Remembering Christopher Hitchens, 1949 – 2011

Christopher
Hitchens died on
this date two years ago. Hitchens was the model of a public
intellectual. He was certainly public in his positions and
arguments, which allows for anyone interested to assess a person’s
arguments. And he was intellectually honest in a way that is
uncommon, with many (most?) thinkers curtailing their views if they
threaten a broader ideological identity. Though definitely a man of
the left, Hitchens was never orthodox and ran into trouble given
his positions on issues such as abortion (he was against it),
foreign interventionism (he was for it), free speech deemed
offensive to certain groups (he was for it), and more. While he
rarely missed opportunities to offend right-wing sensibilities (he
once joked about Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s clearly having started
with the president was still in office), he didn’t hold back
against the left, either. He had few kind words about Martin Luther
King, Jr. and he dismissed Gandhi as a “poverty pimp.”

He admitted to Reason in a
wide-ranging  2001 Reason interview conducted a few months
before the 9/11 attacks that his connection to the left was fraying
(he would break definitively with The Nation magazine shortly after
the attacks). Part of the reason stemmed from his realization that
the forces of creative destruction unleashed by capitalism were
remaking the world in a way that he – along with Marx and Engels in
the Communist Manifesto – could appreciate:

The thing I’ve often tried to point out to people from the early
days of the Thatcher revolution in Britain was that the political
consensus had been broken, and from the right. The revolutionary,
radical forces in British life were being led by the conservatives.
That was something that almost nobody, with the very slight
exception of myself, had foreseen.

I’d realized in 1979, the year she won, that though I was a
member of the Labour Party, I wasn’t going to vote for it. I
couldn’t bring myself to vote conservative. That’s purely visceral.
It was nothing to do with my mind, really. I just couldn’t
physically do it. I’ll never get over that, but that’s my private
problem.

But I did realize that by subtracting my vote from the Labour
Party, I was effectively voting for Thatcher to win.

Hitchens was a good friend and ally to Reason over the years,
though we disagreed with him on many, many topics (indeed, on
most topics). He graciously penned a foreword to our 2004
anthology Choice: The Best of Reason, remarking

It is useful and encouraging to have a magazine that approaches
matters with an additional dash of hedonism. Freedom might be
more efficient, but it also might possibly be more
enjoyable….I find that Reason keeps my own
arteries from hardening or from flooding with adrenaline out of
sheer irritation, because in the face of arbitrary power and
flock-like conformism it continues to ask, in a polite but firm
tone of voice, not only “why?” but “why not?”

The world of ideas needs more people like Hitchens: People who
speak up for their beliefs, debate them openly and honestly, and
have the courage to change their positions when they come to new
understandings. Hitchens was an admirer of Thomas Jefferson because
Jefferson, for all his limitations as a flesh-and-blood being, was
commited to an Enlightenment ideal that we might struggle in the
general direction of truth and understanding if we vet all of our
arguments in public debate and discourse. That’s the model that
Hitchens embodied in a manner that will always inspire his
audience.

Reason on Hitchens, Reason articles by Hitchens, and more.

In 2007, Hitchens headlined Reason’s “Very Secular Xmas Party,”
leading the crowd in a rendition of Tom Lehrer’s “Christmas Song”
after riffing on the the holiday season, the Bush presidency, and
North Korea. Take a look: