The class struggle is over. Christopher Hitchens, Marxist polemicist to the world, is no longer a man of the Left. On some days, confesses Hitchens, apostasy leaves him with a feeling akin to “the phantom pain of a missing limb”. On other days the sensation is more like “having taken off a needlessly heavy overcoat”. No more does he believe in a radiant socialist future and increasingly reflects “upon the shipwrecks and prison islands to which the quest has led”. Nevertheless, in his lively memoir, Hitch-22 (2010), Hitchens argues cleverly and in the end persuasively that advancing age has not betrayed the principles of his youth, and that he continues to be as radical and adversarial as ever.
Critics on the Left will,
for the most part, remain unconvinced. Certainly Hitchens freely confesses to
having experienced “the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential
matters” Margaret Thatcher was correct. Moreover, throughout the past two
decades he has been a vocal if nuanced defender of Gulf War I, NATO
intervention in Bosnia, Western intervention in Afghanistan and Gulf War II.
Leftists will also abhor
the sympathetic picture he draws of the relationship between George W. H. Bush
and the Kurds in northern Iraq. Yet Hitch-22 does not mark a political
transformation in the way David Horowitz’s Second Thoughts: Former Radicals
Look Back at the 60s does.
Hitchens is no conservative. He continues to be unrepentant about his
opposition to the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and even poor old
Mother Teresa.
Hitchens’ recent
bestseller, god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, is another case in point. Though
Hitchens’ name often turns up on lists of new wave atheists, his anti-religion
stance is less Richard Dawkins than Ludwig Feuerbach. On the subject of
religion, at least, Hitchens remains a nineteenth-century Marxist who thinks
belief in God is a dangerous irrationality, an impediment to greater justice in
this world.
In a brief
interview-and-answer section (à la Vanity Fair), Hitchens even offers up Leon
Trotsky as one of his favourite characters in history. If one takes Hitchens at
his word then the incongruity of his political position begins to take on a
certain kind of logic. In the context of today the term “Trotskyism” has become
almost meaningless. There are as many self-avowed Trotskyists prepared to find
common cause with Radical Islam as not. Even so, Hitchens is heir to the one
valuable tradition in Trotskyism – the capacity (and inclination) to challenge
the orthodoxies of the Left from within the Left itself.
Consider, for instance,
Hitchens’ acerbic dismissal of the political musings of Leftist icons such as
Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal and Edward Said. It is a powerful critique, and even
more so for all of these characters being former confidantes of his. About
Chomsky, Hitchens says: “Regarding almost everything since Columbus as having
been one continuous succession of genocides and land-thefts, he did not really
believe that the United States of America was a good idea to begin with.”
Chomsky, like so many others in the New Left, might promote himself as a
libertarian socialist, but in that one pointed sentence Hitchens unmasks the
man’s real political identity – nihilism.
And so we arrive at the
real (if implicit) theme of Hitch-22. This memoir is not so much Christopher Hitchens leaving the Left, but of
the Left leaving Christopher Hitchens. Not only does anti-Americanism and
thinly disguised anti-Semitism blight the modern-day Left. There is also the
issue of relativism, arriving in 1969 in the form of “The Personal Is Political”.
Ever since, argues Hitchens, “to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal
subdivision, or even erotic preference” has been enough “to qualify as a revolutionary”. The
consequence of this “sinister” development has already deeply compromised the
West and possesses the capacity to wreak even more havoc in the future.
Political relativism, in
the opinion of Hitchens, has made society and the Enlightenment Project
vulnerable in ways few could have predicted: “More depressing still, to see
that in the face of this vicious assault so many of the best lack all
conviction, hesitating to defend the society that makes their existence
possible, while the worst are full to the brim and boiling over with murderous
exaltation.” One only needs to consider the trials and tribulations of Salman
Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, let alone the fate of Theo van Gogh, to comprehend
his meaning. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, it was Hitchens
on the cover of The Spectator
boldly announcing Islamo-fascism as the great enemy of civilisation.
Right from the outset
Hitchens acknowledges that Hitch-22
will not rise far above the genre of a “political memoir”. He does cover his
mother’s disturbing and tragic death, his father’s character and his famous
friendship with the brilliant novelist Martin Amis, and yet the colour and
depth of these powerful (and admirable) personal connections are never totally
realised. Hitchens candidly admits that he is first and foremost a polemicist,
modestly contrasting his writing talents with the artistry of friends like
Martin Amis and James Fenton.
That said, Hitchens
conveys an intriguing complexity in the relationship with his “almost
tragically right-wing” brother Peter. Christopher appears to have teased and
derided his younger sibling from an early age. Politically, at least, the two
brothers could not have been more different. Christopher mockingly asserts that
various arguments in Peter’s book, The Broken Compass, make him “desire to be wearing a
necklace of the purest garlic even while reading them.” Peter is a Christian,
after all. Significantly, though, Christopher goes on to acknowledge insights
in The Broken Compass
that are both compelling and unsettling. He even tries to build an intellectual
bridge between the two by mentioning (admittedly in a footnote) the possibility
of “there being such a thing as a Protestant atheist”. There is also the
wonderful anecdote about the childhood quest for an unabridged version of The
Pilgrim’s Progress.
None of this is to imply
that Christopher Hitchens, atheist and contrarian, is about to become a
conservative like his brother or, for that matter, a conservative of any kind.
Hitchens makes it clear on the last page that he feels “absurdly honoured to be
grouped in the public mind” with such characters as Richard Dawkins, Daniel
Dennett, and Sam Harris. Nonetheless, Christopher’s begrudging respect for
brother Peter might signify something hopeful. Here we have the possibility of
the archetypal rebel and the archetypal traditionalist lining up, at long last,
on the same side of the barricades in the defence of Western Civilisation.
First published in the
Winter 2010-11 edition of Salisbury Review.
