Christopher Hitchens is the Marmite of intellectual journalism—anyone with even a passing acquaintance with his output is likely to have a strong reaction to the man and his work. For some, his journey from ‘68 agitator to cheerleader for Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is merely a latter-day version of the “Paul Johnson flip” in mid-life from left to right. But Alexander Linklater’s portrait of Hitchens, this month’s Prospect cover story, suggests that there’s a bit more to the man than that.
Linklater wrote his Prospect piece after spending three days living, arguing and drinking with Hitchens in Washington earlier this year. What emerges is a portrait of a curiously old-fashioned figure—a literary-political polemicist whose intellectual interests and debating style seem closer to the giants of the 18th and 19th centuries than to many of his contemporaries. He has next to no interest in social or economic policy; has apparently nothing to say on science and technology; and retains a strong belief in the value and importance of language, as Alex makes clear below, and in the out-takes of his interviews with Hitchens.
Hitchens has famously turned his back on many of his former leftist comrades (although perhaps he would put it the other way around). And he has retained not the content but the form of his Marxist upbringing—a passion for argument and an insistence on the need to take sides, hitched to an intellectual absolutism and a disdain for the genteel liberal world of trade-offs and compromise. As Alex says, one phrase you will never hear him utter is, “OK, let’s agree to disagree.”
Let us know what you think of the piece below.
i am 62. i live in australia. i find myself in overwhelming sympathy with the views of Mr. Hitchens as described by Mr Linklater. Wish it could have been me with 3 days of drinking eating and arguing. what fun!!!
Christopher Hitchens is riding the surfboard of his ideas which
consists of a few sturdy planks held together by his massive social life.
As Marx and others have insisted, ideas are the froth of history and the men and women merely actors.
I think he saws the air too much and takes himself too seriously too but, after all, it’s his role in life and someone has to play it. It might as well be Him.
Hmm. How to comment?
To follow Mr. Farr’s model, I’m 33. I am an Outer Hebridonian British expat living in California. I am a champion of Mr. Hitchens in a big way in my small circles. As a disliker of the reductionist, complexity-denying, complicity-requiring, obfuscatory and blinkered nature of identity-politics, (the formulation of which sentence is
the joke, gerrit? gerrit? It’s not funny, I know but I kinda like it anyway, damn me, so it stays) I find in Hitchens an honest, rigourous intellect to admire.
To be so independent requires great courage and clarity and confidence in one’s information. Many people possess these virtues but Hitchens distinguishes himself and then soars in his ability to communicate his contrarianism in such a way as to convince others to look and look again. he is a very difficult man to dismiss, even for those most dismissive of him.
We all recognise the rigour in his thought and, in examining our own flabby pockets of habit and thinking, are shamed into some intellectual house-cleaning. In order to see what Hitchens sees, one must strip oneself of as much self-deceit, prejudice and lazy though as one can. This process is what I value most in his writing, be it on Jefferson, Orwell, war, literature or politics - I’ve read most of his books. I often come to different conclusions to him, occasionally the same, but invariably I feel I’ve arrived there as honestly and exhaustively as my thought processes and self-awareness will allow. Hitchens has been a kind of neurological Occam’s razor for me and I feel immensely fortunate to have encountered his formidable intellect. I can never hope to compete but he has sharpened and raised my game and if that isn’t what a public intellectual does, he’s not worthy of the title.
“The notion of history as an unravelling argument, to be lost or won, is, ironically, a declaration of faith. Under it, the chaos of human reality consumes idealists, moralists and revolutionaries alike.”
These words of Tom Nuttall from the last paragraph of his Hitchens article demonstrate above all the emptyness of the Hitchens vision [along with all others] and the limitations of a humanity unable or too dishonest with itself to consider or comprehend, particularly the moral limitations of human nature. The growing and even threatening chaos of reality should give pause for a more critical contemplation of the human condition. And if the potential of ‘project humanity’ turns out to be a negation of its highter aspirations, where does it turn for progress?
http://www.energon.org.uk
Well, not to your website – unless it wants a headache!
Hitchens is the type of person of whom it can be said that even when you disagree with him, you must do so with your hat in your hand.
BTW, I find it inexcusable that a publication from the UK would write “…the HMS Jamaica…”. Have you fired ALL your proofreaders?
What a fine piece about an endlessly interesting fellow, a killer of the Buddha on the road.
Dear Sir:
All glory laud and honour that a UK publication as prestigious as the Prospect Journal is backing a US led alliance, and one now given solidity by a Johnson flipper like Hitchens who has switched from left to right since GW II in 2003. What if there is a GW III?
I wonder if there is more that the children of Israel can expect of us in the West, before too much ground is given to Syria and the secret Bedouin despots of the Arabian sub-continent?
Is there more that the children of God can ask for from professor Hitchens?
Rick
The occupation of Mr Hitchens’ wife, Ms Blue, was given in the Prospect article, as elsewhere, as ’screenwriter’. This piqued my curiosity — what exactly has she written for the screen? A search of a mainstream, but nevertheless rather extensive database imdb.com reveals … not a single work for cinema or television. Is Ms Blue a produced screenwriter? Or is this an ornamental title? I would be dismayed if Prospect is simply flattering Ms Blue’s (and Mr Hitchens’) vanity by calling her a screenwriter if her work is not produced.
The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on. The article about Christopher Hitchins left me with the sad impression that a small group of elitist, leftist mates are arguing and in-fighting over world politics with very little sense of reality and with even less to contribute in the form of constructive critical analysis. It’s pathetic. It seems to be more important that this mate agrees, while that (ex-)mate disagrees, than that there is any sort of idealism being propagated to a wider public, supported by sound argument. The ivory tower has reached Babylonian proportions, as I’m sure somebody must have said before. Is the left really in such disarray about the stuff that really matters? No wonder it has turned to removing plastic bags from polite society as its raison d’etre.
This article is a remarkable attempt at creating a polemic around an opportunistic charlatan. Hitchens is an antisocial adolescent wet dream, and it certainly explains why he became such iconic figure in the United States ( thanks to the average Americans with fractured psyches, short attention spans, and a penchant for anything that can momentarily lift them out of their fuzzy world view….).
Still, I have to applaud the performance at trying to embellish & make something out of such pathetic & grotesque character, ridiculous in his ideological simplicity. Parva Leves Capiunt Animas…An Emperor with dirty clothes and questionable body hygiene, The deceitful over weighted buffoon of Washington DC, he who relishes at exposing himself in public. and who seems to believe that morality stops at the door of his own moral leprosy.
The US, the land where one form of worship gave way to another.
Thanks to a variety of articles, TV appearances and YouTube bits, I’ve been exposed to the opinions of Mr Hitchens here in Australia. Always provoking and rarely consistent with expectations when comparing other opinions on different subjects. Almost without exception, the daily opinions of pundits are as easily predicted as the directional hang of my privates. The thoughtful inconsistency of Mr Hitchens is appreciated.
Although the profile piece suggests Mr Hitchens doesn’t engage in ad hominem pop psychology to colour-in between the lines, my knowing a little more about the writer helps me understand the purpose of his writing. One last pyromanic statement from Christopher Hitchens without this context would have probably resulted in a henceforth non-click. I’m glad I clicked. Nice job.
Christopher Hitchens is a man that evokes passion, unlike many of my Christian brothers and sisters, I admire him greatly. Love him or hate him, his intellect must be respected. Hitchens exemplifies the character of a true pioneer, whom will never be popular in times when expedience is the rule.
Hitchens strikes me as someone who could no longer be part of the left once he decided, as he apparently has, that no one has the right to tell him what to do or think. That would make him more of a militant libertarian than a neocon, and it has made him more susceptible to American rhetoric about freedom than his hero Orwell was. I wish that leftists would make more of an effort to refute his arguments and expose his biases without resorting to ad hominem tactics, but that might be expecting too much.
What I found most significant were two paragraphs in the final section (specifically, the sixth and fifth from the end) where Hitchens derides the idea of a politician wanting to be “just a manager” and the attitude of “those people who actually want to improve conditions for the underdogs”.
It seems clear that Hitchens is far more interested in riding his hobbyhorses of radical change than in the sort of incremental improvement that most of the rest of us would welcome.
What bubbles up from the miasma of his youth, is a distillation of what confronts us all, the absurdity of religion. Out of the mist of alcohol,surprising clear thought. Carry on C.H.
Fascinating piece, but I still find that Hitchens is something of an enigma. Maybe his memoirs will offer some more info on his personal odyssey.
The only abiding principles of Hitchenism are totalitarian instincts and a Bolshevik hatred of all things spiritual.
The migration from left-wing totalitarianism to right-wing totalitarianism is no more mysterious a process than the inevitable drying up process that comes with time and age. It’s still cancer of the soul.
The Linklater-Hitchens interview and the accompanying “out-takes” were very good in providing us readers with a rounded picture of the man. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that due to his recent alliances with and access to the powers-that-be in the Bush administration he is a significant presence in some kind of serious and ongoing debate about U.S. foreign policy in general and its two Middle-Eastern wars in particular. The debate hardly exists where it matters (the U. S. Congress and the major news media, defined as those which reach the majority of citizens on a daily or even weekly basis). In spite of the restricted venues in which Hitchens appears (journals of opinion with small circulations, PBS television shows with limited viewership, etc.) it is still good and necessary for him to stake out his positions and explain their rationales. He is one of our few “professional public intellectuals” who is persistent in doing this. And there is something unusual and refreshing about his wish to avoid confessional writing concerning his youth and the influence of yonder times and their climate of opinion upon his own beliefs (an attitude which is consistent with his dismissal of identity politics as jejune and pointless, with which I heartily agree). And still … and still … there is a bit of Hitchen’s myth-making – and some intellectual cuteness — in his efforts to demonstrate that his opinions now are consistent with his beliefs in 1968 or thereabouts. (E.g., who in the hell would bother to investigate what being a “Luxemburgist” commits one to? Looking back one can only say that she is one of several exemplary early and “heterodox” Marxist saints who might have become the devil himself once she got some real power in her hands; to dismiss this possibility would be naïve.) I’m not sure why such an idealized consistency of opinion, with its hint of clairvoyance, is important to Hitchens. The poetry business in downright funny. On the one hand his citations show a wonderful memory and point back to a time when memorization of stirring passages was considered to be a desirable educational attainment (and it’s a terrific tactic in debates, in which one’s ancillary purpose is to outshine one’s opponent as a personality as well as a thinker). On the other it obviously muddies the water when it comes to rational discussion, because if there is one thing that poetry does it is to move us beyond such discussion, for good or ill (the compressed language of poetry and its arguments through simile, metaphor and analogy lead to just the opposite of concise discourse — it opens up a world of possibilities, all indefinite). Hitchens thereby enjoys the image of a self-contradictory and contentious (deep?) “character” which is the vehicle of well-honed and evidence-supported arguments, a nice and tricky combination. In spite of my occasional reservations about his ideas, especially about Iraq, I’ll toast him mentally with my next drink and cigarette (which, at age 63, I can ill afford; but, with Hitchens as a fellow-spirit in this regard, I am determined to enjoy the virtues of my vices up until the last possible moment). By the way, it seems a little odd that in the discussion of the “repentant Left” and its typical “Kronstadt moment” (another allusion which is becoming esoteric), Daniel Bell is mentioned while the much more widely read and influential “The God That Failed” anthology edited by Richard Crossman is not.
I thought this was an excellent biographical piece on a very intriguing public intellectual. I have made many attempts to find information of a more biographical/psychological nature with regard to Mr. Hitchens, but this is by far the best I’ve seen.
I especially think that everyone should have the opportunity to hear him speak/lecture/converse in the flesh…
http://criticaldonkey.blogspot.com/2007/10/hitchens-takes-stage.html
great read …but I don’t find Christopher Hitchens”s positions contradictory.
This is just to confirm that I though I share his name, I am more suspicious than Eric K. of ‘pop’ intellectuals who make their name through poses and gut intuition rather than from solidly-grounded, published research. Hitchens is a good debater and solid on atheism, but has he really changed the way we think?
Hitchens is a stereotype. Sir Oswald Mosley says somewhere in ‘My Life’, (his autobiography) that ‘former communists make good fascists because they understand real politics’. Hitchens cheered on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, then ‘changed’ just enough to allow him to cheer on the US invasion of Afghanistan.
People who find self-obsessed opinionated drunks fascinating obviously haven’t spent enough time in pubs.
Eric says that Hitchens is ’solid on atheism’, but so what? It’s time to forget about atheism. Atheism continues to engage with a set of bad bronze age fairy tales that should just be forgotten about. Atheism is the last refuge of religion. It’s like a debate with a madman - it can have its lucid moments, but sanity can’t prevail and the madman gets taken seriously because of the debate.
I don’t find Christopher Hitchens”s positions contradictory.
We all, as good scientific mammals, should change our minds when the evidence warrants. And that is the most that I can find in Hitchen’s changes or reversals.
I admire his courageous persistence, and his willingness to change when necassary.
Hitchens certainly makes me think, beyond the pure enjoyment of his literary skill. I’ve been wondering if he’s ever read “The Theory of Everything” by Ken Wilber. Wilber is not about positions, but where people are coming from. More importantly, Wilber describes an opportunity for everyone to expand the scope of our vision and potential. I’d love to get an email from Hitchens after he read Wilber just to know that he’s taken into account the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Hitchens enlightenment would be delicious.
“Britain had failed in its duty to protect the island; the west had failed to make the necessary intervention.”
Is the above what Hitchens’ really thougth at the time, and still clings to, some outdated imperialist trope? What duty of Britain, to whom? To the Greeks? Churchill sacrificed the Greek anti fascist resistance during WWII with barely a thought. And what ‘necessary intervention’? To aid the Greeks as they carried out their Enosis, union with Greece, which would have meant Turkish Cypriots becoming second class citizens on their own land? England had no hesitation in sending ships a thousand miles for the Falklands (where no Briton lived, and purely out of the imperial butt lust of it), but when the Turkish do so in support of their folks somebody rises up from the woodwork to sing that lament of the white man’s burden all over again.
I like Hitchens’ prose style, and that prodigious intellect working overtime, but at the root of it, a white man is a white man, be he a neocon, or a Trotskyite.
A wondrous talk with and about a life well-lived. Brilliance is its own reward, but is also vital for us lesser folk, because no policy can be respected intellectually unless and until it faces and matches Hitchens’ arguments. On Iraq, Hitchens is deadly wrong, despite the (current) count of the bodies, and the release of millions to freedom by the invasion, because the invasion, including the necessarily (given Bush/Cheney and the commanding role of the neo-cons, which Hitchens should have seen) disaster of an occupation, will have poisoned the Middle-East and much of the rest of the world to America’s best qualities. That will take another great generation, perhaps, and hopefully, led by Obama, to cure.
Gobble-the-duke, as Baldrick would say
(1)”No policy can be respected intellectually until it faces and matches Hitchens’s arguments” — true, or as Sartre put it, one’s duty as an intellectual is not to believe, but to think without restriction. (2)The sad being who called Brother Hitch a “totalitarian” has read neither him nor Arendt, and is to be pitied. (3)Behind these comments, the most insightful piece yet done on the outstanding public intellectual of our time, who happens also to be its most remarkable personality, Boris Johnson on stilts and with gravitas, who not existing would have to be invented, a task beyond any living novelist.
Christopher Hitchens is either a fool or the only person on the planet who knows what to think about most of the important questions.
I’m surprised that Hitchens has failed to pull himself out of the left/right paradigm and realize it for what it really is, a dialectic designed to obscure the true natures of key players, all of them prospective or manifest tyrants. Swastika or red star, the bullets are the same.
I well remember Hitchens’ early appearances on TV, on Cross Fire, and how he seemed to be the successor to the aging Gore Vidal, a leftest of sharp wit and pugnaciousness. Boy did that ever go south! I even saw Gore denouncing Hitchens on some NYC liberal forum. Still, this article
left me with one nugget to cherish: “There should have been a thorough Roman cleansing of all that, and a Hellenisation of the Jews. We wouldn’t have had to put up with fundamentalist Christianity, and its plagiarism in the form of Islam. There would have been other barbaric shit. But we wouldn’t have lost the connection to Athens.”
Christianity?, wrecking the vehicle of the barbarian would not have made a scrap of difference, they would have found another car. What of Athens?, a place in the spotlight, the beam would have found another if this were not so. Like Nietzsche before him, Hitchens wrestles with the archetype of the self, whiskey filling a godless void? He writes from the surface rather than from underneath, his lack of introversion is his greatest weakness. Like most intellectuals, he weighs up the world in the abstract, forever in the shadow of living experience.
Blimey - a lengthy profile of/interview with Hitchens. That would be about the 107th in the last five years, eh? Glad to see Prospect is out there on a limb, breaking new ground in contemporary intellectual life.
Leaving aside the ethical/moral arguments for the 2003 Iraq war, assuming that was is justified, what do we(u.s.) do about countless other evil totalitarian and fascist regimes? Do we just focus on the Middle Eastern fascist regimes because we need their oil? If U.S. is the superhero that rescues these poor helpless nations in need of our military might, it doesn’t seem right to me that we only rescue the ones with oil buried in their sand. I would like to know if Hitchens would be in favor of attacking ALL totalitarian regimes or just the ones with a oily commodity that U.S. values.
Hitchens? Erudite old English bastard who is totally in love with himself. I can just see him sitting in that old chair at 3 am mainlining the whiskey directly into his portal vein, murmuring “I can’t believe I’m ME, what a privilege it is for me to actually know ME. Why ME is smart AND English”
If there is no God, then the best this guy could offer us is to erase himself. He uses too much carbon. If he would erase himself he would go from carbon sink to becoming a carbon donor and thereby fulfill his destiny and save the rest of us another 30 years of the pain and the carbon utilization. If he were made in the image and likeness of God, then I guess he would deserve to live, but otherwise would somebody please pull his plug?
Hey you big brained English Boo Hoo, the French figured all this out in the 18th century. Stick that in your Maker’s Mark and swizzle it.
Hitchens? In a word pretentious
So self-recursive as to be hermetic, beyond our powers of parody, Hitchens belongs in a neat English garden: the Drunken Typing Gnome.
The thing that struck me about this interview was Hitchens’ ignorance of American politics outside of the issue of foreign policy. This points to the most gaping hole in the neoconservatives’ world-view: they believe that American power must be used abroad in defence of a set of values, but really, they have no idea what they are defending.
In more detail, they believe in the uncompromising use of Western military power in all parts of the world in an attempt to uphold and promote Western values. When pressed, they emphasize that central to this project is freedom of expression. What does this mean? To the neoconservative intellectual, freedom of expression means writing a few pungent articles for the Observer (Cohen) or Vanity Fair (Hitchens), and being remunerated quite handsomely. This is their vision of the society worth defending. It is the vision of a glorified debating club that needs to be protected and promoted by a massive military machine.
In their zeal to promote their debating-club world-view, they spare no thought for those things in Western society that are absolutely worth defending. I have never heard mention of any of the following by a neoconservative intellectual: equality of the sexes, equality of opportunity, access to healthcare, immigration reform, climate change, the pensions gap, the credit crisis, the problem of balancing economic growth with societal wellbeing. One might as well be speaking another language (other than the language of that odd mental construct, the “anglosphere”). Moreover, in this interview, Hitchens seemed almost to perceive his ignorance of these all-important matters as a badge of honour. Without knowldege of these matters he cannot be a liberal. He is the Lyndon Johnson without the Great Society program.
Clearly then, the challange for the liberal hawk is to create something that is worth defending and promoting, and in this task the neoconservatives fail in the most miserable fashion.