Oh God.
(Published 11/2/07, Stanford Daily. Slightly corrected version here.)
I was on page four of Christopher Hitchens's latest ("God is Not Great") when the Fear hit for the first time. I heard a voice screaming, "Who says that? That's the nadir of declasse tastelessness! It's not even funny! Who? Who?" over and over. My tax advisor whipped the butt of his pistol back and forth across my temples until the noise stopped. Now wordless and bleeding, I passed the book over. He began to sob as the full impact of Hitchens's witless offensiveness hit him right in the pituitary. The man whose book jacket blurbs declare him "an intellectual willing to show his teeth in the cause of righteousness" had summarized the whole priest sex abuse scandal, traumatized children, international cover-ups and all, as follows: "No child's behind left."
"Shit," my tax advisor muttered. "I don't know if we have enough drugs for this trip. As your tax advisor, I advise you to run out for a couple blotters of acid and some high-grade heroin."
OK, enough of that. The gonzo book review thing is so pre-vernal-equinox-2006. But if ever a book made me want to dive into the Great Red Shark and the Nevada desert and the bad craziness and the uppers and the downers and the peppers and the poppers and the screamers and the laughers and the dancers and the hoppers, it's this 300-page compendium of weak attempts at wit and eternal monument to pseudo-intellectual triumphalism.
I mean, damn, dude. Mad Pundit! Mad Pundit! Someone get on the babblebox and call me up some big mofos, arm them with nets and sticks and tasers and body armor so good that Rummy would have provided it for the troops if he thought it would help him get in on the Hoover's sinecure for disgraced Republicans (like he needed the help). Send the football players in and let 'em go USC game on his ass. Tranq 'im up, truss 'im down, pump 'im full of thorzie and gently set him back down behind his desk at Vanity Fair with instructions to see the Nice Doctor at least three times a week until the voices stop ordering him to write the really ridiculous things.
The book is self-critiquing. Just look. Hitchens on his fellow atheists: "Our belief is not a belief." (Is there an epistemological surgeon in the house? We need a doxastiectomy, stat!) Hitchens on Augustine: "laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease." (Haha! That blithering oaf had never heard of wave-particle duality either!) Hitchens on end-of-the-world myths: "One's own death is canceled -- or perhaps repaid or compensated -- by the obliteration of all others." And as if below-the-belt amateur psychoanalysis weren't enough, we have outright paranoid conniption: "As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon."
A little of this is semi-tolerable to the extent there is an argument, or at least a point, to the damn book. And there is. It's in chapters six through nine. Those chapters are actually pretty good -- he attempts to systematically shoot down the claims of the religious about things like the veracity of their holy books, the superior morality of believers, etc. The problem comes with the other chapters, which are basically a litany (heh heh heh, I said "litany") of sins (heh...) by the religious, combined with bitchy snark designed to show how smart he is and make fellow atheists feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, he's not that smart, and the book mostly makes this atheist feel bad about himself for sharing a demographic-political class with the vile boor.
And nothing in this book is going to de-convert a believer. Perhaps the content Hitchens aims at in chapters six through nine could, standing alone, have instilled some doubt, had they been written by an able advocate. But the rest is nothing more than a cherry-picked catalog of the enormities perpetrated in the course of faith. Hitchens, of course, ignores the enormities perpetrated in the course of every other major human motivation (greed, lust, fear, ideology, jealousy, honor, socialization, race, class, gender, adventure, boredom, competitiveness, shame, etc.). The way this species rolls, one day exercise nuts gonna pop a genocide. (Perhaps a demagogue will inflame them by laying their rising health insurance costs at the beslippered feet of the sedentary.) After which I hope to see Hitchens write a book entitled, "Stair Is Not My Master." Then I'll write a nasty review of that, too. And the cycle of birth, death and rebirth continues.
So put yourself in the place of a believer reading the book. If you are, like Hitchens's foils, a killing, repressing, molesting, pig-hating, etc. maniac, you'll see nothing wrong with the nasty activity. (Or, at most, feel guilty and attribute that guilt to your religion and your behavior to your ungodly desires.) If not, you'll think that the beliefs you hold lead you away from, not toward, killing, repressing, etc. Either way, you'll realize the book is an ugly hissy fit, written in a totally irrational frame of mind. And as if to ensure that he won't persuade anyone at all, Hitchens is careful to plop down the most offensive, malicious, and vitriolic bits right at the beginning.
And his stylistic choices make me think he consciously models himself on Stewie from Family Guy. Observe the following piece of snide fastidiousness: "The most educated person in the world has to admit -- I shall not say confess -- that he or she knows less and less..." Does he really think that uttering the word "confess" will infect him with the God-cooties? Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice! And the middlebrow arrogance! "But the literal mind does not understand the ironic mind, and sees it always as a source of danger." (Or maybe he meant that sentence ironically. Woah. Deep.) Maybe a better comparison would be to the comic book store guy on The Simpsons.
OK, look. I shouldn't have to write this review. I agree that religion has mostly been a pernicious influence in our politics, our history, our education, our class system, our public health, fo' sho' pretty much everything, hear? I'm the man who once proposed that we atheists get a "There is no God Day" in late December to compete with Christmas, Chanukah, Yule, etc. But the attack on everything even tangentially associated with religion is such overwrought, overasserted, overwritten, overblown rubbish! Hitchens seems to think that everything that has ever had the taint of religion is irredeemably corrupted. What could have been a compelling book-length argument against faith is instead a half-microwaved argumentative potato packaged in a melting shrinkwrap of plastic pseudowit and paranoid fanaticism.
Obviously, the audience for the book is composed of not-very-intelligent atheists who need a mediocre writer to give them an excuse to feel smug. If you're in that category, you'll probably get a few jollies out of the book. Though even you would do better reading Dennett or Dawkins or someone else intelligent and civilized. A philosopher and a scientist (respectively), each had someone to teach him how to construct an argument. That's a contingency that Hitchens evidently never encountered.
Incidentally, I wonder what Hitchens has to say to the monks in Burma, who are finally earning their moral authority even as they use it to resist an atavistic, ravening despotism? But please, nobody tell me. I can't bear to see any more of his hysterical nonsense.
