A rapidly mutating Hitchens

["Jurriaan Bendien" <J.Bendien@xxxxxxxxxx>]

To explain Hitchens's trajectory would be quite a task, the the long and the
short of it is, that you have to look at the way he entered into leftwing
politics (the motivation), which importantly determined his exit from it.
The Left of course attracts geniuses and nutters and everything in between,
with all sorts of motivations.

To my knowledge, Hitchens never held an ordinary job for any length of time,
where he was working with ordinary people. I never get from him a sense of
real delight, empathy, partisanship and satisfaction with the emancipatory
struggles of ordinary people, their struggles to improve their lives, and
get even with the world, a real and deep identification with oppressed
people or even just a comradeship, a desire to help them or anything like
that. What does stand out, is his contempt for stupid people.

His understanding of what Marxism and socialism is about, is very poor, I
have seen no evidence of him ever deeply and thoroughly thinking through
theory for himself, never mind doing anything original. It's all pretty
superficial artistry, being trendy. Suppose you reject the idea of Marxism
as a neat and tidy system which explains life, the universe and everything.
What then ? You are still confronted with the real problems the theory tries
to address, and with the challenge of realising its positive intention in a
better way, in other words, to construct a better approach to socialism.
Hitchens doesn't get anywhere here beyond recyclers of George Orwell and
stuff like that.

His stance seems to be that he wants to "expose" people, cast doubt on their
integrity, and debunk "myths", while profiling his own cynical erudition,
but the point is that there is no coherent, constructive, positive purpose
in this, in relation to human emancipation from oppressive conditions. What
does he do it for, is what you have to ask.  His enjoyment seems to come
from showing how stupid, misguided, incompetent and gullible people
(especially leftwing people) are or can be, with a few "brutal home truths".
In this way, he invents a clever apology for his own past. He also seems to
have some urge to "testify", including testifying against "false prophets".

It is somewhat analogous to what Marx described as "critical criticism" in
The Holy Family, the liberal pursuit of criticism for its own sake, in
accordance with the latest fashions. A more modern version might be Popper's
idea that "one must live with illusions, but one should live with as few
illusions as possible".  If that is your gambit, it doesn't really matter if
you are with the Left or with the Right, and since the Right has more money
and currently more success, you might as well be with the Right (Popper's
motivation was similarly not really to advance scientific methodology and
thus improve scientific practice, it was rather to demarcate science from
non-science, according to abstract, general criteria, specifically excluding
Marxism from scientific practice; thus Popper comes to the bizarre
conclusion that science is about trying to falsify theories - just the
opposite of real scientific practice, which tries to prove theories and
generate positive knowledge we can use).

I read Hitchen's book on Mother Teresa, which I found back again, but what
struck me is that, while he polemically casts doubt on the credentials of
Mother Teresa (obviously not a trained intellectual like him, thus an easy
target), he shows no real identification with the plight of the poor in the
Indian continent, has no involvement with it, and does not concern himself
at all with the question of what a more adequate human spirituality might
require. So there is a sense in which he misses the wood for the trees, and
makes a mountain of a molehill, which cannot convince anybody who is serious
about the issue.  Whatever else you might say about Mother Teresa, she did
actually help poor people, and advocated their plight. That is how she got
attention in the first place, maybe too much, the wrong attention, but okay.
That was her practice, for better or worse.  But Hitchens has not a shred of
human sympathy or understanding in this sense. Nor is his critique linked to
any political project, such as helping the poor, or winning the faithful
over to socialism. It is just maverick stuff, being contrary for the sake of
being contrary.

Genetics has nothing to do with this. A particular genetic make-up creates
at best a disposition to behave in certain ways, or the potential of a
specific behavioural repertoire. How that might manifest itself depends on
how life is lived in society, with all its complex interactions.

Jurriaan



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