Christopher Hitchens, Literary Bully

Christopher Hitchens

I confess to bristling when I hear the name Christopher Hitchens.The intellectual provocateur has been in the news recently, first for publishing his memoirs and second for contracting throat cancer.Although he is smart and well read, he has always struck me as a self-righteous intellectual bully, one who is more interested in toppling icons than in building a better world.I don’t see him engaging in dialogue, only haranguing.

Reading Hitchens is like watching a blood sport. Who is he going to bring down today? Mother Theresa? Bill Clinton? Pope Benedict? God himself? As I see it, Hitchens reduces the complexity of those he is attacking so that he can deliver a knockout blow. Even when I agree with him, I don’t like the part of myself that he appeals to.

I wouldn’t be writing about him except for something interesting that David Brooks said in a New York Times article last week. Reporting on Hitch-22, Brooks believes that Hitchens’ literary background makes him more fully rounded than most political columnists. Brooks lists such literary influences on Hitchens as Richard Llewellyn (How Green Was My Valley), Arthur Koestler, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Wilfred Owen, James Joyce, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McKewan. In Brooks’ opinion,

his is a memoir that should be given to high school and college students of a literary bent. In the age of the Internet and the academy, it will open up different models for how to be a thoughtful person, how to engage in political life and what sort of things one should know in order to be truly educated.

Brooks also notes, however, that one wouldn’t want those in charge of policy following the Hitchens model:

It would not be a safe world if every policy writer were as literary as Hitchens. Government is mostly about administration, trade-offs and compromises. But his perspective usefully highlights psychology, context, courage and virtue — important things that are hard to talk about in policy jargon or journalese.

So according to Brooks, either you’re a colorful and opinionated commentator or a dull hack who gets things done.Seen from that point of view, literature becomes positively dangerous.Do I hear an echo here of Plato’s desire to ban artists from the republic?

Contra Brooks, I believe that our policy writers and government officials will become more effective, not less, if they read good books. How Green Was My Valley would get them thinking about the poor, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon would awaken them to the noxiousness of ideological thinking, Graham Greene’s political novels would remind them to hold on to their souls in the face of political tradeoffs, George Orwell would alert them to the dangers of manipulating language, Wilfred Owen would remind them of the horrors of war. And speaking of those horrors, I didn’t see Hitchens invoking Owens when he advocated a preemptive war in Iraq.

I’m glad that Hitchens has read a lot but disagree with Brooks’ belief that “literary” automatically means “impractical.”  Literature may well have shown Hitchens ways to be captivatingly outrageous–it is a powerful medium after all–but literature also helps us (as this website is dedicated to showing) to engage more fully and constructively with the world.

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