Great post.  You said all that really needs to be said about Hitchens, and those like him.

i had been sitting around with a lot of mixed feelings about hitchens and you summed them up very well.  thanks.

How did he expose Mother Theresa?

Nosehair, my condolences on your broken Google.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html

@Flyingnosehair: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missionary_Position

But yes, I’ve been keeping my mouth shut all day on this as well. I wouldn’t wish his fate on anyone, and I’m willing to respect the space for grief of mutual friends and allies, but the only phrase that comes to mind is this:

“The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones”

One of the more sensible, interesting, and concise memorial statements. Well done!

Thank you. The fucking fangasm for Hitchens has made me ill.

Ta-Nehisi Coates flagged this profile of him:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016fa_fact_parker

“He Knew He Was Right”.  When you’re as sure as him, it’s easy to become a bully.  And apparently his thing was bullying homeless guys.

It makes me wish there was an afterlife, so that Hitchens could be considered with contempt by George Orwell, who he claimed to admire, while learning nothing from him.

Michael Shermer and Penn Gillette come to mind as I read this.  Both do a great job debunking religion and woo but are also libertarians, which is about as magical thinking as it gets.

He came from British literary tradition of tearing things apart in print in order to make things better, and his attacks on the royal family demonstrated his disregard for an outmoded social arrangement that has some not-nice people at the top:

Amid all the wretched declension of the British royal family, many people seem willing to suspend their general disapproval, disappointment, boredom, nausea – you name it – in the case of our Sovereign Lady the Queen. Unselfish, dutiful, serious, modest, faithful unto death, she rises above the showbiz values, disco ambitions and petty neuroses of her clan and brood. But does she truly deserve such a dispensation? Monarchs may be able to elude responsibility for many things, but surely the state of the monarchy is not among them. And the Queen made at least two decisions of her own which contributed to the present zoo-like condition of her relatives. The first was her choice of consort: the hawkish and chilly authoritarian who made such a hell of his offspring’s childhood. The second was her resolution, so pious and so carefully meditated, to sacrifice her only sister’s happiness for the greater cause of family values and the high duty of setting an example. This is the House of Windsor, not the House of Atreus (let’s keep our sense of proportion), but still, here if anywhere was its original sin. Does Brenda, even now, look wistfully back on a time when marriage to a divorced war hero was considered the height of scandal and required the officiousness of the aptly-named Cantuar?

His support for the Iraq war I will never forgive, despite my agreement with this exchange with Richard Dawkins.

Hitchens on the left-right spectrum

RD I’ve always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.
CH Yes; it’s broken down with me.
RD It’s astonishing how much traction the left-right continuum [has] . . . If you know what someone thinks about the death penalty or abortion, then you generally know what they think about everything else. But you clearly break that rule.
CH I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian - on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/12/dawkins-hitchens-catholic

Personally, Galloway’s manner in which he told Hitchens to get fucked still makes me smile:

Before the hearing began, the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow even had some scorn left over to bestow generously upon the pro-war writer Christopher Hitchens. “You’re a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay,” Mr Galloway informed him. “Your hands are shaking. You badly need another drink.”

Yeah, he said and did some wonderful things, and Roman Polanski made some great movies.  Their good does not, cannot wash out the stink of their transgressions.

I’ve read a lot of my favorite atheist blogs lamenting Hitchen’s death. Yes, he argued effectively against religion, but Hitchens is a sparkling example of how intelligent people can hold ridiculous and bullshit beliefs. Hitchens is also a great example of what it means to not examine one’s privilege. Can you be brilliant and be limited and blind to your own advantages in the world? Yes, yes you can.

It takes a special kind of atheist to be so violently opposed to religion that you team up with Conservative Christians to kill muslims.

That said, I am looking forward to the editorial cartoons of him at the pearly gates.

Being an outspoken atheist hasn’t stopped them before. nor a Jehovah’s Witness, not big on the Saints thing, who converted to Islam Nor a jew. nor has being a Buddhist and kind of a shitheel.

So, yeah, Hitchens at the Pearly gates. looking forward to it.

@8 dopus dei:  “... apparently his thing was bullying homeless guys.”

Dopus dei, where did you get that from?  Are you referring to this from the article you linked to?:

Not long ago, in Baltimore, I saw Hitchens challenge a man—perhaps homeless and a little unglued mentally—who had started walking in step with his wife and a woman friend of hers while Hitchens walked some way ahead. Hitchens dropped back to form a flank between the women and the man, then said, “This is the polite version. Go away.” The man ambled off. Hitchens pressed home the victory. “Go away faster,” he said.

Okay, so let’s review what happened:
(1)  A man who was “a little unglued mentally” started walking in step with Hitchens’ wife and a woman friend of hers.
(2)  Hitchens positioned himself between the women and the man, and told the man to fuck off. 

From this you think it’s fair to conclude that it was Christopher Hitchens’ “thing” to “bully homeless guys?”  Really?  Or did you not think anyone would bother to read the article you linked to? 

My opinions on Hitchens are mixed.  He could be invigorating in a debate and he wrote very well.  He also played the Oscar Wilde type of an intellectual perfectly which can be fun in smallish doses. 

He was well informed on some topics but he treated topics on which he was poorly informed with equal arrogance.  Sadly, the latter was too often the case when he wrote about women.

Genius? Misogynist? Alcoholic? Messiah?

@karpad http://www.shortpacked.com/2011/comic/book-13/05-the-death-of-snkrs/pearlygates/

Atheism without skepticism is nothing to be proud of, and Hitchens was no skeptic at all.  His universe was an unexamined one.  He could turn a flowery enough phrase and engage in the trappings of logic, but at his best he engaged in blatant post-hoc rationalization of his prejudices and at his worst he was completely incoherent.  He never had a belief that he questioned.

The love he has long gotten from the online skeptic and atheist communities is, IMO, one of the most disappointing things about the internet.

JonE: Hah!

DonnaDiva @10: I love Penn and Teller, and that’s always bummed me out about them. But they do make their living tricking people, and I suppose it’s easy to develop an objectivist POV if you’re part of a group with some specific skill/knowledge (magicians) that spends its time manipulating the clueless masses.

As for Hitchens… yeah. I heard some newsreader talking about him on tv yesterday, and thought “is he dead, or has he said something else terrible?” but didn’t stick around to find out.

Please please PLEASE add names to go along with the photos on the Overrated White Dudes site.  Not only is it helpful for those of us who aren’t good with faces, but it’s just good accessibility design - remember, not everyone on the internet can see!

I’ve been surfing around the youtubes for a while now to catch up on Hitchens and it really is a mixed bag. He said some awfully sexist things, but he also said things like these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9qoUXu-JsE In that clips he speaks of empowerment of women as the best way out of poverty.

He gave islamists many well deserved verbal beatings, but those are horribly undermined by the fact that he supported the wars that killed so many innocent muslims.

The world needs the kind of people who go their own way, but of course when you go your own way you can get very lost.

I don’t know, Hitchens seems about perfectly rated.  When anyone dies there’s always an impulse to draft a hagiography, in addition to fanboy adulation, there’s just a general component of “someone died, that sucks, let’s remember the good times.”

Hitchens, of course, was against that reaction, so while it’s always correct to represent a passing figure’s entire life (good and bad) it’s doubly true in this instance.

Hitchens was a below-average philosopher with an incredible writing talent.  His contribution to atheism wasn’t intellectual, it was emotional (again, both good and bad),  His high-profile, eloquent, unapologetic defense of atheism combined with a truculent disdain for all religion was important.  He did a great deal of good for the movement, and he created a certain amount of public space for earnest criticism of religion.

He was also a drunk asshole, misogynist, absurd war apologist…etc.

I don’t think he’s overrated, I think he’s rated.

Thank you for this. I had been critical of your post/comments on Facebook, but I really enjoyed this post. It was concise and a unique point of view that you were well suited to present.

I think his downfall was in his anathema to the void, to not knowing, not having a side to defend.  He had a need to be loyal to something.

He left the Left so he had to embrace the Right, or at least the parts he felt the Left did not do justice to.

He was the most extraordinarily verbal person I have ever had the pleasure to listen to.  I make no apologies for his politics, but this talent (which should not be confused with pure logic or pure intelligence) can’t be denied.  When his style was fortified with substance, it was sublime.

@Comment #25: Libertarian

I think it’s important to distinguish between “converting” the religious to atheism (or at least setting aside a particularly malicious belief) and providing inspiration to other atheists to be vocal and unapologetic about their criticisms of religion.  I would agree that Hitchens probably wasn’t particularly convincing to religious folks, he was too hostile and enjoyed mocking them too much. 

I do think Hitchens did a great deal of good for atheists.  It’s important to mock stupid ideas.  It’s important to refuse to shy away from arguments and attack the presumption that religion is sensible or moral or just.  Hitchens inspired many atheists to attack the stranglehold religion has on the public discourse.

Take the Civil Rights Movement as an analogy (yes, obviously very different on the specifics).  The goal of the movement wasn’t to convince Southern whites that they should end Jim Crowe, the purpose was, among other things, to say: “it doesn’t matter what the hell you racists believe, you can’t treat us that way.”

I admired Hitchens in that capacity.  He didn’t develop any new arguments, but he expressed existing arguments very well.  He primarily offered atheists a new attitude with which to approach the debate and participation in public life.  Unfortunately, as oldfeminist pointed out, when that same attitude was fueled with less worthy subject matter, it became pathetic to watch.

The lesson I take from Hitchens is that substantive, well-supported positions should be advanced passionately, and the difference between advocacy and sophistry is the strength of the logic and science behind one’s words.

I’ve gotten a lot of personal value out of the writing of all the prominent atheists.  The problem is that at their best and least disagreeable they’re preaching to the choir (pardon the pun). I’ve found very little that I’d consider helpful in discussing my atheism with believers.  Which is okay since I look to those writers mostly for validation and I come away satisfied. But as Amanda points out they present a poor public image at times and the inclusion of more women and people of color would help mitigate that.

I had my problems with him too, but he was a brilliant and brave. He didn’t pull his punches, and so I think a critical post is probably the best tribute to Hitchens you could have posted.

@20—Agreed that Hitch’s work was marred by his lack of skepticism.  But think of how much he got written.  Some of it under conditions of severe pain or physical danger.  We like to tell people to examine their privilege and question their premises: they should, but scrutiny takes time and slows down one’s output.  You can’t have everything in a thinking journalist.

File me in the Mixed Feelings drawer.  The Iraq War, the comfort he gave to George W. Bush, the way he didn’t even think before endorsing forced-birthery: all unforgiveable IMO.  Hitchens way overdid his hatred of Bill Clinton, and he liked to hang with other men in packs.  I was repelled by how he didn’t have a place for women in his intellectual life. 

But the attack on Mother Teresa that Amanda mentioned?  Hugely important.  That work alone made his time on earth a great gift.  He did a lot to show that Henry Kissinger was a war criminal; he helped end the Vietnam debacle; he had interesting things to say about how to live. 

Loved his prose style and plummy fluency, but that one’s a question of taste.  I get how someone else could be turned off.

Re: Hitchens and Mother Teresa

What Hitchens had to say was important, but mostly because it showed how important it is to criticize the horrifically wrong when they die and everyone is paying attention.  Hitchens didn’t do investigative reporting on Mother Teresa and he didn’t have anything to say that hadn’t been reported before or that wasn’t known by people who followed earlier reporting.  What he did was to emphasize, at the time of Mother Teresa’s death when everyone was paying attention, the facts that she was a horrifically bad person who was hypocritical about god and devoted her life to making sure that dying people suffered as much as possible out of a belief that suffering is good for people.

The best lesson Hitchens ever taught is that when you see a hagiography to the recently deceased in the process of being written it’s time to emphasize the deceased person’s flaws rather than elide them, and the greater the flaws and the more obsequious the hagiography the more important it is to do so.

I just don’t buy that he was overrated. I wish he’d had greater influence and that Kissinger was made to stand trial. And, as a public libertine, he set a darned good xample for the rest of us in what is sadly becoming a buttoned down society.

Also, come on… a tumblr of overrated white dudes that includes Jim Morrison but not Bono?  Or did I miss Bono somewhere?  Put up Bono!

Someone known to Twitter as @PabloK says

“One of the worst effects of the Hitchens-Amis-Dawkins triumvirate was to turn atheism into a macho test of who could be the biggest prick.”

Apologies!  Bono is in there.  Well done.

Here’s my problem, as an atheist, with Hitchens and the other ‘new atheists’: they talk as though religion were some discrete, autonomous force, a virus from outer space that attaches itself to human beings and drains us of our precious bodily fluids.  I would think that for an atheist the starting point would be that religion, and religions, are human creations, like art and science.  Religion doesn’t make us do things; we make religion and interact with it.  This takes some strange turns—has anyone else noticed that, even though people create their gods, they create some pretty strange ones?  It’s not a simple matter of wish fulfillment, since that can’t account for gods that torture and kill us simply because they felt like it.  Sometimes it’s fear fulfillment.  And from my experience I have to say that many theists *like* the idea that they are fundamentally different from nontheists.  It suits what one writer called the “paranoid delight in persecution” that many believers exhibit: they hate me, therefore I am good.

The same goes for racism, sexism, antigay bigotry.  Those turn up in religion because people believe them already.  Look at the history of women in science, which is a reminder.  Look at the history of scientific racism.  Look at the way scientific medicine took over absurd ideas about masturbation, women’s sexuality, and homosexuality, and dressed them up in scientific garb.  At the moment in the US, science may be less of a threat to us than it was a hundred or even fifty years ago, but that can always change.  (Even the ex-gay movement tries to make itself look reasonable by appealing to discredited psychological theories, like the close-binding mother / distant father pattern.)  And scientific racism is still alive and well, because so many people want to believe that it’s all in our genes, and people we don’t like are *different* from us.  Even though these theories and claims have been discredited over and over again, many scientists cling to them.

Peter DeVries had one of his characters say something to the effect that she would rather believe that there is no one out there than that there is a Being that sees us suffering but does nothing about it.  I feel the same way, but obviously a lot of people don’t.

Well said, Duncan. I would rather be a religious culture that works to overcome intolerance and end inequalities than an atheistic one that doesn’t, and the sort of hitchens brand sexist, violent atheism is why it took me so long to identify as an atheist and why i still am not to enthused about the label.

http://m.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/01/hitchens-201201

“So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.”

Duncan—As I understand it, at the end of the day the point behind “new” atheism, which isn’t really new at all, is that religious style faith is inherently dangerous.  Religious style faith is the acceptance of the notion that something can be true without empirical support or even in contradiction of empirical support.  Once you start saying that certain ideas don’t have to be tested against reality in order to determine whether or not they’re true, you’ve got problems, even if the specific belief held as a matter of religious faith is itself benign.  You’ve got problems because any limitations on religious faith can’t be empirically delimited and are, in fact, arbitrary. 

People who believe that religious faith is an appropriate mode for determining one truth are susceptible to believing that it’s an appropriate mode for determining another truth or even an antithetical truth.  They’re incapable of coherently arguing that religious faith itself is bad and they can’t argue that the process by which malignant religious beliefs come to be held is incorrect, which leaves them without any good arguments against the validity of those malignant beliefs.  Sure, lots of religious beliefs are themselves benign, but the benign beliefs are a key part of creating the environment in which the more malignant beliefs thrive.

So the “new” atheist is critical of the concepts of religion and religious style faith at least as much as he or she is critical of the specific tenets of any religion.  This is where the stridency of “new” atheism and the drive to criticize all religion comes from.  The problem with Hitchens’s fake “new” atheism was that he exhibited religious style faith in droves.  He didn’t subject his beliefs to empirical testing.  He clung to ridiculous beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence against them.  He was strident but he also completely undermined the very basis needed to support that stridency.  He wasn’t a “new” atheist; he was just an asshole and for him his atheism really was just another religion.

@Robert Johnson: The very fact that the darned majority of people in the world subscribe to one or another mass metaphysical delusion really is a problem. Kudos to Hitchens for making the case.

Was he able to apply the rigors of the scientific method to all of his beliefs?  Heck, who is capable of that?  Since Hitchens was a real reporter, he had more primary source evidence than most.

He was also, sometimes, wildly correct.  Re: Hitchens and Kissinger.

This is a great post by Amanda and a great thread.

I also think Hitchens distinguished himself in his writings on his own impending death. I’d rather read any of those pieces than read one word of the overrated Joan Didion writing on the same subject, for instance.

By the way, if anyone didn’t read Amanda’s link to Hitchens’ Slate piece on Mother Theresa, it’s important not simply because he took her down but also because he took her down, in part, on explicitly feminist grounds:

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

That’s really good stuff.

Obviously, the guy’s no feminist—his awful writing about female comedians, by itself, disqualifies him, I would say. But using his rather well-disseminated voice to express the feminist critique of Mother Theresa was a fundamentally decent act.

@38—I had the same feelings about atheism. There are a lot of more tolerant atheist out there, and those people are going to be the future of the movement. A lot of prominent atheist cite Hitchens as an inspiration for their own writing and activism work. I personally drew no inspiration from him, but there are those who did, and it’s the people who’ve drawn inspiration from his better writings, while still being critical of his position on Iraq and women, that are going to form the future of atheism.

@44. As an atheist I’m on the other camp.  I don’t want atheism to be just a branch of left wing politics.  The only political view that logically flows from atheism is defense of separation of church and state.  There is no reason why atheism per se should affect politics related to the economy, war and peace, environment, taxation, criminal justice etc.  Tribalism not logic helps to do that.

Its only because the theocrats are currently aligned with conservative politics that is currently that way where there is a presumption that atheists are some of left wing branch.

A far healthier effect of atheism is the encouragement of evidence reality based approach to science and politics.  If you have confidence that your political views are evidence based that should help and reinforce it.

Hitchens was someone who helped with atheists being ‘out’ and open about their atheism.  In that he was quite beneficial for atheism though he largely ‘preached to the choir’.  I doubt he persuaded anyone who differed from him.  If your tone is mocking and ridiculing you are unlikely to persuade.

I enjoyed Hitchens because he was an iconoclast who was rather unpredictable and didn’t care if he hurt people’s feelings. 

@Miguel, you’re right…of course that exchange with the homeless dude makes Hitchens look awesome and brave, and not at all like a guy who (per Parker’s thesis) never had a chance for heroism in his youth who therefore went around spoiling for a fight in middle age.  I don’t know what I was thinking.

He was often wrong on topics regarding feminism, but his actions of late showed that he knew he had been treading on the wrong side.  Not enough, mind, but it was a turn toward the better.

The amount of fucks I give about Hitch’s death is equal to the amount he gave about dead Iraqis.

It’s appropriate that every photo of him on all these tributes shows him with a cigarette in his yap, and he died of esophageal cancer. Haven’t yet seen a column that says: “Also, this moron killed himself.”

Glenn Greenwald has a wonderful post on the dark side of Hitchens and the deifying of the dead here.

I’m sure that drinking had something to do with his cancer as well, there has been a proven link to esophageal cancer and excessive alcohol consumption…..............

DA, you are quite right.  In fact I read that even using alcohol-based mouthwash can contribute to oral and esophageal cancer.

Best post I’ve read on Hitchens.  You’re capable of turning a great phrase yourself, though hopefully not while drinking and smoking so much that the cells of your esophagus mutate and lead to your early death.