I woke up this morning in Manchester to the sad news of Christopher Hitchens's death. On my way home I have gathered, via Twitter, that the volume of tributes (as well as other matter) has been enormous. The only thing I have actually been able to read, however, before getting back and to my computer is the full interview with him by Richard Dawkins in the New Statesman that was trailed a few days ago. From this I reproduce an excerpt (not yet online as far as I can see) which continues from the short quote I gave here. It is a fitting passage to highlight today:
I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian - on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.
That has secular forms, with gurus and dictators, of course, but it's essentially the same. There have been some thinkers - Orwell is pre-eminent - who understood that, unfortunately, there is innate in humans a strong tendency to worship, to become abject. So we're not just fighting the dictators. We're criticising our fellow humans for trying to short-cut, to make their lives simpler, by surrendering and saying, "[If] you offer me bliss, of course I'm going to give up some of my mental freedom for that." We say it's a false bargain: you'll get nothing. You're a fool.
Hitch was valued by his friends and admirers for many qualities: his erudition, his wit, his polemical brilliance. For me, above all, it is his independence of spirit that is to be remembered - his willingness to stand aside from and against what putatively right-minded others held to be obligatory for the virtuous, if he could not find support for it within his own convictions. Here, on normblog, he has always been The Dude. Like many others, I will miss him.