Thank Hitchens

If it weren't for Christopher Hitchens I wouldn't be here. I don't mean this in any metaphysical sense, but quite literally: I wouldn't be sitting in this seat, at my folding card-table, with a glass of retsina and a cigar, unable to sleep, in front of a word processor writing. Hitchens deserves almost all of the credit for my own intellectual awakening about ten years ago, and my subsequent decision to be a writer. It's true that I was raised by two brilliant academics, and my parents are certainly the foundation of my love of reading, but by the time I'd graduated from New York University, I'd all but lost interest in the life of the mind. I'd been dipped and coated in various ideas about identity politics, trendy postmodernist theory, some sort of vague Western conspiracy to oppress the rest of the world, and, most perniciously, moral relativism. 

 

Fortunately, thin as it was, the batter didn't stick too well. When my generation was hit with the greatest challenge to its existence in the form of two planes smashing through two skyscrapers and a few thousand immolated corpses, the moral questions raised were more difficult to answer in my state of mind than they should have been, in hindsight. I had been taught that morality was a word about which hung a stale but pungent odor of hypocrisy, hubris, and absolutism. It was a relic from a time when religion ruled the lives of men and no right-thinking liberal person was supposed to believe in anything as old-fashioned and un-ecumenical as right and wrong, much less good and evil. Still ankle-deep in ash, people were already talking about chickens coming home to roost, payback for imperialist crimes, and reaping a harvest of our own sowing. There would later be times when I felt guilty for not joining the armed forces the day after the attacks, but at that time I was still filled with a kind of masochistic guilt – a belief that, having been so lucky in my birth, my environment, my situation, there must naturally be distant victims of my own prosperity, and that they were well within their right to punish me.

One night I happened to switch on to Bill Maher's talk show. One of the guests, a chubby but roguish man with somewhat stringy blond hair, was defending the invasion of Iraq and giving the finger to Maher's audience while mocking them for repeatedly bleating like sheep at the most simple of “stupid Bush” jokes. At first, I thought he was another right-wing pundit, but as I listened to his pleasant English voice, I realized he was arguing for the invasion from a left-wing point of view. I was bowled over. It was my first encounter with a genuine contrarian, someone who could never be pigeonholed or lined-up on a neat spectrum. It was the exact feeling I'd always had but hadn't been smart enough to understand or bold enough to articulate – I was always too afraid that by breaking party lines with those around me, the disapproval of the majority would outweigh the potency of the argument.

In Peter Brook's stage and screen adaptation of the Indian epic The Mahabarata, one character, a young man, is determined to study under the greatest weapon master in the land. He is turned down as a pupil, so he builds a statue of the teacher and practices in front of it every day. In a similar way, I began to write, always with Hitchens' own writing in my mind. I began to read with the same hunger I'd had as a boy, before the things on offer were as dry and insipid as Deleuze and Donna Haraway. I tore through four or five books a week: novels, history, politics, and poetry (for the first time ever.) All because Christopher Hitchens had appeared to me as the embodiment of the man of letters and I wanted to be one tenth as smart and well-read as him. 

 

I read every article he wrote that I could find - essays about Auden, blowjobs, George Orwell, full-body waxing, Thomas Paine, and the King James Bible. I watched countless videos of Hitchens debating on every topic, and went to watch him destroy opponents live with his dazzling rhetoric, wit, and knowledge. I watched as he sat calmly, with a scotch in hand, and jotted something on his notepad while his opponent (in this case Rabbi Shmuley Boteach,) told the audience that Hitch had been lying and that Boteach himself had never read anything anywhere that would prove the points Hitch had been making. When his turn came, Hitch looked once more at the pad, and then gave Boteach the names, authors, and publishers of three books which would support the single point he had been challenged on – from memory.

 

It was Hitchens' erudition, his easy style, his humor, which first led me to try my hand at speaking in public, expressing my opinion, arguing in earnest – that, and the fact that he once said that if you can cut a dashing figure at a podium you'd never have to dine or sleep alone. I began to lead the New York City Atheists monthly meetup group, and I gradually became more comfortable in myself and my thoughts. I stopped being afraid of running up against the chill wall of consensus. When people parroted opinions they'd heard someone else say because they thought that everyone in the immediate area would agree with them, I began to question them and to engage them in discussion. The more I read, the more I spoke, and the more I wrote, the more I came into my own. Through my work in and connections with secularist and atheist causes, I ended up meeting authors, diplomats, UN representatives, and working on political initiatives to keep church and state separate. And it all went right back to Hitch.

But the most important thing that Hitch did for me was to teach me what it meant to be a moral person and a moral writer. It was around the time that I'd first encountered Hitchens that I had independently come to the conclusion that rather than being a product of American imperialism, the attacks of September 11^th were the fruits of a hideous religious ideology, totalitarian in its ambition and tenets. My atheism, always a casual and personal philosophy which I had taken for granted, now evolved into a political belief in secularism. When God is Not Great was published, I realized that the time when religion ruled the lives of men was by no means over, and that it was up to members of my generation to push back against it or risk being destroyed. It was Hitchens' writing that showed me that moral relativism was an easy out – one which absolved the individual from having to make a difficult choice. For the first time in my life, I began to feel emboldened to describe things in terms of right and wrong. And I soon realized that the criteria for knowing who one's enemies are are by no means soft.

Because of Hitchens' literary expertise, I came to understand style, art, beauty, and culture as more than mere window dressing but as the point themselves. I soon realized that my enemies are easy to identify – they are, first and foremost, the people who burn books, who put death sentences on novelists, kill filmmakers, attack cartoonists, burn embassies, kidnap travellers, bomb nightclubs, throw acid in the face of girls who would dare go to school, demolish ancient statues, crush their own daughter's windpipes for speaking to men, have a truly imperialist dream of restoring an ancient and oppressive world order, and only read one old, morally twisted book. I decided I was on the side of libraries filled with many books. And when people criticized US soldiers for not protecting the Baghdad museum as quickly as they could have, I criticized the men who looted it. And Hitch was always ready to point out that these weren't the enemies of “Western” civilization. The word “Western” was completely irrelevant and unnecessary. 

 

And the root of all of this is what is now the most important philosophical tenet in my life thanks to Hitch: a belief in absolute freedom of speech and freedom of conscience without fear, and the corollary belief that if any one principle needs to be defended quite literally to the death, this is it. I looked for a quote to illustrate this point from my favorite book of Hitchens': Letters to a Young Contrarian, but I realized I'd have to quote the entire book. Just go buy it.

I met Hitch briefly a few times at events where he was a speaker. The last time he remembered me. I wrote to him several times, and he always replied promptly, whether it was me asking him for advice on learning about Australia (he recommended Robert Hughe's The Fatal Shore, a well as national poets and writers like Henry Lawson, C.J. Dennis, and Fergus Hume,) discussing what I thought was his Indian flag lapel pin (it turns out that it was the flag of independent Kurdistan – I told him I would give him one of my pins of the flag of secular Kashmir, but I never got the chance,) or, at my last correspondence with him, informing him of the fact that it was the 200^th anniversary of Shelley being sent down from Oxford for writing The Necessity of Atheism. In the response to that last letter, he insisted that the next time I was in Washington DC I call him up and come over for a drink. Unfortunately, the next time I was in his neighborhood he was out of town for the first of his chemotherapy sessions.

I have many things to thank Christopher Hitchens for. Chief among them are my love of: PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Iraj Pezeshkzad, Anthony Powell, James Fenton, Philip Larkin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, and countless other writers. It was Hitchens who made me decide to go to school to become a journalist, and Hitchens who helped me overcome my natural timidity, not only in social situations, but in the world – I would never have dreamed of going alone to Kashmir or the Congo (I've done the latter but was prevented from the former by worried family after the hotel I was booked into was the site of a grenade attack a few days before my arrival. But I'll get there some day.)

Christopher Hitchens truly made my life what it is today. I'd call him my idol if it wasn't for the fact that, iconoclast that he was, he would hate to be called anything of the sort.

I've posted the following video a million times on Facebook, but it is Hitchens at his best, and probably the 20 minutes most responsible for making me who I am today.