THE SOPHISTRY OF CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

I'm back from my internet-free weekend and, on the whole, found it restorative and recommend the exercise highly.  Unfortunately, I returned to find Christopher Hitchens's predictable - and predictably asinine - defense of his chum and fellow traveler Martin Amis.  The most generous thing to be said about this incoherent ramble is that it's nice to stick up for one's friends.

Honestly, it's a bit difficult to know where to begin.  I've watched Hitchens's deterioration over the years with genuine dismay.  It's true that there are some who argue that he was never much as literary critic to begin with - Dan Green makes the point especially firmly - but I don't agree.  I think many of the essays in Unacknowledged Legislation are excellent, and I've lamented the gradual decline of what was once an astute literary mind.

But I'm here to bury Hitchens, not to praise him.  And his response to Ronan Bennett's essay - to which I linked approvingly just before the holiday - shows him at his absolute worst, clearly underscoring what a caricature he's become.  To wit:

Ronan Bennett's clumsy tirade against Martin Amis in G2 on Monday will not have been a complete waste of space if it allows us to revisit the words "discriminate" or "discrimination". In a public quarrel that originated between two professors of English (Amis and Terry Eagleton) it ought not to be necessary to remind people that these terms are, at root, complimentary. To have a discriminating palate, for example, is to enjoy good taste. I have argued for years that the concept is absurd when applied to racists. "Discrimination" is something that they just can't manage. Indeed, it is the very thing of all things that they cannot, by definition, manage. A racist is a racist precisely because he can't distinguish between a Jew and another Jew, or an Asian or West Indian or Chechen. The "out" groups are all made up of generalised amalgams and there can be no exceptions.

Thus to accuse Martin Amis of being a racist is to say that he can't tell the difference between, say, one Irishman and another. Now, a moment's thought on the part of his worst enemy would reveal that accusation to be silly and vicious, and baseless on its face. I am not writing as Amis's worst enemy. In fact, I am writing as a friend who also took issue with what he said, in unscripted conversation with a Times reporter, a short while after the ghastly assault by Muslim fanatics on our public transport system. (By the way, yes, I do think that the word "fanatic" requires that prefix in this case.) I wrote my article last autumn and it was published in the Manhattan City Journal last January, so Mr Bennett need not congratulate himself so warmly on being the only one apart from Eagleton with the nerve to raise the issue.

This is what passes for Christopher Hithchen's critical engagement these days.  Word games and outlandish assertions, with a dash of reductio ad absurdum, that hoariest of rhetorical crutches.  Honestly, does anyone other than Hitchens really believe that Bennett was suggesting that that Amis "can't tell the difference between, say, one Irishman and another any of this."  Of course not - he neither said nor hinted in the general direction of any such thing, nor would any reasonable human being extrapolate any of this.  It's the worst kind sophistry, pure and simple, the rhetorical flourishes of an intellectually bankrupt gasbag who can no longer trade in the facts.  I'd say it was beneath Hitchens but, sadly, nothing seems beneath him any longer. 

Years ago, I saw Tariq Aziz interviewed on Charlie Rose where he somehow managed to insist with a straight face that the first Iraq War was the result of American aggression.  It was a riveting performance and Hitchens's ludicrous assertions brought it back to mind.  But in some ways that's apt, as Hitchens is no longer a thinker or a critic - he's a propagandist.  What else to make of his risible assertion that "A racist is a racist precisely because he can't distinguish between a Jew and another Jew, or an Asian or West Indian or Chechen." 

The propagandist, after all, trades in his inciting soundbites even as he knows the truth lies elsewhere.  Like the cheap magician, it's all about the misdirection.  But a man of Hitchens's education cannot possibly be unfamiliar with, to cite merely the best known example, The Nuremberg Laws which were careful to distinguish mischlinge - Jews of mixed parentage - down to agonizingly specific degrees.  This assertion - which underpins much of Hitchens's racial "philosophy" - is something he frequently leans on and is so patently absurd - more sophistry from the master - that it scarcely requires repudiation.

Except that Amis and Hitchens both do require repudiation, most firmly perhaps for floating this insidious notion of a "thought experiment."  This was anything but.  This was the expression of a particularly ugly strain of racism from which Amis was clever enough to try to deflect criticism by prophylactically suggesting, in essence, "I don't really mean this, of course, but ... "  And that's total shit and he should not be allowed to get away with giving himself a very clever cover from which to spew this invective.  There were surely a lot of "thought experiments" taking place in interwar Germany, as well.  Here Hitchens goes so totally off the rails that it's clear that 9/11 and Islamophobia have permanently deranged him.

The problem with the notion of a thought experiment - aside from the sheer, calculating disingenousness of the thing - is that it also provides cover not just to Amis but to plenty of others who have, perhaps, experienced similar thoughts and feelings.  But instead of summoning our better angels to challenge ourselves on why such beliefs, though seductive, are finally simplistic and repugnant emotional responses, Amis creates a safe harbor for indulging in this kind of trash.  And Hitchens should know better than to deploy his considerable rhetorical gifts to, as the headlines of his piece has it, "defending the indefensible." 

But the sad truth I've come around to at last is that Hitchens no longer knows better.  He has been irredeemably and irretrievably twisted by world events and has drowned in his own Kool-aid.  The greatest loss is that, for all his considerable gifts, he can no longer persuade.  He aims his salvos to the like-minded rabble in the cheap seats, and walks off the stage patting himself on the back for his cleverness without converting a single mind.  This trait infects all his work these days - God is Not Great, while occasionally splenetically entertaining, will not sway a single undecided.  And isn't that at least one key measure against which a true rhetorician or polemicist measures success?

Reading Hitchens's essay, I was reminded of a line from Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, in which the protagonist Henry expresses his frustration at another piece of considerably less elegant political hackery.  "Words don't deserve that kind of malarkey," he says.  "They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos."  It's been years since Hitchens built a bridge to anything, and it's hard to believe the same man could still write like this as recently as 2000:

"There's a quavering note here which, ironically in its way, contrasts with Abe Ravelstein's robust and amoral and defiant and very American style; a style redeemed from being merely reactionary by its understanding of the ancients, and the understanding (to which it incidentally or accidentally assists us) that intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilized man."

Well, Hitchens hasn't adopted that particular pose, that's for certain.  And if you accept Churchill's definition of a fanatic as one who won't change his mind and can't change the subject, it seems that Hitchens has finally crossed over to the side he so despises.  And I, for one, lament the loss.

Comments

[Steven Augustine]

Mark, I think I see rhetoricians on all sides of this argument swinging wildly at specific personalities rather than quietly debating the essential points...in other words, passionate ad hominems like "racist" and "Islamist" and "gasbag" have all but replaced a simple discussion of the facts.

Neither Hitchens's nor Amis's nor Eagleton's nor Bennet's moral triumphs/character flaws are proof of the justice/foolishness of any side of this argument, simply because these people aren't the real players on the stage. They are commenting, to a largely disinterested planet, from the sidelines, and what are we doing but commenting on the commenters?

Anyone genuinely interested in sorting this out should return this debate to the arena of its actual elements.

The real players (the "Western" and "Middle Eastern" men, both, with guns, bombs, zealous followers and body counts to manage) are busy making history while we literate types are so furiously involved with our little meta-narrative.

Does a child full of American-made shrapnel anywhere in Iraq today give a damn what Hitchens said? Between Mr. Amis's affect on world politics and that of the world-renown Angelina Jolie's, there's obviously no comparison, and anyone who thinks otherwise is clearly nostalgic for an earlier era.

I'm feeling fairly helpless when it comes to doing anything about the war in Iraq, or the plight of the Palestinians, or rampant anti-Semitism (disguised as anti-Israelism or anti-Neoconism) in the UK...

...but there's always hope that along with the possibly imminent regime change in Washington, legislators in such cities in the EU as are affected by the issues on this table will be a bit more clear-minded about protecting Free Speech, and prosecuting/preventing Human Rights Violations that conveniently cloak themselves as Cultural Inheritances.

I consider women to be human; how about you?

Sneer back in L.A. about all that if you want, but concerns about honor-killings, clitorectomies, forced marriages, and death threats against apostates and heretics both, et al, are what this issue boils down to for *Europeans* and various other types living over here. It's not about "race" (it's my understanding that most Arabs and Iranians, for example, are considered Caucasians, in any case)...it's not about language, music, mode of dress or cuisine.

This "debate" as it's waged polemically in the GU, by the way, is nothing but an extension of the Oedipal class war that rages on almost every issue in the UK (certainly re: books)...the positions staked out are issued at birth. It's a cyclone in a bedsit and signifies nothing. It's laughably similar to the era of verbal punchups (communism-vs-imperialism) during the reign of Stalin.

I don't want my daughter growing up in a Europe where a cartoonist/novelist/film maker can't twit an imaginary superbeing without genuine fear of losing her/his head to some illiterate's blade.

That anyone can construe that feeling as "racist" is beyond belief, in my opinion.

[TEV]

Hi Steven,

Actually, I'm not at all interested in changing the arena, as you have. My post is about one thing and one thing only, and that's Hitchens's failed rhetorical skills. It does not undertake to address or solve the problems of Islam and Europe - territory far beyond the brief of most litblogs. It's purely an assessment of Hitchens's complete degradation as a thinker and writer.

That said, it's worth remembering the reaction in the US when John Lennon posited that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, a reaction not dissimilar to the Danish cartoon episode. A fanatic is a fanatic but folks who kill abortion doctors aren't taken to represent American Christians.

Still, as I said, this isn't really about The World Crisis - it's about the complete disintegration of a once formidable mind.

[John Shannon]

Well put. Poor CH has been turning himself into a performing clown for a long time.

[JMW]

The thoughts on Hitchens are provocative. I think the larger point, though, is that Amis and anyone else should feel free to say whatever they'd like. This seems like one of an increasing number of cases in which liberals -- and I count myself as one -- seem to be arguing pretty vehemently against free speech. (The outcry against Amis has seemed, to me, less an argument against what he said than an argument that he should never have said it.)

As for fanaticism, which you mention in the post, I recently read this terrific definition of it, by George Santayana: "Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."

[Steven Augustine]

"A fanatic is a fanatic but folks who kill abortion doctors aren't taken to represent American Christians."

Mark, the above point is arguable...quite a few around the world see Bush's various military activities as logical extensions of his awful religion. I've bent over backwards, I think, to make it clear that I'm not singling out Islam; I can't think of a single "terrorist" with Bush's potential for destruction.

I'd love the overall debate to move along far enough for us to deal with the *Superstition-Empowered Thantalogists* on this planet as more of a coalition than two sides of a struggle between good and evil...it's just that things are stuck at Square One, and there's all this pointless squabbling over whether Martin Amis is a racist or not.

Anyway, I can't see how I've gone *so* far off-piste with my comment, since it pertains to much of the Hitchens material you deal with here, but I'm not going to repay your good-faith response with grumbling...

And, yes, I do agree: the Hitchens tool is sadly blunt of late, and in many ways a cautionary tale about the life of a professional contrarian.

[Steven Augustine]

Erratum:

"Thanatologists" (Christ, I hate typos)

[CAAF]

I'm very fond of Hitch (and Amis, for that matter) but thought his "thought experiment" defense was both chilling and lame -- I'm so glad for your able response. Lately, he seems committed to always working his proofs backwards: He knows the answer before he even starts, he only has to trump up some false reasoning to show how he got there.

After I read Hitch's piece I was thinking it should appear in a pamphlet alongside Irving's NYTBR review of the Gunter Grass biography, another well-meant but limping defense of a friend from this year.

[JMW]

You could make the case -- theoretically; I'm not making it here, though I'm tempted -- that Hitchens doesn't represent the dangers of being a contrarian as much as the danger of not being one. In other words, it's all well and good when Hitchens is raging and polemical if his targets are Kissinger, et al, but not so when he's going after those usually championed by the left. I'm not saying he's right about everything he's opining about these days, but I'd say the reaction to him can incriminate his audience as well as himself.

[Steven Augustine]

JMW

"In other words, it's all well and good when Hitchens is raging and polemical if his targets are Kissinger, et al, but not so when he's going after those usually championed by the left."

So true. He was a Contrarian Colossus when he executed the Mother Theresa Takedown, though, wasn't he? 603 readers around the world beshat themselves laughing...and the rest just sputtered, poleaxed and jawdropped. From that to the Paris Hilton apologia in less than a century: it hardly seems possible.

[a very public sociologist]

It is a shame Hitchens has gone over to the dark side, as he was a valued weapon in the left's armoury. Hopefully he'll repent and return to the fold one day, but I won't be holding my breath.

[AdaBooks]

"Thus to accuse Martin Amis of being a racist is to say that he can't tell the difference between, say, one Irishman and another."

I took Hitchens to mean here that a racist is one who doesn't discriminate between an Irishman and, say, an IRA-man. That is, a racist would just lump them together, make all Irish suspect. And, presumably, that would go for Muslims and Islamist extremists, too. It may not be the epitome of rhetoric but it is, at least, clear. And I found it strange that it caused you such incredulity.

As for Amis, my opinion is that his comments were nothing more than bad taste. (He isn't a politician and he has no power to enact policy.) His tag of "thought experiment" may be pompous and even false, but as it was an unscripted comment, made by a man who earns his living at fiction, so it should surprise no one if he should "experiment" extemporaneously (and on the record) now and then.

[WillisDyer]

I wasn't going to comment, but I love this blog, and I'd hate to see its readership misrepresented. I'm absolutely heartbroken over some of the comments I've read here, and seeing as how it's impossible for me to separate the offender from his apologists, by commenting I get a chance to speak to both.

Historically, when despots get to power they murder or keep close surveillance over their nation's writers and intellectuals. Why? Because the poets and cultural critics have the ability to stir action against bad government or, in this case, the almost two million innocent Muslims living in Britain. To say that Amis and "Hitch" don't have cultural influence (i.e. indirect influence over the thinking of policy makers and ordinary people) is to egregiously understate the power of not only Hitchens and Amis but of literature itself as a cultural force.

"Bad taste" my ass, it was racism, and not of the Michael Richards variety, but the kind that will have a lasting pernicious effect on religious tolerance within the UK and elsewhere.

I understand Mark's incredulity. Amis gave us Heavy Water, Hitchens gave us Why Orwell Matters, and now they both give us garbage.

[Steven Augustine]

"I wasn't going to comment, but I love this blog, and I'd hate to see its readership misrepresented."

You don't/can't speak for this blog's readership... you can only speak for yourself. As does anyone commenting. Even Mark.

[Nick]

Great post.

[fun_shapes]

Most of these comments completely ignore what Bennett is saying. Its not that we shouldn't be able to have cartoons of Muhammad, or be able to criticize the ideology which fuels religious fundamentalism, but it is when the two are conflated, when the two are so easily, so insidiously conflated, that we have a problem.

There is a difference between criticizing certain 'virulent' ideological strains within a religion, and wondering (in public) whether the whole community of Muslims shouldn't be terrorized until they 'sort it out.' One can almost understand why Amis is saying this, but to make a statement like this suggests passing judgement on the whole group based on one (relatively minor) incident in the British capital.

And like WillisDyer says, the importance and influence of Hitchens and Amis, and the statements that they make, cannot be underestimated. In Foucauldian terms, their statements would be part of the formation of a post 9/11 discourse, a discourse which in my opinion is just this side of sanctioning all out war against Muslims. It is not stated as such, of course: instead, we are presented with various contingencies (i.e., Stephen's notion of Islam as a gender Apartheid, Amis' wish to save our Enlightenment project), contingencies which always make it seem like we are only reacting to what is going on - when in fact we are the ones who have most of the responsibility in what is going on. The absence of any political grounding here while making these statements is astonishing - as if these bombers operate in a vacuum of ahistorical, apolitical existence. Further, the rejoinder that "there is that wish isn't there" is nothing more than a nice pre-emption of any criticism one might have of what is being said. Amis can flatly fall back on his "thought experiment" clause and no one is harmed.

Finally, it isn't 'our' job to correct the patriarchal, homophobic, mysoginistic, sexist et al tendencies prevalent in Islam today. What should concern us, however, is the role the west has played historically in maintaining a cultural, imperial, and ideological hegemony over the middle east and most of the 'third world' - a hegemony which has arrested any sort of organic sorting out of these issues which might have come about otherwise.