Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) - For or Against?

Neutral and I are having a discussion about Christopher Hitchens. It needs a new thread. Good meaty arguments appreciated.

Good post. But wrong.

Today we can read the eulogies to Hitchens in the Guardian where scores of soulless stuffed dummies praise Hitch when they agreed with him but lament where he went wrong. Usually leftists, defining their attitude by this or that issue, they echo the vulgarity of their one dimensional opinions...he was OK until the Falklands War, then he sold out and became a conservative...yawn, bore...

This is not a gracelessness which Hitchens displayed. True, as a polemicist he did destroy people, and occasionally you would see that he was personally cruel to people who did not deserve it (compared to most of his targets who did). So he would call perfectly respectful religious opponents "enemies" and scorn their offers of friendship. And yet he was by all accounts personally charming, and counted many believers and opponents amongst his friends. His flaw was that he was a polemicist who, despite being aware of the weakness of an ad hominem attack and despite the fact that the core of his writing eschewed such tactics, was very often unable to confine his approach ad argumentam.

I totally agree with you about "god is not great". It was his worst book in my opinion, by a country mile, and yet the one that may threaten to define him (odi profanum vulgum et arceo!). It was, as you said, a list of bad things done by Christians and other believers. The argument was incredibly crude - Terry Eagleton has suggested that if Hitchens and Dawkins received essays from first year undergrads that so poorly appreciated the arguments of their opponents, they would fail them.

One answer to Hitchens would be quite simply to adapt one of his favourite sayings: "what is said with so little logic is dismissed as easily". People do bad things. People, in history, that is most of them, belonged to religious groups. It is as easy and to blame evil on the oxygen in the air, as it is on religious belief. This work is also about as un-marxist as you could get: an idealist construct, rather than a materialist one. To Marx religion was an understandable human yearning, the heart of a heartless culture, its "spiritual point d'honneur", and was certainly no squalid conspiracy. Hitchens vulgarity here is to my mind an awesome self-indulgence.

But despite that Hitchens is a powerful opponent of religion when he debates. When he tackles the problem of evil he is persuasive (the fact that a God watches humanity live like brutes for a hundred thousand years before intervening) as he is about Christ's divinity (and then when he does intervene he chooses to go to one of the most backward parts of the world to reveal Himself, not China where there was a mighty civilization for example, but to a desert in the Middle East). And against the religious fundamentalists he is a devil's advocate from Heaven, listing their conscious crimes and hypocrisy.

But what of Theresa of Calcutta? Here I am afraid I am with Hitchens. I do acknowledge a one sided polemic on his part, but I think he should not be aksed to apologize too much for that. He makes it clear that his target is not so much Theresa as her hagiographers (in his documentary Malcolm Muggeridge comes off much worse than Theresa, poncing about talking about her divine aura and demonstrating his slavering obsequiousness as he mutters "ah, yes, he's got his rations" about one of Theresa's poor dying charges). This was Hitchens main target - the unquestioning sanctification of Theresa. For a contrarian, to challenge such fawning and uncritical populism is a primary duty, surely, and one sided polemic not an inappropriate tool?

Theresa represents the worst of traditional conservative Catholicism. This is not just because she opposes abortion, which she has in common with most Catholics, but because she opposes contraception, (which most educated Catholics actually practice), and actively campaigns against it. Now when, as Hitchens rightly says, the biggest cause of poverty in the developing world is the status of women as baby breeding machines, and the best cure for poverty is the emancipation of women, I am right there with him. And Theresa of Calcutta is a sworn enemy of such emancipation. In fact she is much worse. As Hitchens shows, her immediate response to poverty is not "to hunger and thirst for what is right" but is to preach acceptance and acquiescence. So faced with an enormous crime of the rich against the poor in Bhopal, she urges the blinded and maimed poor to "forgive".

This is a demonic travesty of your suggestion of "grace". This is where the righteous anger of the Jesus who threw the moneylenders out of the Temple is appropriate. But she emulates the worst Saducee and urges people to shut up and accept injustice. This act, whatever the personal motivation of Theresa, is an evil act, which should precude any possible possibility of canonization.

And if you think this is a one off, then just look at her fawning to the Duvaliers in Haiti, a conscious attack on liberation theology in Latin America. Here she consciously lines up against those who fight for the "option for the poor", those who look to empower the poor, to give them a voice and who look for justice as their religious duty. Her support of the powerful is an echo of that deeply evil Catholic Church which tolerated fascism and Nazism and harried and oppressed liberals and socialists within its midst, excommunicating and condemning. She is the Catholic Church which Vatican II had left behind.

But surely she should be commended for the work she and her sisters do witrh the poor? That's your argument, that she allows the poor to die with dignity. I know a little about her order. There is no dignity in going to a shelter organized by Theresa's nuns. You are given shelter, but no dignity. You are treated as a child and leave your individuality at the door if you want to enter. No matter: it's a bed and warmth, more than the State is doing, but let's not pretend there is any dignity.

In Calcutta though, it's much worse. The order denies proper palliative care. It sees Christ in the suffering and so it deliberately avoids a solution that would alleviate such suffering. It chooses to allow suffering. Hitchens charges that Theresa collects hundreds of millions of dollars, and spends hardly any on the poor, preferring to create hundreds of religious houses instead. This is a serious charge that needs to be answered. This does not challenge the vow of poverty taken by Theresa's nuns. It challenges why the money is not used to create hospices with palliative care. The poor are merely the raw material in Theresa's spiritual factories. As a great admirer of the monastic life I can only say that Theresa's version is an obscene parody of such.

Clearly, as with George Galloway, Hitchens does ad hominem attacks with great gusto. But Hitchens generally confined himself to attacking the idea of Theresa, the political causes she espouses and the actions of her organization. He did however grapple with how much to make of the fact that personally when she was ill there was no painful suffering for her - she checked into the very best clinics in California. In the end he thought it was appropriate to mention even though he acknowledged it to be possibly ad hominem in that it was such a massive contrast between the image of the saintly sufferer and the reality of a woman who would treat the poor differently from the way she expected to be treated herself.

As a Catholic I do feel that judging others is problematic. I am a big opponent of Eugene Pacelli, and his role as Pope Pius XII, but he was not an evil man. It is difficult to admire a woman however who contetedly basked in the sickening eulogies that followed her wherever she went. I have known humble religious people. Their humility is usually accompanied by an angry irritation at any eulogy directed towards them. I don't seek a window into Theresa's soul but I cannot help feeling that there is something of the show-woman about her.

So there goes: two subjects which Hitchens would have us discuss. And is there a better pastime in life than to discuss such ideas? He also wrote brilliantly on Orwell, Jefferson and Paine. I find his reading wide and his mind very open indeed. But as Chesterton - someone with whom Hitchens had a turbulent intellectual relationship - said: the point of having an open mind is to firmly close it again on something solid. Or something like that.

 

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) - For or Against?

Hitchens was a thinker....not a believer in mythologies.

 

I agreed with most of Hitchens's views.

The only major areas of disagreement I have with him are with respect to slave reparations and interventionism.

For whatever reason, he supported slave reparations, which is an entirely ridiculous idea.

He also was an ardent interventionist in most respects. I think we're too interventionist.

 

I don't see Hitchens as someone who should be remembered for his views, but for his argument. And in that argument was a deep integrity. Amongst his detractors are some who can never get past the fact that they disagree with someone. And some of these people take this disagreement and turn it to nastiness and churlishness. I suspect that too many people are made uncomfortable by controversy. If someone does not agree with them, their reaction is rejection, avoidance and retreat - couched in abuse, too often. But to me Hitchens was a man who was alive when in argument, who tested himself and his ideas against allcomers, and who revelled in the fight. Hitchens to me was a man whose public persona spoke of integrity, and that is how I shall remember him. Not that he's gone away. He has left so much conversation in print and I still have a lot to have out with him. Which I will.

His brother Peter is a right wing hack on the Daily Mail whose usual articles are simplistic Tory propaganda. Or so I thought. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough and was behaving like those I criticize. I think his maginficent, understated tribute to his brother, here, is a masterpiece.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/a...moriam-courageous-sibling-Peter-Hitchens.html

 

The simple reality is that every time I read Hitch, I came away knowing that I was reading a man who scoped his work to make a specific case - usually at someone else's expense - and that would be bought only by those who were unfamiliar with the subject he worked.

Well, lets talk about Mother Theresa, because this act, more than anything else that Hitchens did strike as profoundly curel, short sighted, egotistical, judgemental, and about as intelligent and slamming ones face into a brick wall.

There is a reason that Mother Theresa was revered, respected, and the gist of Hitchens not at all tounge in cheek attempt at the destruction of her acheivements in simply cruelty and the moster ego that assumes that everyone who respects her and her achievements is a simple dolt. It is one of the most arrogant judgements I have ever seen - and one that reeks of a isolation and insultation from the realities of the world he held in such derisive judgement.

His antics begin with the fundamental misinterpretation of the oath of poverty, and, as you said, there is simply not even an acknoweldgement of a different point of view - just a lacerating lashing of contempt. The oath itself is about sacrifice, it is about placing others needs before your own. And whereas Chris hardily cheers the disenfranchised who went to join the hard working sisters only to discover that helping people is hard work, that it means not sitting in a castle handing out candy to children, are his heros - his rebuttal to the oath of poverty - his rebuttal to the eschewing of money and UNNECESSARY property in favor of charity and stewardship is profoundly shortsighted and simply wrong. He offers no pronouncement or examination of the wisdom of this choice, simply delcare the shaloow and lazy to be the moral superior to Mother Theresa herself?

And it gets worse. Mother Theresa was known for her humbleness and kindly approach to people, and yet, for taking the satisfaction that the example she set lead to the creation of over 500 centers around the world, where people SERVED OTHERS, she is lambasted as selfish, sinful, prideful in an unworthy way. And all the people she treated with dignity, whom she worked FOR, and whom did not deserve the respect she gave them? The service, kindness, and charity she gave them anyway? Not even mentioned by Hitch, whose goal was clearly not an honest assessment.

But the one that got me was the one I found to be the most horrific, and this is where Hitch goes badly astray. It is true that Mother Theresa worked with some unscrupulous people, even took money from them - all of which went to the poor. There was, in her opinion, nothing to be gained by the haughty judgement of people, and there were people in desperate need of the supplies, education, and training such money could buy. And where she disagrees most profoundly with Hitchs judgement is that even these very bad people deserve to be treated like human beings.

Hitch may have gained satisfaction from standing in desrisive judgement over people, but his self congratulatory arroagnce never helped anyone but himself. He dealt with no moral cunundrums, nor challenges, just judgement.

Hitch never went into the dark places of man kind, but in my own experiences there, you make deal with dark men found in the shadows to do good things for the people who dare not go there. The Suna awakening is but one example of many that come from my profession, but the message of haughty judgement vs charity and compassion is a stark and revealing portrayal of what is important and a mirror into the short comings of Hitchens.

He was a polemists, an often hypocritical judger who rarely offered solutions. He was little more than a critic. What's worse, he was smart enough to know all this. If there is anything about Hitch that makes sense in this - it is that he knew people who pay him money to write these antics, knew they would cheer his name if he cut down people rather than solved problems. And so he did, he made his choice.

And his choice is empty, a waste of intellect that did little more than twist something good. Attacking people of honor and integrity, who are nevertheless human, is low and dishonorable. It is easy to be a critic, hard to solve problems. He took the easy path with the gift he was given.

 

Absolutely "for" in terms of his arguments against religion. He was simply very honest to himself and to anyone he spoke to. I can understand how religious types took offence, but the bitter pill of the truth is indeed very hard to swallow.

 

Mother Teresa was an evil human being. What she did she did for herself, not those who were suffering. She thought that suffering was good for the soul so those who came to her for care she made sure that they suffered. How did she do this? By offering care that was substandard even in the poor parts of India.

Where did most of the money she raised through donations go? To her order. Yep, not to the poor, in whose name she had raised the money, but to her evil, twisted order.

If there was a hell she'd be there.

 

Neutral. You make a decent point about the vow of poverty and Hitch's lack of appreciation for this, but that is not really the issue. I summarized Hitch's points in my OP and I also added my own impressions. Can you answer those points? Panzerkampfwagon also summarizes Hitch's charge against Theresa very succintly. The whole point of Hitch's venom was to counterbalance a very sentimental, obsequious, uncritical acclaim of Theresa which he sees as unwarranted.

In some ways it was a critique of Catholic teaching on contraception, which is a scandalous crime in my view and one that warrants polemic as it does a great deal to facilitate the continuation of poverty and over-population. Attacking people who were at the forefront of that evil campaign is entirely appropriate. Saints should not be characterized by innocent naievety, even if you believe that. Saints have at least a moral obligation to think about the consequences of their preaching and campaigning and a Church that tells the millions of people in India that they should eschew contraception, is deeply complicit in the perpetuation of over-population and the subjugation of women.

There is alos a lot of evidence that Theresa deliberately avoided channeling the tens of millions of dollars her organization receives to palliative care, because she sees a spiritual benefit in suffering, into providing resources for her convents. This means that the money gets spent on monasticism, not suffering. A few less convents and a lot more medicine would go a long way. Her own private behaviour using clinics in the USA does rather undermine her claim to sanctity. I am not convinced about the humility. I know humble people and they do not behave as she did. They would make sure that the sickening eulogies that followed Theresa around were withdrawn.

There is a valid criticism that Theresa's funds are misplaced. Hitchens actually doesn't accuse Theresa of this. He says clearly that she doesn't claim that the money goes to treat the sick. Hitchens just publicizes the fact, and rightly so. If I give to the Benedictines (which I have), I give money for people to pursue the monastic way of life. But those who give to Theresa are deluding themselves if they think that most of this money goes to alleviate the suffering of the poor. It goes to prop up an organization that sees spiritual capital coming out of human suffering and that campaigns politically for measures that oppress the poor, such as banning contraception and saying unctuous and highly irresponsible things about pigs and murderers like the Duvaliers. I don't buy your "she held her nose whilst she asked bad people for money". She fawned over these thugs. Hers is a reactionary organization which works on the basis of the deserving poor. It is one that routinely eulogizes the powerful - not out of innocence or clever fund raising tactics but out of deference - because it belongs to that pre-Vatican 2 tradition of servility to the rich and the most vicious hostility to liberalism and social reform.

You could deal with my points you know. Mother Theresa's actions in Haiti were to me a conscious rebuttal of liberation theology. Her urging to "forgive" people at Bhopal who had not even repented, was utterly disgusting in my opinion. I'm all for forgiveness, but what Theresa did was to disempower and subjugate the victims by her intervention. Forgiveness can come after the rich who committed horrible crimes against the poor at Bhopal have paid suitable compensation. This is just the same sort of forgiveness that protected paedophile priests. This is utterly duisgusting and letting Theresa off the hook on this one just underlines the malaise and complacency in the Church.

Just repeating what a good egg Theresa if won't do. Please deal with the arguments. They are sincerely made.

 

This might be the best summation I've ever heard of Christopher Hitchens.

The true measure of a man's greatness is in his wisdom. Wisdom is displayed in the happiness and contentment one exhibits in relation to the many things he has learned about his environment and about life itself. Too many people mistake intellect for wisdom. And as a result, there are a great many brilliant people walking around this planet today with virtually no shred of wisdom. Few people embody this sentiment as well as Christopher Hitchens did. He was a shining example of everything wrong with the new atheist movement; negative, cynical, and completely uninterested in any change for the better.

This is what the new atheists see as an improvement over religion. A negative, empty, cynical view of life where everyone is Bill Maher and Janeane Garofalo.

 

Bollocks.

As Hitchens would often say: "what can be asserted with no evidence can be dismissed as easily".

 

You completely missed my point. I think you lack the same wisdom.

 

I did answer them.

And the problem is that we take Hitchens word and slat for these events as if they are gospel, and they are not.

For example, Mother Theresa collected millions, it is true. That she spent little on the people she helped? BS. Does Hitch EVER address the now public fiduciary records of the Catholic Church, which would include the records of one Mother Theresa?

Does he address volume in the slightest? Well, lets talk about triage, because, once again, this is a lesson from my profession. The currency in my profession is time. The wounded pile up and there is alimited supply of doctors that can treat them, so they treat the ones that are most urgent and, if that demand exceeds the time limit - some will simply not be treated.

The same applies to India where the currency is not time, but money. How many hundreds of millions are there in India in need of help? Hundreds of millions. So, if you collect hundreds of millions that equates to a dollar per person to help them. And yet mother Theresa is able to build hundreds of building dedicated to poor, offer them basic medical care, to serve, feed, and cloth people, coordinate activities and outreach and all on ... a dollar per person by Hitch's count? That is simply incredible, a testimony to stewardship that any CEO would find miraculous - and another reason for the enforced discipline that Hitch eschews and criticizes.

We deal with this same issue today as we look at rising costs of medical care, and juggle with cost care - and right now, the care is rationed by money with increasingly more people dropped from the roles of medical care. Apparently though, with Morther Theresa havingto make hard medical choices about which services she provides - she is evil - the rest of us are just fine though? Again, another example Hitch's hypocritical judgement.

Agh, but Hitch hates the Catholic Church? Well, that should be the first ring that something is amiss in his analysis - that something just may be far more subjective rather than objective in his analysis.

You state that Hitch's attempt was merely to offer rebuttal to the enraptured view of Mother Theresa? I say it was an angry broadside of twosted contempt that had little to do with any other reality than Hitch's need to knock down things that stood up to him. Its the behavior of a spoilt bully, railing against authority and devoid of problem solving.

Indeed, most of the world is horrified by Hitchen's antics on this one, most of the world sees Hitchens angry rant for exactly what it is. The only ones who seem to be enraptured by it are, for the most part, angry, emotional atheists (Like Panzer), who, just like Hitch, seem to find value and solution in the angry castigation of evil in very good people.

Panzer, like Hitch, their only concern is knocking things down, and they will lie, omit, and simply raise the volume of their voice to prevent any interferrence with that emotive desire. What they cannot do, nor indeed do they EVER attempt to do, is find a way to help the poor.

A fitting rebuttal from Hitch or Panzer would have been taking a dollar per person and doing more and doing it better than Mother Theresa. Instead, we get arm chair invective that is at its core, dishonest.

That is Hitchens. And that is not a man following his conscience but one enslaved by the emotions he cannot, and indeed will not even attempt to, control.

 

Hitchens slammed Theresa for a good reason.

The orthodox Catholic view on poverty is just demented, honestly, but then again, that's a common problem with any orthodox religion.

The stricter and more fanatically you interpret a religion, the more it justifies psychotic and completely illogical views.

 

So, what do YOU think we should do about poverty?

Scream about it? Because that will solve it? Tell those actually engaged in helping the poor that they are scum bags? Nice.

Unfortuantely, such antics are far more about you then about the poor, just as they were with Hitch.

 

I prefer giving to charities that don't affiliate themselves with strange dogmas.

You know... like Oxfam.

 

I will refer to Chris in the present for my own reasons.

The man is hugely smart. What Chris doesn't get is that all his denials of God are correct except for the overwhelmingly gigantic fact that the God he is denying IS NOT WHAT GOD IS!

All atheists make that same incredibly naive mistake.
Of course most religions believe in that same "God".

God is All. And creation is the manifestation of that FACT.

That means the world to you. Literally.

 

If God is everything, then what is the point of worshipping him/her/it?

As far as I can tell, the existence of a divine being really has no practical worth to our daily lives.

Religion assumes that praying to this being somehow will convince him/her/it to help you, but if this being is all-knowing and all-powerful, then it seems rather silly.

Whatever this god being is has already decided everything beforehand, so praying is kind of like begging the director to change the script. It seems much more productive just to leave this god be and work things out on your own terms, since whatever happens is exactly what was meant to happen.

That is... if we are to believe that a god actually exists.

 

I admired him both as a writer and as a thinker. I didn't always agree with him, in fact, I doubt anyone did, but he wasn't afraid to take an unpopular position. He lost his position as editor of The Nation over his support of the Iraq War, and no doubt lost a good many friends over that as well,

 

Let's assume there is a God. According to all I've read/heard this God made the decision to have me born. Then when I can't for the life of me rationalize that some one who created me then insisted that I believe in him/her and if I'm not capable of suspending the disbelief he was supposed to have engendered in me he is going to send me to some where very hot where I will suffer for eternity. Sorry folks......it don't add up.
What's even more pathetic is there must be thousands of little weird off-shoot religions each claiming their belief system is the only true path to heaven. Yeah right. When I die and IF! I end up standing in front of God and I'm expected to explain why I should be allowed into heaven I tell him quote "You claim to have made me. It appears you are an 'underachiever'.
love the bumper sticker that reads "If there isn't a God up there I'm F****D".

 

From the little I know of this man, he was an extension of Joseph Campbell in a anthropoligical sort of way. He also had views similar to George, (Carlin not Booosh) and Jessie Ventura. All of which I totaly agree with and have observed in my life. In other word, this dude either used acid at one point in his life, or he was born with the shamin like ability to see the world on a large scale while evaluating every significan problem and how they interacted with eachother to create the culture and society in which we live, and come to accurate analysis of what is realy going on.

He obviously evaluated people's behavior vs, what they said.

 

Hitch was a rare bird. He put the truth as he saw it before his Left-wing biases. Most progressives are bald-faced liars.

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I thought Hitchens was a bit to crass for my taste. He was as dismissive of his opponent in an argument as they were of him. Which made many debates I saw seem like two people talking to themselves instead of a real debate. I enjoy reading and listening to Dawkins much more. His debating style is much more refined and he actually seems to enjoy the other persons participation in the debate rather than loathe them completely.

I don't believe atheists should hold the religious in contempt and beat them over the head with what may seem to us as silly beliefs. I think our cause is better served thru pure debate instead of insult.

 

Why tie the concept of an unmoved mover to a certain dogma?


_

 

Well, fortunately in a wide and diverse world, there arw mamy ways to help people. What Mother Theresa did was nothing shortof amazing. In sharp comparison, all Chris did was complain and find fault. The onlt people he ever helped were those who looked for reasons to find fault.

There are many ways to help people, and anyone who did a good job of it found themselves in the cross hairs of Chris.

 

Easy to say. But you can't demonstrate it. Just more windy abuse from you Unifier.