Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011
A moving tribute from his brother Peter Hitchens here.
I never actually finished 'God is not Great' and, as all I knew of him was his position as one of the 'four horsemen of the apocalypse', at first I was rather dismissive of him in comparison to the likes of Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett. Then I came across this article 'Christopher Hitchens and the Battle of Beirut', and the account of his bravery and integrity made me reconsider my opinion of him. Since then I've always enjoyed reading his articles for Vanity Fair and such like and he is definitely my favourite of the four. In fact these days, I tend to be rather dismissive of the other three in comparison to the likes of him.
It's funny how these things change.
2 comments:
You're quite right to not even bother to name the fourth and least of this preposterous conglomeration, Ringo Harris.
But the tragedy of Dennett and Dawkins is that they really are trailblazingly important figures in their chosen fields, whose early works, before they went mad with hatred, are of the highest order. The trouble with them, and why you are entirely right to have given up on them, is that they have opted to stray away from their fields of expertise into tiresome juvenile agitprop.
But they are a great philosopher and a great scientist.
Hitchens was a journalist. A good one, apparently - I've never read him - but a journalist nonetheless.
I agree: It was a good piece by Peter - characteristically so. What would C have written about P, I wonder, had their fates been reversed?
I can cheerfully admit that Prof. Dennett was always (and still is) much too clever for me, but I respected his ambition and considered him to be the most insightful and imaginative.
For all I was a bit of a Prof. Dawkins fangirl (I fell for his meme theory like the star struck teenager I was. I still refer to it from time to time albeit not in a serious manner), it did eventually become clear that he was something of a broken record, never quite addressing the implications of his arguments as someone like Prof. Singer would. Then he found his calling as popular bad-philosophy writer and that was that. The end of the affair.
Harris was just too parochial for me and like Dawkins, I found his attacks on post-modernism tiresome, not because I am particularly post modernist myself, but because his 'solutions' were the same arguments of tired modernism, riddled with the same contradictions and issues that led to post-modernism in the first place.
I was all for the Brights and still would have been after my own beliefs shifted. It just became clear that it was a lot of bluster and little substance (though at least it led to the plethora of atheist/apologetics/philosophy blogs that I am currently enjoying). The one constant was Hitchens' eternal rudeness and erudition, though I was more impressed by the latter!
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