Review: Arguably by Christopher Hitchens

If ever anybody lived for outraging new forms of correctness, it was Christopher Hitchens.

Anybody would think a man who’s targets ranged from Mother Teresa to Henry Kissinger, Noam Chomsky to Sarah Silverman, actively sought attention. Or so detractors have said. Though why should this be a sleight on the accuracy of his convictions is debatable. For when Hitchens is right, he is very right. Yet there is a lurking suspicion of controversialists: that what they miss in accuracy they make up for in shock value, and, ultimately, lack sincerity. While this may contain a grain of truth, it can be too easy, too safe to deny the liberating impulses of a contrarian. In an earlier book of missives exploring radical, dissenting positions, Letters to a Young Contrarian, Hitchens wrote: “The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”

And it was the independence of Christopher Hitchens mind that was shocking. Not the bombast – the performance, and the bravado – the sensitive and broad-ranging erudition that made counter-intuitive points sound right. Beyond the Wildean character was a brilliant literary critic who habitually stormed the world stage to outrage, delight and inform.

Hitchens had two basic modes: the commentary and the polemic. The former brought out his female qualities of intuition, gossip, sympathy; the latter, were either attacks on anything he didn’t like (generally some form of dogma, illiberalism or stupidity) or defenses of ideas or people he did liked. Or loved. These are macho, loud, and scolding. In She’s No Fundamentalist, Hitchens takes up the task of defending Ayan Hirsi Ali and happily names and shames his former acquaintances Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Baruma for incorrectly slurring Hirsi Ali as an “Enlightenment Fundementalist.”

“But who dares to say [that belief in free speech is] the same as the belief that criticism of religion should be censored or the belief that faith should be imposed? To flirt with this equivalence is to give in to the demagogues and to hear, underneath their yells of triumph, the dismal moan of the trahison des clercs and “the enlightenment driven away.”

This enlightenment is not uncontroversial. The Greatest Think Tank in History, its promise of what Saul Bellow calls, ‘the universal eligibility to be noble’ is self-defeatingly seen as a cover for Western hegemony. Hitchens railed against cultural relativism and sacred cows, his pet hate being the idea of ‘moral equivalence’. And, in the intellect of Hitchens, we had a living specimen of the paradoxes of our politics. Had Hitchens classically moved Left to Right? Had he become a megaphone for Western Imperialism? Was he an advocate of universal freedom? Had the Left, as Nick Cohen contends, moved Rightward by implicitly supporting reactionaries in the name of multiculturalism? Hitchens saw a schism he thought transcended the traditional Left / Right divide: and it was this:

“Briefly stated, this ongoing polemic takes place between the anti-imperialist Left, and the anti-totalitarian Left. In one shape or another, I have been involved – on both sides of it – all my life. And, in the case of any conflict, I have increasingly resolved it on the anti-totalitarian side.”

For the anti-imperialist, loyal to popular Marxist critique, the West is still the great superpower and the enemy of an enemy can so often be a friend. Islamists are resisting American hegemony. For the anti-totalitarian, Islamism and theocracy are barbaric, reactionary, oppressors of freedom. In Saul Bellow: The Great AssimilatorHitchens writes of Bellow’s political evolution: “His life as public intellectual is sometimes held to have followed art or trajectory: that from quasi-Trotskyist to full-blown ‘neocon’.” And, yet, like so many so-called neocons, like Hitchens himself, Bellow was hesitant to embrace the term. Further complicating the Left / Right diagnosis is the fact that many conservatives oppose liberal interventionism on the grounds that it is Leftwing Utopianism. Others, like Michael Gove, vehemently advocate interventionism as essential to defending the West. There are other Marxist critiques: no less the accelerationists who argue that capitalism, a revolutionary force, must be ‘speeded up’ in order to collapse itself, before moving onto a new stage of materialism. America, therefore, embodies the ideals of former Leftist movements and is the perfect agent of revolutionary change.

Left or Right, evidenced in these essays is a garrulous, individualist, raconteur glinting with contradictions: eloquent, literary, moral, boyish, patriotic, and charismatic in the way only a sort of upper-class Englishman can be. Essays range from the female humour deficit, to food and drink, to a cultural history of fellatio, the experience of torture and the oppression of the burka. Again, with the eclecticism of subject matter and forceful clarity of prose, parallels with his, Leftwing-patriot hero are easily drawn. Revealingly, in Hitchens’ view, George Orwell: “Decided to write as if people could be addressed as if they were humane and intelligent and democratic.” When we write about our heroes, we are really writing about the aspirations of our higher selves.

At its best, Arguably is Hitchens being Hitchens. George Orwell was novelist as well as journalist and committed himself to fighting earthly totalitarianism. Hitchens, by extension, no less courageous, no less anti-totalitarian, possibly stretched the definition of fascism to include Bin-Ladenism. Though what matters most is not whether Hitchens was Orwell, for, he was, unfailingly himself. Playing by the rules, keeping your head down, not speaking out for fearing the condemnation of peers may be safe, even lucrative, but it is not necessarily the path to truth. Arguably, true or untrue, Left or Right, reminds us of the sacred freedom of an unchained mind.