Arguably : selected essays

Essayist Christopher Hitchens ruminates on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men, the haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard, the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell, the persistent agonies of anti-Semitism and jihad, the enduring relevance of Karl Marx, and how politics justifies itself by culture--and how the latter prompts the former.;All American. Gods of our fathers: the United States of enlightenment -- The private Jefferson -- Jefferson vs. the Muslim pirates -- Benjamin Franklin: free and easy -- John Brown: the man who ended slavery -- Abraham Lincoln: misery's child -- Mark Twain: American radical -- Upton Sinclair: a capitalist primer -- JFK: in sickness and by stealth -- Saul Bellow: the great assimilator -- Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita -- John Updike: No way ; Mr. Geniality -- Vidal Loco -- America the Banana Republic -- An Anglosphere future -- Political animals -- Old enough to die -- In defense of foxhole atheists -- In search of the Washington novel -- Eclectic Affinities. Isaac Newton: flaws of gravity -- The men who made England: Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" -- Edmund Burke: reactionary prophet -- Samuel Johnson: demons and dictionaries -- Gustave Flaubert: I'm with Stupide -- The dark side of Dickens -- Marx's journalism: the Grub Street years -- Rebecca West: things worth fighting for -- Ezra Pound: a revolutionary simpleton -- On "Animal Farm" -- Jessica Mitford's poison pen -- W. Somerset Maugham: Poor Old Willie -- Evelyn Waugh: the permanent adolescent -- P.G. Wodehouse: The Honorable Schoolboy -- Anthony Powell: An Omnivorous Curiosity -- John Buchan: Spy Thriller's Father -- Graham Greene: I'll be damned -- Death from a salesman: Graham Greene's bottle ontology -- Loving Philip Larkin -- Stephen Spender: a nice bloody fool -- Edward Upward: the captive mind -- C.L.R. James: mid off, not right on -- J.G. Ballard: the catastrophist -- Fraser's Flashman: scoundrel time -- Fleet Street's finest: from Waugh to Frayn -- Saki: where the wild things are -- Harry Potter: the boy who lived -- Amusements, annoyances, and disappointments. Why women aren't funny -- Stieg Larsson: the author who played with fire -- As American as apple pie -- So many men's rooms, so little time -- The new commandments -- In your face -- Wine drinkers of the world, unite -- Charles, Prince of Piffle -- Offshore accounts. Afghanistan's dangerous bet -- First, silence the whistle-blower -- Believe me, it's torture -- Iran's waiting game -- Long live democratic seismology -- Benazir Bhutto: daughter of destiny -- From Abbottabad to worse -- The perils of partition -- Algeria: a French quarrel -- The case of Orientalism -- Edward Said: where the Twain should have met -- The swastika and the cedar -- Holiday in Iraq -- Tunisia: at the desert's edge -- What happened to the suicide bombers of Jerusalem? -- Childhood's end: an African nightmare -- The Vietnam Syndrome -- Once upon a time in Germany -- Worse than "Nineteen Eighty-four" -- North Korea: A nation of racist dwarves -- The eighteenth brumaire of the Castro dynasty -- Hugo Boss -- Is the Euro doomed? -- Overstating Jewish power -- The case for humanitarian intervention -- Legacies of totalitarianism. Victor Serge: pictures from an inquisition -- André Malraux: one man's fate -- Arthur Koestler: the zealot -- Isabel Allende: Chile Redux -- The Persian version -- Martin Amis: lightness at midnight -- Imagining Hitler -- Victor Klemperer: survivor -- A war worth fighting -- Just give peace a chance? -- W.G. Sebald: requiem for Germany -- Words' worth. When the king saved God -- Let them eat pork rinds -- Stand up for Denmark! -- Eschew the taboo -- She's no fundamentalist -- Burned out -- Easter charade -- Don't mince words -- History and mystery -- Words matter -- This was not looting -- The "other" L-word -- The you decade -- Suck it up -- A very, very dirty word -- Prisoner of shelves. Gods of Our Fathers: The United
States of Enlightenment

Why should we care what the Founding Fathers believed, or did not believe, about religion? They went to such great trouble to insulate faith from politics, and took such care to keep their own convictions private, that it would scarcely matter if it could now be proved that, say, George Washington was a secret Baptist. The ancestor of the American Revolution was the English Revolution of the 1640s, whose leaders and spokesmen were certainly Protestant fundamentalists, but that did not bind the Framers and cannot be said to bind us, either. Indeed, the established Protestant church in Britain was one of the models which we can be quite sure the signatories of 1776 were determined to avoid emulating.

Moreover, the eighteenth-century scholars and gentlemen who gave us the U.S. Constitution were in a relative state of innocence respecting knowledge of the cosmos, the Earth, and the psyche, of the sort that has revolutionized the modern argument over faith. Charles Darwin was born in Thomas Jefferson’s lifetime (on the very same day as Abraham Lincoln, as it happens), but Jefferson’s guesses about the fossils found in Virginia were to Darwinism what alchemy is to chemistry. And the insights of Einstein and Freud lay over a still more distant horizon. The furthest that most skeptics could go was in the direction of an indeterminate deism, which accepted that the natural order seemed to require a designer but did not necessitate the belief that the said designer actually intervened in human affairs. Invocations such as “nature’s god” were partly intended to hedge this bet, while avoiding giving offense to the pious. Even Thomas Paine, the most explicitly anti-Christian of the lot, wrote The Age of Reason as a defense of god from those who traduced him in man-made screeds like the Bible.

Considering these limitations, it is quite astonishing how irreligious the Founders actually were. You might not easily guess, for example, who was the author of the following words:

Oh! Lord! Do you think that a Protestant Popedom is annihilated in America? Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical Strifes in Maryland Pensilvania [sic], New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy it is that these People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could they would. . . . There is a germ of religion in human nature so strong that whenever an order of men can persuade the people by flattery or terror that they have salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fraud, violence, or usurpation.

That was John Adams, in relatively mild form. He was also to point out, though without too much optimism, the secret weapon that secularists had at their disposal—namely the profusion of different religious factions:

The multitude and diversity of them, You will say, is our Security against them all. God grant it. But if We consider that the Presbyterians and Methodists are far the most numerous and the most likely to unite; let a George Whitefield arise, with a military cast, like Mahomet, or Loyola, and what will become of all the other Sects who can never unite?

George Whitefield was the charismatic preacher who is so superbly mocked in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. Of Franklin it seems almost certainly right to say that he was an atheist (Jerry Weinberger’s excellent recent study Benjamin Franklin Unmasked being the best reference here), but the master tacticians of church-state separation, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were somewhat more opaque about their beliefs. In passing the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—the basis of the later First Amendment—they brilliantly exploited the fear that each Christian sect had of persecution by the others. It was easier to get the squabbling factions to agree on no tithes than it would have been to get them to agree on tithes that might also benefit their doctrinal rivals. In his famous “wall of separation” letter, assuring the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, of their freedom from persecution, Jefferson was responding to the expressed fear of this little community that they would be oppressed by—the Congregationalists of Connecticut.

This same divide-and-rule tactic may have won him the election of 1800 that made him president in the first place. In the face of a hysterical Federalist campaign to blacken Jefferson as an infidel, the Voltaire of Monticello appealed directly to those who feared the arrogance of the Presbyterians. Adams himself thought that this had done the trick.

“With the Baptists, Quakers, Methodists, and Moravians,” he wrote, “as well as the Dutch and German Lutherans and Calvinists, it had an immense effect, and turned them in such numbers as decided the election. They said, let us have an Atheist or Deist or any thing rather than an establishment of Presbyterianism.”

The essential point—that a religiously neutral state is the chief guarantee of religious pluralism—is the one that some of today’s would-be theocrats are determined to miss. Brooke Allen misses no chance to rub it in, sometimes rather heavily stressing contemporary “faith-based” analogies. She is especially interesting on the extent to which the Founders felt obliged to keep their doubts on religion to themselves. Madison, for example, did not find himself able, during the War of 1812, to refuse demands for a national day of prayer and fasting. But he confided his own reservations to his private papers, published as “Detached Memoranda” only in 1946. It was in those pages, too, that he expressed the view that to have chaplains opening Congress, or chaplains in the armed forces, was unconstitutional.

Continues...
Excerpted from Arguably by Christopher Hitchens Copyright © 2011 by Christopher Hitchens. Excerpted by permission of Signal, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. "All first-rate criticism first defines what we are confronting," the late, great jazz critic Whitney Balliett once wrote. By that measure, the essays of Christopher Hitchens are in the first tier. For nearly four decades, Hitchens has been telling us, in pitch-perfect prose, what we confront when we grapple with first principles-the principles of reason and tolerance and skepticism that define and inform the foundations of our civilization-principles that, to endure, must be defended anew by every generation. "A short list of the greatest living conversationalists in English," said The Economist , "would probably have to include Christopher Hitchens, Sir Patrick Leigh-Fermor, and Sir Tom Stoppard. Great brilliance, fantastic powers of recall, and quick wit are clearly valuable in sustaining conversation at these cosmic levels. Charm may be helpful, too." Hitchens-who staunchly declines all offers of knighthood-hereby invites you to take a seat at a democratic conversation, to be engaged, and to be reasoned with. His knowledge is formidable, an encyclopedic treasure, and yet one has the feeling, reading him, of hearing a person thinking out loud, following the inexorable logic of his thought, wherever it might lead, unafraid to expose fraudulence, denounce injustice, and excoriate hypocrisy. Legions of readers, admirers and detractors alike, have learned to read Hitchens with something approaching awe at his felicity of language, the oxygen in every sentence, the enviable wit and his readiness, even eagerness, to fight a foe or mount the ramparts. Here, he supplies fresh perceptions of such figures as varied as Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Rebecca West, George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, and Philip Larkin are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions and intrepid observations, gathered from a lifetime of traveling and reporting from such destinations as Iran, China, and Pakistan. Hitchens's directness, elegance, lightly carried erudition, critical and psychological insight, humor, and sympathy-applied as they are here to a dazzling variety of subjects-all set a standard for the essayist that has rarely been matched in our time. What emerges from this indispensable volume is an intellectual self-portrait of a writer with an exemplary steadiness of purpose and a love affair with the delights and seductions of the English language, a man anchored in a profound and humane vision of the human longing for reason and justice. @Font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p. MsoNormal, li. MsoNormal, div. MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div. Section1 { page: Section1; } "All first-rate criticism first defines what we are confronting," the late, great jazz critic Whitney Balliett once wrote. By that measure, the essays of Christopher Hitchens are in the first tier. For nearly four decades, Hitchens has been telling us, in pitch-perfect prose, what we confront when we grapple with first principles-the principles of reason and tolerance and skepticism that define and inform the foundations of our civilization-principles that, to endure, must be defended anew by every generation. "A short list of the greatest living conversationalists in English," said The Economist Here, he supplies fresh perceptions of such figures as varied as Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Rebecca West, George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, and Philip Larkin are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions and intrepid observations, gathered from a lifetime of traveling and reporting from such destinations as Iran, China, and Pakistan. Hitchens's directness, elegance, lightly carried erudition, critical and psychological insight, humor, and sympathy-applied as they are here to a dazzling variety of subjects-all set a standard for the essayist that has rarely been matched in our time. What emerges from this indispensable volume is an intellectual self-portrait of a writer with an exemplary steadiness of purpose and a love affair with the delights and seductions of the English language, a man anchored in a profound and humane vision of the human longing for reason and justice

'As soon as we abandon our own reason', wrote Bertrand Russell, 'and are content
to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.'

For over forty years, Christopher Hitchens has proclaimed truth where others have spun falsehood and written, with passionate commitment, on matters that others fear to broach. This volume of essays encompasses Hitchens' writing over the past decade on politics, literature and religion.

In Arguably Hitchens explores a wide range of cultural and political issues, past and present. His fresh perceptions of figures as diverse as Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Rebecca West and Philip Larkin are matched in brilliance by his acerbic discussions and intrepid observations, gathered over a lifetime of travelling and reporting from destinations such as Iran, China and Pakistan.

Hitchens' life has above all else been one of defiance and wit, courage and humility: in an age of digital punditry and twenty-four hour hucksterism, he has been a voice of reason amid the clamour, making an indelible mark on politics and literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Arguably is the indispensible companion to the Anglosphere's pre-eminent political writer.

Shortlisted for the 2012 Orwell Prize 'As soon as we abandon our own reason', wrote Bertrand Russell, 'and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.' For over forty years, Christopher Hitchens has proclaimed truth where others have spun falsehood and written, with passionate commitment, on matters that others fear to broach. This volume of essays encompasses Hitchens' writing over the past decade on politics, literature and religion. In Arguably Hitchens explores a wide range of cultural and political issues, past and present. His fresh perceptions of figures as diverse as Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Rebecca West and Philip Larkin are matched in brilliance by his acerbic discussions and intrepid observations, gathered over a lifetime of travelling and reporting from destinations such as Iran, China and Pakistan. Hitchens' life has above all else been one of defiance and wit, courage and humility: in an age of digital punditry and twenty-four hour hucksterism, he has been a voice of reason amid the clamour, making an indelible mark on politics and literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Arguably is the indispensible companion to the Anglosphere's pre-eminent political writer. The first new book of essays by Christopher Hitchens since 2004, Arguably offers an indispensable key to understanding the passionate and skeptical spirit of one of our most dazzling writers, widely admired for the clarity of his style, a result of his disciplined and candid thinking. Topics range from ruminations on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men to the haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard; from the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell to the persistent agonies of anti-Semitism and jihad. Hitchens even looks at the recent financial crisis and argues for the enduring relevance of Karl Marx. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It reveals how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. In this fashion, Arguably burnishes Christopher Hitchens' credentials as (to quote Christopher Buckley) our "greatest living essayist in the English language." For nearly four decades, Christopher Hitchens has been telling us, in pitch-perfect prose, what we confront when we grapple with first principles -- the principles of reason and tolerance and skepticism that define and inform the foundations of our civilization -- principles that, to endure, must be defended anew by every generation. Here, in Arguably, he invites readers to take a seat at a democratic conversation, to be engaged, and to be reasoned with. Astute, vivid, and uninhibited, Hitchens sets a standard for the essayist that has rarely been matched in our time. What emerges in this indispensible volume is an intellectual self-portrait of a writer with an exemplary steadiness of purpose and a love affair with the delights and seductions of the English language, a man anchored in a profound and humane vision of the human longing for reason and justice. [(Source)][1] [1]: http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/213580/arguably#9780771041419 From One Of The Most Admired Public Intellectuals Of Our Time, And A Multi-award Winning And #1 Bestselling Author, Comes A Collection Of His Most Important And Controversial Essays On The Theme Of Culture And Politics And How The Two Relate. From The Hardcover Edition.