The Flawed Rationalism of Christopher Hitchens

Over the last decade or so, Christopher Hitchens has become one of the most controversial and intellectually rigorous political journalists in the English-speaking world. He has an acute instinct for demolishing political cant and ill-conceived views, a talent he has been recently parading in Australia. He is a so-called defector from the Left, taking his views from either end of the ideological spectrum and infamously mounting a morally compelling case for the invasion of Iraq. For over a decade before the 2003 invasion he had been lobbying for the removal of Saddam’s regime from a socialist and human rights perspective, becoming an advocate for the Kurdish population and pro-democracy dissidents within Iraq. Unexpectedly, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, his views and those of the White House suddenly converged. And it was then that a gulf opened between him and the political Left.

In broader terms however he is not a defector from leftist traditions, having written, among a great deal else, an admiring biography of Orwell. However, particularly since 9/11, he has made many enemies amongst leftist intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky. Yet he has maintained a consistent line for years and it seems it is the world around him that has changed. By his own admission he is a libertarian, a secular rationalist in the tradition of the European Enlightenment, who is socially progressive and in favour of the emancipation of women and free and open social democracies. It is when people from the Left, intent on a reflexive anti-Americanism, do not oppose with adequate moral vehemence the subjugation of women, oppressive undemocratic regimes and the extremes of political violence evident in the Middle East, that his ire is provoked. Like Luther, who never sought to break away from the Catholic Church, Hitchens seems intent on purging the Left of its less favourable aspects while still remaining a believer.

He has recently been promoting his latest book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, in the media and at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Previously, in A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, and a collection of essays edited by Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, Hitchens had written about politics, human rights and among other things his disdain for Noam Chomsky’s kneejerk anti-Americanism.

In his current book he turns his attention to religion, yet there is a thread of continuity which binds his writings on religion and politics. It is this: Hitchens sees the problem of militant Islam in terms of the broad tectonic movements of history. Europe had liberated itself from superstition and medieval theocratic rule during the Enlightenment, developing notions of rational enquiry and political liberty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unfortunately, Hitchens argues, there are still pockets of such medieval backwardness existing in the Islamic world where the delusory teachings of religion not only inform but also dominate through force political and social life. This is the schemata through which his thinking is filtered, the grand scheme to which all his writings on politics and religion adhere. And it is compelling stuff, particularly in an age that seems to suffer from historical amnesia, to reconfigure public debate in terms of such broad historical trends.

Hitchens is to be valued for his knowledge of Middle Eastern politics and his robust and tendentious form of arguing. He will not abide intellectually lazy thinking or any form of acquiescence to political correctness and its facile rituals of politeness and forced conviviality. Consequently he can be rude and upsetting for those who are used to being treated with kid gloves by that accursed ethos of tolerance and affected plurality that often dogs our political, educational and social institutions. In the media and during discussions Hitchens consequently arouses a great deal of controversy. This is due to the fact that he attacks people’s emotionally-based beliefs with razor-sharp reason in a similar manner to that other great demolisher of irrational belief and superstition, Voltaire. People make the mistake, however, by trying to meet him on his own terms, of trying, for example, to defend religious belief through reasoned argument. This approach will always fail and once you accept the rules of the game laid down by the secular rationalist he or she will always win.

Hitchens’s views, if they are to be countered, need to be approached as all other forms of secular rationalism have been from the seventeenth century onwards. There are innumerable critiques countering Enlightenment rationalism, from Rousseau and the English Romantics, through to Dostoevsky, Jung, Koestler and Milosz. Adopting such an approach gives us a sense of the tradition within which he operates and also the problems associated with that tradition.

Hitchens inadvertently offers us the thread by which we can unpick his eloquently woven arguments. In a defence of his criticisms of the Left in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics he states that there have been many “such defectors … [a tradition of] courageous re-thinking, from Kautsky to Koestler. I wouldn’t claim to be in that chart at all.” This is a frank and modest admission that also pays homage to thinkers who are more profound and penetrating in their range and thought than Hitchens is. To diffuse the man’s hubris requires a different tack than that usually adopted by his critics, and I think his mention of Koestler provides an opener.

Koestler wrote, in the wake of the success of Darkness at Noon—the novel that was instrumental to the collapse of the Soviet regime—an account of the foundation of the state of Israel and the consequent years of bloodshed in Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917–1949. It is a virtually forgotten work these days, which is unfortunate because I think it is one of the most insightful accounts of the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Koestler as a young man lived in a kibbutz in Jerusalem and spent several years reporting about and travelling to and from the city. In his autobiography Arrow in the Blue he writes of what he calls “Jerusalem Sadness”, the melancholic feelings evoked by a city of unremitting and violent bloodshed whose inhabitants are “poisoned by holiness”. Coincidentally, the phrase is echoed by Hitchens’s most recent book. Yet Koestler, unlike Hitchens, does not believe that the pathological and irrational sources of human violence can at all be assuaged by mere rational argument.

The originality of Promise and Fulfilment lies in its analysis of what Koestler terms the psychological factor in history. I lack the space here to go into the details of obfuscation and prevarication that surrounded the formation of immigration policy to Israel before and after the Holocaust and I refer the reader to Koestler’s detailed and exacting account of primary sources. His conclusion though is illuminating, and established a theme that was to concern him for the next forty years of his life, becoming the idée fixe of works such as The Ghost in the Machine, The Act of Creation and The Roots of Coincidence. When discussing the detention of Jewish refugees, who were forbidden to enter Israel, a state that was ironically established for people of the Diaspora, Koestler writes:

“It is futile to search for rational causes when faced with acts of an irrationally vindictive character. How indeed could the continued detention of these human wrecks under abstruse legal pretexts be logically connected with oil policy, the Soviet menace, strategy, morality, expediency or what have you? It is a puzzle with a simple psychological solution … the subconscious layers of the mind have their own logic and wry humour.”

Koestler, again as he relates in Arrow in the Blue, had read Freud, Adler and Jung as a young engineering student. Such study produced in him a lifelong interest in the emotional and irrational wellsprings of human behaviour, and combined with the apparent irrationality, barbarity and absurdity of twentieth-century history, a sense that the Enlightenment project had certainly not delivered on its promises. As he writes of himself and his contemporaries, “we were very enlightened and reasonable. Only we failed to see that the Age of Reason and Enlightenment was drawing to a close.” The irrationality of human violence and political decision making, which often acquires a gloss of rational defence after the fact, is no less evident today on the global scene than it was when Koestler was writing. It may be argued it is even more so.

The sense that man, conceived as a conscious rational being, is not master in his own house, was one of the major breakthroughs of Freud’s work. The concept of the unconscious or an inner terra incognita, an unknown country of the psyche that precedes and predicates the Cartesian subject, the focal point of rational consciousness, was a revolutionary idea. Jung, who abandoned the vestiges of rationalism still lingering in Freud’s work, took such a critique further. He suggested that Homo sapiens is inherently religious and that the rationalist dismantling and repression of the symbology and social forms of religion that characterised the Enlightenment manifested itself in a number of  “Luciferian” developments such as the French Revolution and the modern conception of the rational subject, which for Jung is merely a normalisation of a state of deep dissociation and severance from the collective basis of emotional and spiritual life. The artificiality of such a situation was evidenced for Jung by the fact that after secular rationalism had demolished images of the Virgin Mother throughout Europe a substitute stubbornly emerged from the collective unconscious in the form of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.

Koestler developed his theories in The Ghost in the Machine and The Act of Creation. In these two brilliant but often neglected works he advanced the findings of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories and Jung’s depth psychology into the realms of evolution and brain physiology beyond that of any other author I am aware of. In commenting on what he terms the “schizophysiology” of the human species, the schism between rational consciousness and the subterranean world of emotion and irrationality, Koestler writes:

“The Promethean myth has acquired an ugly twist: the giant reaching out to steal the lightning from the gods is insane … To go on preaching sweet reason to an inherently unreasonable species is, as history shows, a fairly hopeless enterprise … The Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment seemed to signal a new departure for man … but they did not solve, on the contrary they deepened, his predicament. Religious wars were superseded by patriotic, then by ideological, wars, fought with the same self-immolating loyalty and fervour. The opium of revealed religion was replaced by the heroin of secular religions, which commanded the same bemused surrender of the individual to their doctrines, and the same worshipful love offered to their prophets.”

I have given here just a sample of Koestler’s thought in order to offer the reader one of the more recent and erudite critiques of the Enlightenment project. It is a critique that, following Freud and Jung, sought to ground theories of human psychology in the physiological basis of unconscious and pre-rational thought.

While skewering some of the more banal forms of religious belief, which make for easy targets, Hitchens does not deal adequately with the entire spectrum of the human religious impulse; nor does he take sufficient account of the tradition of psychological thought from Freud through to Jung and Koestler that has called the rationalist project into question. It was Jung, as a scientist and empiricist, who established that the human psyche contains archetypes and forms of experience of an inherently religious nature that are a priori structured into the human brain. This is why no society in human history has evolved that does not have some form of religious practice or belief. The importance of Jung’s work and Koestler’s is their attempt to reconcile the irrational sources of religious experience, in both its creative and pathological manifestations, with a scientific and empirical mindset. And both thinkers, in their penetrating appraisal of the unconscious and critiques of the rational subject, offer perspectives that throw into relief some of the inherent problems evident in the kind of Enlightenment certainties that form the basis of Hitchens’s writings. Therefore if we want to counter our most colourful and entertaining contrarian we may do best to accept his own judgment that he is not at all on the same chart as thinkers such as Koestler.

Further, Koestler is amongst good company. The rationalist and emancipatory principles of the Enlightenment, which underpinned the Scientific, French and Russian revolutions do not fare well in the works of Dostoevsky, particularly in his most controversial and vehemently reactionary novel, The Devils. Yet at the heart of his work, particularly the great philosophical meditation that is the centrepiece of The Brothers Karamazov, is a legitimate and unflinching articulation of the anxieties and uncertainties of European modernity. His articulation of the problems associated with living in a world stripped of faith and meaning, “the disinherited mind”, analysed with acuity by Eric Heller in his book of that name, is one of the most penetrating in European literature. Dostoevsky had a profound distrust of the rational peregrinations of what he called the “Euclidian mind”, a mental disposition he thought to be at the root of the spiritual and moral malaise of modern Europe. It is a note that was echoed more recently by Czeslaw Milosz, who in The Land of Ulro not only looks at contemporary political and social reality (or more appropriately unreality) through the lenses of Blake and Dostoevsky, but also offers one of the more compelling critiques of the intellectual traditions that are so dear to Hitchens.

We should be thankful that Hitchens takes people like Mike Moore and Noam Chomsky to task, if merely in the interest of rigorous public debate. However, despite his charm and humanity, there is a sense of hollowness and hubristic overreaching in his thought and manner. He appears to be insensitive to the realm of experience that comes under the term “religious” and which in its most pure form found expression in the works of Meister Eckhart, Dante, Hieronymous Bosch, Swedenborg, Blake, Dostoevsky, Jung, Weil and Milosz, to name just a few of Europe’s most important religious writers and artists. Hitchens with justification attacks the most banal, abhorrent and indefensible forms of religious thought and practice. Yet he shows less of an inclination to come to terms with some of the towering religious thinkers that civilisation has thrown up and who give us a very different impression of the religious impulse than the current phenomenon of fundamentalism evident in both the West and the Islamic world.

Hitchens makes a habit of demolishing the arguments of people who are not professional authors or thinkers, people who consequently feel they are out of their depth in the presence of such an intelligent, rigorous and gifted writer. Unfortunately they are unaware that for some of us Hitchens at times seems to be out of his depth, that there are other thinkers who are in a completely different league from him, and for whom many of his premises would be untenable. Which is not to detract from the man, for he has pointed the fact out to us himself.