About a month ago, Christopher Hitchens, one of the great English-language essayists of our time, passed away. In the time since that unfortunate loss, a flood of obituaries has honored the man. According to the standard accounts, Hitchens was a writer, a rascal, and advocate possessing a remarkable talent for provoking and alienating others – even when he was right.
Hitchens had the unique opportunity (and responsibility) of providing people with a glimpse of the world. Writing for a spate of widely read publications, he tackled everything from “Why Women Aren’t Funny” to “The Case for Humanitarian Intervention,” controversially urging the latter before and during the American war in Iraq.
And his prose – erudite, elegant, and evocative – was remarkable. Simply put, the man could write.
Even so, Hitchens had two glaring weaknesses. First, like many intelligent people, Hitchens was too confident in his opinions. As a consequence, he was susceptible to cloaking ideological presumptions in the garb of observational commentary – a common charge, but true nonetheless. Second, though this may have been inevitable given the breadth and pace of his work, Hitchens was often wrong about the facts. So while he was a powerful observer, Hitchens could get in his own way.
Take the lesson of Lebanon, where Hitchens traveled in 2009.
Sponsored by a Lebanese pro-democracy foundation, Hitchens visited the tumultuous country to give a talk at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Like many others who’ve set foot in Lebanon, Hitchens took a beating (figuratively and literally).
AUB is one of the more prestigious universities in the Middle East, with a rich intellectual history including on-campus crises surrounding a late-19th century debate on Darwinism and a mid-20th century controversy over Arab nationalism and Westernization in Lebanon. In short, despite its dysfunctional administration, AUB has been a hotbed for debate and activism since its inception in 1866.
Perhaps unawares, Hitchens expected a friendly reception on campus, with the polite and deferential questions one might hear at a policy event in Washington, DC. The crowd roughed him up; he roughed himself up, really. Most disastrously, while fielding questions after his talk, Hitchens identified Walid Jumblatt as one of the Middle East’s “true revolutionaries.” Of course, as Hitchens knew perfectly well, Jumblatt was and is the neo-feudal leader of the Druze community and head of a centuries-old political household in the Levant.
Hitchens would later suffer worse at the hands of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), a bunch of garden-variety thugs masquerading as members of a sophisticated political movement. Walking down Hamra, a bustling street that once was one of the more cosmopolitan places in the Arab world, Hitchens spotted one of the many SSNP flags and signs that have hung over the area, protected by embedded party partisans, since 2008.
As Hitchens details in “The Swastika and the Cedar,” the zubaiyaa – the SSNP insignia that resembles a spinning swastika, but which party intellectuals claim invokes the cross and crescent of Lebanon’s spiritual families – offended his sensibilities. He began defacing the sign, barely getting through the “C of a well-known epithet” before SSNP youths assaulted him and nearly dragged him away for questioning in broad daylight.
On the details, Hitchens deserved every beating he took. He was profoundly mistaken in equating Jumblatt, a survivalist par excellence, with the Lebanese activists at the heart of the Cedar Revolution or with revolutionaries that have emerged during the Arab Spring. And it was foolish and arrogant – just plain stupid – to deface an SSNP sign in a neighborhood dominated by its thugs.
At a deeper level, however, people’s response to Hitchens matters more. At AUB, Hitchens took an academic beating in a public forum where he had agreed to air his views and defend his convictions. In his writing, he practically admitted that he was fair game. In Hamra, by contrast, members of a political party (or gang) almost beat him to a pulp on a public street – a main thoroughfare, in truth – which they regard as their private playground.
The Hamra incident was symptomatic of a problem that Hitchens recognized, though he expressed it poorly. Despite lacking an intimate knowledge of the Levant, or perhaps because he was not burdened with such baggage, Hitchens saw clearly that “those [in Lebanon] who inconvenience Syria by their criticisms are bad liabilities from the life-insurance point of view.”
Not much has changed since he wrote those words – not yet, at least. In fact, the scope of dissent and countervailing violence has only broadened.
At home, where nearly a year of dissent has not swayed the entrenched elite, and in Lebanon, which the Assad regime still regards as a runaway coastal province, a Levantine clique of cabals fights thoughts with bullets, confronts words with bombs, and rewards dissent with death. Most troublingly, sandwiched between corrupt regimes and dynamic Islamists, ostensible Arab liberals – including Lebanon’s March 14 coalition – are increasingly compelled to accept the logic of violence.
Though he was often wrong and though he deployed an alienating sort of polemical fury, Hitchens died in his bed of illness, perhaps a product of his own excesses. He did not, thus, die at the hands of those he disagreed with.
It was a spectacular life and a quiet death. The converse awaits Lebanese and other regional public figures, as they live in fearful silence and self-censorship or die from violent acts engendered by disagreement. Until intellectuals, activists, and politicians are willing and able to live or die on their own terms, the Middle East – especially the perpetually unstable Levant – will not see a better tomorrow.
The Silent
Very glad to see you take on this topic, though as you may have expected, I have a few comments. I’ll take them broadly in the order they appear:
- It would have been nice to have had an example of his “cloaking ideological presumptions in the garb of observational commentary”. If by this you simply mean he wrote what he felt, I see this not as a flaw but as a very welcome breeze of candour in an all-too-constipated, politically correct and ‘inoffensive’ intellectual environment.
- Was he really “often wrong about the facts”, a charge you repeat at the end? You cite the valid case of his poor understanding of Jumblatt, but that to me was a rare, and conspicuous, lapse as opposed to a common one. If he had a reputation for factual error, I was never aware of it (and that he spent his career making large claims about people – e.g. that Bill Clinton was a rapist in ‘No One Left to Lie To’, or that Henry Kissinger was a war criminal in ‘The Trial of Henry Kissinger’, or that Mother Teresa was a fraud in ‘The Missionary Position’ – without ever being sued for libel suggests that his facts were more often than not in very good order).
- I’m not sure if it’s at all true that he “expected a friendly reception” or “polite and deferential questions” at AUB. For his stances on god and, more pointedly, Iraqi Baathism, he was denounced on a more or less daily basis from both the right and the left, and I see no reason why he should have expected any different in Lebanon, of all countries. As for the questions, he famously delighted in confrontation and was never happier than when seizing on a fatuous or flaccid interrogator.
- On this same point, I’ve seen no evidence that he took any sort of “beating” at AUB. If I remember correctly, someone called him a fascist, which showed a questionable understanding of his politics to put it mildly, and the others made the usual zoo noises about being a stooge of Zionism and capitalism (as of course anyone who opposes Islamism and Syrian dictatorship must be). It was actually Michael Young, in my opinion, who dealt with this question best, in his obituary in The National (http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/an-enemy-of-totalitarianism-the-mideast-misunderstood?pageCount=0).
- It now starts to get downright sinister when you say that he “deserved every beating he took”. Excuse me? Can you really mean to have said that the use of a marker pen to express written dissent calls for physical violence in reprisal? I don’t see how you can put down these words and then go on to decry the “clique of cabals [that] fights thoughts with bullets, confronts words with bombs, and rewards dissent with death” as if you hadn’t just a moment ago defended precisely this culture. You may not have it both ways: either there is to be free expression or not; and either nonviolent dissent should be opposed with violence or not; and I’m afraid you come out of this crucial test looking ambivalent at best.
- Finally, on what you describe as his “alienating” style. This is all too often written off as mere pugilism or crankery, but he actually believed there were very good reasons to be oppositional and unforgiving. Accused once on air by some typically nervous TV anchor of bringing about “too much heat, and not enough light”, he instantly snapped back “light only comes from heat”. Put more formally, he believed that radical change (what we would now probably call ‘progress’) could not come from forever diluting and decaffeinating one’s arguments to suit the sensibilities of an audience that was all too easily ‘offended’. So long as one allowed people to avoid confronting the important questions, one acquiesced in the overall degrading of politics. The “dialectic”, as he called it (no doubt a relic from his Marxist/Trotskyist days), was the only path forward. I for one think there’s a lot of truth to that, and it saddens – no, irritates – me to see people say, in effect, ‘Couldn’t he have been a bit nicer?’ (He was invariably described, by the way, as being unimpeachably courteous and chivalrous in person. I don’t think many could watch this clip of his interaction with an 8-year-old audience member and see a cruel or cantankerous bully http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok7MqazQkCo)
So I’m afraid I don’t really grant you either of your two “glaring weaknesses”. But a nice piece nonetheless.
Hey Alex,
1. There’s a difference between writing what you feel, in a transparent manner, perhaps in an opinion piece, essay, or even within a news article that calls for some color, and allowing ideology and intellectual dispositions to shape what readers a world away think are the facts. While Hitchens was great at the former, I think you must admit he’s done plenty of the latter.
2. On the beatings, I’m only saying that, in terms of the small picture, he ‘deserved it.’ He was comically wrong about Jumblatt and he was just plain stupid in defacing a gang sign in gang territory. And he admits as much on both counts.
The larger point, however, is how his interlocutors handled the issues. You and I have disagreed on as much as we’ve agreed on, but it’s always been amicable. I hardly think you’d beat me and drag me into a car because of it… And, as you concede, that’s the larger point.
How do I reconcile the two? Imagine me throwing up a ‘Bloods’ sign in a ‘Crips’ neighborhood. Down in the weeds: I would have ‘deserved’ it in the sense that I ‘asked’ for it, considering how stupid I’d have been. At 30,000 ft.: Nobody would argue that I’d deserve an ACTUAL beating (or worse). That’s my point here, and one that Hitchens himself made.
3. On his style… I don’t say it’s a bad thing. I just point out what it was and how it was received by people. There’s no denying his approach, just as there’s no denying his talent and accumulated skill.
4. His stance on Iraq, among other places, is an example of him being too confident. Lebanon, too, was such a place. And both are examples of factual shortcomings.
Does that mean you or I disagree with him? Not necessarily. In fact, I agree with plenty of what he said on Beirut. But the same traits that made him such a great essayist – especially his clarity and tone – simply amplified when he was right and when he was wrong.
I will say, however, that I should not have used the word ‘glaring.’ I meant to say that ‘X and Y stand out.’ But the connotations of the word I use needlessly make it seem like I’m picking on him. My mistake.
5. As to all points, I’ve generally tried to hedge a bit… I don’t know what Hitchens expected at AUB. And yes the crowd was full of Laptop Leftists we’ve discussed before. But he could and should have prepared better for that question, considering the premise of his talk.
6. Finally, on him being ‘misunderstood,’ as Young writes, I agree. But framing people’s reaction to what he said – just as I have to frame your reaction to what I write – is necessary.
(I hope I got it all. I’m writing this on my phone)
All that said, I’m glad you appreciated the deeper point I was making. This is less an attack on Hitchens than on the SSNP thugs and their ilk across the political spectrum.
I sense that we basically agree on the Hamra beating question, but I still think your formulation is fishy – it has a nasty echo of those who said Salman Rushdie “deserved” the fatwa because “he knew what he was doing”, or that this or that rape victim “was asking for it” when she wore that mini-skirt, and so on. Why is it that so many people describe what he did as “stupid”, and so few describe it as “courageous”? I certainly wouldn’t have the balls to do it, but I imagine I’d feel quite proud of myself if I did, just as I would if I defaced a Likud or Yisrael Beitenu flag in Jerusalem (and how different it would be for the laptop-Leninists if he did that!).
There’s no denying that he could get his facts wrong – I once wrote a piece myself on such an occasion (http://thedisgraceofgod.blogspot.com/2011/07/defaming-victims-hitchens-slanders.html). What I disputed was whether this was “often” the case. As I said before, I’m not aware of him having a reputation for factual error (though Lebanon is indeed an unarguable counterexample – and an odd one, too. Why did he not once visit the country between 1991 and 2009? That’s plain incuriosity to me).
This is a big subject, and one that in all propriety should be tackled over wine, if not whisky.
On most points, my only response is: ‘Fair enough.’
With regard to the beating, again, he deserved it ‘on the details,’ my way of making the point that, at the primitive level, certain acts draw certain responses. There’s a fine line between courage and stupidity and, in this case, he straddled it. I accept the point you’ve made about how some assholes believe women were ‘asking for it,’ but I do believe the gang analogy is more appropriate. Even so, and this is important for me to get across, the problem was not his defacing the sign; the problem was that a ‘political party’ essentially treats Beirut’s main shopping district like its own back-alley.
You’re right on the issue of facts. ‘Sometimes wrong’ would have been better. I also think, now, I should have made distinctions between his literary essays and foreign commentary. I do wish to reiterate that his mistakes were those you’d see from someone who tackled so many issues at such a rapid pace… Not due to incompetence, but sheer volume and expedience.
Perhaps in June we can get that wine!
Or, even better, you’ll treat me to some of the famous Zahle arak.
Here’s a question, or perhaps rather an exercise in advocatus diaboli: I’ve heard it said by some that defacing the SSNP logo would have been one thing, but to have done it on the Khaled Alwan sign in particular was something else. To these people, Hitchens wasn’t making a point about swastikas but instead was desecrating a prized symbol of victory over the foreign aggressor and occupier. This of course prises open the classic resistance/terrorism debate, and I’m wondering where you stand on it. Are Israeli soldiers on Lebanese soil fair game, and if so, does it matter if you’re wearing civilian clothing or not?
I’ll have to get back to you in full at a later point, as I’m at work… My first instinct, however, is to say that even soldiers are not always ‘fair game’ – at least, normatively. War, like other competition, has – or should have – rules.
I’ll need a bit more time to take a breath, set aside my bias against the SSNP’s more recent thuggish manifestations, and write you back on the merits…
Arak will flow come June!
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