When he's right …

National Review, Feb 14, 2005 by Michael Potemra

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS is the kind of writer who makes you miss your bus stop when you're engrossed in him, who makes you want to grab friends by the arm and read them passages that have made you shiver between the shoulder blades (this last was Vladimir Nabokov's test for good writing). He is such an excellent writer, indeed, that on the notorious occasions on which he is colossally, flagrantly wrong you suspect he must be kidding. (Mustn't he?)

The new anthology Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (Nation, 475 pp., $16.95) is Hitchens's widest-ranging book since the events of 9/11 catalyzed his transformation from an occasional gadfly against leftist platitudes into a full-throated denouncer of the Left's ideological abdication from the defense of Western liberty. The United States, he writes, "has been very kind and hospitable to this immigrant, and I would calmly affirm that . . . my adopted country has found a defender in me. This necessarily broad and vague allegiance came to a tungsten-sharp point in the fall of 2001," when terrorist atrocities by "barbaric nihilists" demonstrated "the fatuity of letting only one side be ruthless and organized, let alone self-confident. It is civilization and pluralism and secularism that need pitiless and unapologetic fighters."

Civilization, pluralism, secularism: This is the trinity to which Hitchens devotes his knightly efforts. His trouncing of one of the age's most egregious snake-oil peddlers ("Unfairenheit 9/11: The Lies of Michael Moore") is reprinted in the book, and stands as a bold reassertion of the true purposes of the current war: "If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD." This passage--like many others in the book--rises to level of art in its remorseless candor; it demonstrates quite starkly who is on the side of civilization and pluralism, and who isn't.

But what of Hitchens's third guiding light, secularism? In a sense, of course, secularism is a condition almost all Americans cherish; I sometimes attend a very conservative Baptist church, in which on one recent occasion the minister--in the course of arguing for traditional moral values in public life--noted that it would be a very harmful thing for the Church to run the State. But Hitchens proclaims his devotion to secularism in significantly less nuanced terms. "Religion" he condemns as "that most toxic of foes . . . the most base and contemptible of the forms assumed by human egotism and stupidity. Cold, steady hatred for this, especially in its loathsome jihad shape, has been as sustaining to me as any love." Religion is "the elevation and collectivization of credulity and solipsism"; Hitchens singles out for obloquy religion's "parasitic relationship" to "disease and ignorance and misery."

Leave aside the reference "especially" to jihad, and its implication that murder in the name of religion is merely a more extreme form of something pernicious in itself, different from other religion only in degree rather than in kind. Focus instead on the inaccurate utilitarian calculus underlying Hitchens's analysis: He is suggesting that throughout history more people have been reduced to misery by religion than have had their misery alleviated by it; that religion has encouraged egotism more than it has encouraged altruism. In Hitchens's understanding, then, Tartuffe is the rule, not the exception; but if this were the case in reality, why do the religious and irreligious alike find Tartuffe a figure of fun? Hitchens is an astute observer of society, and must therefore be aware that the acts of social benevolence inspired by religion are more numerous than the acts of religious bigotry, violence, and oppression; why then this level of rejectionist fury? In my experience, the only other people who cherish similar hatred for the sins of religious thugs, bigots, and hypocrites are . . . religious believers themselves. Do we have in Hitchens a self-suppressed Puritan, a Jeremiah who will not console erring believers with nominal professions of faith as he chastises them?

To read Hitchens, then, can be a thought-provoking joy, but sometimes a joy tout court. He is a lover of language, which is evident not just in his own perfectly turned phrases, but in his unearthing of gems from others. It was from Hitchens, for example, that I learned the great definition of "the upper crust" as "a load of crumbs held together by dough"--Bolshevist, to be sure, but lovely. And from this book, an anecdote in which an Irishman is seeking work at an English construction site. A surly English supervisor rebukes him: "You don't look to me as if you know the difference between a girder and a joist." To which the Irishman indignantly responds: "I do, too. The first of them wrote Faust and the second one wrote Ulysses."