Behind the Times paywall there are some good paragraphs by Philip Collins on Christopher Hitchens. The whole piece (£) is well worth reading and mainly concerns Hitch's refusal of the consolations of religion in the face of terminal illness. But Collins also addresses the charge against him of political apostasy:
[I]t is... Hitchens' late conversion to scepticism in politics that has inspired the scorn of former comrades on the Left. Hitchens, they say, has turned from the idealistic Left to the neo-conservative Right. The most obvious manifestation of this apostasy is his character[i]stically voluble support for the War on Terror and action in Iraq.
Hitchens needs no defence from anyone else but, as it happens, his support for the war in Iraq is entirely consistent with his previous support for the Falklands war and for American intervention in Bosnia. On each occasion he has taken sides against fascism in its various guises. As he said in 2002: "I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials." The better critique of Hitchens is not that he has betrayed the cause. It is that, much like... Tony Blair, his account of global religious conflict reduces a complex problem to a Manichean one. But it is hard to repulse the insinuating thought: what if he's right?
It is also hard - for this blogger, anyway - to repulse the thought that right and wrong on these issues may not be blocks of solid marble, in possession of one set of partisans or another, but parcelled out amongst them - though not necessarily in even proportions, and not necessarily amongst all of them. Collins would, it seems, be receptive to that thought as well, for, as he also writes:
Hitchens has, indeed, moved. He has given up a belief in a political utopia and replaced it with the insight that the combination of capitalism with liberal democracy needs to be cherished and defended. If only Hitchens had a full term to pursue this belief. As he says in Love, Poverty and War: "It is civilisation and pluralism and secularism that need pitiless and unapologetic fighters."
The shame is that it took until the end of his memoirs, which will be in turn too close to the end of his life, before Hitchens stumbled on what he calls his "Hitch-22": that we must commit to our beliefs while remaining sceptical about those who are fired by certainty. The old comrades simply cannot fathom that acquiring scepticism in politics, and in the process throwing off defunct beliefs, is the same process as acquiring wisdom.
I don't myself think all of Hitch's old beliefs are defunct, and I doubt that he for his part thinks so. But the general spirit of these words from Collins is spot on.
