Exemplary Lives: Christopher Hitchens

August 7, 2023

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens was an author, journalist, and social critic known for his aggressive style and iconoclastic perspectives. He was among the most prominent public intellectuals of his time. He was born in 1949 in Portsmouth, England, to a middle-class family striving to get him into the upper class via an elite education. They pulled it off. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford. Balliol has about 600 students, but the alumni include Matthew Arnold, Adam Smith, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and four Prime Ministers. Hitchens took a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), an intensely competitive undergraduate program at Oxford that boasts five Prime Ministers among its graduates. Hitchens lived and breathed politics. He joined a left-wing democratic socialist party as an undergraduate. He remained a socialist until the end of his life.

Balliol College, Oxford

I find Hitchens compelling because my life has paralleled his. I was born four years later in Cambridge, MA, to middle-class Utahns who wanted me to rise in the world through an elite education, in my case, Phillips Andover and Harvard. One of my Andover classmates was a visiting student from England who tried to persuade me to apply to Oxford to study PPE. Instead, I got a degree from Harvard in Social Studies, a program inspired by PPE. Like Hitchens, I am a lifetime democratic socialist. When I tried my hand at blogging, Hitchens was a primary model. He died in 2011 of esophageal cancer; I am in a late stage of oropharyngeal cancer. My tumour is just a few centimetres up the throat from where Hitchens’ was.

Hitchens worked as a journalist in the UK in the 1970s, writing for the New Statesman and the London Review of Books. He moved to the United States in 1981, where he wrote for The Nation, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic. Hitchens wrote precisely, quickly, and with great energy and fluency. His first essay about his cancer begins like this:

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services. They arrived with great dispatch and behaved with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.

Hitchens begins the paragraph with a cliché, “feeling like death.” But watch closely: he uses it to refer ironically to his heavy smoking and drinking, a life that could have been designed to give him throat cancer. Then he transfigures the cliché to a fresh but ghastly image of waking up “shackled to my own corpse.” The paragraph ends with another familiar metaphor: the discovery that you are severely ill is like emigrating from the country of the well to the land of malady. I speak for all cancer patients; this is how we feel. But the image of the paramedics, helmeted and booted yet gentle, is fresh and, surprisingly, almost soothing.

Above all, notice how Hitchens has mastered writing in the first person; he is always present. Hitchens was a great public speaker and debater; you can hear his voice in his prose.

There are amazing stories about his writing. His Vanity Fair editor, Graydon Carter, describes having a long lunch in which Hitchens consumed Churchillian volumes of brandy. They then returned to Hitchens’ apartment, where he grabbed a portable typewriter and wrote a 1000-word column in one hour. It was published, with a few corrections, as that first draft.

 I don’t care for every aspect of Hitchens’ style. He was a master of English contempt, the quiet, mocking dismissal so witty that you miss that he hasn’t addressed your argument. I prefer writing in a spirit of charity, which doesn’t require kindness. Instead, the charitable writer attacks the best argument for the view she opposes. This shows respect for norms of dialogue. Moreover, if your goal is to show that your opponent’s view is false, whether she has a moral character is irrelevant. Hitchens, however, wrote and spoke as if he were at war. He frequently lapsed into name-calling.

Hitchens’s writing on religion was frequently weak in these ways. There is little sign that he attempted to understand what Christians mean by, say, the word “God.” I don’t recognize my beliefs in his characterization of my religion. Nevertheless, the Church is a target-rich environment if you are looking for hypocrites and charlatans. Hitchens’ ferocious criticism unmasked many scoundrels and thereby did the Church excellent service.

What made Hitchens exemplary was his commitment to intellectual honesty and to living in a way consistent with his values. A person is intellectually honest when they conscientiously pursue the truth. If they believe they know the truth, they state it regardless of personal cost. Intellectual consistency means you commit to applying the same values in all situations. Hitchens wanted his actions to conform to his beliefs. This quality is often lacking in academic moral philosophy. Academics care about the truth of what they write. But only the writing matters, not the correlation between the paper and its author’s life. These virtues—call them integrity—describe a writer’s intentions to be honest and consistent, not whether he always succeeds.

Did Hitchens succeed in living a life of integrity? Hitchens shocked his friends and allies on the Left when he supported the Iraq War following the September 11 attacks. Hitchens argued that his positions were consistent. His most important political commitment was opposition to totalitarianism. In the late 60s, this meant opposition to British imperialism and Soviet communism. In 2001, it meant opposition to Saddam Hussein and Islamist theocrats. I accept that Hitchens’s intentions were consistent because he called out his new American neoconservative allies when they committed crimes.

A striking example of this was Hitchens’ writing about the use of waterboarding by American forces during the Iraq War. Defenders of this practice denied that it was torture. Hitchens had himself waterboarded.

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure.

Hitchens wrote monthly essays for Vanity Fair about his cancer. I read them as they appeared. Years later, when I became ill, I started writing about cancer because of his example. I have sought to emulate this: Hitchens got sick and did not give up. He wrote until he died.