Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

This post will be considered untimely, as the death of Christopher Hitchens occurred last thursday. He will be remembered as a great writer, a great wit and, with Richard Dawkins, one of the great voices in what is dismissively referred to as the "New Atheism."

I have frankly not read as much of either as I would like. But it seems to me that Hitchens differs from Dawkins in his opposition to religion. What Dawkins attacks as an affront to science and rationalism, Hitchens' strongest and most eloquent assaults on the edifice of faith were moral ones. He argued, and persuasively, that the God of the Abrahamic religions differs only in its degree of relative power over the individual from human dictatorships in the vein of Hitler and the now-deceased Kim Jong-il. (The running joke, on Twitter, is that Hitch and Václav Havel got to pick the third of the trio.)

Because everyone understands, or thinks they understand, the fundamentals of morality, his rhetoric is to my mind more accessible than Dawkins', cloaked as it is to the layman behind what seems an unassailable wall of complicated science. By making the case that religion is essentially immoral rather than merely factually incorrect, shifty arguments against, for example, evolution, disguised with jargon to confuse the layperson, could find no footing in debate with him. This explains how he could be friends with many people of faith - they found common ground on issues of morality even if they disagreed with where Hitchens led those arguments. He could respect a person of faith who shared that common ground; that's harder to do when you think that a person of faith is necessarily intellectually deficient. He was a deep and complex thinker, and a hard man to agree with on every point.  I think he would disapprove of someone who did.

Hitch was famed as a fierce debater, called by some the "Lion of Atheism," and was always strident in his denouncements of both evil and idiocy, and contemptuous of those who embodied both, like Jerry Falwell. But those who knew him unanimously cite both his wit and charm, and as a writer and a public intellectual he had few contemporary equals. I think that it's as a writer, especially of a vast volume of sparkling essays, that I would best like to remember him.