Merry Christmas To Christopher Hitchens, Wherever He Is
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
As Christmas remains a religious occasion, a few thoughts from that perspective commend themselves.
The National Post [where this dispatch first appeared] seems to have been plunged into mourning for Christopher Hitchens, perhaps best-known for his belligerent atheism. I must say that I had a few fierce written exchanges with Christopher over the years, mainly in Britain’s Spectator magazine, but not on religious matters. In our polemical battles, which were entertainingly acidulous and ungentlemanly on both sides, the arguments he made were so unmitigatedly fatuous, he always seemed to me rather silly, more a pest than even a gadfly, much less a sage or wit.
Our first pyrotechnic outburst came when President Reagan had just endured a cancer operation and was about to meet Mikhail Gorbachev. Christopher wrote that Reagan should resign the presidency and not embarrass the West by having to interrupt the summit meeting every 15 minutes to go to the lavatory. It was, as I wrote, an utterly tasteless (and inaccurate) prediction (and not without its ironies given its author’s subsequent medical history). Christopher retreated ungraciously, especially after the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting was universally seen as a success. However, when Ronald Reagan died, in 2004, widely hailed as a popular and outstanding president, Christopher carped after him as “an idiot.”
The last real dust-up we had was over his “book” about Henry Kissinger’s supposed role in the overthrow of Chilean president Allende in 1973. (To those of us who write properly researched and referenced non-fiction books, it is a little hard to take 80,000 ill-tempered words thundered incoherently out in unsubstantiated accusations as more than sophomoric pamphleteering.) Hitchens dismissed the complete absence of any supporting evidence for his thesis as merely illustrating the fiendish cleverness of the accused. I argued in my Spectator review that made for an unconvincing case (little imagining how disagreeably familiar I would personally become with the technique).
I would have participated in the recent Munk debate in Toronto between Christopher and Tony Blair about religion if I had been able to leave the United States, but I listened to it carefully. Christopher repeated his usual well-tried disparagements, with some spontaneous witticisms, as Blair’s very flaccid comments warranted, and certainly won easily on the night. Blair failed to attack any of atheism’s vulnerabilities, and was surprisingly inept for a talented forensic debater and genuinely committed Christian.
If pushed, atheists always fall back on the shortcomings of individual clergy and a variant of Bertrand Russell’s vacuous old fable that there is a finite amount of knowledge in the world and every day man is a step closer to possessing all of it. I have no problem with atheists generally, but their arguments are rubbish when they go beyond general skepticism, and the only atheists who aren’t somewhat disturbed are those who don’t much think about it and are serenely uninterested in other-worldly thoughts.
Christopher’s claim that Mother Theresa was “a bitch” and a “fanatic” had no basis at all. And his rages against Pope Benedict were founded on the pope’s teenage conscription into a non-political German anti-aircraft battery (from which he deserted at the first opportunity) and his supposed facilitation of Boston’s Cardinal Law’s flight from justice. (Law returned to the United States for 18 months and answered all the grand jury’s questions, but Christopher was never much interested in the facts of a case.)
I’m sorry he died, and if my friends David Frum and Jonathan Kay grieve for Christopher, I’ll take their word for it. (My wife Barbara had a very convivial talk with him at the Frums’ house last year despite all the fire we have exchanged and I was grateful to him for speaking well of some of my books.) But I never saw why the norms of civilized behaviour and comment should be waived for him, and cannot say I will really miss him (any more than I think he is now missing me).
I have it on good authority that Christopher Hitchens was disappointed that the child-molestation scandal, appalling though it was, did not bring the Roman Catholic Church crashing to earth like the zeppelin Von Hindenburg at Lakehurst, N.J. in 1937. People of that mindset are always particularly infuriated, century after century, at the stubborn failure of the Roman Catholic Church simply to fold its wings as the bumble bee is supposed to do, and fall to the ground. In their desperation, they even rejoice at perceived setbacks to Rome by what they consider to be lesser sectarian antagonists. (The recent acquisition of the Reverend Robert Schuller’s “Crystal Cathedral,” designed by Philip Johnson and familiar to scores of millions of Sunday television viewers of the Hour of Power, by the Roman Catholic diocese of Orange, California, for $51-million, should remind even the most blinkered materialists not to underestimate the strength of invisible means of support.)
This pope has responded effectively to the sexual abuse crisis, and there has been no discernible reduction in general church attendance or recruitment. The most important, and perhaps least recognized relevant fact is that more than 95% of the Roman Catholic clergy are dedicated people who have sacrificed a great deal to lead a Christian life and have educated and otherwise cared for hundreds of millions of people with exemplary devotion and self-discipline. At this time of year, especially, those millions of humanity’s benefactors should be remembered.
My current and thankfully soon to be departed surroundings incite me to constant gratitude that Pope Benedict is almost the only prominent person in the world who regularly expresses solicitude for the many millions of imprisoned people in the world (an inordinate number in the United States). And I am prompted to cite a Christmas excerpt from Pope John Paul II’s 2000 message on the subject, which is frequently invoked by his successor: “Public authorities who deprive human beings of their personal freedom … must realize that they are not masters of the prisoners’ time. In the same way, those who are in detention must not live as if their time in prison had been taken from them completely; it needs to be lived to the full.… In many countries’ prisons, life is very precarious, not to say altogether unworthy of human beings.… In some cases, detention seems to create more problems than it solves. This must prompt rethinking with a view to some kind of reform.… Such a process is based on growth in the sense of responsibility. None of this should be considered utopian.”
Both popes have elsewhere inveighed against the imperfections of the prosecution services and the evils of false convictions. I am in a relatively endurable prison, but even Christopher Hitchens, if he had suffered such a fate as mine, rather than the much harsher one that has felled him, would be less dismissive of the leaders of Christianity.
A Merry Christmas to all, including Christopher, wherever you are.
This dispatch first appeared at the National Post.