Allahu Overrated?

Friday, January 25, 2008

BOOK REVIEW

God is not Great
Christopher Hitchens
Twelve, 2007

By Nicholas Desai

I am of two minds about the New Atheism, embodied by Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris. On the one hand, we are witness to the persistence of religious fanaticism even after the demise of totalitarian socialism in the form the Soviet Union and its satellites. Many, it appears, prefer the domination of religion to the moral rootlessness the West seems to offer to some. And anyone who has interacted with this form of religion in societies, often non-Western, in which religion boils down to a means of social control, will be sympathetic to their efforts to promote, if not a secular utopia, at least the exercise of reason against religious practices that amount to child abuse, incitement to murder, or hatred.
Unfortunately, at least in what is revealed in Christopher Hitchens’s brief for atheism, these critiques lack a certain amount of sophistication. Whereas serious atheists like Nietzsche thought long and hard about what the elimination of God might mean (“God is dead” being only the starting point of the difficult intellectual task he sets for himself), Hitchens is confident that, divine supports removed, humanity will be able to carry on as if nothing has happened, and perhaps even be a little more limber and cheerful.
Hitchens’s latest effort, God is Not Great (the first word is annoyingly in the lower case even when referring to monotheism’s God), feels dashed off and often sophistic. This is unfortunate, since many of Hitchens’s best works, even at their most vehement, evince a subtle understanding of an issue’s many sides. His essays are “literary” in the sense that one can extract something from them even while disagreeing, just as one can do this from certain fiction writers who hold extreme political views. Polemics are fun to read, and when done well, they bring the reader to a position that is perhaps subtler than the surface argument. But if they fail, the effect is hysterical and false.
There is a great deal of standard “village atheism” in this book, epitomized by Hitchens’s absurd question, meant I think to be devastating, that Christ apparently did not die since he was resurrected. But other reviews have pointed out Hitchens’s most important argument, which is implied though not stated outright. He seems to say that literature, understood not as divine revelation but simply in its capacity as literature, can replace religion as a guide for morality. This is heartening at least: he understands that morality is a tricky subject and not something that can be resolved simply by “acknowledging each others’ autonomy” or other such deficient libertarian phrases.
And there is something to this. Anyone who has read really great literature will find themselves attuned to life more attentively, hearing moral and psychological registers they would not have otherwise perceived. The greatest music makes it difficult to enjoy top-forty hits; the greatest painting heightens appreciation of a given landscape. The effects of art, though, like the effects of drugs, fade if one doesn’t receive regular doses. Moreover, anyone who has spent time around the best and the brightest, whether young or old, knows that the most educated are not necessarily the wisest or most virtuous. Education even lends a sense of entitlement, whether deserved or not, that is often used for moral license. Egotists, who swell the intelligent population, are notoriously forgiving when it comes to their own faults.
But, momentarily forgetting these objections, we might ask: does Hitchens himself fully understand literature? He is certainly one of my favorite writers about fiction. Even when his essays don’t necessarily wend towards a thesis or conclusion (a very overrated destination for literary appreciations, anyway), they almost always provoke thought and draw attention to aspects of a book that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. His far-reaching knowledge of history illuminates works one would have otherwise thought ahistorical, and his attempts at humor (often successful!) are more than welcome in the deadly serious world of lit-crit. Re-reading some of his literary essays, though, I was struck that not too far underneath this vastly entertaining ice sheet is the cold sea of left-wing pedantry. I was disappointed to see again and again Hitchens rate writers of fiction according to their political views. Even when the essay itself could be enjoyed without obsessing over the views of George Orwell or Victor Serge, it is clear that his guiding principle, or at least the occasion to speak, is political. Even his essay about P. G. Wodehouse starts with a dig at a certain Nazi who sold ladies’ underwear.
It seems ungrateful, considering that (to extend the previous metaphor to absurd lengths) the ice sheet gives us at least a place to stand. I wouldn’t want to stuff those essays back into the lamp, but they put me on alert as Hitchens dragged in such writers as Dante, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy as witnesses for the prosecution. An unexpected tactic you might say, considering these men’s very well known views on religion. Could it be that his use of them is just very subtle? No, unfortunately, in this book, it turns out that he simply doesn’t understand them. His one mention of Dante, and the episode of the harrowing of hell, sounds like something ripped from SparkNotes. But examine another more calamitous case, that of Dostoevsky.
Consider this epigraph to God is Not Great:

Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in your name, and beyond the grave they will find only death. But we will keep the secret, and for their own happiness we will entice them with a heavenly and eternal reward.
—The Grand Inquisitor to his “Savior” in The Brothers Karamazov

People who quote “Shakespeare” or “Dante” or “Dostoevsky” are almost always quoting one of their characters. Remember precisely who says “To thine own self be true” or “All the world’s a stage” (and to whom, why, and in what context) the next time somebody schlepps one of those out from BrainyQuote.com. In this case, Hitchens is not quoting Dostoevsky, but a specific character called the Grand Inquisitor, who in turn is the invention of Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov for a story he’s made up to tell his brother, the novice monk Alyosha. For a two-sentence excerpt from what is the best novel I’ve ever read, it would be impossible to provide adequate context. Every other sentence provides context, just as surely as every molecule exerts a gravitational pull, however small, on every other molecule in the universe. Yet some particles are more proximate than others. For example: (a) The Grand Inquisitor is an official in the Spanish Inquisition, but (b) The Grand Inquisitor is an atheist, and (c) he nevertheless conducts autos-da-fe in the name of Christianity, but (d) he has just arrested Christ, who resurrected a child upon returning to Seville. At this point, Daniel Dennett’s head has just exploded. Hitchens, committed to literature, soldiers on with a mere migraine, even while carrying out his duties as the atheist polemicist. He is, in perhaps an unintentional way, right to put “Savior” in scare quotes, as the Grand Inquisitor does not believe Christ has saved humanity and in fact left the job horribly unfinished. But quoting the Grand Inquisitor in this way is a bit like quoting Iago, whose actions make his words suspect. A mass murderer, atheist, and totalitarian, the Inquisitor still claims to be acting in humanity’s interest by telling lies and crushing dissent, an eerily prescient vision of twentieth-century politics. The Inquisitor tells Christ he ought not to have resisted the Devil’s temptations in the desert; he to have stripped mankind of its freedom. Is this a witness worthy of our trust?
One could go on, discussing this story, how it relates to the teachings of Father Zosima, the philosophy of Smerdyakov, Ivan’s eventual madness, and other details that (perhaps very irritatingly for the polemicist) do not fit the program. The quotation itself, by the way, is not very good, certainly not something that would be of valued if it were found written on an index card in an alleyway. Dostoevsky was not a great stylist, and I value him in part for his muddled, slightly hysterical style that conveys something profound which the more careful writers cannot. We ought to value this quotation, dragooned into Hitchens’s argument, because it is part of a very gripping story. Of course the novel brings to mind certain ideas as it’s being read: it is informed by ideas. And of course it makes a certain amount of sense to think of the novel as a case for Russian Orthodox Christianity: Dostoevsky was devout and argued strenuously for his faith. But ultimately, we don’t value The Brothers Karamazov because it is a tract or position paper. It’s literature, meaning that it defies final interpretation, and appeals to people who believe vastly different things. I myself cannot bring myself to believe in God, for two reasons that are beautifully and terribly depicted in Karamazov. There are the miracles, whose existence I’ve never been able to accept. More maddeningly, there is the presence of evil and suffering in the world. Before his Grand Inquisitor story, Ivan, in the chapter “Rebellion,” describes the suffering of children, using incidents that Dostoevsky found from newspaper clippings. It is a difficult chapter to read.
Even at his clumsiest, Hitchens retains a certain power. If I wanted to commission a new version of the St. Crispian’s Day speech from Henry V, perhaps one designed to move the audience to drink whiskey and write relentlessly in the service of a certain intellectual program, I would approach Hitchens first. He has perfected a kind of rousing rhetoric:

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.

After the audience stops clapping and whistling, though, you start to wonder what precisely the sufficient factors are, and what the factors are for. How should we live? What are we? These are questions that religion and a great deal of philosophy asks, but that the New Atheism glosses over. Literature, he would say, gives answers to these questions.

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

But this is an extraordinary statement. Find me an issue on which Schiller and Tolstoy agree, and I’ll show you a dozen others over which they’d come to blows, Tolstoy’s commitment to nonviolence notwithstanding. The greatest of writers disagree on basic questions and, to get to core of it, they do not offer answers. Even an author as didactic as Tolstoy in his late period leaves certain aspects of his art unbridled. Fiction is nothing more than what it is, and the most dogmatic author can’t control what his reader takes away from his story.
So literature can’t replace religion because religion does provide what the human mind desires, definite answers to the deepest questions. Hitchens, bereft of his Trotskyism and soon, I think, of his neoconservatism, must find a sturdier provider of meaning than literature if he proposes to scrap religion. In the mean time, I hope he continues to bat out his unparalleled literary essays, albeit not as accessories to his anti-clerical polemics. n

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