Summary:

• John Figdor, Assistant Chaplain at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard, remembers his encounters, literary and personal, with the late Christopher Hitchens.
• John offers suggestions for how your Humanist community can engage his legacy.

Christopher Hitchens, photo credit GASPER TRINGALE (Vanity Fair).

“You’re better off thinking for yourself and taking all the risks and, I might add, all the pleasures that might come from that” – Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011).

I want to begin with a confession: I’ve been writing a eulogy for Christopher Hitchens ever since I heard that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 Oesophageal Cancer and hating myself for putting pen to page before the man had even passed. Hitchens’ death has been particularly hard on me. You see, Christopher Hitchens is the reason that I considered atheism important enough to fight for (I’d previously been an apatheist, or apathetic atheist). His case against god was central to my Harvard Divinity School thesis, “The God That Fails,” where I used Hitchens’ masterpiece, god is not Great, to oppose arguments for divine justice made by Rabbi Harold Kushner (Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People), theologian John Hick (The ‘Veil of Soul-Making’ Theodicy), and most of all, the conservative Christian perspective on the Bible.

My love of Hitchens’ writing began much earlier, back when I was a freshman in college.  I was assigned some of the essays that later made up his short book, The Long Short War, for a political science course at Vassar. At the time, I was impressed by Hitchens’ rhetorical style and clear reasoning. I did not, however, agree with his conclusions (I felt like our Iraq escapade was ill-advised and would have been considered “a fool” by Hitch for doubting the existence of WMD in Iraq). After that, I quickly picked up his little book called, Letters to A Young Contrarian, and felt like Hitch was speaking directly to me. Part of what I love most about Hitch was his steadfast resolve to live life rationally in all times and in all ways. Indeed, this is the man who told us to, “suspect your own motives and all excuses,” and, that if you want to live a life, “free of illusions, either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognise and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows that he is right.” (1)

Just as the New Atheist tide was rising, I picked up Christopher Hitchens’, god is not Great, which I read in my ramshackle apartment in Butte, Montana where I worked as an AmeriCorps VISTA in a domestic violence shelter. As I read his case against god, I found myself resonating with passages such as: “Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody — not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms — had the smallest idea of what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge. Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion,” scribbling “yes!” furiously in the margins. (2) I also became increasingly aware of the deleterious effects conservative religion had on Montana. From Pastors who counselled women to stay with their men, despite the beatings, to rescue missions that didn’t welcome gay people, to casual derogatory comments about faiths other than Christianity, especially anti-semetic slurs, my experience in Montana painted a clear picture of religion at the intersection of many problems in the world. Convinced we could do better than bronze age texts for moral inspiration, I applied to Harvard Divinity School to press the case for Hitchens-style Atheism.

But at the Divinity School, I encountered a different sort of Christian than the ones Hitch talked about. Instead of finding William Lane Craigs and Dinesh D’Souzas, I met Christian Atheists, a lot of agnostic Christians, a lot of deistic Christians, and plenty of Unitarians who weren’t terribly interested in god. Finding so many liberal and functionally atheistic Christians was totally contrary to my experience and expectations! Facing another crisis, I found an opportunity to call on Hitch personally for advice. I met him in Washington D.C. at the American Humanist Association Conference there and got to shake his hand and ask him about these deists and liberal Christians. After explaining that I was a grad student at Harvard Divinity studying modern Atheism, I asked him (to paraphrase from memory), “Look, Hitch, you convinced me that the theocrats pose a real threat to American democracy. And perhaps you’re right that they do. But there aren’t many, if any, of those folks at Harvard. So since I’m stuck here for two more years, I could use some advice in relating to them.” He said, and I remember it clearly, “A little while ago I proposed a truce with the faithful and here are its terms. If you don’t want your religion imposed on me, taught to my children in schools, or given a government subsidy, we can and should be allies against the theocrats.”  I took that advice to heart and it ultimately led me to work with the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard and to pursue a career as a Humanist Chaplain.

There is perhaps one more important lesson that Christopher taught me, and it is one that I am lucky to have learned early. When I was that high school debate student, just discovering Hitchens’ prose, I was an ardent capitalist, primarily interested in finding out how my talents would fare on the open market. However, Hitch opened my mind to doubts about the efficacy of money in the pursuit of happiness. I remember reading, “The great reward…lies in the people you will meet when engaged in the same work, the lessons you will learn, and the confidence you will acquire from having some experiences of your own.” (3) This I have confirmed to be true in my experience. While abandoning my interest in a career as an attorney has downsized my bank balance, I’ve never been happier. I frequently tell people that I have the greatest job in the world, talking about philosophy and ethics with Harvard grad students, undergrads, and alums. It is the people I have met along my path as a Humanist, people such as Christopher Hitchens, but also people who are still with us, people like Bob Stephens (the inventor of Darwin Day), August Brunsman (the founder of the Secular Student Alliance), and Greg Epstein (my mentor at Harvard), who continue to remind me that, as Hitch put it in his special way, “When you get to be my age, you can’t make old friends anymore.”

I want to leave you with Christopher Hitchens’ closing advice to Atheists, as his words are much more comforting than anything I could say:

“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.” (4)

Goodbye, Hitch, and thanks for the memories,

JPF

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1. Hitchens, Christopher. Letters to a young contrarian. New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 140, p. 33.

2.Hitchens, Christopher. God is not great: how religion poisons everything. New York: Twelve, 2007, p. 64.

3. Hitchens, 2001, p. 126.

4. Hitchens, 2001, p. 140.

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Hitch in Discussion: Four questions for further reflection.

1. What illusions or delusions do humanists suffer from?
2. What should Humanists stand up for that they currently are not? What cause(s) are we Humanists forgetting?
3. Is god great (given the extent of human and animal suffering)?
4. How can Humanists be (productively) less boring and more provocative in their advocacy for Humanist positions?