RIP Christopher Hitchens

Christopher HItchens, one of the last of a dying breed of intellectual progressives commentators, has passed away after a two-year battle with cancer.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.

Hitchens was a contradiction in ways that didn’t used to contradict each other; an irascible wit; fiercely civilized; an open-minded and spiritually-questing atheist (among an atheist scene that has become more dogmatic, rigid than Wisconsin-Synod Lutherans, and intellectually dead to boot), a progressive who sought human progress.

10 thoughts on “RIP Christopher Hitchens

  1. One of the last honest men. I respected his integrity, and now God (I believe) is respecting his choice.

  2. Hitch shouldn’t be considered one of the “New Atheists”. He believed in the numinous. He had the same problem with religion as Orwell; Hitch learned contempt for religion when he learned contempt for the English Church at mandatory public school chapel.
    Hitch wasn’t as serious a thinker or writer as Orwell, and he knew it; Orwell was a revolutionary, Hitchens was a pet of the ruling class. When George Galloway called him a “popinjay” the insult penetrated far deeper than anything the religious or the conservatives said about him.
    Someone should have told Hitchens that simply calling the circumcision of Jewish boys a barbaric ritual is not an effective use of reason against superstition.

  3. As Dan Foster said, I hope he has received a glorious surprise. I’m not anything like an atheist, but I enjoy watching him expound. some of his best repartee came in his debates over religion. The man had principle, and the wit and talent to make his voice matter.

  4. Hitchens was a great man, I loved him whenever he was on the radio and loved the debates, unlike Richard Hawkins he was a respectful and well-read atheist. He also had no sacred cows so to speak, and Mitch I don’t think its fair to call him a progressive because he was just as willing to take on the left and its dogma as he was the right’s. He was, well he was Hitchens. I only wish more atheists were like him.

  5. Ahh, that explains the mysterious “Oh SHIT!” I heard from among the clouds yesterday…..

  6. Terry I’d put him to the left of “southern conservatism” and Huckabee and a little higher up, how about you?

  7. Only if you changed “More Hamiltonian” to “More Hitchensian”, Ben!
    Once he sorta-kinda gave up Marxism, Hitchens was unable to provide a detailed, positive vision of governance (“positive” meaning “this is how we should rule ourselves”, not just criticism of the status quo). The closest he came was an essay praising Jefferson’s vision of a nation in a constant state of churning revolution, with the people on the bottom always overthrowing the people on the top and replacing that elite with themselves.
    Very Trosky-like, very much against the grain of the American political character and very much in the mode of European political history. He could only make it work by accentuating Jefferson’s early support of the French Revolution and Thos. Paine, while ignoring Jefferson the bourgeois slave owner. In other words, he admired Jefferson’s ideas until they differed from his own.
    The reason Galloway’s ‘popinjay’ insult hit Hitch so hard was that Hitch saw the truth in it. Real poor, oppressed people look to people like Galloway to lead them, and they don’t care if Galloway is a thug who didn’t go to the “right” schools. Hitch spoke in the language and accents of the ruling class to the ruling class.

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