[R-G] An Interview with Christopher Hitchens

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http://www.powells.com/interviews/christopherhitchens.html

An Interview with Christopher Hitchens
God is Not Great, How Religion Poisens Everything

C. P. Farley, Powells.com



Farley: Your book is one of several that have come out recently that argue
against religion.

Hitchens:   It's true. Books like this have been doing better than they
might have done a few years ago. I think it's because people have had enough
of religious bullying: the Danish cartoons, the way the parties of God are
behaving in Iraq and elsewhere, the attempt to teach garbage to our children
under the stupid pretext of Intelligent Design, believing that AIDS is bad,
but condoms are worse — I think people have had enough of all that stuff.
But then, some really excellent and important individuals like Daniel
Dennett and Richard Dawkins have decided that it's time to get out there and
combat this. And it's sort of working. I am, luckily, riding their wave, or
their coattails.

Farley: What effect do you think these books are having?

Hitchens:   Well, the other day, for example, in London, Dawkins and I and a
moral philosopher, a brilliant guy called Anthony Grayling who's also
written an atheist book, were asked to debate three spokesmen of the other
side. And the debate had to be moved from its original venue, which is
pretty big, to the largest hall in London. They couldn't accommodate all the
people who wanted to get in. They were paying to come, too. Quite
extraordinary.

There is something in the air about this now. People realize that they
thought that the essentially secular values of the Enlightenment were fairly
safe, that they wouldn't have to do anything to earn them or to defend them.
They just luckily inherited what people had done before. No. In fact, we're
going to have to fight for them ourselves. Good. I'm glad. I think it's a
good thing.

Farley: Do you see the same climate here in the United States as you do in
England?

Hitchens:   Definitely. I mean, Richard Dawkins's book has sold 180,000 in
hardback, I think. This book was launched, by me anyway, at the Arkansas
literary festival in Little Rock a couple of weekends ago, and it pulled in,
if I say it myself, a very very full house of very enthusiastic people. On a
Sunday! And I'm going to spend a lot of time in Dixie on a book tour. I
asked the publisher to arrange it that way. And we've issued a charge. We've
got three or four debates with local religious figures.

So we're going to test this proposition that everyone in this country is a
credulous believer. I don't think it's true. I'm not sure how confident even
the believers are in what they believe. So, we're going to give them a run
for it, anyway. It's no merit of mine, I don't think, that the book is
number four on Amazon before it's published. People are willing now to push
back a bit.

Farley: Yes, people are a little fed up. The rise of fundamentalism in this
country has been going on for some time now. But I think it took the
opposition awhile to get frightened and angry enough to push back.

Hitchens: Indeed. I'm pretty sure that's what's going on.

Farley: It seems to me that you are arguing not so much against religion as
you are against people who believe in a certain kind of truth, truth with a
capital T, truth that can't be questioned or doubted, truth that requires
faith despite evidence...

Hitchens:   Yes. The target is faith, really, the willingness of people to
believe something without reason or without evidence. And not just anything,
either, but the most important things. In other words, they claim to have
the authority of the divine to tell people what to eat, what to read, how to
have sex. They don't just say God exists, something that not even the most
brilliant theologian has ever been able to demonstrate, but that they know
his mind. They know what he wants me to have for lunch, or not, or, what
book to have on the shelf, or with whom to go to bed. It's preposterous.

If it was a belief in astrology, say, which is based on the same mentality
as religion, that the heavens were arranged with you in mind, I wouldn't
care. If someone believes that the most important thing about them is that
they're a Capricorn, that can't do me any harm. As Thomas Jefferson says,
that neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. He didn't care if there were
one god or a hundred gods. But, he was wrong in saying that that was true of
all religions. Because the people who do believe think they have the right
to tell me what to do — with threats behind it. And that I won't have. I
refuse to be talked to in that tone of voice.

Farley: Which is how you are able to describe the secular totalitarian
governments of the twentieth century as essentially religious?

Hitchens:   I don't think it casuistry to do this. Because if you are, say,
Joseph Stalin, and you have taken power in a country where until very
recently the Czar, the hereditary ruler, was also the head of the church and
was believed by millions and millions of people to be quasi-divine, you'd be
really stupid if you didn't try to exploit that belief and try as far as
possible to emulate it. You'd know it was there to be called upon.

And, of course, in the case of fascism, fascism is practically another word
for Catholicism, for those decades. Hitlerism was a pagan, quasi-Christian
movement. And imperial Japanese fascism was actually led by a person who was
a god. Not even a pope, but a god himself, for crying out loud. It's very
obvious that Chinese communism is in some ways an emulation of Confucian and
imperial methods.

So, the task of the atheist is essentially to move people into a position of
skepticism where they wouldn't fall for anything like that either. No
country has ever suffered from adopting the views of Thomas Paine, Thomas
Jefferson, Bertrand Russell, Baruch Spinoza, etc. No one's ever said, Ha, it
was only when they started to think like that that they started to build
concentration camps. It's never happened. Never will, either.

Farley: I thought it interesting that you wrapped Buddhism up in all this
because at one point you suggest, quite rightly, that Buddhism isn't really
a religion.

Hitchens: No, but it's a faith.

Farley: Is it?

Hitchens:   Well, Sam Harris and I disagree very much on this, and he may
possibly be right. We haven't had the full-out discussion yet. He is a sort
of Buddhist. And he's definitely an atheist. What I'm saying is that it's
still an appeal to the transcendent — it's a surrender of the mind.

Farley: In my experience, Buddhism teaches deep skepticism, that you
shouldn't trust anything you don't experience for yourself.

Hitchens: Yes, but you're supposed to be the subjective judge of what you're
experiencing, are you not? Look, it doesn't seem to me, given what I write
about its past, that it can be as innocuous as so many people believe. I
failed to mention, I meant to, in my list of things that Buddhism or
Buddhists have been responsible for, that it's also the case that the
Burmese dictatorship is a Buddhist one. It spends a great deal of the
national product building stupas.

But I know that some people will think I'm piling on a bit there. That's the
only thing in the book so far that I've run into that I might have to
consider rewriting. I am going to have a proper dialogue with Sam Harris on
this because he is a very serious guy and he thinks I'm in error here. I'm
not closed-minded. When I'm talking about Buddhism I don't feel the same
sense of urgency as I do when I'm talking about Islam, say. So I'm happy to
concede that.

Farley: I'll let Sam Harris take it from there, then.

One thing you don't discuss directly is mythology. Many people consider
religions myths, not literal truths. Most of the scholars who have studied
this subject — whether they're psychologists, or anthropologists, or
whatever — they tend to conclude not only that all human societies have
mythologies, but that we are hardwired for myth. Even more, that a human
society must have a functioning mythology to be healthy. Do you agree?

Hitchens:   Yes, I mean, it's very very hard to disagree with that, because
the evidence is that we are myth-making creatures, and legend-building
creatures.

Farley: So, I guess the question is, if you are opposed to a world-view
based on faith, what would a healthy mythology look like?

Hitchens:   I have to say that I think, because again nothing should be, as
it were, taken on trust, I would be dubious about whatever the prevailing
mythology was. But I think there could be a reasonably healthy one.
Actually, there's an example I kick myself for not putting in the book.

Everyone knows the story of William Tell. And in Switzerland that's what
they teach the children. It's the foundational myth of the national hero and
so forth. But there's a recent work being published that suggests that there
really was no such person. It was quite a shock in Switzerland. You know,
you're going to leave us with some of our illusions, surely?

The William Tell story is not a bad one. It's a perfectly healthy national
myth to have. People shouldn't mind terribly calling it a myth. The danger
is when they don't think it's mythical.

As with, say, Israeli archaeology, as I do discuss. They concluded that the
story of the Exodus is all nonsense. It's all made up. Some people would
find it had real world consequences to admit that — which it does have. The
English believe in King Arthur, but it is not quite the same. People know it
is partly fantasy. And, again, I think it is fairly harmless. The idea that
the United States was a new birth of freedom and so forth is, I think, a
partial truth.

Farley: But also a myth?

Hitchens: There are many many mythical elements to it. It involves
remembering a lot of things, and forgetting a lot of things.

Farley: But doesn't this myth have harmful effects as well as positive
effects?

Hitchens: Well, anything that's nationalist can turn toxic at any minute, of
course, even if its ostensible claims are noble ones. Very much so, yeah. I
think it's always right to be on guard about this because it's only a short
step to the suggestion that almost all nations do have that God has a
special providence for them. And, I find I'm even more on my guard when that
starts to come up.

It wouldn't be for me to say how healthy my life was, but I don't think I
lead it with anything approaching a mythological faith. For me, it's enough
that Shakespeare ever lived. I would, actually, be upset to find — well, I
wouldn't be upset to find that the Earl of Oxford wrote all those plays.
What would shake me was to find out that it all wasn't written by one
person, that several of the plays had different authors. Then somehow the
achievement is diminished. It wouldn't diminish the standing of the plays,
but I would get the blues if that was true. But I'm absolutely willing to
read the evidence without prejudice if it's ever presented to me.

My proposal for the United Kingdom when it becomes a republic and
disestablishes the Church of England, which we're long overdue to do (I say
we, though I've actually just become an American citizen), is that we change
Westminster Abbey from what it is now, a sort of bone yard for kings with a
thing called Poet's Corner, where Auden and Wilde and Kipling and so on are,
and we make that, instead, the centerpiece. We make it a temple of our
national letters, and that of Ireland and Wales and Scotland as well. That
would be worth showing to school children, and it would be worth showing to
tourists. You could be proud of it.

Farley: Speaking of mythologists, that was Joseph Campbell's conclusion,
that traditional cultural mythologies that are believed by entire societies,
like Jesus and the resurrection and so forth, are being replaced by the
individual mythologies as expressed by individual artists. That mythical
stories were being replaced by singular artistic visions.

Hitchens: Well, I'd like to think that's the way things are going.
Unfortunately, it has the corollary, what we vulgarly call celebrity
culture, which I don't like either, because it has the effect of not exactly
deifying but elevating mediocre human individuals into something like cult
status. That, I don't trust. There are lots of secular forms of worship, and
propitiation I don't like.

Farley: Like Marilyn Monroe, who in the end is more like a cultural
archetype than a human being.

Hitchens: Particularly her, as it happens. Partly because I used to worry
that I was gay or something when I was young, not that that would be such a
terrible thing. I could not see what was sexually attractive about her.

Farley: Well, I'm gay and I get it.

Hitchens: Oh, good, well, I've since found that many many gay people think
she's absolute heaven. Like Elizabeth Taylor. I wouldn't fuck Elizabeth
Taylor with your dick. Then Briget Bardot came along and I realized I was
all right.

Farley: So, your sensibilities, at least with women, are more European,
then. Yet, you chose to move to the United States.

Hitchens: I did. I had to come here to become a writer. I think I now
understand why it was I always wanted to come to the United States. And it's
to do with the other ambition that I always had and couldn't explain,
wanting to become a writer. In some way, the two impulses were closely
connected, I now realize, because I only really started to develop as a
writer when I came here.

Farley: Do you have any idea why that is?

Hitchens: No, any more than I have an idea why it is that I never wanted to
do anything else, wouldn't be able to do anything else: it chose me.

Farley: Actually this question of Europe and the United States interested
me. If the topic is religion, and you're an atheist, it seems that Europe in
many ways exemplifies your ideal much better than the United States. Europe
is much more of a secular culture.

Hitchens: Oh, no, I really don't think so. For example, in Britain the queen
is head of the church as well as head of the state. Religious instruction
and worship in the schools is legally mandatory. Subsidies are paid now to
provide for separate schools for Muslims, which would be unthinkable in the
United States. In Germany you have to pay a tithe, a portion of your taxes
to a church. You can choose which one it is, but it's extremely difficult to
opt out of paying to one at all. It would be quite false not to say that
France is a Catholic country. The government appoints the bishops. It also
appoints the Muslim imams. It can hire and fire them. This is a disgraceful
state of affairs.

The United States constitution is the only ever written, and the only one
extant, which explicitly separates the church from the state and says that
the government can not take a side in religious matters. That's why, when I
took my oath of citizenship, I arranged to take it at Thomas Jefferson's
memorial in Washington, partly because I'm his biographer, but also because
we have the same birthday. April thirteenth, that's the day we did it. His
Virginia statute on religious freedom is the basis of the first amendment,
and that's what I'm in the business of defending. And, so far, we win,
because the most recent challenge to it, this absurd so-called intelligent
design movement, the only really intelligent thing about it is that it's
managed to get people to call it intelligent design, instead of what it is,
just brute creationism. Well, even in Oklahoma and in Texas and in the most
conservative county in Pennsylvania where the courts have heard this,
they've flung it out, dismissed it, and told the legal system to stop
bothering with this tripe.

But that's not what most Europeans think of the United States. Indeed, it's
not what many American liberals think of the United States, either.

Farley: Explain.

Hitchens: Well, they think the place is saturated with fundamentalism, when
this is absolutely not true. People like Falwell and Robertson are clown
figures, in fact. They're just waiting to be even more exposed than they
are.

Farley: Well, they're very powerful.

Hitchens: No they're not. They're absolutely not.

Farley: One hundred and fifty lawyers from Pat Robertson's fourth tier law
school were hired by the Bush administration.

Hitchens: They were, yeah, but it doesn't show. It absolutely doesn't show.
Has there been a single school prayer uttered? No. Nor will there be. If
they won on a thing like that, it would be the end of them. The reason these
guys are prominent is because they keep losing. Because they can represent
themselves as a persecuted minority, which is in fact how they do sell
themselves. When they were really powerful in the twenties, they were able
to change the constitution. They were able to ban alcohol and ban the
teaching of evolution. Now they only demand equal time, you notice, and they
can't even get that.

But their two big victories of the twentieth century, Prohibition and the
Scopes verdict, were the end of them. Not even in the long term, but in the
fairly short and middle term, they totally discredited themselves. They'll
never get that position back. But even if they did, just suppose they could
elect, or impose themselves upon an administration such as to mandate school
prayer, ban abortion, and a couple other things, you know exactly what would
happen.

Farley: If Roe v. Wade were ever overturned, it would be a huge blow to the
Republican Party.

Hitchens: Yes. So, in my experience the people who bang the drum all the
time about the Christian Right, so called, are essentially fundraisers for
the Democratic party trying to frighten Jews into giving money. These people
are not within a million miles of getting their hands on the levers of
power. And, if they did, it would be the end of them. So, I think it's a
scare tactic. By the way, this very often comes from people who have nothing
to say about someone like the so-called reverend Al Sharpton. Or the
appalling religiosity of Barack Obama. Did you read the New York Times on
Monday?

Farley: I didn't.

Hitchens: Well, have a look at the crap church he is involved with in
Chicago. Sinister, ethnic-based, cult thing. And this guru he's got. If it
was a Republican doing this we'd all be absolutely surging to and fro. They
get a free pass. And all this nonsense of Dr. King's dream, and so on, that
I attack as well. As if you need a dream to say that African Americans
should have civil rights. It's a very material fact, that had already been
proved by black secularists. There's no need for a preacher to get involved
in this.

Farley: You also argued that Dr. King's arguments were not at their core
religious, and that's why they succeeded.

Hitchens: Yes. One of the reasons I admire him so much, apart from his
exceptional moral and physical courage, is that it is precisely because he
didn't invoke Exodus that he can be defended. I don't think that's very
often pointed out, is it?

And the left in this country is saturated with religiosity, like nonsense
like Liberation Theology and so forth. And that to me is just as bad, in
some cases worse.

Farley: Worse than...?

Hitchens: Than a harmless clown like Falwell, who is hopelessly overblown.

Farley: Or Al Sharpton?

Hitchens: Yes, Al Sharpton is a racist and a hooligan and a thug and a liar.
But he gets treated with exaggerated respect.

Farley: He does get a lot of air time.

Hitchens: I am at present listed to debate him next Monday at the New York
Public Library. But I don't think he'll show up. I have a feeling on the
night he won't be there.

Farley: I was also struck in the book: a number of times you use the word
"evil." To my mind that is a fundamentally theological or cosmological word,
which to me feels at odds with your premise.

Hitchens: Yes, it is, too. It is a contradiction in me. I acknowledge it.
But I find the word is necessary. I've written about this at greater length
if you're interested.

Farley: Where?

Hitchens: In my little book about Iraq. It was a collection of my Slate
columns on my arguments about the war. And it's called A Long Short War. You
may even have it in the store. It's a little pamphlet, really. And, one of
the essays in there is about the question of evil. I say that people laugh
when the president uses the word evil, as if he's being morally simplistic.
But when people explain their decision to once again swallow their vomit and
vote for the Democratic Party they always say it's the lesser evil, don't
they? So if you put the word lesser in front of it people seem to be able to
use the word.

But I quote Robert Fisk, one of the president's most intense critics. He
went into Kuwait just after the Iraqi army had been expelled from there, in
'91. He said that, walking around the place and seeing what had happened in
the time they occupied it, you couldn't shake the idea that something very
evil had occurred. And I was very impressed that Fisk would do that.

I said I thought I knew exactly what he meant. It's not just a matter of
cruelty for its own sake, it's a matter of cruelty that's going to destroy
you, too. Cruelty for its own sake is pretty easy to understand as a source
of pleasure. But, people who pursue it so that it kills them, too. The
surplus value of fascism is evil, I would say. We need a word for it. If it
wasn't the word evil, it would be another word that meant the same thing.
There has to be such a term. Our universe would be incomplete without it.

Farley: Evil, as opposed to mental illness.

Hitchens: Very much so, because that is to reduce it, and try and tame it.
The Greeks used to call the furies the eumenides, which means the "kindly
ones" in Greek. They thought if they gave then a nice name they might not
hear. You could say it under your breath, you could mention them, but they
were so awful, so terrifying, that you couldn't call them by their real
name. I think that's a very strong human tendency. And certainly
psychoanalysis's disposal of the problem of evil doesn't work. Or, it
doesn't work for me. I actually feel that I've once or twice met genuinely
evil people, and I've seen the work of evil in the world.

Farley: To "see the work of evil in the world." Once again, that sounds very
cosmological to me.

Hitchens: You're right. I admit that it appears to.

Farley: And I'm curious how that fits in with your opposition to faith.

Hitchens: It isn't an article of faith. It's a conviction, not without
evidence. And I'd have to introduce you to the people concerned or show you
what I saw in Northern Iraq, or a couple of things like that. But I would be
able to fight in my corner, all the time knowing that to a certain extent it
contradicts my rationalism. But I just defy anyone to get by without the
word. And nobody does, and nobody can, and there must be a reason.

If you talk about Satan or the devil or hell or any of these things, that's
different. I think anyone who believes in that is a fool. Or, if not a fool,
then easily fooled — and too easily frightened. But, I don't know any
thinking person who manages to get by without recourse to a word like evil
or wicked. There must be, therefore, a reason for that. But, when I've done
my best there's still a sort of ten percent around the thing that I haven't
accounted for. I do appreciate that.

Farley: I would like to talk a bit about Iraq. I don't want to talk about
why you believe the war was justified. You've covered that elsewhere. But
I'm very curious, if you are standing against religion and for secularism,
it seems that your stand on Iraq has put you in league or in alliance with
many people who are on the opposite side of that argument. The president
framed the war in terms of good and evil, and many religious people bought
it on those terms. Meanwhile, you have made yourself very unpopular with
huge swathes of the secular left. And I just find that a very curious
position for you to be in.

Hitchens: Yes, but I think the ironies are more at their expense than they
are mine. One, it is the people who are on the left who refer to the parties
of god and the jihadist murderers in Iraq as "the resistance," not me. And
it's been the left that has been euphemizing Islamism since before 9/11,
thinking of it as a protest of unjust conditions, which is exactly what it
isn't. It's the creator of unjust conditions. It doesn't come from poverty
and unemployment, it's the creator of poverty and unemployment and
injustice. So, I've had a long quarrel with the left on this point, for
their softness on religion, this version of it, for a long time.

Second, the faction that advocated for the liberation of Iraq, apart from
the Iraqi left and the Kurdish left, was, in American terms, the so-called
neo-conservatives, who are renowned, among other things for — it's often a
bit overstated — but for their relationship with Leo Strauss, who was a very
very firm atheist. In particular, he had contempt for Christianity, as did
the other best-known right wing thinker in the country, Ayn Rand. The
fundamentalists are not particularly high on the war in Iraq. They're
prepared to follow the president if he does something like this, for the
most part. And I quote a couple of them who even thought there might be a
few biblical prophecies involved about Babylon and so forth, garbage like
that.

But this doesn't get you out of your difficulty, because it happens to be
the case that the issue of Darfur has been kept alive in this country most
of all by the Christians, as has the issue of human trafficking and slavery
in parts of Africa. So, if you brought up the issue of Darfur, it wouldn't
really be fair of me to say that now you've put yourself in the
fundamentalist camp, now would it?

Farley: No.

Hitchens: Very well, then. I think those are all the answers I was going to
give on that point. But the thing I want to emphasize the most is that the
Iraqi Arab and Kurdish secular left is the main object of my solidarity. And
they were of one mind in getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Whereas all the
religious people in the world seem to want to keep him in power. I mean all
the Muslim nut bags seem to be willing to fight to keep him there.

Farley: Isn't the objection from secular people that by deposing Saddam we
are setting the preconditions for a Shiite state, a theocracy, similar to th
e one in Iran? Isn't that the concern?

Hitchens: It is a concern, yes. But this is what you might call a prisoner's
dilemma because the fear of Khomeini was what put the United States
government in the camp of Saddam Hussein in the first place. And it is,
unfortunately, the case in the material world that if you weaken Iraq you
strengthen Iran, and vice versa. What I think it's not completely quixotic
to hope is that if you could get anything even remotely resembling a Shiite
democracy in Iraq — it wouldn't be exclusively Shia, because, for example,
the Kurds, who are approximately one fifth of the country, are all Sunni,
but a recognition that Iraq is majority Shia, which it is — actually, it
could lead to a situation where they were friendlier with Iran, where there
would never be another war between the two countries, and where some of the
democratic ideas that are washing around Iraq would become part of the
Iranian conversation too.

And indeed there are some reasons to think that is happening. I've
interviewed anti-regime imams in Iran, including Khomeini's grandson, Said
Khomeini, who want to overthrow the theocracy there and who've been very
encouraged by what they unfailingly call the liberation of Iraq. So there's
another dialectic at work in the longer run, we hope. And even if it doesn't
happen any time soon, I think it's thinkable. It's certainly the side I'm
on. So I feel I know what I'm doing.

Farley: I think much of the distrust of this venture stems from a deep
mistrust of Bush, much of which is tied to his overt religiosity and his
ties to the religious right. So I also found interesting in the book how you
downplayed the left's distrust of Bush's religiosity. People are very
protective of the secular foundation of this country and fear that Bush is
eroding that. You disagree?

Hitchens: No, I think it's overstated and sometimes misstated. The president
does not say that he was born again. Only Jimmy Carter of our presidents
ever said that, a man who is now on the left widely adored.

Farley: But Bush has used all the language of the born again, in code,
perhaps.

Hitchens: No, he's not. Nor does he say that he's on a mission from God.
He's very careful not to do that. And he's considered, as you know, to be a
great disappointment by the fundamentalists, and not without reason. He is a
fool, who thinks that the word faith is automatically a compliment. He said
that's why he trusted Vladimir Putin, for example, because he wore a
crucifix. Even he, dumb as he is, must regret having said that. And clearly
he bids for the votes of people who are religious bigots. I would criticize
him for all that. I just don't want it to be overstated or misunderstood.

It's certainly not because of his religion that he decided to take out
Saddam Hussein. The American policy in Afghanistan and Iraq depends very
largely on the emergence of secular forces. That's obvious to everyone on
the right, that our only friends are the seculars in these countries.
Progress is measured by secularization. That is an irony I can absolutely
live with. And it's at the expense of the believers in both countries.

It's not a matter of people's subjective opinion of things. It's what
they're actually doing. Bush is a disaster as president. And I don't think
anyone doubts that I think that. But I don't think as a religious nut bag
he's in the same class as Jimmy Carter, who's now being praised all over the
liberal world as a peacemaker and all this sort of thing. In his book he
writes that the problem with Israel is that it's too secular. Good grief!
Bush is not even in the same class as a religious hypocrite in the matter of
piety as Bill Clinton, with his prayer breakfasts and carrying the Bible all
the time. What I think of it is, you call it the left standing by
secularism. I call it trying to preserve their comfort zone, by thinking
that religion is only a problem on the right. That is simply a mistake. It's
a false picture of reality.