V V: The argumentative Christopher Hitchens

Bertolt Brecht in his play, The Life of Galileo, had warned that “unhappy is the land that is in need of heroes” because the moment we abandon our own reason and rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles. Many others have said much the same thing in different ways but at a time when the conspiracy of courtesy – call it political correctness, if you like – has become the accepted way of life, all it leads to is each side telling the other what the other would like to hear. What is needed is continuous doubt and the cut and thrust of debate or, as Christopher Hitchens puts in his latest collection of essays, Arguably (Atlantic Books, £16.99), an extension of his earlier books like In the Line of Argument, Prepared for the Worst, and many others that challenge conventional ways of seeing over a range of issues in politics, literature and religion.

 

For over 40 years, Hitchens has proclaimed the many faces of truth as he sees it. However, where many other intellectuals have compromised with authority, he has always said what he felt and thought with defiance and wit, courage and humility.

In Arguably Hitchens explores a wide range of political and cultural issues, past and present. This is a big book divided into six big sections: All American; Eclectic Affinities; Amusements, Annoyances, and Disappointments; Offshore Accounts; Legacies of Totalitarianism; and Words’ Worth.

Each section has around 15 essays that were written earlier for leading American and British journals. But they aren’t typically journalistic pieces that by their very nature are ephemeral; these are, to use a cliché, the first draft of history or literature in a hurry backed by a deep historical sense which put issues in a wider perspective.

What is of perennial value is just not the subject that would have lost some of its immediacy but the language, the style and the background that are required for all reportage if it has to be of some lasting value. Unlike much journalism today that barely rises above petty gossip of the “who’s in, who’s out” kind, Hitchens has always packed in a great deal of history and literature in all his pieces, which make them witty, passionate and instructive. So, here’s a sample of his writing on different topics.   

 

“It is said that, just before the Sino-Soviet split, Nikita Khrushchev had a tense meeting with Zhou Enlai at which he told the latter that he now understood the problem. ‘I am the son of coal miners,’ he said. ‘You are the descendant of feudal mandarins. We have nothing common.’ ‘Perhaps we do,’ murmured his Chinese antagonist. ‘What?’ blustered Krushchev. ‘We are,’ responded Zhou, ‘both traitors to our class.’” 
 

“Yet for all his insight into the innovative and ingenious character of capital, Marx also understood the destructive and destabilising path it might take. He might never have imagined the horrors of World War I and fascism when he diagnosed the ills of class society, but he realised that capital was suspicious of its own claims about the market system and the ‘freedom’ that it supposedly allowed. As he pointed out, the abolition of competition in favour of monopoly, when it occurred among businesses, would only intensity competition among workers. Does such an idea seem antiquated in the decade of the disposable employee?

Socialism was an idea before Marx. Democracy was an idea before Marx. What he argued was that you can’t have any of the above until you are ready for them, and you can’t have one without the other.” 

“Commenting acidly on a writer who I perhaps too naively admired, my old classics teacher put on his best sneer to ask, ‘Wouldn’t you say, Hitchens, that his writing was somewhat journalistic?’ This lofty schoolmaster employed my name sarcastically, and stressed the last term as if he meant it to sting, and rankled even more than he had intended. Later on in life, I found that I still used to mutter and improved my long mediated reply. Emile Zola — a journalist. Charles Dickens — a journalist. Thomas Paine — another journalist. Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell — journalists par excellence. Somewhere in my cortex was the idea in which George Orwell himself gave explicit shape: the idea that ‘mere’ writing of this sort could aspire to become an art, that the word ‘journalist’ — like the iconic modern English usage of the word, ‘hack’ — could lose its association with the trivial and evanescent.” 
 

“Salman Rushdie’s unsettingly brilliant psychoprofile of Pakistan, in his 1983 novel, Shame, rightly laid emphasis on the crucial part played by sexual repression in the Islamic republic. And that was before the Talibanisation of Afghanistan, and of much of Pakistan too... Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumour of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. Moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter.”

For sheer good writing and analysis, read these essays.