There Is One Orwell, and Hitchens Was His Prophet

Recently I read The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century (Pluto Press, 2004) by Scott Lucas.  Lucas shows how Christopher Hitchens anointed himself as George Orwell's spokeman for the twenty-first century.  It was a good read, and reminded me of a number of things I needed to be reminded of, such as this:

Hitchens charged that Chomsky, in The New Military Humanism, was guilty of 'double standards' in criticising NATO's bombing of Yugslavia while supporting intervention in the case of East Timor.  Chomsky replied, 'There is a double standard only if the intentions are humanitarian …. My book found no evidence of benign intent [over Kosovo] …. hence no double standard but rather the familiar single standard of power interests with little concern for human consequences'  Hitchens, after the cheap jibe, 'It is no disgrace to be condescended to by Noam Chomsky nor to be instructed in matters of formal logic and argumentative procedure', wrestled with double standards before settling on a simpler call, 'We appear to be in a new era, where old reflexes serve us less well.  However, this does not relieve us of our responsibility to take the side of the victims, as Chomsky once taught me and many others to do' [66-7].

Quite.  But who are the victims?  Hitchens lost sight of that question, except for thinking that he himself was the victim, of Left Orthodoxy.  Those who were killed or maimed or made into refugees by American (or NATO, which amounts to the same thing) bombs, missiles, and bullets were never on his radar, as Lucas points out:

At no point did Hitchens acknowledge that, his clearly defined 'war against Saddam', the Iraqi people rather than the leader were likely to be the first casualties and those dealing with the long-term consequences [85].

What I want to focus on, though, is Hitchens's accusation that Chomsky applied a double standard, allegedly opposing "intervention" in Kosovo but advocating it in East Timor.  This is a popular claim among liberal and progressive enthusiasts for US state violence.  I first encountered it, I think, when George H. W. Bush invaded Panama in 1989, and numerous times since then.  I haven't yet heard it in connection with US support for the Saudi invasion of Yemen, but that's probably because most Americans, regardless of their location in the political rainbow, are doing their best to ignore that one.

As far as I know, Chomsky never called for the US to "intervene" in the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor, which lasted from 1975 to 1999 and killed hundreds of thousands of people -- roughly a third of the population.  This was largely because the US had already intervened in that action, by approving it in advance, by arming and training Indonesian forces, by Presidential evasion of Congressional prohibition of US support, and by blocking United Nations action.  Not until the East Timorese had courageously voted for independence in a referendum, did President Bill Clinton finally instruct Indonesia to withdraw.  In 2002 journalist Allan Nairn (who along with Amy Goodman was badly beaten by Indonesian troops in East Timor in 1991) questioned Clinton about this, and Clinton bravely dodged the question.  He conceded that the US had "ignored" and been "insensitive" to the situation, which was false, since US presidents including Clinton had worked so hard to support Indonesia for a quarter of century. (There's no transcript for that clip, but a partial transcript is available here. It's worth listening to the clip, which includes not only Clinton but Richard Holbrooke and Henry Kissinger lying wildly about their records.)

Hitchens and other apologists for state violence might claim that Clinton "intervened" by finally stopping US aid to the Indonesian invasion, but this ignores the ongoing intervention that preceded it.  They also hope to confuse the issue by equivocating.  Chomsky and other critics of US foreign policy don't necessarily object to diplomatic "interventions," it's military interventions that we oppose.  President Obama could intervene in the Saudi invasion of Yemen, for example, by withholding material and other support for the Saudis, and Chomsky would surely approve of that -- provided the aid wasn't merely continued by diverting it through other channels, as normally happens in such cases.  But what liberal and progressive supporters of state violence want is military intervention, marketed as "humanitarian," with enormous costs in human life and well-being for its supposed beneficiaries.  There's no double standard.

Quantum Genetics and Transcendence

There was something else in Scott Richard Lyons's excellent book X-Marks that I wanted to bring up here.  In a discussion of Indian nationalism and the different ways Native writers have tried to define what it means for them, Lyons returns to the Canadian First Nations writer Taiaiake Alfred and to Alfred's recommendations that I quoted before:

It is a reasonable question to ask if Alfred would value or even recognize “one-to-one mentoring, face-to-face interaction, and small-group dialogue to effect the regeneration of our minds, bodies, and spirits” if it were conducted in the context of an Indian church or a Boys and Girls Club and not in a “warrior” sort of way. If Alfred’s answer is no, then we are once again in the realm of cultural resistance, not nationalism, and probably in the presence of a culture cop. Another way that Alfred defines people by “what they are” rather than by “what they do” is evident in his curious defense of Kahnawake’s stringent requirements for citizenship. In his first book, Alfred defended his nation’s 50 percent blood quantum and its moratorium on marriages to non-Natives – that is, if you married a non-Indian, you would be stripped of citizenship – while admitting that Kahnawake’s desired goal was apparently no more than phenotype: “physical characteristics were ideal because they helped an individual identify himself as Indian, and represented the difference between Indians and non-Indians.” By that logic the comedian George Lopez could become a stellar Mohawk. Alfred’s second book was somewhat critical of blood quantum but still ultimately justified it, and Alfred even invented a convenient historical narrative for it: “membership was determined by beliefs and behavior, together with blood relationship to the group. Both blood relations and cultural integration were and are essential to being Indian.” That claim is historically false and biologically unwise, as mandated “blood relations” would soon enough produce unsightly genetic issues in any small group of people … [142-3]

I'd go farther than Lyons and declare that the combination of culture and "blood" equals racism.  Not many people who've gone through a Western-style education would try to root culture in biology anymore.  Western-educated people mostly know that there is no link between culture (language, customs) and biology (physical traits like skin color).  As Noam Chomsky says, "Take a child from a Stone Age culture and raise him in New York: he will become a New Yorker. Raise an American baby in New Guinea, and he will become a Papuan 'native.' The genetic differences one finds are superficial and trivial, but human beings have the extraordinary characteristic of being able to live in very different ways."  But there's still a counter-narrative based in Kumbaya liberalism that we, and especially non-whites, need to be in touch with our "roots," a metaphor that really doesn't work.  (A plant's roots are wherever it was planted, not in whatever distant place the seed came from.  Seeds are supposed to travel.)

But the main reason I wanted to quote this passage was Lyons's reference to mentoring, face-to-face interaction and small-group dialogue "in the context of an Indian church or a Boys and Girls Club and not in a 'warrior' sort of way."  Or, he could have added, "in a university classroom."  Back in the late Nineties, when the mythopoetic men's movement was at its peak, I had some vehement online debates with some of its adherents.  One of them argued you don't need to actually wield weapons or shed blood to be a "warrior."  I asked him if he could recognize as a "warrior" a gay man who fought with words and ideas against other men's abuse of women and other men?  He didn't answer that, even though it followed from his declared position.  I didn't really want to claim "warrior" status anyway, even such a watered-down version: I was countering his complaints that he, a would-be Jungian "warrior," was being picked on by what he called juiceless capons and soft men, among many other revealing epithets.  The mythopoetics were never really comfortable with the movement's faggots, despite their important but not prominent (for PR and merely homophobic reasons) role in the movement from its inception.  When someone starts babbling about "warriors," the first thing I want to know is what role they envision for non-warriors.

These thoughts sent me back to Richard Seymour's critique of Christopher Hitchens on religion.  First Seymour quoted Hitchens on religion as the opium of the people:

What is being argued in this passage is not that religious enthusiasts and prophets are dope peddlers.  That is the universal vulgarization of Marx's opinion.  What Marx meant is that there is a chord of credulity waiting to be struck in all of us.  It is most likely to be struck successfully if the stroke comes concealed as an argument for moral and human behavior.

Seymour comments:

This, bewilderingly, rebuts one vulgarisation with another.  It is a misreading bordering on travesty to say that Marx's passage here adverted to a 'chord of credulity' (meaning, I suppose, an innate need for some transcendental experience, which religion purports to supply).  It is quite correct that Marx was not dismissing religion in this passage but rather ascribing its power to earthly sources, or what Marxists describe as the 'material conditions' of exploitation and oppression.  

This is a disingenuous reading of Hitchens.  I don't think Marx meant a "chord of credulity," but I don't think Hitchens meant "an innate need for some transcendental experience" either.  What he meant, presumably, was a widespread human willingness to believe what one wants to believe, what brings one comfort, whether it's "transcendent" or not.  It's hard for me to believe that Seymour would deny that human gullibility is a real phenomenon, and a frustrating problem, both in others and in oneself.

As for Seymour's "innate need for some transcendental experience," it sounds to me as if he thinks there is such a thing.  But "transcendent" isn't the clearest word in the language; it has numerous meanings just within the philosophy of religion, and I'm not sure which one Seymour had in mind.  Leaving that aside, Seymour begs two questions: whether there is a "need" for such experience and whether it's "innate."  Just because you think you need something doesn't mean you do need it, let alone that you can get it.  One of the religious meanings listed by Wikipedia is "Salvation, the human transcendence of death."  There are many ways to "transcend death," and not all involve belief in an afterlife.  (I stand with Wittgenstein, who wrote that even if there is an afterlife, it's as much a riddle as this one, and so isn't any help.)  But even if Seymour's right, even if I grant that human beings innately need transcendent experience, it doesn't follow that they will get it, or that religion is the only way to get it.  That, I submit, is like claiming that religion is the only way to have morality, or beauty, or wisdom.  Some people have insisted that transcendence is best found outside of organized religion, for example, in solitary contemplation without sectarian membership; who is he to say they're wrong?

I doubt Seymour would want to go that far, though, for he continues:

Hitchens, as he made clear during the Rushdie affair, did not agree with this approach.  Religion had 'a life of its own,' and by the time of the war on terror had assumed such gigantic proportions in Hitchens's mind that it explained almost everything.  God is not great?  Hard to believe after such a lengthy tribute to his puissance [68].

I'd like to think that Seymour basically agrees with me that religion does not have a life of its own, and doesn't explain much of anything: it was invented and is constantly being reinvented by human beings, and it has no essence.  I'm not sure I agree with Marx's explanation of what religion is or where it comes from, but that can be discussed.  If people want "transcendent experience," they're welcome to pursue it, though they can still be questioned and criticized about what they're looking for and what it means.  What I want to argue here is that whatever good things religion "purports" to offer can be found anywhere and everywhere, and the best way to resist the culture cops is to remember that.

Among the Believers

While I'm on the subject of religion, I should mention Richard Seymour's new book Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens (Verso, 2012).  It's a good read, well-researched, with some material from Seymour's own interviews with some of Hitchens's friends and colleagues, and it gives its subject credit for his virtues while mercilessly dissecting his faults.

I've noticed before that Seymour seems to take a softer line on religion than I do.  From Unhitched I suspect that we're closer to agreement than I thought, but we still disagree on a lot of details.  First he shows a few of Hitchens's factual errors from his anti-religion polemic God Is Not Great.  I'd already seen Terry Eagleton sneering at Hitchens's distaste for Jesus' teaching against wealth and good bourgeois concern for the future; from reading Seymour I see that it's a survival from Hitchens's own bourgeois upbringing.  But I'd noticed that Eagleton is unreliable about religion himself.  Seymour is better, but he still has something to learn.

He mentions that "Hitchens complained that religions have historically staunchly resisted the translation of their texts -- the Talmud, the Bible, the Quran -- into the language of the common people.  He remonstrated that this demonstrates a desire on the part of arbiters of faith to keep the people in ignorance.  Again, even with a will to believe the worst of religion, this claim is impossible to sustain" (63).

I haven't yet read God Is Not Great, so this stupidity on Hitchens's part entertained me.  Could he really have been that ignorant?  In the first place, those "texts" were originally written in the vernacular.  The Vulgate, the Latin version that was adopted as official by the Roman Catholic Church, put the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek original into the vernacular of the Roman Empire.  But I also noticed something odd in that list of holy texts -- "the Talmud, the Bible, the Quran."  Was it Hitchens's, or Seymour's list?  The Talmud, though very important in post-biblical Judaism, doesn't have quite the same status as the Bible.  But "the Bible" is shared by Christianity and Judaism; it sounds to me as though someone was trying to name a specifically Jewish text, whether it was "Scripture" or not, but wasn't informed enough to get it right.  Let him who is without sin ...

Seymour then quotes William Hamblin, a professor of history at Brigham Young University (!):

In reality the translation of religious texts has been a major cultural phenomenon in ancient and medieval times and has steadily increased through the present.  The Bible, of course, is the most translated book in the history of the world ... The Bible was also the most widely translated book in the ancient world ... The earliest translation of the Qur'an appeared within a couple of centuries of Muhammad's death.  By the tenth century there were extensive commentaries on the Qur'an in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish -- the three great cultural languages of medieval Islamic civilization.  These included a word-for-word grammatical analysis of the Arabic text, thereby providing translations.  In the Middle Ages there were numerous interlinear translations of the Qur'an.  In addition, the Qur'an was translated by non-Muslims, largely for polemical purposes ... [63].

This has the tone of an infomercial more than information, and there are problems with it.  A commentary, even word-for-word, isn't a translation.  Interlinear translations can be read, but they're probably not used in worship; they're meant for study, and like commentaries they are more likely to be used by professional students than ordinary laypeople.  A good commentary, simply by detailing the manifold interpretations possible, will probably annoy most laypeople, who want to believe that the meaning of a text is accessible to honest common sense.  (Similar difficulties attend the translation of the Hebrew Bible into modern languages: among Jews, translations weren't forbidden so much as discouraged in favor of studying the text in the original. That isn't a bad idea in any case. Seymour and Hamblin must be aware of the problems involved in translation of any text.)  I don't know as much about the history of Islam or the Quran as I do about Christianity, but I'm suspicious of Hamblin's polemic here.  He's comparing apples to oranges.  He goes on to decry Hitchens's complaint that

'devout men like Wycliffe, Coverdale, and Tyndale were burned alive for even attempting early translations' (p. 125) of the Bible into vernacular literature ... Far from being burned at the stake, John Wycliffe (1330-1384) died of natural causes while hearing Catholic mass in his parish church.  Miles Coverdale likewise, died unburned in 1568 at the age of eighty-one.  Of the three translators mentioned by Hitchens, only William Tyndale ... was burned at the stake.  But Tyndale's execution in 1536 was as much for his opposition to Henry VIII's divorce -- entailing what was viewed as a treasonous rejection of the Succession Act -- as it was for his translation efforts [ibid].

This is disingenuous to the point of dishonesty.  Hitchens's turning Wycliffe and Coverdale into martyrs is inexcusable sloppiness, of course.  As I've often said, if we atheists are going to criticize believers, we have to be more scrupulous about telling the truth.  But Hamblin is guilty of distortion too.  True, neither Wycliffe nor Coverdale were martyred for their translations, but Wycliffe was declared a heretic on multiple grounds.  His body was exhumed and burned, and the Church attempted to destroy every copy of his translation they could find.  (Minor detail: he suffered a fatal stroke while saying mass, not hearing it.)

Coverdale produced his translation while in self-imposed exile from England, in Protestant Antwerp, and it circulated in England after Henry VIII had broken with Rome, so it was not produced under the auspices of the Vatican.  After a brief return to England, he went back into exile on the continent, due to religious controversy at home.  As for Tyndale, Hamblin's trying to muddy the waters.  While his execution was overdetermined, he produced his translation in the face of ecclesiastical opposition, and he complained: "They have ordained that no man shall look on the Scripture, until he be noselled in heathen learning eight or nine years and armed with false principles, with which he is clean shut out of the understanding of the Scripture."  The picture is more complicated than either Hitchens or Hamblin allow.  It may be difficult to disentangle all the reasons why these men got into trouble, because their determination to make the Bible available to laypeople in English went along with other heterodox beliefs, but it's clear that the Roman Catholic Church objected to the translation projects for their own sake.

Hamblin's attempt to blame Tyndale's execution on politics -- his refusal to condone Henry VIII's divorce -- is a popular diversionary tactic; it's often used to explain away Galileo's problems with the Church, for instance.  (He got in trouble because of his tactlessness with the Princes of the Church, not because he taught that the earth moved.)  It seems to assume that there is a pure, unworldly essence of religion that isn't weighed down by worldly concerns and conflicts.  If this is true, then it implies that real religion is useless as a guide to living in the real world, where political entanglements are inescapable; I don't think most believers really want to assert that.  But the burden in that case would be on religious leaders to stop getting bogged down in worldly politics, which isn't going to happen.  It also can be used to get rid of almost any criticism of religion, since whatever one doesn't like can be blamed on corrupt human beings, not the pure essence of faith.

A further example of literal-minded obtuseness is Hitchens's reading of Abraham's near sacrifice of his son Isaac.  Here, Hitchens thundered, there is no softening of the plain meaning of this frightful story, which is the Almighty's sanction of child murder.  The literalism is compounded by the absence of contextual awareness.  The ancient Israelite readers of this story, as well as their neighbors in pagan society, would have been accustomed to the idea of human sacrifice.  In its context the function of the story was precisely to outlaw the killing of humans [63].

Oh, dear: that word "literal" again.  I agree that the original function of the story was probably to abolish child sacrifice in Israel -- not "child murder," which was fine with Yahweh when the children were the children of idol worshipers, and certainly not "the killing of humans," which Yahweh not only didn't outlaw but demanded on numerous occasions.  But Seymour's historicist reading of the Akeda, the story of Abraham and Isaac, overlooks a few crucial points: it implies that Yahweh had previously demanded the sacrifice of Israelite children, but later changed his mind (as a deity is entitled to do).  Later in the Torah, Israelites are instructed to dedicate their first-born sons to Yahweh, and then to redeem them with a cash payment.  First-born livestock were not to be redeemed; presumably they were to be sacrificed.   When did he change his mind?  Not in the time of Abraham, or in the time of Moses.  Most scholars today think this part of Genesis was written after 1000 BCE and probably nearer to 600 BCE -- up to a thousand years after Abraham is supposed to have lived, and centuries after Moses.

There's also a story in Judges 11, which takes place long after Moses, in which a chieftain named Jephthah vows to sacrifice whoever or whatever first comes out the door to meet him, if Yahweh gives him success in battle.  Yahweh grants his wish, and Jephthah's daughter comes out to greet him.  (In context, this indicates that Yahweh selected his reward for Jephthah's victory and inspired the girl to present herself to her father.)  Jephthah weeps and wails, but carries out his promise after granting her two months to mourn her virginity.  Some modern theologians have argued that Jephthah didn't actually kill her, but dedicated her to perpetual virginity or solitary confinement. This apologetic reading hasn't been generally accepted.  I think that the story of Jephthah's daughter shows that the biblical writers weren't all on the same page, and that the ban on human sacrifice in Israel came later, even much later than Abraham or Moses.

It should also be remembered that Hitchens wasn't the first to disapprove fiercely of the story of Abraham and Isaac.  Medieval rabbis disputed about it; one fourteenth-century rabbi asked, "How could God command such a revolting thing?"  Seymour can hardly accuse them of foolish literalism: they took the story seriously.  Christian interpreters have wrestled with the story too.  One of the most famous is Soren Kierkegaard, who in 1843 devoted a book, Fear and Trembling, to the subject, exalting Abraham for his faith.  For believers, the import of the story is not as simple as Seymour would have you believe.  Hitchens's objections aren't entirely off-base either.  Anyone who doesn't question Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac isn't taking the story as seriously as Seymour thinks we should.

No Man Is an Island

I just had to pass this along. Though I respect and value his work enormously, Norman Finkelstein is not usually subtle, let alone laconic, as he is here. (Thanks to Jews sans Frontieres, where I first read it a few minutes ago.)

A Brief Comment on the Passing of Christopher Hitchens

Even some of the critical commentary on Hitchens’s passing pays tribute to his robust atheism, which no doubt shocked readers of Vanity Fair.

But the ultimate irony seems to have gone over everyone’s head.

When I first learned that Hitchens was diagnosed with an excruciating and terminal cancer, it caused me to doubt my atheism.

Could it be merely chance?

The news came just as Hitchens was about to go on a book tour for his long-awaited memoir.

It was as if he was setting out on his victory lap when the adulating crowds were supposed to fawn over him and—wham!—his legs were lopped off at the kneecaps.

Could it be the hidden hand of a Jehovah?

If I still had doubts, the events of the past week dispelled them.

First Hitchens passed.

If that wasn’t burden enough to bear, the next day Vaclav Havel imploded.

The deep thinkers among us were now beside themselves with grief.

But then, on the third day, Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket.

Was this a practical joke, and who was the joker?

Biblical scholars report that divine interventions usually come in threes.

Moe, Larry, Curly.

Christopher, Vaclav, Kim.

I cannot help but see in this otherwise improbable sequence a divine intelligence at play.

The irony could not be more perfect: the god that the vindictive but witty Mr. Hitchens made a career scoffing at turns out to be…vindictive but witty.

But I will leave the last word to a close buddy of Hitchens’ who is himself a true believer.

When Saddam Hussein was executed, Tony Blair remarked: “I do not believe in capital punishment, but I think the world is a better place without him.”

When I heard that Hitchens was dead, I took a deep breath.

The air felt cleaner, as if after a 40-day and 40-night downpour.

***

I get no satisfaction from Hitchens’s passing.

Although he was the last to know it, every death is a tragedy, if only for the bereft child—or, as in the case of Cindy Sheehan, bereft parent—left behind.

But, still, life is full of surprises.

No one should be too smug in his certitudes.

And if you’ve made a career of pissing on other people’s mostly innocuous beliefs, should it surprise that outside the tiny tent called Vanity Fair, your memory stinks of urine?

Christopher Hitchens, the Ann Coulter of the Alcoholic Left

O Cthulhu, I've put Hitchens's name into the title of a post. Who knows what I'll do next?

My fellow atheists are such a disappointment to me. For example, this morning on Avedon Carol's Sideshow blog, I read this account of Hitchens's performance at the Freedom from Religion Convention:

He told us what the most serious threat to the West was (and you know this line already): it was Islam. Then he accused the audience of being soft on Islam, of being the kind of vague atheists who refuse to see the threat for what it was, a clash of civilizations, and of being too weak to do what was necessary, which was to spill blood to defeat the enemy. Along the way he told us who his choice for president was right now — Rudy Giuliani — and that Obama was a fool, Clinton was a pandering closet fundamentalist, and that he was less than thrilled about all the support among the FFRF for the Democratic party. We cannot afford to allow the Iranian theocracy to arm itself with nuclear weapons (something I entirely sympathize with), and that the only solution is to go in there with bombs and marines and blow it all up. The way to win the war is to kill so many Moslems that they begin to question whether they can bear the mounting casualties.

Avedon commented, "Hitchens' 'atheism' turns out to be indistinguishable from everything he's said is wrong with religion, Jihad, Crusades, and all." I'd noticed that about Hitchens too, and not just Hitchens. Sam Harris is a big supporter of the "war on terror" too, and The End of Faith bore a blurb from torture supporter (and plagiarist, and all-round liar and thug) Alan Dershowitz. I checked the book's index when I noticed that, and found that it contained a long attack on Noam Chomsky, which is one reason I still haven't read it. But I did read Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris's plea to Christofascists to join the crusade against Islamofascists. As though Christofascists weren't already foaming at the mouth for more Saracen blood! So much for Dawkins's argument that a world without religion would be a world without war, or at least a world with much less of it. To say this doesn't mean that I've started liking religion, only that being an atheist doesn't automatically make you rational, any more than being a theist automatically makes you good.

Thanks to Avedon's link to Maureen Dowd, I found this piece ("Carson-Era Humor, Post-Colbert", which may or may not work -- you may have to go to the Dowd piece to get to it) which also mentions Hitchens: "Mr. Hitchens, a one-time pariah for his support of the Iraq invasion and his savaging of Mother Teresa, still serves as something of a social arbiter in Washington." Social arbiter? Still? That's even more discrediting than supporting the Iraq invasion and endorsing Bush in 2004. "One-time pariah"? Why not "still", especially since he keeps adding reasons to shun him?