis. Vasily Grossman in Life and Fate suggests that antisemitism is like a vast mirror, an ocean of insecurities. The cruising insecurities in the common mind, for some reason gravitate towards the Jew as the explanation of and reason for all frustrations.

The central paradox of it is that you may hate the Jews and think they’re insects, but you also suspect they’re running your life. The Jews, to the anti-semite, are both contemptible and all-powerful.”

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“Nobody thinks West Indians are trying to take over Wall Street, for example. It’s just not alleged; people that hate them just don’t say they’re trying to take over the international financial system.

My grandmother, whose origins were in what is now Breslau, had a very simple explanation, she’d say, ‘Oh, come on darling, they’re just jealous.’ Well, of course, Goyim can be as jealous as they like. But it’s the protean nature of antisemitism that gets me.

If they can’t hate the Jews for being behind international finance capital, it will be because they’re behind international Communism. Often both at the same time.”

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Watch Hitchens and Amis discuss the Jews, Israel, and antisemitism below. I highly recommend this talk as a crash-course on the subtleties and interrelationships between those three complex topics. It’s also really funny.

The photograph was taken in Jerusalem. It’s what you see if, on a Friday night, you walk up to the Western Wall then turn around.

Filed under: History, Humor, Philosophy, Religion Tagged: Adolf Hitler, anti-semitism, Christopher Hitchens, Jews, Judaism, Martin Amis, No Laughing Matter, racism, Saul Bellow, Sigmund Freud, Vassily Grossman

“That’s why it’s so appalling to see so many liberals making excuses for bin Ladenism and Jihadism as if it was some kind of fucking liberation theology, which it is not. It’s the most reactionary ideology in the history of the human race. It means business. It means slavery; it means mass murder; it means bigotry. It means the abolition of culture.

And there are people who say we have to understand its deep-seeded nature, which we certainly do, but not by apologizing to or retreating from it…

Say it once, hope not to have to say it again: You do not deal yourself a hand in the conduct or formation of British foreign or defense policy by putting a bomb on a bus in Tavistock Square in London. You do not. Final. Do I have to say it twice? No.

Will I listen to anyone who says that we should? I certainly will not. I certainly will not, and nor should anyone else.

And the Prime Minister will not do so. And what people ought to realize is that there is indeed a connection between this and the wars abroad. The same people did this at King’s Cross and Edgware Road and Aldgate last week who last Friday blew up 34 school children in Baghdad. Yes of course there is a connection: we’re fighting the same people. And they will rule the day. Or we will outlive, and out kill, and out fight them.

They say they prefer death to life, maybe they do.

They want to be martyrs, we’re here to help.

But our love for London will outlive their hatred, and their love of death. Believe me.”

__________

Christopher Hitchens, speaking at D.G. Wills Bookstore in California, May, 2006.

The picture is of Lee Rigby, son, husband, father of a two year old boy, and drummer in the British Royal Regiment — ritually and barbarically murdered on the streets of south London yesterday.

Filed under: Current Events, Freedom, History, Interview, Politics, Religion, War Tagged: Afghanistan war, bin Ladenism, Christopher Hitchens, Iraq War, Jihadism, London, terror, Terrorism

Let me ask a little more philosophical question. I’d really like to hear both brothers respond to what might be called the challenge of Friedrich Nietzsche, which assumes a large place in Christian apologetics, which is the idea that in the absence of transcendence, all you’re left with is a ferocious human will. So I just would love to hear the perspective of whether he was a crank or a prophet in these areas from both brothers.

Christopher Hitchens: I can rephrase the question in addressing it.

Nietzsche famously said that in the absence of the divine, all that there is, is the human will to power. That would be all you were left with. That’s why Nietzscheism is so often used as almost a substitute among some people I know for the work of Ayn Rand, for example. And implied in that is also that that can be admirable. I must just tell you that I was once asked by an evangelical radio station a lot of very, very polite questions about my book against God. Then at the end, they asked, was I an admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche? I said, actually, I wasn’t really much of one at all.

They were clearly disappointed with this, but they went on and said, well, did I know that he’d written most of his antireligious books in a state of syphilitic paralysis? And I said, yes, I was aware of that, or certainly had heard it plausibly alleged. They said they just wondered if that would explain my own — (laughter) — more recent work — I thought, well, no, but thanks for the compassion.

Look, it might be that all of these questions are replacement questions. Is it not equally true to say that the religious impulse is an expression of the will to power? Who could deny it? Someone who says, I not only know how you should live, but I have a divine warrant here revealed to me, in some cases exclusively, that gives me permission to do so. What is that but the will to power, may I inquire? I think it’s a very, very strong instance of it.

If I don’t get asked the Nietzsche question, which I quite often do, if it isn’t that, it’s usually The Brothers Karamazov issue instead. I forget which brother it is, maybe it’s Smerdyakov. It doesn’t matter. He says, if there’s no God, then surely everything is possible — thinkable.

Everyone understands the question when it’s put like that. But is it not also the case that with God, or with the belief in it, permission can be given by anyone to do anything to anybody and has been and still is? Unfortunately, these questions are not decidable according to your attitude toward the supernatural. These are problems of human society and the human psyche — you might say, soul — whatever attitude we take to humanness or the transcendent.

Peter Hitchens: First of all, just a small objection to that.

It seems to me that the Christian Gospels are read any way you like, and especially the final few days are one of the most powerful denunciations of the exercise of power, of the behavior of mobs, of show trials, all the many activities of which governments and politicians get up to.

There is even in the jibe against Judas — “the poor ye have always with you” — the first skeptical remark about socialist idealism ever made in human history. So I think that you would be hard put to claim that the Christian Gospels gave you a license to order people about. And it seems odd that the center of Christian worship is someone who is indeed tortured to death by the powerful.

But leaving that one aside, I think atheists should pay more attention to Nietzsche because I think that he does actually encapsulate quite a lot of what they very, very seldom say they desire. Now, in my book I quote at length from a passage in Somerset Maugham’s book, Of Human Bondage, in which the hero decides — and this is an Edwardian person brought up in detail in the Christian faith in an English vicarage — decides that he no longer believes in God and says quite clearly, “This is a moment of enormous liberation. I no longer need to worry about things which worried me before, and I am no longer tied by obligations which used to tie me down. I’m free.”

What else is the point of being an atheist? But yet, when you actually put this to atheists, they tend to say, oh no, no, not me. I’m just as capable of following moral rules as you are, even if they are Christian moral rules. This constantly comes up and immediately swirls down the circle of the atheists’ refusal to accept that there is actually no absolute right and wrong if there is no God and that therefore, they are liberated.

Why aren’t they more pleased they’re liberated and why don’t they exult more about it? Perhaps because they don’t want to spread the idea too widely and have too many people joining in.

__________

From the Pew Forum’s roundtable conversation with brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens, on the question of Can Civilization Survive Without God?.

Mark Twain claimed that the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at once, and still retain the ability to function. That said, I think both Hitchens brothers are right on this point.

This entire Pew transcript is worth reading. So often in discussions like this, the questions asked do nothing to constrain or direct the interlocutors’ answers, serving instead as mere runways for flights into mere digression and monologue. The questioner cited above could have simply asked, “Do we need faith to moderate human will?” But that wouldn’t have been as restrictive. Instead, by citing Nietzsche (and thus inviting further reference to his work), and locating him within the apologetics of his philosophical opponents, the question takes on color and context.

The Pew roundtable is great for that reason; all the questions are similarly sharp and provocative. One of my bosses, Michael Barone, also asks a question further into the discussion.

Watch a preview of these two titans in conversation below.

Filed under: Interview, Philosophy, Religion Tagged: atheism, Ayn Rand, Bible, Can Civilization Survive Without God?, Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, doubt, faith morality, Friedrich Nietzsche, Judas, New Testament, Of Human Bondage, Peter Hitchens, Pew Forum, religion, The Brothers Karamazov, W. Somerset Maugham

[Dylan Thomas] was ultimately of course a very tragic man wasn’t he?

Well I suppose so, he sought his own death and he found it, which is not entirely tragic. He certainly wrote of course the most magical things… and he’s alive.

But one gets a sense of waste though, surely when you think, surely he left behind him stuff that will live forever, but he might have left more behind him.

No I don’t think so. I think he’s — well, Michael, you say I sense of waste and I wouldn’t quarrel with that. But I think he probably burned himself out.

He sort of fulfilled the notion a lot of people have of the Welsh — the Celts generally — about this sort of death wish that they have, the creative people. Do you, first of all, accept that they have this sort of headlong rush towards the edge?

Yes I think that we rather love precipices. We go towards them and withdrawal now and again. Sometimes we go over the edge.

Did you ever feel that way yourself — have you ever felt yourself going toward the precipice you pulling back short of it?

I have, yes. I think we all do, we Celts.

Would you care to tell me how — what circumstance?

Well there was a second or two I think, perhaps about a year ago, when I didn’t fancy much staying alive.

Really? So you contemplated suicide?

Oh no. No, I wouldn’t kill myself in the ordinary sense of the word. I wouldn’t take pills or drugs or anything really in that sense. But I did suddenly wake up one morning and found how splendidly rich and extraordinary the world was, and that I couldn’t bare its richness and its beauty. And in order to obviate the richness and extraordinary beauty of the world, I thought its best to leave it.

How do you leave it if you don’t top yourself?

Well, you can kill yourself any second. I don’t mean by any obvious means, but you can of course… drink yourself to death… and I’d assume that’s rather pleasant.

It’s better than falling on a sword, that’s for sure. So is that what you tried to do — to drink yourself to death?

I had a go, yes.

And how acute did this become? What amount were you drinking?

Oh, pretty bad. Because my doctor in California — I was in California — said that if I kept on as I was going, I only had two weeks to live. Which was rather fascinating when you examine the idea of two weeks — every second, every minute, every hour, every day. Two weeks only. I was absolutely fascinated; wasn’t frightened at all. Because I thought Here we go again boys. We’re on the edge of a terrible precipice.

Anyway, I decided to withdrawal from the precipice, which I have done.

How difficult was it, having embarked on this business of drinking? I mean, how heavily were you drinking?

Oh, I was up to — I was a champion… if you pardon my using of a Yorkshire word. I was up to, I’m told — because of course you can’t remember if you drink that much — I was up to about two and a half to three bottles of hard liquor a day. Which is a lot.

That’s true. I like drinking, but I think one day of that might blow my head off. That must have meant then, to have drunk that amount, you must have started in the morning, at breakfast.

Oh, you start at midnight. And you keep on through midnight, and you go on and on and on. Oh you don’t eat; you don’t do anything very much except drink. Fascinating idea of course — the idea of drinking on that scale. It’s rather nice to have gone through it and to have survived.

We all know… we all know that we’re going towards an inevitable doom. It’s rather interesting to deliberately go towards it and then withdraw. Because nobody else has been there and withdrawn. But I’ve been there.

I’ve seen that dark wood. I know how terrible it is. How frightful it is, how frightening it is. But I went there and came back.

__________

From Richard Burton’s 1974 interview with Michael Parkinson.

It’s worth noting here how subtle and exacting Parkinson’s questions are. My favorite interviewer who is currently working, Charlie Rose, shares some of the same stylistic and substantive approach to getting answers from deep, deep within people. You have to coax them out.

But about R. Burton, who truly had the perfect voice…

There are some voices that are so rich and sonorous that they can captivate you completely without ever actually communicating anything of value. The siren song of the human voice — when bronze and baritone in Burton’s case — is as pretty as any other sound.

Richard Burton’s voice was one of the most distinct. Like Christopher Hitchens’s, it was low and smoky and mellifluous, with a provincial English edge; it echoes into your head in the most pleasing way, and it stays there. I have several family members and friends whose voices I positively enjoy hearing, and part of that enjoyment is doubtless a product of what they say. Though more perhaps it is a product of how they formulate and produce sentences — that air that passes through the pharynx, larynx, and lungs somehow emerges to be something immortal. You remember their sentences and statements, in love or in anger, in humor or anguish, long after the moment. And you remember it in their words.

And while the message or the content of their speech lives on, the voice is what’s remembered. There’s a reason why Salman Rushdie’s short tribute to Hitchens was phrased as it was, and in the order that it was.

“Goodbye, my beloved friend. A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops.”

And Richard Burton’s own troubled, short tenure must be lamented in the same way.

Filed under: Interview Tagged: alcoholism, Christopher Hitchens, death, drinking, Dylan Thomas, interview, Michael Parkinson, Richard Burton

To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven:

A time to be born,
And a time to die;
A time to plant,
And a time to pluck what is planted;
A time to kill,
And a time to heal;
A time to break down,
And a time to build up;
A time to weep,
And a time to laugh;
A time to mourn,
And a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones,
And a time to gather stones;
A time to embrace,
And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to gain,
And a time to lose;
A time to keep,
And a time to throw away;
A time to tear,
And a time to sew;
A time to keep silence,
And a time to speak;
A time to love,
And a time to hate;
A time of war,
And a time of peace.

What profit has the worker from that in which he labors? I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.

I know that nothing is better for them than to rejoice, and to do good in their lives, and also that every man should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all his labor—it is the gift of God.

__________

From the book of Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3, verses 1 through 13.

As the New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges says, “…reading Ecclesiastes is like reading Beckett.”

This is from the New King James translation, the only version of the Good Book that I’ll pick up. Peter Hitchens defended the KJV (over other versions) like this:

The King James Bible Versus the Sid James Bible

“…We have now had two generations brought up to believe that nobody and nothing has the right to tell them what to do, or to restrict or restrain themselves – especially in what they regard as their private life.

And they can tell within minutes of encountering the Authorised Version of the Bible, that it is their enemy’s weapon. This is because it is not simply a translation, but a poetic translation, written to be read out loud to country people in large buildings without loudspeakers, to be remembered, to lodge in the mind and to disturb the temporal with the haunting sound of the eternal. In this it is very effective…

As for ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and ‘ye’, these remind the reader or listener that they are in a poetic and eternal context, not reading Harry Potter or listening to the radio news.”

Read his brother’s similar and equally spirited defense of the NKJV below:

New Bibles for a New Babel

“To seek restlessly to update The Bible or make it ‘relevant’ is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare.

‘Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,’ says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter?”

The picture above was taken on Inch Beach in Ireland.

Filed under: Religion Tagged: Chris Hedges, Christian, Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, Ecclesiastes, King James Bible, New King James Bible, Peter Hitchens, religion, script, Scripture, the Bible, Time

“I mustn’t pretend to remember more than I really do, but I am very aware that it makes a great difference to have had, in early life, a passionate lady in one’s own corner…

I am speaking of the time of my adolescence. As the fact of this development became inescapably evident (in the early fall of 1964, according to my best memory) and as it came time to go back to school again, my mother took me for a memorable drive along Portsmouth Harbor. I think I had an idea of what was coming when I scrambled into the seat alongside her. There had been a few fatuous and bungled attempts at ‘facts of life’ chats from my repressed and awkward schoolmasters (and some hair-raising speculations from some of my more advanced schoolmates: I myself being what was euphemistically called ‘a late developer’), and I somehow knew that my father would very emphatically not want to undertake any gruff moment of manly heart-to-heart with his firstborn—as indeed my mother confirmed by way of explanation for what she was herself about to say. In the next few moments, guiding the Hillman smoothly along the road, she managed with near-magical deftness and lightness to convey the idea that, if you felt strongly enough about somebody and learned to take their desires, too, into account, the resulting mutuality and reciprocity would be much more than merely worthwhile. I don’t know quite how she managed this, and I still marvel at the way that she both recognized and transcended my innocence, but the outcome was a deep peace and satisfaction that I can yet feel (and, on some especially good subsequent occasions, have been able to call clearly to my mind).

She never liked any of my girlfriends, ever, but her criticisms were sometimes quite pointed (‘Honestly darling, she’s madly sweet and everything but she does look a bit like a pit-pony.’) yet she never made me think that she was one of those mothers who can’t surrender their son to another female. She was so little of a Jewish mother, indeed, that she didn’t even allow me to know about her ancestry: something that I do very slightly hold against her. She wasn’t overprotective, she let me roam and hitchhike about the place from quite a young age, she yearned only for me to improve my education (aha!), she had books of finely bound poetry apart from the MacNeice (Rupert Brooke, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury), which I will die to save even if my house burns down; she drove me all the way to Stratford for the Shakespeare anniversary in 1966 and on the wintry day later that year that I was accepted by Balliol College, Oxford, I absolutely knew that she felt at least some of the sacrifice and tedium and weariness of the years had been worthwhile.”

__________

One of my favorite sections from one of my favorite memoirs, Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens.

Filed under: Memoir Tagged: adolescence, Balliol College, childhood, children, Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22, Hitchens, memoir, memory, motherhood, Shakespeare, Writing

“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”

__________

Christopher Hitchens, writing in Letters to a Young Contrarian.

Hitch passed away two years ago today. Read more from CH.

Filed under: Journalism Tagged: advice, Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian, Writing

“In some ways, the photograph of me with Martin and James is of ‘the late Christopher Hitchens.’ At any rate, it is of someone else, or someone who doesn’t really exist in the same corporeal form. The cells and molecules of my body and brain have replaced themselves and diminished (respectively). The relatively slender young man with an eye to the future has metamorphosed into a rather stout person who is ruefully but resignedly aware that every day represents more and more subtracted from less and less.

As I write these words, I am exactly twice the age of the boy in the frame. The occasional pleasure of advancing years — that of looking back and reflecting upon how far one has come — is swiftly modified by the immediately succeeding thought of how relatively little time there is left to run. I always knew I was born into a losing struggle but I now ‘know’ this in a more objective and more subjective way than I did then. When that shutter clicked in Paris I was working and hoping for the overthrow of capitalism. As I sat down to set this down, having done somewhat better out of capitalism than I had ever expected to do, the financial markets had just crashed on almost the precise day on which I became fifty-nine and one-half years of age, and thus eligible to make use of my Wall Street-managed ‘retirement fund.’ My old Marxism came back to me as I contemplated the ‘dead labor’ that had been hoarded in that account, saw it being squandered in a victory for finance capital over industrial capital, noticed the ancient dichotomy between use value and exchange value, and saw again the victory of those monopolists who ‘make’ money over those who only have the power to earn it…

I now possess another photograph from that same visit to Paris, and it proves to be even more of a Proustian prompter. Taken by Martin Amis, it shows me standing with the ravissant Angela [Gorgas], outside a patisserie that seems to be quite close to the Rue Mouffetard, praise for which appears on the first page of A Moveable Feast. (Or could it be that that box of confections in my hand contains a madeleine?) Again, the person shown is no longer myself. And until a short while ago I would not have been able to notice this, but I now see very clearly what my wife discerns as soon as I show it to her. ‘You look,’ she exclaims, ‘just like your daughter.’ And so I do, or rather, to be fair, so now does she look like me, at least as I was then. The very next observation is again more evident to the observer than it is to me. ‘What you really look,’ she says, after a pause, ‘is Jewish.’ And so in some ways I am — even though the concept of a Jewish ‘look’ makes me bridle a bit — as I shall be explaining. (I shall also be explaining why it was that the boy in the frame did not know of his Jewish provenance.) All this, too, is an intimation of mortality, because nothing reminds one of impending extinction more than the growth of one’s children, for whom room must be made, and who are in fact one’s only hint of even a tincture of a hope of immortality.”

__________

From the memoir Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens.