As I don't need to tell any reader of this blog, I'm as much an admirer of Christopher Hitchens as the next person, and I thought his recent visit to this country was a tour de force. But there's something that's come to perplex me about his attitude to religious belief and, more particularly, religious believers. As background here, I refer to earlier posts of mine in which I've tried to explain why, although I have been unreservedly atheist in outlook all my adult life (to go no further back than that) and will argue the matter as and when it is relevant to do so, I don't put myself about mocking religious believers or their beliefs, unless - and exceptionally - under various kinds of provocation from them.
Talking to Hitch about this subject when I was in Washington, I said something to the effect that I wasn't confident of there being a future in which people had all ceased to be religious - because I see religion as meeting certain deep human needs and anxieties irrespective of its truth value - and was surprised to find him agreeing: explaining that he was Freudian as well as Marxist in his thinking on this; that although it was an illusion, religion was a necessary illusion. I heard him repeat more or less the same thing in the Blasphemy Debate at the Hay Festival. He said that religion was the highest form of 'wish thinking', and that it wasn't eradicable until we cease to be afraid of the dark. You can find him expounding the same thing here:
On his [Marx's] analysis, the likelihood that religion would ever wither away or go into a decline must be reckoned as very slight. However, the possibility of its becoming a private belief or a purely personal source of comfort - rather than a matter of state and society - should not be dismissed either. Freud only extended this idea in his celebrated essay The Future of an Illusion, by pointing out the extraordinarily close correlation between doctrines of immortality and redemption, and the inextinguishable human desire to defeat or transcend death. For him, faith was ineradicable as long as humans were in fear of personal annihilation - a contingency that seems likely to persist. But the strength and tenacity of the belief did not make it any less of an illusion.All of which makes clear sense to me. And yet, in conversation with his brother Peter, Hitch also said:
I can't stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith. I mean that to me is a horrible repulsive thing.I think there's reason to doubt that he actually meant this, or could consistently stand by it, without any qualification - a point to which I will return. But in any case what he says is an expression of contempt for religious believers and what they believe. And that is what I find perplexing. It is perplexing in view of the other things he has said and written about religion, in the way of its being based on those well-known human needs and fears.
It might be suggested on Hitch's behalf that, whether it meets such needs or not, because religious belief isn't substantively true, all it merits is contempt from atheists and humanists; and its adherents, likewise, only deserve disrespect in one or another mode. But that religion isn't true cannot be a sufficient reason for this; it is quite standard in democratic and pluralist societies to disagree in a tolerant and non-contemptuous way with beliefs and opinions we hold, or even sometimes know, to be false.
Again, it might be said - actually, it often is said - that it's not just that religious belief isn't true; consider also the terrible harm it has done, all those who have been persecuted, tortured, murdered, in the name of one religious creed or another. Even if (so the argument might go) it is a form of belief rooted in human nature, that is no reason to be indulgent towards it. There are bad facets of human nature, and these have to be restrained, mitigated, diverted. They must not be indulged. Thus, if there are, as there appear to be, cruel impulses within the human make-up, we don't give in to them; we try to curb them.
The flaw in this line of argument seems obvious to me. In a nutshell: religious belief has no monopoly on harm; conversely, good is not exclusively associated with the irreligious. It is not religious belief as such which leads to persecution, torture, murder, it is dogmatic and intolerant belief of every kind. Think of the millions killed in the last 150 years in the name of political beliefs, including would-be socialist and liberal beliefs as well as racist and fascist ones, deaths that cannot be laid at the door of religious faith. At the same time, it is a straightforward empirical fact that countless numbers of people - and I use 'countless' here advisedly and literally, not just loosely to convey the sense of very many - have been moved by their religion to do good in the world, to behave well. And this is to say nothing of what they have been moved to create.
Human impulses towards cruelty are therefore not a proper analogy for religious belief, though I do not have anything neat to offer as a ready alternative. Perhaps this might do. Think of a person who has illusions about the character of someone he loves - his mother, his children - and has those illusions because he loves them and so is unable to face certain unwelcome truths about them. That he has such illusions may certainly end by doing him, or them, harm. But so may it lead him to do a lot of good things he otherwise might not do.
Asked in the Blasphemy Debate whether he had ever felt any 'spirituality' himself, Hitch replied - indirectly - that he had met religious people morally superior to and braver than himself: people who in terrible countries and dangerous situations had done witness for the rights of others, been self-sacrificing. 'When they say that religion is their motivation,' he added, 'I'm obliged to respect it'. Precisely. This is why I wrote above that I cannot take at face value his statement about not being able to stand anyone who believes in God. More importantly, this is for me a definitive, a crushing, rebuttal of those who treat religion with contempt. One can, one should, argue about its truth content and its rational basis or, as I think, lack of one; because that is our duty with respect to all beliefs. But I have read now about hundreds of people impelled by their religious faith to acts of great and courageous humanity, and we who have never done that owe them respect and more than respect, we owe them the celebration of what they did; for such people are the glory of humankind.
The religious, I will end by saying, do not for their part have any monopoly here, either. That is the way the world is, a bit complicated.