The NY Times columnist Ross Douthat recently wrote an op-ed on the untimely death of Christopher Hitchens. In the op-ed, Douthat mostly discusses how Hitchens was able to maintain a warm and cordial relationship with people, such as William Lane Craig, who hold remarkably nasty opinions and parade them as moral teachings. I fully agree with Douthat that this was one of the things which made Hitchens so powerful and it's an approach that's worth cultivating. If you can't calmly discuss the ethical and logical failures of your opponent's position with them, you're not doing yourself any favors.
Douthat also points out that many believers were taken with Hitchens: they disagreed with him vehemently, but they liked him. Of course they were taken with him: beyond being very articulate and brilliant, Hitchens was very charming. Even when he was publicly flaying somebody, he (mostly!) managed to be surgical about his criticisms. He criticized the opinion, not the person who carried them.
Douthat takes this positive relationship and uses it to suggest that, deep down on the inside, Hitchens believed in God. At the end of the article he really goes for it:
One of Hitchens' strongest arguments against God was that it would be like a celestial North Korea: you have no personal intellectual life, you must worship the dear leader, but you can't even get out by dying. He thought it important to repeatedly articulate how religion justifies prosecution of thought crimes. Hitchens also had a clear understanding of how torture could be used to destroy an individual's identity. In an interview Hitchens joked about how the folks who waterboarded him could've made him "admit" that he was a hermaphrodite. Maybe he wouldn't have joked if he had known about Douthat's latent necrophilia and his willingness to assault the dead so soon.
I don't really mind people attacking Hitchens after his death[1], but this article is something else. It's an attempt to make false peace with a dead combatant. Douthat is extracting a confession from a broken body: you can get a corpse to say anything. The only reason Douthat has the balls to print it is that it Hitchens is presently indisposed---he can't defend himself. The only consolation is that people will read his little article and laugh.
[1] After all there are plenty people around to carry on the argument and Hitchens himself was not interested in being sentimental about the dead.
Douthat also points out that many believers were taken with Hitchens: they disagreed with him vehemently, but they liked him. Of course they were taken with him: beyond being very articulate and brilliant, Hitchens was very charming. Even when he was publicly flaying somebody, he (mostly!) managed to be surgical about his criticisms. He criticized the opinion, not the person who carried them.
Douthat takes this positive relationship and uses it to suggest that, deep down on the inside, Hitchens believed in God. At the end of the article he really goes for it:
Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.
My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why.The basic problem (which everyone has caught on to) is that Douthat is being dishonest. No thinking person with any knowledge of Hitchens would buy it. It's a waste of paper and bandwidth. In addition to being a waste, Douthat's article is disgusting because it perpetrates one of the abuses of the individual that Hitchens was himself passionate about.
One of Hitchens' strongest arguments against God was that it would be like a celestial North Korea: you have no personal intellectual life, you must worship the dear leader, but you can't even get out by dying. He thought it important to repeatedly articulate how religion justifies prosecution of thought crimes. Hitchens also had a clear understanding of how torture could be used to destroy an individual's identity. In an interview Hitchens joked about how the folks who waterboarded him could've made him "admit" that he was a hermaphrodite. Maybe he wouldn't have joked if he had known about Douthat's latent necrophilia and his willingness to assault the dead so soon.
I don't really mind people attacking Hitchens after his death[1], but this article is something else. It's an attempt to make false peace with a dead combatant. Douthat is extracting a confession from a broken body: you can get a corpse to say anything. The only reason Douthat has the balls to print it is that it Hitchens is presently indisposed---he can't defend himself. The only consolation is that people will read his little article and laugh.
[1] After all there are plenty people around to carry on the argument and Hitchens himself was not interested in being sentimental about the dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment