There’s been a huge outpouring of opinion about Christopher Hitchens from both Right and Left, most of it encomiastic, but mixed in with some harsh reviews as well. That isn’t surprising; obviously a polemicist like Hitchens — especially one who crossed the aisle as publicly as he — is going to have his fair share of enemies and critics.
The hard traditionalists, like Lawrence Auster, didn’t like him at all. For Auster it was Hitchens’s militant atheism that put him far beyond the pale. It’s a fair cop, too, I think: I’m an atheist myself, but have come to believe that secularism is, as far as cultural survival is concerned, a maladaptive trait, and to recognize that religion plays, whether I like it or not, a vital role in a nation’s cohesion, vigor, and cultural continuity. Atheists should be more careful about this, if you ask me: they risk, without realizing it, kicking down the tent-pole. But in the end, it’s a matter of priorities: for Mr. Hitchens, the almost certain falsehood of most religious doctrine, and the stupidity and violence with which he so often saw it propagated and defended, was simply more than he could suffer in silence, no matter the cost.
Jonah Goldberg, who knew Hitchens, made this point in his latest ‘G-File’ newsletter:
I once wrote somewhere around NRO that I thought that maybe — just maybe — Hitchens could be considered a “man of the Right.” He was no conservative. You can’t really be a conservative in the Anglo-American tradition and hate religion. You can be a non-believer, I think. But you have to at least have respect for the role of religion and maybe a little reverence for the role of transcendence in people’s lives. Hitch had nothing but contempt. It was one of the last truly asinine Marxist things about him.
…The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that Hitch — who believed in the importance of Western Civilization (he said he’d rather defend Western Civilization than denounce John Ashcroft), gloried in the splendor of the Canon, admired other cultures but rejected utterly the asininity of multicultural leveling — was certainly not a man of the contemporary Left, or maybe not of the Left at all.
I no longer think Hitch was really a man of the Right, chiefly because you can’t be a man of the Right and reflexively, perhaps even childishly, reject the label.
Here’s John Derbyshire:
Christopher Hitchens has died, much too young. I can’t say I was a fan, am not in fact sure I ever read to the end of anything he wrote.
Hitch was a court jester for the liberal elites. He took care never to violate their most sacred taboos. Like Stephen Jay Gould, who also died too young, also of cancer, Hitch carried the banner of soft Marxism forward into the post-Soviet era.
I’m sorry if I sound lukewarm. I’m an opinion journalist, like Hitch, and I am fully aware, as he was, that it is a low kind of trade ”” “the vituperative arts,” as Auberon Waugh said. Hitch was superbly good at it, far better than I could ever hope to be, and miraculously productive to the end. Is that a bit better?
I’ll add this: He was often fun to watch, quick at thinking on his feet, and something like a genius at not suffering fools gladly.
There now; it didn’t come out so bad. I even think the subject might have applauded it. Goodnight, Hitch.
I don’t think that even those who were unapologetic admirers, like me, could possibly have agreed with the man about everything, or perhaps even most things. For me, as I said before, what made me a Hitchens fan were those qualities with which he seemed unfairly, impossibly gifted: his coruscating intelligence, his dazzling skill in debate, his virtuosic wordcraft, and above all, his luminous vitality and style.
In a post yesterday on atheism and death, Bill Vallicella offered this:
‘Brilliant’ is a word I don’t toss around lightly, but Hitch is one to whom it unarguably applies. Public intellectuals of his caliber are rare and it will be sad to see him go. Agree or disagree with him, it is discourse at his level that justifies the high regard we place on free speech.
Yes indeed: it’s sad to see him go.