The Quotable Christopher Hitchens
Locating the foundational principles in Christopher Hitchens can be a challenge: He denounced the 1991 Persian Gulf War as vociferously as he supported the 2003 invasion and once memorably castigated Bill Maher on the latter’s television show for making the same kinds of cheap jokes about George W. Bush’s intelligence that Hitchens himself had made many times. Moreover, on some subjects in which Hitchens is consistent he is unwaveringly mistaken: To this day, he backs the economic reasoning of Karl Marx. If there is ever a Jeopardy category titled “Marxist Backers of George W. Bush,” you’ll be ready.
Hitchens’ best friend of more than 30 years, Martin Amis, may have summed up the legendary thinker/debater/provocateur better than anyone to date when he wrote, in the foreword to the jazzy and scintillating new book of quotations The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism, that the subject at hand may be a distinguished author who “speaks like a genius.” But Hitchens, says Amis, “thinks like a child (that is to say, his judgments are far more instinctive and moral-visceral than they seem, and are animated by a child’s eager apprehension of what feels just and true).”
Hitchens evidently sees himself as a sort of superhero of the intellect. The Bat Signal goes off in his head, “Injustice!” he cries, and there he is, swooping in with all of his considerable mental weapons at the ready to right the wrong of the moment. Such is the panache with which he battles that you may not even notice that he may be flexible about such details as whose side to be on.
This book contains Hitchens’ 2003 comment about John Edwards: “Some people do come into politics for serious and honorable reasons. He’s the first for a long time.” Edwards, a vile, sanctimonious ambulance chaser who famously suckered a jury pretending to be a sort of courtroom medium channeling the voice of a dead child, eventually earned his place in sleaze Hall of Fame. He did not, as should have been obvious to Hitchens even then, get into politics for any reason other than the pursuit of fame and power, which was why he found it so easy to morph from Southern moderate to populist class war depending on the circumstances. But you’ll find no apology from the writer for his long support of the North Carolina senator in his recent Edwards-mocking column. You’d think someone with Hitchens’ famous distaste for those who claim access to the supernatural world would have been especially sensitive to Edwards’ hocus-pocus charlatanism.
In 2007, Hitchens offered praise for Tunisia and largely forgiving words for its dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali (“a guiding but not tyrannical hand”) for keeping radical Islam at bay. The dictator looked to him like the underdog against Islamism. This year it became clear that it was the people of Tunisia who were the real victims of Ben Ali’s oppression, and in 2011 Hitchens wrote of the “Peron-style tawdriness of the Ben Ali regime.”
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
US poet (1819 – 1892)
Hitch is indeed contradictory at times, but I fear you’ve misunderstood his point on abortion.
On the one hand, he seems to favour a degree of protection for the ‘unborn’, as his first quote implies. On the other, he thinks that this same case has been undermined by the works of the religious right. In other words, because of the manner in which Falwell et al. have tried to attack abortion — for ideological reasons and in a somewhat vicious manner — people associate anti-abortionism with the religious right, not a rational consideration of unborn rights. Hence the term ‘wrecked’; it is hard to wreck something that lacks inherent value in the first place.
That said, he is wrong to say ‘Obviously, the fetus is alive, so that disputation about whether or not it counts as ‘life’ is casuistry.’ This is to side-step the moral argument completely by claiming it has a merely definitional answer. I’d've thought his private education would have taught him the seven criteria necessary to constitute life. From there, he’d understand that even if a foetus fulfilled all the criteria (it doesn’t for reproduction), it clearly would not constitute ‘life’ in the same sense as humans do, insofar as its e.g. response to stimuli is different from humans’.
That’s not to say that foetuses are not life, nor that they’re not human life; however, this kind of lazy ‘casuistry’ I notice more and more in Hitchens’ argument whenever he leaves his (great) fields of expertise.
“Reproduction”? So is a hundred-year-old person alive? I don’t see any of them reproducing. How ’bout people with birth defects that render them incapable of reproduction?
You say “seven criteria,” so I guess it’s been decided then. Carved in stone, are they?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Definitions
I am not at all implying that this has been set in stone. Point taken re reproduction, but as you’ll see when reading the wiki page, the definitions apply more on the species level than to any given individual. This is precisely why I argued it is dishonest and facile to reduce the abortion debate to merely a semantic one, as Hitch here does.
Problem with that is if you’re claiming old folks are exempt from your initial argument because the definition applies ‘at a species level,’ then I have to ask: are you claiming that a fetus is from a different species? If you include geriatrics and the sterile as human, then you can hardly discount a fetus based on its reproductive abilities.
You do realize that cell division is, in fact, reproduction. I mean, you wouldn’t be making a statement based on scientific principle without actually knowing the principle, would you?
Hombre, I make no pretence to advanced knowledge in biology. However, when making such biting and patronising condemnations as the one to which I’m replying, it helps to have your facts straight. To quote the above-cited list:
‘Reproduction: The ability to produce NEW INDIVIDUAL organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism, or sexually from two parent organisms. [my emphasis]‘
Except in case of identical twins, I do not see how cell division per se would constitute reproduction. That said, given your evidently superior training in this field, I look forward to you correcting me.
(It also helps to have your terminology straight. Perhaps look up ‘scientific principle’.)
No one ever wanted to or was motivated to kill their child before birth because of any thinking about whether the child was a living human being or not. Nor did Hitler or any Nazi only reach the conclusion that they should kill Jews because Jews were subhuman, or Southerners first enslaved blacks because blacks were sub human. The killing and the enslaving came first because of other motivations. The “non-human” or “sub-human” crap is only some post-crime rationalization that only makes sense if you want it to. But it is never the first motivation so therefore is meaningless. Jefferson’s view that all are created equal is a better view than the Jefferson Davis/Hitler’s codicil “Except those we want to exploit or kill,” especially for those who adhere to Lincoln’s view of America.
That’s all very well, but I don’t think Andrew Johnson was, defending slavery, wrong to observe ‘Mr. Jefferson meant the white race.’
Also, I’m not sure you’re right with respect to Hitler. His dislike of Jews was partly for personal/power reasons and partly for scapegoating, but I think it’s difficult to argue the racial ideology underlying it all was solely ex post facto.
Given the context, I am fairly certain that when Mr. Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal”, what he meant was that none of them are created kings, dukes, barons, etc. That is, he was denying the then-well-established doctrine of inherited nobility, which was the fundamental justification of the government from which he was declaring independence. That this claim also cut against the then-well-established institution of slavery may or may not have occurred to him at the time.
What I have always admired about Christopher Hitchens was his public hatred for Bill and Hillary Clinton and for his very vocal support for Democracy in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon and Iraq. Sometimes Hitchens is on the right side of history. Other times, he’s just plain wierd. But it’s always fun listening to him. He seems to be dying of cancer, but I do hope that’s not the case and that he does recover. If he dies, a very talented voice will be silenced forever, and that would be a shame.
I can’t help liking Hitchens, even though he’s been rotten about Mother Teresa and about Christianity in general. (Ironically, his brother, Peter, also a journalist, is a practising Christian.) His arguments are always lively, articulate, intelligent, and often amusing, so even when I vehemently disagree with him, it’s a worthwhile occupation to read what he has to say.
As for Hitchen’s recovering from esophageal cancer, it’s rather, sadly, unlikely:
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/06/christopher-hitchens-unspoken-truths-201106
mother teresa had it coming. too bad there aren’t more exposes of this type.
…like when people name a school after a famous person …then find that person to be a pedophile.
often naming anything with that of a person is froth with danger. some one is always damaged. .. was benedict arnold a traitor or a patriot? he was a british subject after all.
people are disappointing …give the school a number or name it after some flora or fauna. …no one would want to go to General P. Malaise High School after-all.
‘Litmus test for me when comparing Christopher Hitchens and Mother Teresa: How many dying people has Hitchens comforted, fed, and cared for? How many abandoned children has he scooped from the gutter, cared for, and found homes for?
You see, there’s no comparison. What’s that saying again, “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”? Or, the Biblical equivalent, ““Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” Matthew 7:3.
Mother Teresa did not have Hitchens’ savage attack on her “coming to her.” And, I hope by bringing up pedophilia, there was no connection to Mother Teresa’s ministry, which continues long past her death.
I saw two of her Sisters of Charity today, in the grocery store. They were buying supplies for their outreach to children this summer in the inner city. I gave them a small donation, which pales in comparison to the sacrificial lives they’re living in the downtown slums.
Yup. People can be so good at smelling rotten eggs, but so bad at laying good ones…
Maybe Mother T’s critics are crabby and critical ’cause they’re worn out with serving the poor in some blackhole of a forsaken city themselves.
They’re not? Oh, all right then.
I see you don’t have much history of the good mother teresa.
…as she sat on a fat bank account while jetting around the world. kind of reminds me about the singer ..the one who calls himself a version of a chimpanzee …bono and his charitable works. another fraud. I might get to meet them in hell after this tour is done.
hitchens has as much right as any to be critical of her and anyone else he chooses.
teresa cared not for the poor and I heard her say it in an interview. and I heard the context of how she said it.
(A response to the post below, ‘link to this comment’ but no ‘reply’)
Not being Catholic, I never thought much about Mother Teresa, except as a nun working at a mission in India. After listening to a Christian Indian speak of her, I learned that she was completely devoted to the poor in Calcutta, visualizing them as a type of Jesus Christ to serve in this world.
She often held the dying in her arms, feeding and talking to them; supplying a little respite in their hard lives for what hours remained. Mother Teresa once told the Western world to send their unwanted babies to her, rather than abort them…a futile gesture, but revealing her heart for the helpless.
The plane trips she took were financed by others, enabling her to speak about the work of the nuns (other similar missions were established) and to garner donations to keep the work(s) going.
She died wearing a $1.00 saari, in which she was buried, she left no estate, no money, and no (according to those of like mind as yours) reputation.
However, now I’m a believer! You’ve convinced me that such a super sleuth of all things scandalous can show a thing or two how mission work should really be done! I anticipate reading of your giving up all earthly possessions, wearing the same outfit for the rest of your life while eating endless watery stews and sleeping on a hot straw mat while listening to the moans of the sick and dying.
When you have spent the remainder of your life cradling dying, dirty beggars as they look into your eyes as the only friend and last thing they’ll see in the world, I’ll believe you have something of substance to say about Mother Teresa.
Now it’s a response to the post above…naughty website link.
yes you can find all kinds f tripe in newspapers. I will go with her words where she said she didn’t particularly care about the poor.
…and disparaging me will not change mother teresa’s history which isn’t nice. not too many papers or reporters would look under that rock and if they did most would quietly put it down and walk away.
I don’t read newspapers…sorry.
What I heard about Mother Teresa came from the ‘horses mouth’ as it were, a former Hindu (now Christian) who has visited her mission in India.
People are free to believe anything they want about her; my atheist parent despises Mother Teresa. I hold a differing perspective, and wanted readers to know that there’s another side to “had it coming.”
We all have it coming; anyone looking under enough rocks long enough is going to come up with something unlovely about every person who ever lived on the planet. Speaking of rocks, I’m reminded of someone who once said, “he who is without sin, let him cast the first stone…”
Let’s drop our rocks and agree to disagree.
..I spent a considerable amount of time in India recently ..(working) and was sad to find that many people were serial liars.
Idiot savant; heavy on the idiot.
*Bingo*
Wonder if Chris Wallace will interview Hitchens and ask if he’s a flake…oh wait…liberal fools don’t eat their own…
you believe Chris Wallace to be a liberal!?!?!?!?!? WOW!! how retardedly right wing could you possibly be? SCARY!! please dont breed
Too late.
MJB, why be so disagreeable? I don’t think of politics as a binary (left/right) issue. Chris Wallace is closer to the far left side of the political spectrum where the Statist/Totalitarian reside. Republicanism (Constitutional Republic)in the center and Anarchism (Anarcho-Capitalist & Anarchy) on the far right. Interesting discussion regarding this here: http://www.afr.org/Hultberg/080105.htm
Well Chris Wallace is no conservative, that’s for sure.
He probably likes to think of himself as a “non-ideological centrist”, but to me he’s just a sanctimonious, squishy and unimaginative repeater of “current wisdom” fatuities.
I am not sure what Chris Wallace is …but I don’t think of him as a conservative.
Wallace is not a conservative he is a clone of his father. His ambush interviews of conservatives proves it.
Conservatives got a little too gushy over Hitchens because of his support of the Iraq war and his dislike of the Clintons. But we need to remember that he is still of the far left.
David Horowitz wrote a lengthy piece on Hitchens a while back which did a good job of pointing out how, with all the contradictions, Hitchens has never broken free of Marxism….
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/243397/second-thoughts-david-horowitz?page=1
I agree ..it is obvious in some of his articles that he has deluded himself (or his readers) in thinking he has left the “left”.
people tend to revert to their early positions without notice.
The assumption being, that that is the most significant way to divide up Americans?
Hitchens’ recent hissy fit in the New York Times (appropriately) against David Mamet’s book on conservatism left little doubt about his enduring loyalties.
/yawn/
Just another leftist ranter…
Now, Now, dismissing Hithcens like that is not fair. Whether or not you agree with him, he is a vastly intelligent man who strives for duality of thought. He treats everyone politely, as far as I’ve seen, and his “rants” are enormously more elegant than any ever heard on the right.
If by “duality of thought” you mean that he’s consistently inconsistent, I must grant you that.
It’s not something to be proud of.
Umm, ahh — remember me and my prodigious, loquacious exhortations?
Hitchens has some really good stuff and really bad stuff …all wonderfully written.
I am still waiting for him to square voting for obama ! the excuse that McLAME was …well lame isn’t sufficient. he could have written in his own name or wiped his as$ with the ballot. both preferable to voting for an imbecile.
The 19-20 centuries where the realm of the great wrighters,who have tought the European humanity:Dikkens,Hugo,Tolstoy -great many of them.There have appeared a small lefist bias.But we are in a hurry to be tought by novelists and the smart journalists today occupy their place.The results will be similar.
Whatever Hitchens has to say, I simply can’t get past all his unbearable smugness. Good God. Just that stupid picture with the stupid cigarette in his hand!
The smugness of English was a great motivator of the American Revolutionaries. May our enemies always be smug, and the smug always our enemies.
“Hitch 22,” his autobiography paints a lurid picture of his childhood—a suicidal mother and distant father—which may have contributed to his rebellious attitude, his drinking at an early stage of life. His own stage covered countries around the globe during his twenties and thirties, where he spoke passionately about his Marxist ideals, since shoveled into the dust bin of reality, of seeing how futile idealism can be. He was and is, in my opinion, one of very few who can use his intelligence like a laser beam dissecting, as he did most recently a book of David Mamet’s, or carving with equal relish Tony Blair during a debate about religion. Critical thinking of such quality is rare, precious as ivory in this age of instant communication, and the loss of his would be a loss to us all, whether we agree with him or not.
Whatever his shortcomings (and there are many), I will continue to hold him in high regard for his many memorable takedowns of leftist hypocrisy from the Clinton years onward. Few are more noteworthy (or more amusing) than his 2004 review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 which included some of his cleverest lines: “With Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, however, an entirely new note has been struck. Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl.” The next paragraph was even better: “To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of ‘dissenting’ bravery.”
Yea, Hitchens! Moore gored — and good.
The Humanity and Inhumanity of Abortion
The inhumanity of abortion, which has claimed in excess of 50,000,000 innocent, pre-born lives in America since Roe v. Wade, far more lives than our nation has lost in all of our wars combined, is apparent to all but the most ardent proponents of the “procedure” and to those who realize the barbarity is inhumane but who defend it on tenuous bases of privacy and personal rights of women and young girls.
Tremendous scientific and technological advances in knowledge concerning fetal surgery, embryology, (pre-natal life), have taken place in recent years. Ultrasound and other techniques now prove what pro-lifers have long claimed, that fetal viability and capacity to experience intense pain occur long before feminists, the abortion lobby, and those all-too-eager to experiment on fetuses contend.
What follows is excerpted from a story and commentary reprinted by permission from the July edition of “Life News,” P.O. Box 223, Ronkonkoma, N.Y. 11779. Both powerfully serve to illustrate the fundamental humanity of pre-born life and the inherent inhumanity of destroying it.
“Given the Chance” by Caitlin Kennedy
On October 24th 2006, a little bundle of life was brought into the world. And when I say little, I mean little.
Amillia Taylor was born at Baptist Children’s Hospital in Miami, Florida, weighing in at a mere 10 ounces. She had spent only 21 weeks in her mother’s womb and was 9 inches in length — approximately the size of a ballpoint pen . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=4849)
One of my favorite quotes of his:
It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one.
Hitchens was a fair-weather foe of the U.S. for most of his punditry career, who famously, and in gleaming contrast to his fellow leftists, became a foul-weather friend after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. He never seemed to entirely let go of his love for Red revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who would probably not have been one whit less bloody a dictator than Lenin was. But he did back off one of the main axioms of progressives, which is to refuse to find value in the present. (“I pledge allegiance to the United States that can be…”) The horrors of 9/11 and the fight against The Jihad which ensued anew thereafter impressed upon him that the free democratic West, in its imperfect Here And Now, was worth fighting to preserve. Compare that to the contemptible Katha Pollitt, his stablemate at The Nation, refusing to let her daughter display an American flag after 9/11. And even if he remained hard Left in all respects, he would still exemplify V. S. Naipaul’s description of radicals’ relationship with the United States:
Always out there, the United States, an unacknowledged part of the world picture of every kind of modern revolutionary: the country of law and rest, with which at the end of the day a man who had proclaimed himself to be on the other side–in politics, culture, or religion–could make peace and on whose goodwill he could throw himself.
–V.S. Naipaul, Beyond Belief, 1998
One of my favorite writers of years past, a cranky guy with lots of firsthand insights into Islam/Muslims, for the most part, highly negative ones.
Hitchens is always interesting to read. I loved his book “God is not great” even though I believe in God–Hitch still made excellent points about organized religion and he made them in his wonderful style.
Hitchens transcends “leftist” and “rightwing” partly because yeah, he HAS been all over the spectrum. but since he’s not running for anything, I don’t see that he has anything to apologize for. it’s not like he ever pretended to be consistent; and it’s not like consistency is an important element of good writing.
I have to disagree with this. I think Hitchens on religion is always boring. For all his impressive erudition regarding literature, poetry, history and politics, he seems to lack even the most basic grounding in matters of metaphysics and epistemology. He refuses to recognize any of the higher realizations of spiritual and religious adepts through the ages, preferring the style of angry reductionism stylish among the current crop of rage-field atheists like Harris, Dawkins and the pathetic Bill Maher. To Hitchens, all religious or spiritual claims can be reduced to mere unsupported superstition. He has no such experience, therefore no one can have any basis for faith other than the shallow considerations to which he has willfully limited himself throughout his own life.
Hitchens routinely makes the rookie mistake of conflating pre-rational, magical or mythic thinking with trans-rational revelation, because they are both non-rational. And because he doesn’t know anything about the latter and is uninterested in learning about it. But even by his own putative standard of the primacy of rationality, he is an amateur. He seems to be completely ignorant of the revelations of Plato, Plotinus, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard and subsequent Western minds who revealed the limits of reason as a tool for addressing ultimately trans-rational questions. He seems to have, as all atheists do, his own blind faith in his own rationality. But he has failed, unlike Kant and others in the West, or Nagarjuna and other geniuses of the Madhyamika in the East, to pursue his rational faculties to their ultimately inadequate dead end. This is truly amateur stuff for a guy who pretends to have contemplated these weighty matters and who presumes to tour the world lecturing us all on our silly beliefs and dismissing thousands of years of profound inquiry into these matters by the greatest minds who ever lived.
Hitchens on religion is like someone who doesn’t know math opining on quantum physics. He is like someone who has never looked through a microscope or learned the protocols of investigating laboratory analysis dismissing microbe theory as witch doctor stuff. These people would be entitled to their opinions, but they would not be interesting or relevant to anyone trained in those fields. Just so with Hitchens’s crudely amateurish boastings about the (non)existence of God or the purely idiotic or even evil nature of all religion.
I have always thought atheism to be the most boring and dishonest of the rigid spiritual belief systems. That Hitchens has made a significant part of his recent career out of proselytizing for it is a waste of his intellect and revealing of an indulgent character. He’s a mere show off on this subject, impressing only the prejudiced and the ignorant.
Kyle,
Hitchens is much more consistent and understandable that you may think. He is basically a human-rights advocate. He sees fetuses as humans because that’s what they are. But he has questions about exactly how much right to give them, and at exactly what age.
He is not an economist. He does not take stances on domestic policy. You may think he does, from his discussions of domestic politics and politicians, but at the basis of most of his opinions is the notion of human rights.
Which is why you have to be careful when you say he subscribes to the economic policies of Karl Marx. This is false. When he is asked about Marx, he says he is a Marxist because he believes in the materialist view of history. A very careful reading of Marx might suggest that there is nothing in the materialist view of history that goes against capitalism as such. All it says is that mankind is motivated by material goods. Which sounds right to me.
But I have never heard Hitchens on record — and if the new book says otherwise I would be interested to hear about it — as saying that, if man is materialistic, then we should control all materialism, which is what “Marxism” and socialism is all about. Hitchens appears to believe in capitalism just as much as the next fellow, and one could argue that capitalism is of a piece with his view of human rights.
But human rights is really his bailiwick, and if you view his work through that lens, I think things become much more clear.
I have loved Chris Hitchens’ wit and zingers in debates.
No one is better at the perfectly timed bon mot.
I read God Is Not Great and was unconvinced by the evolutionary arguments offered in support of Hitchens’ thesis. I thought a better title would be “religion is not great”, but the author might not agree.
I share his gut level instinct about abortion and understand what Martin Amis writes about his friend: “…his judgments are far more instinctive and moral-visceral than they seem, and are animated by a child’s eager apprehension of what feels just and true.”
As for Mom Teresa, I believe (without absolute knowledge) that more than a bit of hype surrounded her life. I have trouble with the whole nobility of personal sacrifice concept, so exalted by the Church.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essay on Self-Reliance
(whew, freedom to contradict myself)
I worry about the government getting in my mate’s or daughter’s vagina. What ever your position on abortion I think vagina inspectors are a bad idea. An if we make laws against abortion and get serious about enforcing them we will have vagina inspectors.
Sometimes Hitchens was right, sometimes he was wrong, but he was always interesting.
Anyone who wants a real hoot should read Hitchens’ delightful little tome on Billary: “No One Left to Lie To.” I sent it to a devoted Billary fan who was abashed into silence.