Christopher Hitchens, 61, is an icon of atheism, a master of polemics, a wit, a gasbag, and an English gentleman at the end of it all. The D.C. resident spoke with The Washington Examiner about a disdain for religion and a love for freedom that have inspired his ideas, his writings and even some regrets. Hitchens will be speaking at Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Ave. NW) Thursday at 7 p.m. about his newest book, “Hitch-22: A Memoir.”
Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
Faith is the most overrated of the virtues. I put my faith in reason, and science, and in irony. … Humans aren’t going to escape the laws of unintended consequences, and it would be boring if they could. And they don’t deserve to.
But where’s your mooring when you realize you’re quite a bit less powerful than you’d like to be?
Well, I don’t agree with [philosopher Friedrich] Nietzsche on everything, but I think he’s right when he says that real men don’t need consolation. And anyway you can’t get consolation by just asking for it.
If, as you’ve said, religions are the source of much ill in the world, and much death and destruction, then why is it that in modern times, secular regimes have brought on so much more death and destruction?
Only a fool would say that fascism was secular — only a real fool, a complete fool, knowing its alliances with churches, and its Christian anti-Semitism. And only a fool in Russia or China would not have tried to borrow the divine principal of czarism — the dear leader, the great leader that now forms the basis for their theocracies and is now the basis of the worship-state of North Korea. Call it what you will, but you cannot call it secular.
Looking back through your adulthood, is there a cause you wish you would have stood firmer for?
No, as a matter of fact there isn’t. But there’s one I regret, if you want to regret. I used to be very friendly with some of the revolutionaries in Zimbabwe, when it was Rhodesia, when it was the white colonial system. I was proud to be on their side, but I very much regret not saying more about the evils of [Zimbabwean President Robert] Mugabe, which I suspected were there, but I didn’t say enough about. It spoils my pleasure in having been on what I suspect was the right side.
Freedom of expression has been an ongoing theme in your books and debates. Where in our lives is it most vulnerable?
In my book, there’s a chapter on Salman Rushdie and the impact of his fight with the fatwa issued against him [by Iranian Ayatollah Kohmeini]. The most depressing stories in that chapter are about the Western intellectuals who surrendered the concept of free speech without a fight — who cried before they were hurt and said that free speech did not extend to faith — that faith couldn’t be insulted. Faith makes very big claims for itself already — it claims to have the truth — but to additionally say, “We claim the right for immunity from criticism,” shows that it’s a totalitarian movement that must be opposed and ridiculed, and its icons spat upon, and its prophet dishonored and satirized. It’s a clue to the tyrannical character of the thing. The greatest exercise in the defense of the freedom of expression is the defiance of any special claims made by religion — the defiance of their demand for respect. They have to earn respect, and they don’t do it by threatening with violence those that subject their holy books to scrutiny.
At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?
Don’t keep the faith. The heavens are empty. We’re better off that way. Don’t keep the faith.
— Leah Fabel
