On the Late Christopher Hitchens' Atheism

Over the years, I have read his articles with both admiration and outrage, usually depending on the subject, but I have to admit that the admiration won out in the end. Of all the defenders of recent political policies that I have vehemently disagreed with, he is perhaps the only one I respect.

I expected plenty of appreciations to appear upon Christopher Hitchens' death, but it is with some incredulousness that I read Ross Douthat's piece on Hitchens in today's New York Times. It's not the fact that Douthat wrote such an appreciation -- it was almost expected -- but rather the audacity and anti-Hitchensian quality of what he had to say, which appeared in the guise of a tribute.

Douthat is in many ways the anti-Hitchens. Hitchens' cynicism was hard purchased over the years. Douthat's cynicism seems to serve one purpose only, which is to further his conservative agenda. Hitchens was not afraid to break with the party line--he saw what he saw.  Douthat always seems to see what he wants to see in a case. I have little respect for him as a writer or as a thinker.

Douthat's column on Hitchens explores the affinity that, according to Douthat, so many religious believers had for the devout atheist and self-declared Enemy of God. Without propounding any counter-theories of my own, I will say that it appears that Douthat is trying to claim Hitchens as one of his own, to make a holy pagan out of him, like Aquinas did with Aristotle -- a "Believer's Atheist," as the title of the column suggests.

Hitchens is reputed to be the kind of gregarious fellow who would sit down to a drink with his worst enemy, Mother Theresa, for instance. I don't know how he would feel at being labelled a "Believer's Atheist," but I suspect that the man who so adamantly and publicly refused requests from religious-minded individuals for a deathbed conversion during his long and public struggle with cancer might have taken issue with the epithet. What Douthat ends up claiming is a misreading of atheism -- Hitchensonian as well as the other varieties. Here's what he said at the end of his piece:

When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”

Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.

Atheist intellectuals of the Hitchens variety rarely talk about atheism as a font of despair. They are generally at peace with the world, with the universe, when they talk about their beliefs. The "wasting shadow" here is not Hitchens' or any other contemporary atheist intellectual's, for that matter -- it is Douthat's, because he is too limited in his worldview to appreciate the fact that people can lead fulfilling lives, even lives absent of despair and existential angst, without a belief in the afterlife. Thus, to say that Hitchens was not the kind of man to give in to despair is not to say that he was a man whose beliefs were all that similar to those of the believers. What we see here is Douthat's inflexible inability to inhabit the perspective of someone like Hitchens -- of someone with beliefs counter to his own.

Agnostics, also, such as this writer, can live content with mystery and uncertainty. I don't know what to expect after I die. I don't expect much, but I will be satisfied with whatever I get, and in the meantime I will focus on doing what little good I can in this world and trying the best I can to extract meaning from my experiences and from those of others. As for the "Marxist fairy tales" and "techno-utopian happy talk," I can only conjecture as to what Douthat might mean. I suspect he's just getting a stab at some enemies while he has the chance.

Douthat ends his column thusly, imediately following the previous quotation:

My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why.

That "why" is why it's "completely wrong to give in to despair." Can there be no other reason besides God and the afterlife? Is a belief in humankind, the universe, and electro-magnetism not enough?

As we have seen before, when Hitchens first publicly announced that he had terminal cancer, we see here the believer's desperate hopes for the non-believer. It's a nice sentiment, I suppose, but it misses the mark because it refuses to demonstrate a decent respect for the non-believer's beliefs.