R.I.P. Christopher Hitchens

The term "intellectual" has come into disrepute, with too many examples of the shallow, facile, and quite frankly not very well educated held up as exemplars.  A true intellectual requires courage, to examine your own original premises, to discard them if found wanting, and to stick by them even if the winds of fashion blow the other way.

Christopher Hitchens was such and intellectual, as to almost redeem the term single handed.

Fearless is a word that comes to mind reading his books.  He was never afraid to tell you what he thought.  That's not unusual these days, but Hitchens would tell you why he thought that way, and present deeply reasoned arguments in support of his thesis.  This made him stand out, especially from his fellows on the left.

The Left used to have a great intellectual force, before it was consumed from within.  In a sense, Hitchens was the last of that tradition.  His grounding in his leftish principles caused his break from the modern left - and his regular career at The Nation - which he describes here:




People who titter at this are frivolous.

He did not flinch from reality, or the necessity of standing up for Western Civilization.  Unlike much of today's left, Hitchens saw the hard won gains of the Left from its days of vigor worthy of defense - indeed armed defense if needed.  His contempt for today's shallow, glib leftists was withering, and deserved:



But his flirtation with libertarianism never really stuck: Hitchens was inescapably (and unashamedly) a man of the Left, before the days of its collapse into today's degraded pap of multiculturalism.  Unlike them, Hitchens didn't flinch from recognizing fascism when he saw it, or agitating against it.  Those he saw as worth our efforts: the working class; women; art, music, and philosophy.  His scorn for so called "radicals" who were firmly in the grasp of the status quo was perhaps unique, and rang more loudly for that.



He was unshakably atheistic, to the very end.  I found this exchange charming, with his description of his close friendship with people of deep faith, but where mutual respect led to an "armed truce".



I will miss him.  I didn't always agree with him, but he always made me think.  I admire his unwillingness to flinch from principle, I admire his celebration of what is good and just about our civilization, and I admire his unashamed, vigorous defense of what he thought right.  I regret that his like will not come our way again soon.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949 - 2011.