Hitch 22: Review, The Loss of Faith.

Hitch-22. A Memoir. Christopher Hitchens. Atlantic Books. 2010.

Review: Hitchens and the Loss of Faith.

Christopher Hitchens is one of the most talented polemicists of the last decades. The former International Socialist, left-wing journalist “as someone who had spent much of his life writing for The Nation and the New Statesman” he became an enthusiast for Humanitarian Interventions, and assembled “an informal international for the overthrow of fascism in Iraq”. After calling for war on Saddam Hussein, he “stopped calling himself a socialist in 2002”. To most people of the left, Hitchens has been thereafter associated with Neo-Conservatism.

There are others who still appreciate him, and are saddened at his present cancer, even while opposing liberal internationalism by force. For all how his “loss of faith” remains a striking, and in many ways unresolved, issue. In god Is Not Great (2007) he said his belief in Marxism could not survive the “onslaught of reality”. That its “intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories” “were in the past.” That it was “no longer any guide to the future” and, as a “total solution” had led to “the most appalling human sacrifices”. (Page 153) But is this all there is to say? In the New Statesman he has been cited as saying that he has remained in some sense a Marxist “but not Socialist”.  Hitch 22 concludes “Karl Marx was rightest all when he commended continual doubt and self criticism” (Page 424).

Hitch 22 is more, then, than the memories of a conventional journalist. His defence of a range of public causes, books on Orwell, Tom Paine, and atheism, to cite a few, show a powerful voice in defence of dissent, and, a “violent sense of repulsion” at the anti-War left. If we disagree with that there is no longer any “authentic socialist movement” (Page 411)that does not mean we reject everything he has ever said, en bloc.  With the deep emotions expressed Hitchens deserves more than clamour at a ‘turncoat’. Critical respect, above all criticism, for this Life and Opinions is called for.

Some have begun this. He has been described as “political romantic’ by David Runciman, and as a “man of faith” subjected to tender scorn by Ian Buruma.

From the left, of the relatively benign, Tom Rainer from the AWL  has some understanding for his hostility to indulgence towards Islamism. Nevertheless Hitch 22 is not written by one of “us”. James Bloodworth admires his “engaged” position, and ability to keep “belligerently arguing a point”. Guy Rundle in Spiked On-Line gets nearer to our objective by asking how and when Hitchens began to drift away from the left – in the mid-1980s. They too have never explained clearly how the Revolutionary Communist Party became the libertarian rightist, Institute of Ideas.

How Hitchens had a faith, lost it, and whether he has truly found a new one, is probably, for the left, both a mystery and of major interest to those who look into Hitch 22.

Very Near and Very Recent.

A leftist reader begins Hitch 22 with all this in mind. There is plenty to disarm the most hardened cadre. A man, who wept at Peter de Vries Blood of the Lamb, a fine secular parable of the slow death of a beloved child, and considers Jeeves a hero, demonstrates feeling and taste. The eulogy to the victims of 9/11 is restrained and moving. Hitchens remarks about the “moral imbecility” of the left faced with this catastrophe. This, he observes, was not confined to the ‘conspiratist’ left that has become part of the 9/11 ‘Truth’ movement. More serious figures claimed that the denial of ‘justice’ to ‘Moslems’ spurred Al-Qaeda into action- as if they had no wills and ideology of their own.

But many of us were deeply affected by this inferno of death. Even those who are no longer ‘anti’ but simply non–American were profoundly troubled. I lived in a daze of sadness for days. In my guts brewed the utmost bitterness at those from the ‘left’ who announced that the US “had it coming.”

But did this mean approving a ‘blow back’? Nothing could be less sure. Realist and ethical thinking on the call to overthrow Saddam, from its justification in claims about his ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to the principle of parachuting in a new government in Iraq, indicated that the US-led Coalition’s plans looked shaky.

But for Hitchens the time had come to join the bandwagon that would eventually roll into Iraq. He would take American citizenship and become “keener on the foreign policy response of the Administration than on its crude and hasty domestic measures.” (Page 250) Paul Breman’s summarised such a stand. That there was now a clear “clash of ideologies. It was the war between liberalism and apocalyptic and phantasmagoric movements that have risen up against liberal civilisation ever since the calamities of the First World War” (Page 183. Terror and Liberalism. 2003).

To abandon, as Hitchens did, his previous “loyalties” to the left for this cause, implies an account of how these ties were built and what they were. It was at The Leys Public School in Cambridge that he read widely, and was attracted to radical ideas. He began “writing grittily polemical and socially conscious essays and fiercely anti-militarist poems.” (Page 72) A 17-year-old Hitchens attended a CND Aldermaston March. It was the opening of the ‘Sixties’.

He became part of that minority (small) that was attracted to radical politics, in Britain largely socialist (though anarchism had a presence), that played an important part in the “youth revolt” of the end of the decade. To “have been there” and “felt it for yourself”(Page 81) was important. Many readers will consider that in the account of his adolescence Hitchens showed robust signs of ‘thinking for himself’ early on, and wonder at his later claims to have begun to do so only late in life.

Then there is Oxford. This was the University of Hitchens-the-life, and Hitchens-the-politics. In the former department he was only the “Second most famous person in Oxford (it’s the first time I had heard of Mike Rosen, a real gap in my education…). Immersed in the place’s “headiness” Christopher acquired enough names to drop to fill out a rival to the elongated ennui of A Dance to the Music of Time (a book he apparently knows backwards). The Warden of All Souls, John Sparrow took a shine to him. Invited to Luncheon Hitchens was “overwhelmed by the variety and deliciousness of the food and wine, and splendour of the silver and glass..”

The “silvered and saturnine features” of his Host and other “gilded and witty reactionaries” played as big a part in Hutchins’s latter political existence was defined by activism with the (as then) International Socialists (IS) and student protests. His experience of the “polymorphous perverse” and “restaurants which featured tasselled menus and wine lists” feature them alongside tales of his forays outside car plants, startling abilities as a leftist orator, and dramatic arrests at demonstrations. Hitchens no doubt overshadowed all, including Tariq Ali, who does, however get mentioned as a “then-friend”.

Living a double-life and keeping these “two sets of books” are less than appealing traits.

If this sounds like jealousy and class hatred, that is because it is.

The Left.

Hitchens had been introduced to the organised Left by Peter Sedgwick, a significant and respected figure in the IS of the time. He was a “hardened sceptic about the worst of the Left as well as an advocate for the best of it” (Page 89) Sedgwick, and the revolutionary he most admired, the anti-Stalinist and exile from the Soviet Union, Victor Serge, refused to admit that all “moral capital” of the Socialist Revolution was exhausted. Hitchens visited Havana, and was unimpressed with Cuba’s adoption of Soviet political and cultural norms. He fiercely opposed the invasion of Czechoslovakia. One false note: the claim, noticed by, amongst others, Buruma, that the IS were the “only ones to see 1968 coming..” suggests a gift for accurate prophecy unnoticed on the rest of the European left (Page 87).

Hitchens, at the time and subsequently, esteems the Black Marxist C.L.R. James, an unequivocal admirer of the ‘Jacobin’ Toussaint l’Ouverture and the Haitian slave revolt, a study that “had a lasting effect on me”.

Does this mean that all hope of the “mercurial element” of the treasured revolution had left socialism soon after? Is the choice between Moscow, Paris and Washington so definitive? Or, could it be inwardly resolved? How can one steer clear of the Stalinist legacy? It is not a good sign that he esteems the over-rated Kolakowski, whose three-volume work on Marxism has been compared unfavourably to a Telephone Directory. To reply one does not have to go far into issues of motive – though as we shall see these can play a part in Hitchen’s public stance – but one of fact.

Even in the microcosm of the 1960s and 70s British far left some of the important divisions between those shaped by the authoritarian side of Leninism’s legacy and democracy were being played out. This was not just a matter of recognising the “cultism” and “mental and sexual exploitation of the young and credulous” by the Workers Revolutionary Party. (Page 88)

For all of his tribute to Sedgwick Hitchens fails to mention that his mentor was opposed to the IS becoming the Socialist Workers Party (Here). Sedgwick argued that it was being built on the suppression of internal democracy. Hitchens took a few more decades to become publicly concerned about this incipient ‘totalitarianism’, or, more modestly that particular fly in the leftist ointment.

After University in the 1970s Hitchens had another “double life”. He was a journalist covering, with courage and perception, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, while writing for the New Statesman, and acting as features Editor of Socialist Worker. If “There were some giants on the Left in those days.” (Page 149) this did not persist after his move away from the IS – as it became the Socialist Workers Party.

Hitchens seems to have noticed the British left’s anti-democratic penchant not through any experience of the left or the SWP’s internal workings. It was during the same 1970s when the rise of the National Front gave some urgency to the fight against the far-right. Tyndall’s boot-boys were apparently a “considerable nuisance”. It was a duty to turn out to oppose them. Nonetheless Hitchens gives no account of the anti-racist and anti-Nazi movement that grew as a result, of dramatic episodes in this fight, such as the Red Lion Square clash, or Southwall – both of which resulted in a protestor’s death, or the Anti-Nazi League – all vanished beyond his ken as he moved to the US.

Instead what remains is a moment when Hitchens was struck to see in a US newspaper that American liberals had supported the right of the American Nazi Party to parade in a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago. Socialist Worker, which he still read though he was no longer involved, sneered at the “empty sham” of American liberalism. They failed to realise that their own country’s legal structure was itself flawed. It is a land, where “the law governing free speech and free assembly was whatever the nearest policeman happened to say it was”. (Page 223)

The American liberals clearly had the upper hand in his mind on this one, anyone “repulsively unpopular” has the right to free speech. Hitchens apparently never heard of the respectable liberal argument used. At the time in favour of free speech but against the ‘right’ of someone to stand outside immigrants’ houses or areas insulting them and calling for the person to be banished from the land – incitement in brief.

Perhaps the key to Hitchens’s changing attitude to the British left lies elsewhere. Invited to speak on Cyprus in Haringey – date mid-70s – to a “rather dingy and poorly lit union hall”. The Labour Party, Union not to mention Cypriot audience (his own comrades get no mention) also appeared rather dingy and run-down. “These people who shun the gaudy display of supermarkets and spend their hard-earned wages at the Co-Op” make endless “preliminaries” to his speech: appeals for strike funds, for resolutions to the Labour Party, and, so it goes.

At the time the “movement”, This Great Movement of Ours, The Movement as a Whole, was everything for Hitchens. It has the “hope of a better future where a thinking working class can acquire the faculties of a serious party of government” (Page 139) It was bound to the international heroes of socialism. But… the actually existing Labour Party is “very boring and comprised” and the unions in the print are “the most hidebound and conservative force of all.” In short, Hitchens loved the Movement but had nothing but disdain for the organisations and people who made it up.

The Other Side of Life.

Nobody can complain if a Memoir is examined through its account of what lies behind a person’s actions. It may be that these can be seen when Hitchens appears most at home – certainly in contrast with his experience in dingy North London union Halls.

These moments of intimacy are not the easiest of reads. James Fenton is undoubtedly a wonderful poet (The Memory of War) and wrote brilliantly for the New Statesman. One rejoices at their friendship. But one rapidly wearies of adulatory references to Martin Amis, and can only feel embarrassment that Hitchens is obliged to offer some defence of the dire Kobra the Dread. Then there are their 1970s “Friday lunches”, a new “Bloomsbury legend.” Recollections of feeding-time word-games are certainly of a kind. The over-fed poetaster Clive James’s happy coinages, on the template of a “Shropshire cunt” look slightly less sparkling in print.

The point however lies elsewhere. This is where Hitchens found a new political background emerging. This was a time when the “post war consensus” was expiring, apparently “increasingly dependent on tax-funded statism” and “run by the union-based, old-line right wing of the Labour party machine.” (Page 175) Views that, to say the least, would not have annoyed too strongly admirers of the rising Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher.

Clearly a consensus against these ‘right-wing’ unions and ‘statism’ underlined these “heterodox” gatherings. It’s as if these pages of Hitch-22 are written to show to his friends that Hitchens was never really one of the picket-line bully-boys of the 1970s. One has the impression that what had initially detached Hitchens away from the left is not a great sentiment of moral outrage at its harping on about the faults of liberal democracy. It is a long-standing fear of being caught out and laughed at in such company.

There is nothing more calculated to push anyone into conformity than being thought a pompous spoil-sport. Hitchens’s relations with Martin’s father, Kingsley, are of this stamp. To observe that the “old boy’s imitation of an angry dog barking the words fuck off’ was note-perfect” is a recommendation for the healing powers of alcohol but little else. (Page 162)

Faith and Reason.

The noted Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity (1949 – 2002), “The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.”(Page 139) All hinges on “the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.”(P 140)

Hitchens describes growing cold on a cause, the Left, to “feel it falling away from me”. The break-up of Yugoslavia and the war in Bosnia profoundly affected him. Much of the (organised) left was hostile to external military intervention, while he clamoured for it, apparently finding only Serbian nationalism the only fascist threat, to a process of by “thinking for oneself”. The first months of the occupation of Iraq was “something more like a social and political revolution than a military occupation.” (Love, Poverty and War. 2004) If he is definitely engaged it has been in the sense of “on s’engage, puis on voit” – you commit yourself, then you’ll see. Apparently he is still contemplating a favourable response to the question, “what if it works?”

Though those with sensitive stomachs will not find it easy to swallow an affirmative, however qualified, transported through the mouth of a young soldier killed in Mosul, Mark Daily, and “deeply influenced” by Hitchens (Pages 320 – 9). The intention, without much doubt, is to choke off a hostile reader’s reply by letting emotion rule over reason. .

Hitchens has played a part in a wider political trend. That is the shift of a part of the left away from Marxism and democratic socialism to a belated ‘anti-totalitarianism’. This reached a brief high-point in the UK with the Euston Manifesto (though it had long-standing European counterparts in journals such as the French ‘anti-totalitarian’ intellectuals and the reviews le Débat and Esprit). This makes universal moral claims against absolutist political regimes.

Despite its supporters’ claims to defend reason it has let emotion overwhelm them. Without a Soviet enemy to fight, it focuses on a variety of targets, from Islamism, the remnants of Stalinism, and parts of the socialist left. These are attacked in lurid terms, as if one can raise the genuine menace of Islamism in various Moslem majority countries to a global threat, and tie to it a vast range of left-wing views, from relativism, post-modernism, and the political activities of small Trotskyist parties and leftish campaigns against War. Hitchens and his allies have attempted to define the political landscape in terms of a division of the world, between liberal ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’.

Hitchens has won many friends, and ferocious opponents, by thinking for himself As New Atheist, Hitchens has brilliantly fought one type of complete belief, the “death cult” of religion, and called for a renewed Enlightenment (god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything 2007). Calling the wilder types of Islamism, in power or not, “Fascism with an Islamic face” had the merit of raising debate, if not ending it, or even beginning to resolve it.

But as often Hitchens has been a funnel through which various ideas have passed, rather than the author of new ones. One recurrent refrain is the most problematic. A fellow traveller of the American Polity, he believes that the historical American “Revolution” is the only one with “any verve left in it”. That is in contrast with Bolshevism and (less explicitly) the French Revolution, as his books on Paine and Jefferson make plain.

One can sympathise with sallies against the “insult and calumny” peddled by the coarser kind of anti-Americanism. But in what sense could the Federalist Papers serve as a new Communist Manifesto for the world’s oppressed? Surely the First Republic’s Declaration of the Rights of Man has some more universal energy left in it? Perhaps Hitchens agrees with Hannah Arendt that it was the ‘social’ element in that Revolution that, by swamping politics by class interests, doomed it to tyranny. Has Hitchens therefore also rejected Marx’s belief that a classless society is a desirable aim? And the call for a social order in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all? If so, he has not defended his claims.

This century’s coalition between anti-totalitarianism, armed-internationalism, and anti-illiberal views was never very secure. The failures of Middle Eastern policy, the desolation reigning in Iraq, the mire that is Afghanistan, weigh heavily.

The ‘anti-totalitarian’ international began to disintegrate in Continental Europe some time back. In France, the division of the troops over the relationship between republicanism and liberalism erupted over a decade ago.

Today it’s a realisation that the domestic right is the main illiberal threat dominates politics in many countries. Italy and France present some of the best-known examples of how attacks on liberty – social and political freedoms – from that quarter are more pressing than the prospect that a totalitarian left or Islamist Caliphate will come to power.

In the circles closer to Hitchens awareness that social democracy – which they claim to support – has an enemy in the market state, has pushed some back to the left. Their reaction to the Liberal-Conservative Coalition impels many to also look again at the kind of passionate egalitarianism that Tony Judt argued for. How is Hitchens reacting? Hitch 22 shows few signs of seeing this. He is in danger of becoming an embarrassing reminder of long-past enthusiasm for the invasion of Iraq.

In his adopted homeland they say that being called history is not a compliment.

Hitchens 22