And that's the other thing he was never afraid of a fight, unlike certain other parts of the Anon 12:12, Lewis never said there was salvation after death, though the implication of the Great Divorce is necessarily purgatorial, it strikes me that his vision was one of souls on earth on their way. ![]() The Haldane/Hitchens debate was funny in its contrast, a bellicose brashness of the Hitch, with quiet reserved demeanor of Haldane. Though he was always way of the mark when it came to religion and theism he gave it a good shot. He was the only one of the new atheists who I could respect in any way for his wit and outspokeness on matters political and he was always entertaining in debate. But love for one’s fellow man, however genuine, is only the second greatest commandment. While there was rather too obviously something of the champagne socialist about him, I do not doubt that he had real concern for real human beings - rather than merely for grotesque abstractions like “the working class” or “humanity” - and that he showed real moral and even physical courage in defense of what he sincerely took to be the best interests of real human beings. Which makes it ironic that the one joke my publisher demanded I remove was a certain jibe about Hitchens’ boozing.) Of the four horsemen of the New Atheism, Hitchens was the only one I found likable, and the only one possessed of a modicum of wisdom about the human condition, or at least as much wisdom about the human condition as one can have while remaining essentially a man of the Left. (No one who knows me or my work could think I regard a crack about one’s affection for the sauce as a serious insult. The Hitchens jokes in The Last Superstition are the only ones with any affection behind them - well, some of them have it, anyway. As far as I know, Hitchens was no closer on his deathbed to becoming the next Malcolm Muggeridge than he had been when penning his decidedly un-Muggeridgean book about Mother Teresa. And sometimes he just hates your guts, and that’s that. Sometimes a man has mixed feelings about you, but will accentuate the negative, loath as he is to acknowledge the merits of an adversary. This struck me as romantic fantasy, born of too steady a diet of happy “crossing the Tiber” stories. Some Catholics seem to have gotten it into their heads over the last year that he might convert - as if someone who is overtly so very hostile to Catholicism simply must be compensating for a secret longing for it, and is sure to be moved by the prospect of imminent death to let his inhibitions fall away. Religion is the last subject about which to have a tin ear or a closed mind, and Hitchens had both. There is no use sugar-coating that fact now that he is gone, and Hitchens was not in any event a fan of the polite obituary. It offers a delightful and (yes) nostalgic tour through Hitchens’s ideas and arguments over the decades by an author who clearly appreciates what the man had to say, how he said it, and how he thought.Except on religion, where he was a complete bore and an insufferable hack. How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment by Matt Johnson is not a hagiography, but it is friendly. ![]() There will be no new books from Hitchens himself after his posthumous Mortality, but plenty have been written about him in the meantime, not all of them friendly. The drink didn’t get him, but smoking apparently did. In 2011, Hitchens left us when he succumbed to complications caused by esophageal cancer. The man could knock out a sparkling magazine column in 30 minutes after sinking an entire bottle of wine (always red, never white) at four o’clock in the morning. His scathing wit, his barn-burner polemics, his prodigious output, his ability to demonstrate the depth and breadth of an entire classical education on a single page, his knack for speaking extemporaneously in perfectly formed paragraphs, and his near-photographic recall of virtually everything he ever read were peerless. Nobody ever beat Hitchens in argument, not even when he was wrong. “He likes the battle, the argument, the smell of cordite,” his best friend and novelist Martin Amis once observed. A review of How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenmentby Matt Johnson, 462 pages, Pitchstone Publishing (February 2023)īritish-American journalist, essayist, author, and human bulldozer Christopher Hitchens intimidated nearly everyone who encountered him, whether in print, on television, or on a debate stage.
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