The “god” of
Christopher Hitchens
Many
years ago, I came to the conclusion that any writer who piles on adverbs and
adjectives with little or no restraint is probably either trying to sell you a
bill of goods or else has an axe to grind. In other words, such people are not
to be trusted.
This
longstanding prejudice of mine probably explains why I have for so long
resisted taking Christopher Hitchens seriously, given his penchant for hurling
insults and invective upon anyone or anything with which he disagrees. To me, anyone who starts off on such a foot
hardly deserves to be heard. But when a friend of mine who had been long urging
me to read Hitchens’ “god is not Great”
(New York:12/Grand Central Publishing, 2007 — note the deliberate use of the
lower case “g” throughout the book) deliberately bought a copy for me to read,
I was still reluctant to subject myself to any more of Hitchens’ rantings than
I had already seen. But the book having
been so purchased (even if at clearance price since it was by now three years
old) what else could I do? So now I will finally write, three years late, my
impression of what Hitchens has been saying.
Right
off, in the introductory chapter, he boils it all down to four main points.
They are: first, that “religious faith wholly misrepresents the origins of man
and the cosmos”; second, “that because of this original error it manages to
combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism”; third, “it is
both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression”, and finally,
“that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking” (p. 4).
It
is noteworthy, however, that this list of indictments, in keeping with the
subtitle, “How Religion Poisons Everything,” is almost entirely directed
against not so much against God as such, but against religion—which is, of
course bound up with human ideas about God and our relationship to him, her, or
whatever it may be. This is important to
note, because after two chapters of cataloging the horrible things that people
often do in the name of God or religion it is only in chapters five and six
that Hitchens ventures into “The Metaphysical Claims of Religion” and
“Arguments from Design.”
In
the first of these, after dismissing Saint Augustine as “a self-centered
fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus” (there is no mention of Augustine’s
understanding of God as “Being as such” or Augustine’s concept of different
species slowly developing into their present form over long periods of time —
which of course would entirely upset Hitchens’ desire to picture God as the big
daddy in the sky) Hitchens moves on quickly to comment on the big bang as “the
accepted theory of the origins of the universe” without mentioning that the
original theorist in this matter was the Catholic priest and scientist, Georges
Lemaitre, who later became the head of the Pontifical Academy for science.
Instead, Hitchens berates the renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking
for meeting with the pope, and who, although he remains an agnostic, is not
afraid (especially in view of the implications of the big bang theory) to ask
the most fundamental question of all — “Why is there something rather than
nothing?” So much for Hitchens grasp of
the fundamentals of metaphysics.
In
“Arguments from Design”, Hitchens shows more ability to understand the basic
issues, at least enough to debunk the claims of the “intelligent design”
arguments that seem to be the last bastion of creationist thought. It is too
bad, however, that he fails to note that most scientists, including those who
happen to be believers, also reject the creationist assumptions or line of
thought. Hitchens seems to have never heard of the term “theistic evolution,”
for if he had, it would have rendered this chapter, as informative as it may
be, largely redundant or at least more interesting.
Chapters
Seven, Eight, and Nine are given over, in respective order, to demolishing any
claims that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam might have to being considered the
product of any divine revelation. But
considering Hitchens’ confused summary of what serious scriptures scholars, as
well as the Catholic Church, have been saying for many centuries about the
Bible, it is hard not to question Hitchens’ understanding of the nature of
divine inspiration, which he seems to have
confused with Muslim fundamentalist claims of the Qur’an being the
result of word-for-word divine dictation.
Chapter
Ten, ostensibly about miracles, goes all over the place, but not without
special invective against Mother Teresa of Calcutta and especially against her
champion publicist, Malcolm Muggeridge, who earns Hitchens’ special scorn —
probably (although Hitchens remains silent on his point) because Muggeridge
once was a noisy proponent of atheism like Hitchens, but who eventually claimed
to “have seen the light”.
The
next two chapters are in a way paired, Eleven being
about how religions begin (mostly by fraud taking advantage of wishful
thinking) and Twelve about how they end (more of the same).
Chapter
Thirteen, “Does Religion Make People Behave Better?” at least begins to address
a more philosophical subject, but again descends into personal attacks on the
thinking and even personal integrity of social reformers like Gandhi and Martin
Luther King. Even
Chapter
Fourteen, about eastern religions, begins with Hitchens’ own reportorial
experience of an Indian guru (Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh) who was an obvious fraud
from the beginning, and from that moves on to the conclusion that all eastern
religions and their leaders, including the Dalai Lama, are likewise
power-hungry frauds. Buddhism, in particular, comes in for Hitchens’ scorn, not
just for its “mindless” passivism but, in the case of
In
Chapter Fifteen, on “Religion as an Original Sin”, in addition to repeating the
attack on religious accounts of the world’s origin and that of the human race
(rather like blaming Columbus for
sailing on the Santa Maria when he could of taken a jet plane!) Hitchens zeroes
in on the concepts of blood sacrifice, atonement, eternal reward/or punishment,
and “the imposition of the impossible tasks and rules.” Again, there’s no
recognition that even the Hebrew prophets inveighed against the distortion or
even sometimes against the practice of blood sacrifice, and that many Christian
theologians have for a long time questioned too literal interpretation of
atonement based on such symbolism. And
as for the idea of eternal reward or punishment, the existential dimensions of
the questions posed by Pascal (whose theology he deems “not far short of
sordid”) much less Kierkegaard (who is not even mentioned) is waved aside for
lack of evidence. So now, at this point in the book, the man who scorns the
whole idea of miracles (Chapter Ten) now demands them before he’ll take
seriously the possibility the idea that the end of the material universe might
not be the end of everything.
Perhaps
it is this total lack of any self-transcending possibilities for human life
that explains Hitchens’ ill-concealed furor over religion’s ethical
demands. The injunction that we “love your
neighbor if as yourself” is deemed “too extreme and too strenuous to be
obeyed.” But the basic “Golden Rule” common to all the higher religions, and
even philosophies such as Confucianism, when rephrased as simply “to treat
others as one would wish to be treated by them” is seen as maybe OK (providing,
I suppose, unless one is a masochist).
But Jesus’ request that we love others as he has loved us is seen as
nonsense and, as far as the gospel urging to “love your enemies” — that is
apparently beyond worth even mentioning. Too much of this is an expectation
that we become, as Hitchens complains, “superhuman.”
This
minimalist dance seems to me to be a strange inconsistency for someone who touts
evolution as the total explanation for what we have become so far. But on second thought, maybe it explains
Hitchens’ preference for repeatedly referring to ourselves, but especially to
people he doesn’t like, as “mammals.”
One might think he’d at least give us the dignity of being classified as
“primates.” But if he did, would he not
be seen as an intimating that we might aspire to evolve even higher? And if so,
must we not expect, even relish, the challenge of becoming better than we are?
Apparently not. It should be noted that Hitchens ends Chapter Fifteen with a special
note about the impossibility of religious taboos about sex and admits that he
could probably write an entire book on the subject, but judging from Chapter
Sixteen, “Is Religion Child Abuse?”, it is probably
safe to say that he probably has it already mapped out in his mind. It seems to
be a subject that particularly provokes him to an outpouring of profanity. (I can hardly wait to read his recently published
autobiographical memoir “Hitch — 22.” Already the reviews have unleashed bevy of
speculations about Hitchens’ sex life and preferences.)
After
wading through all the above, one might think that I
would advise the reader not to take Hitchens seriously, but quite the contrary.
In Chapter Seventeen, on “The ‘Case’ Against Secularism” (note the quotes
around the word “case” implying that there is none) he at least makes a seeming
effort to be fair when it comes to deciding whether or not it is religion or
atheism that has worked the most havoc and mayhem on the world. In fact he even
honestly admits there have been fanatics and scoundrels on both sides. But the
problem is that when it comes to identifying the root problem, religion gets
the most blame whenever it has cooperated with totalitarian or nationalist
movements, while atheism, when it plays the same role, is largely left off the
hook, with the totalitarian or nationalist expression caricaturized as a
“religion” of sorts. But even if we
accept that sleight of hand, it is instructive that Hitchens avoided citing any
numbers, even in his endnotes. So I will instead supply some for him. From what
I was able to glean from the Internet, especially Wikipedia, it seems that it
is generally admitted that the Second World War, which was begun by the Fascist
and nominally Christian countries, caused the death some 61 million people,
while the total killed by officially atheist Communist regimes (apart from any
wars) is currently estimated at 94 million.
So you can draw your own conclusions.
Finally,
I would say that Chapter Eighteen is well worth reading all by itself. In “A
Finer Tradition: The Resistance of the Rational”, Hitchens himself finally
becomes more rational, leaving behind what Ian Buruma, in reviewing Hitchens’
latest memoir in the New York Review of
Books, calls Hitchens “peculiar tone of righteousness and [his] parochial
point of view” (which Buruma also describes in terms of “narcissism”) as well
as his “atheistic sloganeering.” Indeed,
on page 262 Hitchens even admits (after being introduced to the thought of
Spinoza) that there just might be “a god made manifest throughout the natural
world” [which] “comes very close to defining a religious god out of existence.” This idea of a “god” seems even to appeal to
Hitchens in a way, probably because Einstein (one of Hitchens’ major heros)
once claimed that on this point that his concept of God was much the same as
Spinoza’s.
There
we have it, both the positive as well as the negative (note italicized
“religious”) indication that Hitchens own understanding of what the word “god,”
even if in lowercase, might really mean. The bogeyman God that has dominated
Hitchens’ thought since his childhood seems to be, ever so slightly, giving way
to something more expansive, something more profound, indeed, to something more
like the despised Augustine’s understanding of God as
“Being in itself.”
Of
course, someone, and no doubt Hitchens himself, might object that Spinoza was
ejected from his synagogue, accused of ‘pantheism’ and excommunicated for his
views. But Hitchens should know (if he
had really cared to fully inform himself) that in the same manner, Meister
Eckhardt, St. John of the Cross, and many other mystics were also suspected of
pantheism or even hauled up before the Inquisition to explain or defend their
views, or that even a few of them were burned at the stake, and that the
Islamic mystic Al-Hallaj was executed in Baghdad in 922 for claiming he had
experienced complete union with God. So
it seems that mysticism of all stripes provides an equal-opportunity for
martyrdom at the hands of fundamentalists.
Hitchens,
who, after all, is only a journalist, and although in Buruma’s view is
“intelligent, often principled, [but] often wrongheaded,” nevertheless should
have, sooner or later, run across the fact that this is not just a matter of
mysticism. Hitchens should also have
found out by now that there is a long-standing tradition of apophatic or “negative” theology in
Christian tradition that holds that the only adequate knowledge of God is in
“the Cloud of Unknowing.” And Hitchens
should have that the greatest theologian of the middle ages, Thomas Aquinas
(whom he trashes as “a man of one book”— this of the man who caused a revolution
by introducing Aristotle into Medieval Christendom) was the same Aquinas who
deemed his writings to be as so-much “straw” compared to the reality that he
sought to describe or that at the end of his life he finally experienced what
he had been saying all along: that while it is possible to know that there is a
God, it is impossible to define God’s essence — thus, for the most part, we can
only have a knowledge of what God isn’t.
Buruma,
at the end of his review, which is enigmatically titled “The Believer”, speaks
of Hitchens as being “a man of faith.” I
will have to reserve judgment on that until I have read Hitchens’ memoir. But what I suspect that Buruma is trying to
get at is that anyone who so persistently and stubbornly doubts practically
everything and everyone is, in some way compensating or even overcompensating
for once having trusted or over-trusted his instincts. Hitchens himself has claimed that while he
has no faith, that he nevertheless trusts — apparently that sooner or later we
“mammals” will get things right. I hope
so. In fact, I think I even detect a
hint that Hitchens’ primitive views of “god” may be, like Hitchens himself,
ever so slowly evolving and maturing.
R
W Kropf 8/1/2010 Hitchens’
god.doc/htm