As most people have probably heard by now, Christopher Hitchens passed away yesterday after a battle with esophogeal cancer.\u00a0 In the wake of his death, my Twitter feed (among many other places) sprung to life with glowing praise for Hitchens.\u00a0 He’s been described as a great wit, a powerful thinker, one of the best writers of the English language, and many other things.\u00a0 He’s been praised for his directness and refusal to stand on ceremony.\u00a0 Well then, in the spirit of that remark let me say that Christopher Hitchens was an asshole.<\/p>\n
Why was Hitchens an asshole?\u00a0 There’s his support<\/a> for the vile and disastrous Iraq war.\u00a0 There’s his disgusting sexism; he believed that evolution had made women unfunny<\/a> and that sexual harassment was largely invented<\/a> (and as an aside, it’s bizarre that Hitchens could say the same kinds of things that Margaret Wente gets excorciated for, and yet Hitchens is considered a great writer and Wente is considered a windbag).\u00a0 There’s his pompous bigotry toward religious people, with examples being too numerous for it to be worth naming individual instances.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Of all the things that Hitchens has been praised for, it seems his style is the primary focus.\u00a0 This is strange to me because of all the things one could criticse Hitchens for, I think his style has to be one of his greatest flaws.\u00a0 He seemed to revel in being ill-tempered, impatient, and generally difficult to deal with.\u00a0 This is a man who makes Richard Dawkins look humble.\u00a0 I have to think that Hitchens’ style makes him perhaps the worst ambassador that atheists in particular could ask for.\u00a0 He had no interest in trying to understand or engage with the other side, he just wanted to proclaim loudly how right he was and how wrong everyone else was.<\/p>\n Contrast that with Kurt Vonnegut, a well known atheist\/agnostic humanist, who argued strongly for that worldview in his day.\u00a0 For example, Breakfast of Champions<\/em>, my favourite novel, recasts the language of religion to argue in favour of secular humanism.\u00a0 Vonnegut doesn’t argue that religious people are stupid or evil or immoral; instead, he argues that all of the things that people search for in religion can be found in a sense of wonderment about our universe and the people we share it with.\u00a0 For another example, read “Yes, We Have No Nirvanas”, published in Wampeters, Foma, And Granfalloons<\/em>.\u00a0 In it, Vonnegut tries to understand why his wife and daughter would follow the seemingly absurd teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, spiritual advisor to The Beatles.\u00a0 Vonnegut pokes fun at Maharishi and the beliefs and rituals that he proposed, but the entire piece is driven by Vonnegut’s compassion for his family and his understanding of peoples’ search for greater things to attach themself to.<\/p>\n Unlike Vonnegut, who argued with a humble, patient understanding of the people he disagreed with, Hitchens more often than not seemed interested in showing off how smart he thought he was and how stupid he believed other people were.\u00a0 He made little effort to engage those he disagreed with, to understand them, to argue with them on a level playing field.\u00a0 And this is at the heart of why I could never stand Hitchens.\u00a0 In my mind, a great writer (or orator) has to embody at a minimum the following three qualities: a compelling style of speaking or writing, intelligent and thoughtful insights into human behaviour, and compassion not just for those one agrees with, but for those one disagrees with as well.\u00a0 Many people believe Hitchens had the first of those qualities, but I don’t think he had the second and he couldn’t have been further from the third.\u00a0 What he was, to me, was a man who argued rudely, often in favour of harmful views, in a manner that had little respect for those who disagreed with him.\u00a0 I don’t think that’s something that needs to be celebrated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As most people have probably heard by now, Christopher Hitchens passed away yesterday after a battle with esophogeal cancer.\u00a0 In the wake of his death, my Twitter feed (among many other places) sprung to life with glowing praise for Hitchens.\u00a0 He’s been described as a great wit, a powerful thinker, one of the best writers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":125,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions\/125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}