Anti-Climacus

On Hitchens, I have nothing particularly brilliant to say. He was very influential in my left-to-right move in college, but like the other person largely responsible for that move (Andrew Sullivan), I hadn't followed him in years.* Part of this was my own move from interest in journalism to academia: he had mastered the short, assertive style of the magazine think-piece, but as I came to find those insufficient to explain the political phenomena I was interested in, my interest tailed off.

I will say, on religion, he did seem to me to be an example of someone who takes a few cases and makes a theory out of them. One of the professors on my dissertation committee wrote a book in which he discussed the origins of human rights, and devoted a few pages to whether they could have come from religion. Though he considered the world anti-slavery movement to be both the first human rights movement and unavoidably inspired by religion, he dismissed religion's larger claims by citing the negative role played by the Inquisition and the treatment of native peoples in America by the Spanish. I have always wanted to tell him this means he has a problem with Jesuits, not with Christianity.

The same seems to have been true with Hitchens: I have no doubts that various figures of the Catholic hierarchy and loud-mouth "evangelicals" richly deserved the scorn he had for them. There's a lot more to Christianity than those people, annoying though they may be. But subtlety can get lost in polemic, and usually is.


*He's sort of The Smiths of public intellectuals that way, whereas I retain an affection for all the old New York Intellectuals who I was reading at the same time.