Extraordinary advice from Hitchens. I read this slowly to make it last, and when i finished, i felt like i was saying goodbye to a friend. The chapter on religion doth sting, but i'm sure we deserve it.
Quotes:
I have become inured without becoming indifferent. I attack and criticise people myself; I have no right to expect lenience in return.
while courage is not in itself one of the primary virtues, it is the quality that makes the exercise of the virtues possible.
The other positive and affirmative element in Rilke is his approach to Eros. He had a high intuition about sex, both as a liberating force and also as the best riposte to the foul suggestions of death. His seven so-called Phallic Poems are among the best non-love verses since the brave days of Marvell and the Metaphysicals; they openly announce that fucking is its own justification.
The truth cannot lie, but if it could, it would lie somewhere in between.
I cringe every time I hear denunciations of “the politics of division”—as if politics was not division by definition.
we are mammals, and the prefrontal lobe (at least while we wait for genetic engineering) is too small while the adrenaline gland is too big.
And it was in order to survive those years of stalemate and realpolitik that a number of important dissidents evolved a strategy for survival. In a phrase, they decided to live “as if.”
There’s a small paradox here; the job of supposed intellectuals is to combat oversimplification or reductionism and to say, well, actually, it’s more complicated than that. At least, that’s part of the job. However, you must have noticed how often certain “complexities” are introduced as a means of obfuscation. Here it becomes necessary to ply with glee the celebrated razor of old Occam, dispose of unnecessary assumptions, and proclaim that, actually, things are less complicated than they appear.
Very often in my experience, the extraneous or irrelevant complexities are inserted when a matter of elementary justice or principle is at issue.
So I practise cognitive and emotional dissonance. The most I can claim is that I do it consciously, while waiting for better days.
(I have my answer ready if I turn out to be mistaken about this: at the bar of judgement I shall argue that I deserve credit for an honest conviction of unbelief and must in any case be acquitted of the charge of hypocrisy or sycophancy. If the omnipotent and omniscient one does turn out to be of the loving kind, I would expect this plea to do me more good than any trashy casuistry of the sort popularised by Blaise Pascal. One could also fall back upon the less principled and more shiftily empirical defense offered by Bertrand Russell: “Oh Lord, you did not give us enough evidence.”)
what really matters about any individual is not what he thinks, but how he thinks.
Sigmund Freud was surely right when he concluded that religious superstition is ineradicable, at least for as long as we fear death and fear the darkness. It belongs to the childhood of our race, and childhood is not always—as Freud also helped us to understand—our most attractive or innocent period.
However, those who persecute religion are to be avoided at all costs. Antigone taught us to trust the instinct that is revolted by desecration.
What I propose to you is a permanent engagement with those who think they possess what cannot be possessed. Time spent in arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted. The argument is the origin of all arguments; one must always be striving to deepen and refine it; Marx was right when he stated in 1844 that “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.”
After all, believing what I believe about the likely randomness of human life, why do I care to write a tract like this one, advocating what I consider to be the glories of Promethean revolt and the pleasures of skeptical inquiry? What’s the point? I have no answer to the question, which I believe to be unanswerable, and that is one unassailable reason why I so heartily distrust those who claim that they do have an answer. But at least they have the question, and that’s something.
Nowadays, “public opinion” is more smoothly and easily ventriloquised. I am sure you have had the experience of making up your own mind on a question and then discovering, on the evening news of the same day, that only 23.6 percent of people agree with you.
One must have the nerve to assert that, while people are entitled to their illusions, they are not entitled to a limitless enjoyment of them and they are not entitled to impose them upon others.
One way of facing this impossible position was to be as grim as possible and to treat all hopes as illusions. For those facing a long haul and a series of defeats, pessimism can be an ally.
the moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage rather than resignation. In a sense, with the back to the wall and no exit but death or acceptance, the options narrow to one. There can even be something liberating in this realisation.
Ruthless and arrogant though power can appear, it is only ever held by mere mammals who excrete and yearn, and who suffer from insomnia and insecurity. These mammals are also necessarily vain in the extreme, and often wish to be liked almost as much as they desire to be feared.
all human achievement must also be accomplished by mammals and this realisation (interestingly negated by sexless plaster saints and representations of angels) puts us on a useful spot. It strongly suggests that anyone could do what the heroes have done.
The essential element of historical materialism as applied to ethical and social matters was (and actually still is) this: it demonstrated how much unhappiness and injustice and irrationality was man-made. Once the fog of supposedly god-given conditions had been dispelled, the decision to tolerate such conditions was exactly that—a decision.
Distrust any speaker who talks confidently about “we,” or speaks in the name of “us.” Distrust yourself if you hear these tones creeping into your own style.
I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It’s as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.
In one way, travelling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight.
Meanwhile, it could be worth bearing in mind that, if you really care about a serious cause or a deep subject, you may have to be prepared to be boring about it.
Dante was a sectarian and a mystic but he was right to reserve one of the fieriest corners of his inferno for those who, in a time of moral crisis, try to stay neutral.
Serbian and Croatian irredentists and cleansers openly fought under the banners of their respective Christian Orthodox and Roman Catholic faiths and were often blessed by priests and prelates. The Bosnians resisted for the most part as Bosnians;
Those who try to condemn or embarrass you by the company you keep will usually be found to be in very poor company themselves;
The next phase or epoch is already discernible; it is the fight to extend the concept of universal human rights, and to match the “globalisation” of production by the globalisation of a common standard for justice and ethics.
as William Morris put it so finely in The Dream of John Ball: Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of defeat, and when it comes it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.
The high ambition, therefore, seems to me to be this: That one should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with the maximum of skepticism, the maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality with the maximum of ironic self-criticism. This would mean really deciding to learn from history rather than invoking or sloganising it.
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.
Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.
