If it wasn’t the philosophical equivalent of the Gunfight at the
O.K. Corral, the distinguished journalists who waited in eager
anticipation around the square-shaped table at the offices of the
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life on Washington’s M Street in
late October may well have anticipated fireworks. The
Washington Post’s Sally Quinn, the Economist’s
Peter David, the Guardian’s Timothy Garton Ash, the Washington
Examiner’s Michael Barone, and a handful of others had been
invited to witness an unusual public debate between Christopher
Hitchens, enfant terrible of the New Atheism and author of the
best-seller God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons
Everything, and his brother, Peter Hitchens, author of the
more recent The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to
Faith. The two brothers had clashed in public debate before,
often acrimoniously, but this event was special: it was the first
major discussion between them in public since Christopher, 61, was
first diagnosed with metastatic (usually fatal) esophageal cancer
in June 2010. Would natural fraternal sympathy prevail over the two
men’s deep, and long-lasting, philosophical disagreement?
There were no fireworks in the large meeting room on M Street,
just flashes of wit (mostly from Christopher), seriousness (mostly
from Peter), and the sense that this encounter, between an ailing
champion of unbelief and his still-energetic brother, might turn
out to be historical. Nobody could fail to observe that
Christopher, in a pale-blue open-neck shirt characteristically left
unbuttoned at the top two buttons, was completely bald from
chemotherapy treatment and understandably tired-looking. His
brother, Peter, 59, also wearing a tieless shirt of very pale blue
color, looked much younger and fresher than Christopher, though
only some 19 months separate their birthdays. The disagreements, of
course, surfaced early at the conversation, yet there was a
surprising overlap in attitudes between the two men. Skillfully
moderating the event, Michael Cromartie, vice president of the
Ethics and Public Policy Center, gracefully referred to Christopher
Hitchens’s reputation, in spite of his strong opinions, of being a
lifelong loyalist to his personal friends. He quoted a reviewer of
Hitchens’s latest book, an autobiography called Hitch-22: A
Memoir, as saying of Christopher that he was “one of the most
purely alive people on the planet.” Some of the audience must have
wondered at that choice of words; with characteristic bluntness,
the older Hitchens brother has told recent audiences flatly that he
was “dying.”
THE PEW FORUM had posed the debating question to the two
brothers as this: “Can Civilization Survive without God?”
Christopher opened with a short statement, in which he, perhaps
surprisingly, invited his listeners to contemplate what he felt had
been the sad demise of a once-powerful notion, that of
“Christendom.” This word, Christopher said, used to be employed by
people without irony. It meant, he said, that “there was a
Christian world. It had been partly evolved, partly carved out by
the sword, partly defended by the sword, at some points giving way,
at other times expanding. But it was a meaningful name for a
community of belief and value that endured for many, many
centuries-and has many splendors to its name.” Now, he insisted, it
was “all gone,” leveled by the madness of World War I. Its loss, he
insisted, had left all kinds of questions about civilization and
culture. “We’ve had to wrestle,” he said, “for a very long time
with the idea, what will we do about civilization; what will we do
about values, ethics, morals; how will we teach them; how will we
learn to live with one another in the absence of any real religious
authority, any credible one, any one that’s worthy of the name,
worthy of respect? This absence has been felt for a very, very long
time, long before I was able to start writing about it.”
Peter didn’t demur at this description of the great loss.
Rather, he insisted, what was civilization? He felt he knew what it
wasn’t, like his experience of arriving in Mogadishu shortly before
the arrival of the U.S. Marines in 1993 and experiencing the shock
of a society that had broken loose from all constraints of
civilization; no passport control, baggage claim, or the normal
paraphernalia of international travel. Peter said that he’d
instantly had to hire AK-47-equipped bodyguards and, before going
to sleep on the concrete floor of a compound rented by a German TV
crew, had listened “to the cries of dying people and the chatter of
gunfire outside and hearing, in effect, what would have happened to
me if I hadn’t found my way into the German compound.” For Peter
Hitchens, the thing that struck him about societies that
were not intolerable to live in was “the rule of
law.”
He added, “This seems to me to be the distinction between a
tolerable free society and one which is not, which is the most
decisive.”
Yet even in the English suburb of Alverstoke, near Portsmouth in
England where the Hitchens brothers had grown up, a plague of
violence and even barbarism had crept into the community, Peter
said, with one ordinary citizen being kicked to death by hooligans
whose destruction of his yard fence he had attempted to stop. “How
has this decline in civilization come about?” Peter asked. “Well,”
he said, “I think it has come about at least partly-and I’m not a
single-cause person-but at least partly because there is no longer
in the hearts of the English people the restraint of the Christian
religion, which used to prevent this sort of behavior.”
Claiming to be shocked to hear of the Alverstoke incident,
Christopher riposted that quite as frightening horrors were
occurring in cities like Glasgow in the 1950s, at a time when the
authority of the Church of England was certainly greater than in
subsequent years. In fact, in Glasgow, Christopher said, “people
would kill you over what kind of Christian you were, as a matter of
fact.” Of course, they did, said Peter, because of the problems of
Catholic and Protestant sectarianism. “But in terms of the lives
which people led, the way in which they behaved towards their
neighbors, the way in which children were brought up, the manners
which people displayed, I don’t think you will find that the effect
of Christian upbringing was small in the 1950s or 1960s.” What had
happened, Peter asserted, was that English society had been invaded
“by trash culture and all that kind of teaching.”
WHEN JOURNALISTS WERE INVITED to ask questions, NPR’s Barbara
Bradley Hagerty inquired gently if Christopher’s illness had led to
a greater warmth between the two brothers. Almost visibly bristling
over the suggestion that intimations of mortality might have
softened his attitudes toward religion, Christopher responded, “I
mean, if you want to know, if anything, my contempt for the forced
consolation of religion has increased since I became aware that I
probably don’t have very long to live.” He added that he found the
idea of deathbed conversions “wholly contemptible.” Perhaps trying
to tamp down any tension, Peter shortly afterwards waded in with a
comment of his own: “it would be quite grotesque” to imagine that
acquiring cancer might enable one “to see the merits of religion.
It’s just an absurd idea.”
Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson wondered about
“the challenge of Friedrich Nietzsche,” who argued that, in the
absence of transcendent values, all one was left with was
“ferocious human will.” Christopher replied that he thought the
religious impulse was merely “an expression of the will to power.”
“Who could deny it?” he said, all but challenging his listeners to
respond.
Peter responded. “I think that you would be hard put to claim,”
he said, “that the Christian Gospels gave you a license to order
people about. And it seems odd that the center of Christian worship
is someone who is indeed tortured to death by the powerful.” Peter
added that he thought Nietzsche had focused on an issue atheists
seldom were honest about: they wanted liberation from constraints.
“This constantly comes up,” he said, “and immediately swirls down
the circle of the atheists’ refusal to accept that there is
actually no absolute right and wrong if there is no God and that
therefore, they are liberated.” Besides, Peter added, how on earth
could atheists explain conscience if there were no transcendent
moral values? “If morality evolves, then morality changes,” he
said. “Then the things of which we most strongly disapprove now
could be things which are permitted later, in which case it’s not
really morality, as far as I’m concerned. And who’s evolving it?”
Christopher ignored this sally, but came back later with one of his
own. “If anything could prove what I so much believe,” he said,
“which is that we are not made by God and never were and could not
have been, but that many, many gods have been made by men and women
and it is precisely the other way around, the basic claim of
materialism — if nothing else could persuade me of that obvious
truth, the behavior of religion itself would be enough.”
Christopher conceded that, as far as civilization was concerned,
people hadn’t yet conquered the problem of alienation or of anomie
or of spiritual waste or of the fear of death. “That,” he said, had
“to be worked on.” There was, he said, also a continuing problem of
“moral relativism.” He nevertheless insisted, “But I don’t think
it’s really true to say that we live less civilized a life than
those of our predecessors who felt that there was a genuine
religious authority that spoke with power.”
GIVEN A CHANCE both to sum up his views and to admit to any
doubts about his faith he might have had, Peter said that the
moments of doubt occurred often when he was reading either the Old
Testament or the Letters of Paul, because, he said
half-apologetically, “as you will see, I’m not terribly orthodox in
my belief.” He insisted that religion was “absolutely necessary” in
order for a person to be moral. “Morality,” he said, “is what you
do when you think nobody is looking.” “This tremendous civilization
in which we live,” he said, “which has been bequeathed to us and
which in my country we’re determined not to bequeath to our own
children, is the most extraordinary piece of good fortune, if
nothing else. And it does seem to me derived — as I say, this
combination of order and liberty almost unique in human history and
unique on the face of the planet — does arise, actually, from
Protestant Christianity.” To this idea, Christopher riposted.
“Morality is not learned by orders. It’s acquired by experience, by
moral suasion, and by comparing and contrasting different ways of
resolving these questions.”
Christopher Hitchens, however, repeatedly expressed gratitude
for the greetings he had received from Christian well-wishers
expressing, as he said, “solidarity” with him. His pugnacity during
the debate was as evident as ever, yet he showed an unexpectedly
conciliatory attitude toward the faith that he had rejected as a
child, and to which Peter, having raged through much of his life as
an atheist, had returned.
Asked if he could think of anything positive to say about
religions, Christopher replied, “The greatest contribution of
Christianity in my life is the reminder of the complete
ephemerality of human power, and indeed of human existence — the
transience of all states, empires, heroes, grandiose claims, and so
forth. That’s always with me, and I dare say I could have got that
from Einstein — I would have — and from Darwin, too. But the way
I got it and the way it’s implanted in me is certainly by
Christianity.”
Civilization certainly survived the debate on M Street. So
indeed did God.
