Anthony Burns ruminates on Hitch’s persistent preoccupations, and wonders aloud about that supposed move from left to right

“For a lot of people, their first love is what they’ll always remember. For me it’s always been the first hate, and I think that hatred… is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going. If you don’t let it get out of hand, it can be canalized into writing. In this country where people love to be non-judgmental when they can be, which translates as, on the whole, lenient, there are an awful lot of bubble reputations floating around that one wouldn’t be doing one’s job if one didn’t itch to prick.” 1

The UK was never really going to be big enough to sustain a freewheeling personality like Christopher Hitchens. By nature he was a big dog looking for other big dogs to bark at, and as a man in possession of the intellectual means to make a name for himself doing it, he needed causes, arguments, and opponents large enough to energise and sustain those means, lest his appetites – the booze, the fags, the need for company – devoured him.

Hitchens moved to the United States in 1981, settling into the Washington DC establishment (after conquering New York) with regular gigs at The Nation and Vanity Fair. He found in the US a more open, less stuffy society that would better fit his polemical style, for as he put it, he did not have to pass as many approval tests in the United States as he did in Britain. The furore in Britain over The Satanic Verses also contributed to his belief that Britain was not going to prove a sufficient bulwark for Enlightenment values in the face of religious medievalism, whereas he believed that the United States might.

Appreciating the greater freedom the US gave him did not make him blind to the grip that religion has on social mores and politics there, where even the most egregious of religious charlatans and confidence tricksters are still accorded dutiful respect by a compliant media, regardless of the nonsense they speak. So the visceral thrill of watching Hitchens deliver a massive ‘Hitchslap’ to the nation on the subject of Rev. Jerry Falwell’s death in 2007 was something to behold. What made Hitchens’ decimation of Falwell’s character and legacy so memorable was the trademark delivery of a series of remarks shorn of all of the polite equivocation and false piety that usually attend the deaths of American figures. Rude and shocking it may have been, but also necessary and bracing when discussing the impact and legacy of a destructive force in American life that held homosexuals and abortion rights supporters partially responsible for the September 11^th terrorist attacks.

Hitch eventually transmogrified into a rare thing in America, a public intellectual and man of letters possessed of sufficient wit and panache to cut through the sound and fury of a national media that has no place for considered intellectuals or detail driven policy wonks in their debates. He was able to introduce elements of both by sandwiching them between entertaining bon-mots and stylish takedowns, resulting in a rude, clever and extremely quotable personal style that made him ideally suited to the culture of American cable news where talk-show hosts lined up to book him as a guest despite the inherent danger of being effortlessly upstaged. Hitch’s command of language and argument in debate furnished him with a comfortable living to supplement his earnings from writing. It commanded him a following amongst the younger generation who enjoyed his savage wit and erudition and who reposted “Hitchslaps” on YouTube and many other corners of the social media, boosting his profile well beyond that of a jobbing hack or writer.

However, this profitable love of argument also created a danger that he might one day become an exaggerated stereotype of himself, a mere contrarian saying rude things on television to drive up book sales rather than a purpose driven contrarian always with a point to make. Critics pointed out that Hitchens often over-egged the pudding with the take-downs of his opponents, sometimes so strongly wording his invective that the point he was trying to make became buried under the rubble of his own locutive onslaught.

Hitchens did not always wear his learning as lightly as he could, fond in his writing and in person of letting it be known that he read very widely and very well. He loved the patronage of the literary and political establishment first in the United Kingdom and then the United States, actively seeking out their company and endorsement, and therefore, and in his own way, Hitch could be as establishment as any of the establishment figures he professed to despise, perhaps a going concern for any celebrated radical who hangs around select media and political circles long enough. But at least his practice of putting his neck on the line by visiting many of the lethal hotspots he talked and wrote about while they were still hot displayed a courage and conviction beyond some of the armchair warriors with whom he was sometimes unfavourably compared.

Hitchens unreservedly described himself as a man of the left throughout his career; he lamented the demise of a “global international working class movement” while continuing to believe in the Marxist dialectic and the materialist conception of history. However, he also doubted if there was even a viable socialist alternative to market capitalism any more and celebrated the demise of the Soviet Union and the communist dictatorships it propped up, believing the collapse “resulted in a huge release of human energy and creativity underlining the aspect of human nature that is incompatible with dictatorship and human slavery” 2

This continuing commitment to Marxist perspectives made his falling out with left-wing friends and colleagues over the Iraq War particularly discordant and bitter. Some of his strident responses to left-wing opposition to the war would seem to fit his life-long tendency to rebel against his oldest ideas, positions and arguments, so as to eventually take up argument against everybody, even himself. But it would be a mistake to believe that Hitchens’ opposition to the movement against the war was merely that of a reflexive contrarian and agitator, or that he went from being a man of the left to a man of the right (his erstwhile new friendships with Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle notwithstanding).

Hitchens always sided with, or saw himself siding with, the people who are against tyranny and oppression, and he saw supporting the Iraq War as an extension of that principle, whether or not the coalition forces were themselves acting in a manner that seemed more consistent with that of their enemies than the values they publicly espoused. In his final interview with Richard Dawkins in the New Statesmen, Hitch stated that he “had one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy.” 3 In an earlier interview he had said:

“The realization that American power could and should be used for the defence of pluralism and as a punishment for fascism came to me in Sarajevo a year or two later… That was an early quarrel between me and many of my Nation colleagues, and it was also the first time I found myself in the same trench as people like Paul Wolfowitz and Jeane Kirkpatrick: a shock I had to learn to get over.” 4

If many on the left fell out with Hitchens for his trenchant defence of the Iraq war, they couldn’t help but support his criticism of the Bush administration over the treatment of suspected terrorists delivered into the hands of US forces by ‘extraordinary rendition’ and other Orwellian terms for kidnap and indefinite detention. His decision to allow himself to be voluntarily water –boarded and then starkly describing the experience afterwards as torture confused some on the American right who had become convinced that Hitch had made a permanent transition from the left to the right. Their realisation that Hitch was not their man at all, especially in relation to the place of religion in politics and society, was hastened when he joined the ranks of the ‘New Atheists’ and published God is not Great, then embarked on a world-wide publicity tour to take on all comers in a series of high profile debates, staking out a claim to perhaps be the most visible and effective public atheist since Bertrand Russell.

He wasn’t jumping on the bandwagon when he joined Dawkins and Harris in releasing a bestseller that made out a case against organised religion. Hitchens had been making specific arguments against the pernicious effects of religion throughout his career, whether describing the poison that religion had stirred into the national and ethnic boiling pots in Bosnia and the Occupied Territories, or taking on celebrated religious figures in the forms of Mother Theresa and the aforementioned Jerry Falwell.

As one of the famous ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ (a title he was instrumental in devising) he offered his own unique perspective on how “religion poisons everything”, describing himself as an anti-theist implacably opposed to the tyrannies of religion. Hitchens thought religion to be false and dangerous, but not trivial, and therefore worthy of his opprobrium. Hitch made numerous contributions to the sceptical discourse on religion, including, “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence”, a famous response directed at various mantras ranging from faith-healing to Creationism that claim that it is up to the non-believers and sceptics to prove their fantastical religious claims wrong. His rabble-rousing instincts, ideal for a public platform, dovetailed nicely with the more studious approach of a Dawkins or a Dennett. Up on stage he reduced most of his religious opponents to matchsticks, relying on a remarkable memory that could draw on vast repositories of knowledge to illustrate deeper understanding of the subject at hand than his religious opponents, despite religion being, in effect, their specialist subject.

Here is a memorable quote from one of his last public debates with a religious believer (in this case Tony Blair):

“What we have here, and picked from no mean source, is the distillation of precisely what is twisted and immoral in the faith mentality, its essential fanaticism, its consideration of human beings as a source of raw material and its fantasy of purity. Once you assume a creator and a plan it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well. And over us to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea, greedy for uncritical praise from dawn to dusk and swift to punish the original sins with which it tenderly gifted us in the very first place.” 5

When diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer at the height of his fame and influence, Hitch decided not to slide quietly off the stage but instead set out to publicly document the journey of his probable early demise. In interviews he forthrightly described the inexorable encroachment of cancer, the suffering and indignity caused by treatments that level the status of every cancer sufferer to that of the other, and, memorably, how he was facing up to impending death and extinction. In 2010 Hitch delivered a master class of prose on the subject of his cancer that contained all the classic virtues found in his best writing, being rigorous in its examination, compelling in its narrative, and serious in the lessons it provided all of us on how a lively, powerful and disbelieving mind can make a determined and unsentimental preparation for death. 6

Hitchens appeared to live by one of Mark Twain’s maxims, that “Sacred Cows make the best hamburger”, making the impact of his sheer hard work in producing continuous output for decades, his fearlessness in prose and in person to cause offence or make powerful enemies, and his powerful, sustained arguments that hit straight through to the heart of much that troubles humanity.

Hitch’s unique voice was unmistakeable, irreplaceable and part of our common cultural heritage. He will be greatly missed by those in the skeptic community and far beyond.

Author

Anthony Burns is a skeptical humanist (including being sceptical of humanism for its own good) and a part-time writer, blogger and occasional radio host on all things that provide grist to the mill. Particularly enjoys following the life and times of the discontents and disreputables that remake the world.

You can follow him on twitter at @TheOriginalApe

Footnotes

1 C-Span’s Booknotes, 2003

2 Newsnight interview, November 2010

3 Interview in the New Statesman, 13th December 2011

4 Interview on the History News Network, December 23rd 2003

5 Munk Debate, Toronto, November 27th 2010

6 Vanity Fair, October 2010

Tessa Kendall looks at primatologist Frans de Waal’s work to muse upon the origin of our better natures

Is human nature a beast that needs to be tamed? Should we “throw out Darwinism in our social and political lives”? Or are we naturally altruistic, empathetic and moral?

In Frans de Waal’s new book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, he takes on the thinkers who believe that morality has to be imposed on our brutish natures and catalogues the growing evidence that disproves them.

There is a long history of thought that the natural world is a merciless struggle for survival and that humans decided to live together ‘by covenant only, which is artificial’ (Hobbes), that natural selection is “a Hobbesian war of each against all” and ethics are humanity’s cultural victory over the evolutionary process (Huxley), that civilization is achieved through the renunciation of instinct and the action of the superego – which men are more capable of than women (Freud), that small children have to be trained to be sociable through fear of punishment and desire for praise (Freud, Skinner, Piaget), that moral behaviour is achieved through reason alone (Kant). A step away from this idea but on the same continuum is the idea that we are potentially but not naturally moral (Ridley).

These ideas have their origins in the Judaeo-Christian teaching that morals have to be imposed from above, that in our ‘natural state’ we are unfit for society because of original sin.

What all these thinkers have in common is a kind of dualism between our ‘better angels’ and the beast within, our Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. More recently, a lack of understanding of the difference between predation (of other species) and aggression (towards our own species) led to the popular and persistent image of humans as ‘killer apes’.

The idea persists even now, albeit stripped of its religious origins. Richard Dawkins, for example, has said that “we, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (The Selfish Gene) and that “in our political and social life we are entitled to throw out Darwinism, to say we don’t want to live in a Darwinian world”.

Some disagree. Darwin is one of them. He wrote that “any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts (…) would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man” (Descent of Man). Stephen Jay Gould wrote in 1980 “Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human?” Philosopher David Hume believed that moral sentiments come from “a tender sympathy with others”.

De Waal agrees with them. He does not believe in any inner dualism, in the need to choose to be moral or to accept moral instruction from above (gods, philosophers or authority figures) because altruism, empathy and morality are innate in us. What’s more, they also exist in other social animals. They are part of an evolved package of behaviours that make it possible for us to be social animals. He calls the idea that civilization and morality are imposed on a violent, immoral, selfish nature ‘Veneer Theory’.

He is not idealising humans or other animals. Conflict is inevitable. It is how and why we resolve or avoid it that matters. He also underlines the difference between humans and some other social animals: “What is so interesting about human prosociality is precisely that it is not of the ‘eusocial’ kind, which promotes sacrifices for the greater genetic good. We, humans, maintain all sorts of selfish interests and individual conflicts that need to be resolved to achieve a cooperative society. This is why we have morality and ants and bees don’t. They don’t need it.”

For many years, De Waal’s claim that other animals display altruism and empathy was ignored or rejected. What his latest book achieves is to put onto a firm evidential basis the fact that the roots of our social behaviour can be seen in other animals. The critical issue is no longer whether animals have empathy, but how it works.

For example, research has shown that moral decisions involve areas of the brain in humans and other animals that deal with emotions and – significantly – the evaluation of others’ emotions. Human morality is “firmly anchored in the social emotions, with empathy at its core” (De Waal, Our Inner Ape). The desire to treat others well comes from altruism which, in turn, comes from empathy.

There is strong evidence in other animals of reconciliation and consolation after conflict – kissing, embracing and grooming for example, to restore social bonds.  They are aware of unfairness – what economists call inequity aversion – which makes good sense in the avoidance of conflict. This has been seen in animals as diverse as capuchins, elephants, canids and corvids. They co-operate and form social ties, both of which improve survival chances – female baboons with the best social ties have the most surviving offspring, for example. Co-operation is strongest in meat-eating animals as hunting requires co-ordination and meat-sharing to provide a reward. Vegetarian animals are much less co-operative because they don’t need to be.

Social animals show gratitude and revenge – remembering the behaviour of others and paying them back. They target their helping, which requires being able to see a situation from another’s point of view. They are able to delay gratification, which shows self-control – a characteristic thought to be only human. Some are aware of the emotional states of others. When VEN cells in humans are damaged there is a loss of self-awareness and empathy; these cells exist in apes, cetaceans and elephants – but not monkeys.

A recent study “highlights the fact that, similar to humans, sensitivity to the emotional states of others actually emerges very young in bonobos and may not require so much complex cognitive processing as has previously been assumed”. Small children comfort other distressed children, even before they have developed the language skills to be instructed to do it.

Part of the problem of resistance against altruism and empathy in other animals is human exceptionalism, the idea that humans are in some way special, set apart. This too has its roots in religion, with humans as God’s special creation, the only creature possessed of a soul. It has persisted for a surprisingly long time in a secular form both in science and the humanities but is slowly being eroded. De Waal has written: “Humanity never runs out of claims of what sets it apart, but it is a rare uniqueness claim that holds up for over a decade. This is why we don’t hear anymore that only humans make tools, imitate, think ahead, have culture, are self-aware, or adopt another’s point of view”.

He also notes that religions developed in countries where there were no other primates have the strongest tendency to set humans outside nature – they have no animal gods or animal-headed human gods.

He acknowledges that humans have more complex and developed social skills; we alone analyse, discuss and codify our behaviour. He says “I am reluctant to call a chimpanzee a ‘moral being’. This is because sentiments do not suffice. We strive for a logically coherent system”.

Human morality and laws show “a move towards universal standards combined with an elaborate system of justification, monitoring and punishment” – for example the Geneva Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In animals there is what is called motivational autonomy – they don’t think about why they do something – for example, they don’t make the link between sex and reproduction or between sharing and surviving.

The only possible exception I can think of (so far) is the arts. No animals have been observed making music, art or literature. Some have been seen draping themselves with greenery and flowers so perhaps fashion design predates the arts.

The fact that it is social animals alone who display similar behaviour to ours is the key. It has been suggested by Dawkins that “humans are nicer than is good for our selfish genes”. But we give help roughly at the same level as we need it; tigers are solitary animals who neither need nor give help, for example. Behaving pro-socially makes society work and affords the benefits of social living to the individual.

Being altruistic may make us feel good but feeling good has little survival value in itself, there must be another reason. Is it selfish to behave socially? Are we all really hypocrites? Is it selfish to care for our young, treat others well and to push to the front of the queue?

The big difference is that queue-jumping is a consciously chosen act whereas instinctive behaviour doesn’t involve thought. As De Waal has written, “Imagine the cognitive burden if every decision we took needed to be vetted against handed-down principles.” We may think about our impulses and choose whether or not to act on them but we do not need to learn or be forced to behave well. We often rationalise our moral decisions post hoc.

One section of the book which looks at atheism has been strongly criticized by some atheists, including AC Grayling, who accuse de Waal of being an apologist for religion. De Waal has said “While I do consider religious institutions and their representatives — popes, bishops, mega-preachers, ayatollahs, and rabbis — fair game for criticism, what good could come from insulting individuals who find value in religion?” and “I am all for a reduced role for religion with less emphasis on the almighty God and more on human potentials.”

This is hardly an apology for religion. It’s true that De Waal doesn’t like what he calls militant atheists or personal attacks on individuals who find comfort in their faith. He singles out Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris among others who, as AC Grayling says “aggressively argue the case for atheism”.

De Waal doesn’t think that all religious people are somehow defective, or ignorant or inferior thinkers. As a scientist, he is more interested in “what good it does for us. Are we born to believe and, if so, why?” and “For me, understanding the need for religion is a far superior goal to bashing it”.

I do take issue with De Waal’s speculation that atheism is the result of trauma. This may be the case for some people but others reach atheism through a mental process that leads them to reject belief. Some people never have a belief system in the first place. De Waal’s memories of the religion he grew up with in Holland contain no apparent trauma to explain his atheism and support this theory.

De Waal’s laid-back atheism may not be the ‘right’ kind, which raises the question: is there now only one atheism that is acceptable in public figures? He writes that the enemy of thought and science is dogmatism, whether political, religious or otherwise, because it shuts down discussion and sets up prophets who cannot be questioned. Does every scientist need to sing from the same hymn sheet as the arbiters of atheism (all white, middle class, old men)? Do they all need to be Dawkinses to be acceptable?

It’s important that this small part of the book does not detract from the whole. The lesson is that all of our behaviours are equally part of our nature, they are evolved and not unique to us. De Waal ends The Bonobo and the Atheist with: “Everything science has learned in the last few decades argues against the pessimistic view that morality is a thin veneer over a nasty human nature”.

Professor Frans de Waal is a Dutch primatologist working in America where he is the CH Chandler Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Living Links Centre at Yerkes Primate Research Centre at Emory University. He has been named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. A leading expert on primate behaviour, he has written a series of books on it – including on morality, politics and empathy.

You can read an analysis of Grayling’s highly flawed argument here.

Tessa Kendall is a writer, researcher and campaigner, one of the organisers of London Skeptics in the Pub and Soho Skeptics.

You can follow her on Twitter @tessakendall