Good, but Not Great

Christopher Hitchens is probably doomed to live in infamy as the most notorious fellow-traveler with the neocons during the War on Terror. This erstwhile Trotskyist fancies himself to be the new Orwell, if not a modern Voltaire. He is a true believer in the right of some entity to topple dictatorships across the globe, and he is convinced that "Islamofascism" is an evil unto itself that must be crushed without consideration of other factors that may have made the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington possible. While he hasn't backed down on his support for the invasion of Iraq, he seems to be distancing himself from the Bush administration, members of which, at least, he once regarded with awe. He clearly wants to reposition himself as not merely a partisan enemy of Islam, but as the scourge of all superstition and barbarism.

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is Hitchens's entry in the growing library of "militant atheism," alongside Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Sam Harris's The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. These books are characterized by a rejection of tolerant attitudes toward belief; their common refrain is that it is not OK for people to believe in anything they like. They cover much of the same territory in their common effort to disprove the familiar arguments for faith in God. Even for the intellectually sympathetic reader, there's a certain monotony that sets in after reading several of these tomes. While Hitchens is often a brilliant stylist, his volume doesn't really relieve the monotony.

The Hitchens book is often overwrought, starting with the title. It's simply not true that religion poisons "everything." It doesn't even poison everything it touches, which is perhaps what Hitchens meant in abbreviated form. Worse, the further you go in the book, the more you suspect that it isn't even religion that's poisoning everything in the cases he diagnoses. After he establishes that faith in the monotheist God isn't the sole problem, and after he acknowledges the crimes of ostensibly secular regimes like the USSR and Nazi Germany (without conceding that they can be labelled atheist nations), it becomes more apparent that some factor like "culture" or "ideology" is the real problem. The author himself admits that the contemplative spiritualist isn't usually a menace to his neighbors, so the problem must be with the impulse to impose conformity on those neighbors, and there is nothing specifically religious about that impulse unless you choose to identify it as religious, which is what some authors do when they attribute, say, Stalin's purges to "dogmatism" rather than atheism. That approach turns atheism into the equivalent of capitalism in the Libertarian imagination: if you see an avowed atheist murdering masses, the argument goes, he's not really an atheist. I don't buy this, but I don't buy either the believers' counter-argument that atheism was a primary motive or authorization for Bolshevik terror.

While the book as a whole is rather a hodgepodge with little sense of an organizing principle, there are plenty of passages that are thrilling to read. Hitchens is probably the best stylist of the "militant atheists," and he's especially good at challenging the contention of liberal Christians that faith was necessary to motivate good works like the civil rights movement. As a sample, here's Hitchens on Martin Luther King, from page 176:

At no point did Dr. King -- who was once photographed in a bookstore waiting calmly for a physician while the knife of a maniac was sticking straight out of his chest --even hint that those who injured and reviled him were to be threatened with any revenge or punishment, in this world or the next, save the consequences of their own brute selfishness and stupidity. And he even phrased that appeal more courteously than, in my humble opinion, its targets deserved. In no real as opposed to nominal sense, then,was he a Christian

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Any reader will get the point, but not all will think to ask whether Dr. King himself would accept this description. I don't know as much about King as I should, but I suspect he would be among those who believed that there had to be eternal values, independent of human conception or imagination, for peace and justice to be possible, and that those values could only come from a Creator and final Judge of the universe. Hitchens makes no real effort to refute this idea, which means he's not going to make much progress among religious progressives, much less the more conservative believers.

This points to a general weakness among the "militant atheists." They'd like people to abandon unthinking faith in primitive revelations, and they understand that people cling to faith to answer important questions about the meaning of life and death and so forth, but instead of actually attempting to answer those questions themselves, they're content with telling other people that their answers are stupid. The sole exception to this is Sam Harris's recommendation of scientifically-verifiable (?) Eastern meditative practices as a path to personal peace, but Hitchens, noting Buddhist atrocities through history, might argue that even that approach might poison everything. In every case, these books seem like preaching to the atheist choir, even when Harris is purportedly addressing Christians. I would be greatly surprised if any of these books converted anyone over college age.

Let me make clear that I think it an admirable goal to wean makind away from faith in ventriloquist Gods and their dummy prophets, but this is one area in which the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas is justified. We're not going to sell atheism to anyone simply by shouting over and over that Brand X (pun intended) is junk. We've got to offer them a better product. In other words, we need to teach people that they will die, and that death will be the end of everything for them, but that they can still die happy and content. If you don't believe that's possible, then we might as well give up.