I need to check and see if Congress declared this National Hitchens Week or something.
His next chapter in God is Not Great asks the question: “Does Religion Make People Behave Better?” We have noted before that the question is framed improperly. It is like asking “Does Anything Going By the Name of Medical Treatment Cure Cancer?” Well, some do and most don’t. The world is not the simple place that most atheists would like to have it be.
But although the title of this chapter asks the question the wrong way, the text of this chapter was significantly more tolerable than some of his other tirade chapters. In this chapter, Hitchens shows himself capable of considerable nuance, and he raises the central question in all atheism/problem of evil discussion, and which we will get to shortly. He also shows himself capable of greatly admiring people who do not share his atheism at all. But sometimes he admires the wrong thing.
For example, Hitchens admires the courage and moral impact of Martin Luther King Jr., and he does so with his eyes open — there is great admiration here, but no prim hagiography. Speaking of King, he says:
“This does not in the least diminish his standing as a great preacher, any more than does the fact that he was a mammal like the rest of us, and probably plagiarized his doctoral dissertation, and had a notorious fondness for booze and for women a good deal younger than his wife. He spend the remainder of his last evening in orgiastic dissipation, for which I don’t blame him” (p. 176).
Hitchens’ broad-mindedness here would probably not be extended to James Dobson, given comparable behaviors, and so we can only wonder about the principles of selection that are operative here. But nevertheless, Hitchens talks about a number of people who have made a difference in the world, and he discusses King, Lincoln, Ghandi, William Lloyd Garrison, and John Paul II. Some of them, he argues, made a difference in spite of their Christianity (King), some made a difference despite theological ambiguities (Lincoln), and some were well-intentioned types who only got underfoot (Ghandi). But, he argues, pound for pound, the secularists have a better record.
“The worse the offender, the more devout he turns out to be. It can be added that some of the most dedicated relief workers are also believers (though as it happens the best ones I have met are secularists who were not trying to proselytize for any faith) . . . (p. 192).
Speaking of the fight against racism against in the American South, he says:
“Anybody, therefore, who uses the King legacy to justify the role of religion in public life must accept all the corollaries of what they seem to be implying. Even a glance at the whole record will show, first, that person for person, American freethinkers and agnostics and atheists come out the best” (p. 180).
And he notes the time a Christian relief worker did not just blow off his question about this issue.
“To my surprise, he did not dismiss my question . . . All that a missionary could do was to try and show people a different face of Christianity” (p. 189).
The problem with this is that the set-up is highly selective, and it is not surprising that it produces the desired results. For example, in this chapter Hitchens acknowledges that “many of King’s inner circle and entourage were secular Communists and socialists” (pp. 179-180). They were helping to train brave volunteers like Mrs. Rosa Parks, and so on. But in the course of twentieth century, the Communists managed to execute or starve a minimum of 85 million people. This was managed in no small part due to the labors, excuses, and lies of their fellow-travelers over here. What was the role of American freethinkers, agnostics, and atheists if we move out of the Western Hemisphere, away from the insult of separate drinking fountains, and we bring in the issues of the Gulag or the killing fields? What do we say about those who averted their eyes, and did everything in their power to keep anybody else from trying to help those shut away in that monstrosity, that global evil?
In a previous chapter, Hitchens confessed his earlier fling with Marxism, but we have to remember that this was not just a matter of what ideas you might have been thinking in your youthful head. People were being slaughtered by the million over there, and they had their apologists over here. So let us ask hard questions across the board. I grant that a freethinker in Alabama was far less likely to support the pettiness of Jim Crow than a conservative Christian in that same state. I grant it, and it is an embarrassment to me. But that same freethinker was far more likely to make pathetic excuses for Mao than that very same conservative Christian. Is that an embarrassment to Hitchens? I hope so, and to include all the genocides of the twentieth century in this equation changes the discussion completely. Hitchens accuses the Vatican of conniving at the massacres of Rwanda (p. 193). Were there any genocides in the twentieth century that atheists planned, executed, and defended? To ask the question is to answer it.
Two issues from this chapter are still remaining. Here, as throughout this book, Hitchens is very free with moral judgments. Speaking of King, he says “the filthy injustice of racism must be borne no longer” (p. 173). He speaks of one outrage in the Rwandan massacre as “this ineffacable crime” (p. 192). It is very clear that Hitchens feels the outrage he expresses. But the one thing that he will not do is give us an accounting of that outrage. He gives us his sentiment. He cannot give us a reason, because he doesn’t have one.
“No supernatural force was required to make the case against racism” (p. 180).
That sounded very confident. No transcendant reality is necessary in order for us to just know that to despise another human being on the basis of his race is objectively wrong and evil. Okay, then. We have now banished all talk of supernatural forces, angels, demons, the gospel, and the Holy Ghost. They are gone from the discussion. We have gathered in our chairs to hear Hitchens give the lecture that he now needs to deliver. The flyer caught my attention the moment I saw it. “The Atheistic Basis for Moral Absolutes.” I am all ears, and am actually starting to fidget in my seat. In a world where we can speak confidently of ineffacable crimes, and filthy injustice, and in that same world where supernaturalism is unnecessary in making the case against racism . . . well, then, let’s hear it. Lay out the premises of your vaunted atheism, and then draw your objective moral conclusions from it. I hope they left time for a question and answer session.
The last issue is one that I covered in my letter to Sam Harris. Hitchens makes the same mistake that Harris does, which is that of saying that we are saying that atheists are raving libertines. There is no god, and so let us debauch everything. But atheists are at great pains to show that they are as moral as the next guy, as Hitchens does in this chapter.
“But where would people be without faith? Would they not abandon themselves to every kind of license and selfishness? Is it not true, as G.K. Chesterton once famously said, that if people cease to believe in god, they do not believe in nothing but in anything?” (p. 184).
Hitchens recounts a debate between a Bishop Butler and A.J. Ayer, in which the good bishop said that he did not see why Ayer, given his atheism, did not live a life of “unbridled immorality” (p. 185).
“Was he in fact not telling Ayer, in his own naive way, that if freed from the restraints of doctrine he himself would choose to lead ‘a life of unbridled immorality’? One naturally hopes not” (p. 186).
The central critique here is not that all atheists are ready to burst forth into unrestrained licentiousness, given the slightest provocation. Many atheists, atheism and all, don’t want to be raving criminals, and that just is fine with me. I am not saying Hitchens is a serial murderer. I am not saying that civilized atheists are just pretending to be ethical. I know that Hitchens expresses genuine moral outrage, and I am glad that he does. It shows that he still is carrying the image of God, just as his name still marks him as a Christ-bearer. If he was baptized, he is carrying that as well.
This critique is not aimed at his unrighteousness, but rather at his unsupported self-righteousness. The issue is not what Hitchens himself wants to do. The issue is whether he can get his god reason to rebuke a completely different atheist who was more of Stalin’s frame of mind. The issue is not that atheism requires an atheist to starve millions in Georgia. It does not, and so Hitchens doesn’t have to. But it does necessitate that consistent atheists stand by mute, with nothing whatever to say, when others (theists and atheists alike) make choices that they personally would consider abominable and outrageous. This is because Stalin had no god, including Hitchens. The disapproval of Jehovah meant nothing to him, and the disapproval of Hitchens would have meant just as little. And Hitchens has no reason whatever that could possibly make Stalin see it differently. That is the issue. It is not whether Hitchens is Stalin. Of course he is not. The issue is whether Hitchens has anything whatever to say when Stalin is being Stalin. And he does not.
So whenever Hitchens condemns the moral behavior of anyone else, he is not proving that atheists can be moral too. He is proving, instead, that he is incapable of following his own premises out to the end of the road he is on. He is proving that he is blissfully unaware of the blatant contradictions in his system. No one can impose their morality on another, and then Hitchens begins dispensing moral judgments on others, and he does so with a snow shovel. So this critique is directed at an intellectual failure of atheism, not at a moral failure. The subject is morality, but the failure is a failure in reason. This is unfortunate for them because it is a failure of their god.