And while we’re on the subject of ‘Intelligent Design’ and the people at the ‘Discovery Institute’ and so on – I just feel like aiming another kick at the design argument. I know I’ve done it before, I’m repeating myself, but – but I’m not sure they get shouted at enough about this.

Okay their big thing is ‘_____ is too complex to have come about without a designer. _____ is irreducibly complex, so a designer must have designed it, because otherwise it wouldn’t be there, being so complex and all.’ Complex things can’t just happen. A hurricane can’t whip through a junkyard and leave a 777 behind. An inebriated chimpanzee can’t shred a pile of old newspapers and end up with a first edition of Tobacco Road. A blizzard can’t produce a snowperson bearing an exact resemblance to Marie Dressler in ‘Dinner at Eight.’ What are the odds that there could be a universe so incredibly carefully calibrated that after some billions of years, what do we find? Us! How likely is that? The odds against it are – there are more numbers in that number than there are atoms in the universe. Therefore, there has to be a designer – that’s the only explanation. Anything else just can’t have happened the way it did.

Okay, so how did the designer get here? If ______ is too complex to have come about without a designer, then obviously whoever or whatever designed _____ has to be pretty complex too, right? So if the first item is inexplicable without a designer, why isn’t the second? Why is the cell too complex to explain without a designer, while the designer itself is not? Why is the designer, in fact, an explanation? Why is it an explanation at all? Why isn’t it more like a bad joke? (Well, it is, actually, it’s the tortoises all the way down joke. But do IDers get it?) It’s like saying ‘how did this chocolate cake get here?’ and being shown for answer – another chocolate cake.

No, the reality is, the argument from design is just a shop window thing. It’s just a pretense. IDers don’t want an explanation (that’s obvious, because if they did, by now they would have taken in the fact that ID isn’t an explanation at all) – they want their God, and they think ID is a respectable way to be able to have it. In fact it’s not respectable, because it’s so silly. An explanation that doesn’t explain anything is silly. But they do get people to listen to them. Maybe if the obvious problem with the designer were more widely noticed, they’d have more trouble.

Bertrand Russell had good blunt things to say about all this, as you might expect. In Why I Am Not a Christian, for instance.

you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: “My father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'” That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”

Or in another version, ‘You can’t fool me, young person, it’s tortoises all the way down.’ (It’s a nice touch that it was Mill, because Mill was Russell’s secular ‘godfather.’ I find that a very pleasing small fact.)

Okay – so apparently you’re not sick of the sound of my voice even if I am. (Well you wouldn’t be, would you – because if you were, you wouldn’t be here. Unless you’re all a pack of masochists who go out of your way to read stuff that you’re sick of. But that’s not likely either, because in fact if you’re masochistic and want to read stuff you’re sick of, you can find plenty of stuff you’re sicker of than you are of me. I’m quietly confident of that. Really. I happen to know [this is a little-known fact, but I’ll make you a present of it] that there is quite a lot of boring stuff on the Internet, ideal for people who want to read stuff they’re sick of. There is boring, pointless, fatuous, even loony stuff by the yard – whereas here if nothing else you can find interesting links. So this place [sadistically enough] is not the first stop for masochists, or even the second or third. So I think we can safely conclude that if you were sick of it you damn well wouldn’t be reading it.) And if you’re not, I’m not. I’m a sheep, you see, and take all my opinions and reactions and degrees of queasiness and malaise from other people. I don’t have any of my own – I’m a kind of weathervane, or pregnancy test strip – I just react.

So Bad Astronomy has a few words about Creationism and the ‘Discovery Institute.’ In particular he says one thing that made me sit up straight and stop slouching.

Many people like to say that science and religion are compatible. I find that to be a monumentally naive statement. Perhaps science and some religions can be reconciled, but if your religion says that Jupiter is really made of pixie dust, or that the Earth is flat, or that 1+1 =3, then your religion is wrong. It’s really just that simple. The Universe knows what it’s doing, and the reality of it is what science seeks. If your religion cannot be reconciled with that reality, then your religion is wrong…

Exactly. Funny how reluctant many people are to say that, even if it is what they in fact think. Funny how they prefer to hem and haw, or change the subject, or talk about different kinds of reality, instead. That’s why I wrote that In Focus on Science and Religion a couple of years ago: in order to make that point as bluntly as possible. I’ve had some emails about the bluntness, and there are places where I should add a footnote saying something like ‘yes I realize there are arguments that can be made about this’ – but I wanted to get as far away as possible from the ‘different kinds of reality’ line of talk. And the Bad Astronomer has the same kind of idea.

Over the course of time, you’ll be seeing more rebuttals — no, debunking — of creationist claims here. I’ve had enough, and this threat is real. They want to turn our classrooms in a theocratically-controlled anti-science breeding ground, and I’m not going to sit by and watch it happen.

Yeah.

I’m sick of the sound of my own voice.

A little from Foucault himself, since it’s available. Some wisdom and insight from M. Discipline and Punish.

One thing must be clear. By “Islamic government,” nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control.

Shrewd, ain’t it! Noooo, nobody meant that! Clerics? A role? A role of supervision or control? Oh, hell no! That’s not what anybody meant.

He did go to Iran, right? He wasn’t confused? He didn’t, like, get off the plane a stop or two early? In Marseille or someplace? He didn’t accidentally say ‘Stockholm’ to the ticket clerk when he meant to say ‘Tehran’?

To me, the phrase “Islamic government” seemed to point to two orders of things. “A utopia,” some told me without any pejorative implication. “An ideal,” most of them said to me. At any rate, it is something very old and also very far into the future, a notion of coming back to what Islam was at the time of the Prophet, but also of advancing toward a luminous and distant point where it would be possible to renew fidelity rather than maintain obedience. In pursuit of this ideal, the distrust of legalism seemed to me to be essential, along with a faith in the creativity of Islam.

Very old and also very far into the future – so far that it comes back around and meets itself? Or what. Because that business of coming back to what Islam was at the time of the Prophet – well, let me put it this way, I’ve never learned anything about the 7th century in any part of the world that made me want to live then. Really not. So I have to wonder why Foucault thought that sounded ‘luminous’. And then that crap about fidelity rather than obedience. Oh yeah? Tell that to the women who got beaten up for not concealing themselves thoroughly enough. And then to top it all off, like the rotting fish head on top of the ice cream sundae – ‘faith in the creativity of Islam.’ Right. Three hooray-words, three sexual-arousal words, three mental-shutdown words – faith, creativity, and Islam. Bad idea, Foukers – faith not a good way to go, creativity really beside the point here, and Islam – well, not quite what you seem to have thought.

But one dreams also of another movement, which is the inverse and the converse of the first. This is one that would allow the introduction of a spiritual dimension into political life, in order that it would not be, as always, the obstacle to spirituality, but rather its receptacle, its opportunity, and its ferment…I do not feel comfortable speaking of Islamic government as an “idea” or even as an “ideal.” Rather, it impressed me as a form of “political will.” It impressed me in its effort to politicize structures that are inseparably social and religious in response to current problems. It also impressed me in its attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics.

One person’s dream is another person’s nightmare.

So Foucault went to Iran in 1979, to see what he could see.

While many liberals and leftists supported the populist uprising that pitted unarmed masses against one of the world’s best-armed regimes, none welcomed the announcement of the growing power of radical Islam with the portentous lyricism that Foucault brought to his brief, and never repeated, foray into journalism…Foucault’s Iranian adventure was a “tragic and farcical error” that fits into a long tradition of ill-informed French intellectuals spouting off about distant revolutions, says James Miller, whose 1993 biography “The Passion of Michel Foucault” contains one of the few previous English-language accounts of the episode. Indeed, Foucault’s search for an alternative that was absolutely other to liberal democracy seems peculiarly reckless in light of political Islam’s subsequent career, and makes for odd reading now as observers search for traditions in Islam that are compatible with liberal democracy.

Yeah. Odd – painful – embarrassing – cringe-making. It’s like watching a putative radical cheering Hitler’s election, or getting misty-eyed while watching ‘Triumph of the Will,’ or putting a lovingly-framed photo of Pol Pot on the wall.

Foucault was virtually alone among Western observers, Anderson and Afary argue, in embracing the specifically Islamist wing of the revolution. Indeed, Foucault pokes fun at the secular leftists who thought they could use the Islamists as a weapon for their own purposes; the Islamists alone, he believed, reflected the “perfectly unified collective will” of the people.

Oh, Christ. How fucking stupid can you get. Especially when you’re someone who’s famous for sniffing out the insidious, non-obvious forms of domination and power. ‘The perfectly unified collective will of the people’ – what the hell would that be? Unless they all happen to be pod people, there is no such thing! You’d think anyone with even the most rudimentary acquaintance with actual human beings, let alone a theorist of power, would be well aware of that. No – what there is is the perfectly unified collective will of some people, which is a terrific instrument for tyrannizing over the rest of the people. The more ‘perfectly unified’ i.e. passionately held, unquestioned and unquestionable, mindless, irrational, fervent it is, the more sharp and thorough an instrument it is. It’s something to be terrified of, not something to rejoice at. Especially – especially (did he miss it because it’s so god damn obvious?) – if the people with the perfectly unified enraged collective will are the stronger part of the people – to wit, the men – the adult men, the straight men, the majority-religion men. Along with the collective will thing, they have sticks and whips and fists.

The Iranian Revolution, Anderson and Afary write, appealed to certain of Foucault’s characteristic preoccupations — with the spontaneous eruption of resistance to established power, the exploration of the limits of rationality, and the creativity unleashed by people willing to risk death…In his articles, Foucault compared the Islamists to Savonarola, the Anabaptists, and Cromwell’s militant Puritans. The comparisons were intended to flatter.

Savonarola! And what did he think Savonarola would have thought of someone like him?! The limits of rationality, the creativity unleashed by people willing to risk death – oh, hell. He pretty much was getting misty-eyed at ‘Triumph of the Will’ then.

“We think of Foucault as this very cool, unsentimental thinker who would be immune to the revolutionary romanticism that has overtaken intellectuals who covered up Stalin’s atrocities or Mao’s…But in this case, he abandoned much of his critical perspective in his intoxication with what he saw in Iran. Here was a great philosopher of difference who looked around him in Iran and everywhere saw unanimity.”

Saw it, and cheered it on. Very clever. Well done.

Foucault, who died in 1984, refused to engage in public mea culpas, despite the fierce debate that broke out in France over his ideas about Iran…Anderson says that the debate over these 25- year-old writings has relevance when some leftists focus more energy on criticizing an administration they scorn than on speaking against a radical Islamist movement that also violates all their cherished ideals.

But, some people think Foucault’s view had some merit.

Other Foucault scholars also see an enduring value in his turn toward political spirituality. James Bernauer, a Jesuit priest who teaches philosophy at Boston College and has written several books on Foucault and theology, sees in the late Foucault’s embrace of spirituality a resource for thinking about how to integrate politics and religion…”Foucault had an ability to see this, to see past the pervasive secularism of French intellectual life, that was quite remarkable.

Ah, a Jesuit priest! Well in that case. No, I’ll stick with that pervasive secularism deal, thanks. The more pervasive the better.

May the god of the atheists shine its everlasting light on Polly Toynbee. Wait. May the – oh never mind, you know what I mean.

At least she hasn’t swapped her brain for a fleece.

It would be entirely reasonable for secular Labour MPs to plead conscience on this, just as the religious are excused the whip on matters that trespass on their faith. This touches on freedom of thought and ideas, with far-reaching consequences for the values of the Enlightenment that are under growing threat from a collective softening of the brain on faith and superstitions of all kinds.

Yep. And you need to watch out for that collective softening of the brain stuff. It can creep up on you and before you know where you are or can say ‘Look at that tortilla, doesn’t that look like St Aloysius the Uninteresting?’ you’ve got religious zealots running the place. It can happen. Don’t you think it can’t. Listen, the US was not such a god-ridden place thirty years ago – not nearly. Then people absent-mindedly voted a ‘born-again’ Christian into the White House, and things have been getting worse ever since. So don’t let down your guard just because Tony Blair doesn’t keep saying ‘God bless you’ during question time – yet.

it is now illegal to describe an ethnic group as feeble-minded. But under this law I couldn’t call Christian believers similarly intellectually challenged without risk of prosecution. This crystallises the difference between racial and religious abuse. Race is something people cannot choose and it defines nothing about them as people. But beliefs are what people choose to identify with: in the rough and tumble of argument to call people stupid for their beliefs is legitimate (if perhaps unwise), but to brand them stupid on account of their race is a mortal insult. The two cannot be blurred into one – which is why the word Islamophobia is a nonsense. And now the Vatican wants the UN to include Christianophobia in its monitoring of discriminations.

Just so. ‘Race’ can’t possibly be stupid, because it doesn’t have any cognitive content anyway. It’s a complete category mistake. One might as well call a pineapple loyal or a Prada bag dyslexic. But beliefs are all about cognitive content – that’s what they are. Believers are always trying to disguise that, trying to pretend that belief is something else – virtue, or a disposition to kindness, or a talent for keeping your pants on, or marital stability combined with fecundity combined with the ability to hang on to a job – but that’s not what it is. It’s inane and meaningless to call red hair stupid (unless it’s the product of a packet of dye, but that’s a special case, and not relevant), it’s not inane and meaningless to call belief in heaven and hell stupid. Rude, possibly, but not meaningless.

…the religious are already getting their way in more insidious ways. For the chilling effect of this law is here now. There is a new nervousness about criticising, let alone mocking, any religious belief, a jumpiness about challenging Islam or Roman Catholicism. This most secular state in the world, with fewest worshippers at any altars, should be a beacon of secularism in a world beset by religious bloodshed. Instead, our politicians twitch nervously in a lily-livered capitulation to unreason. Why? Because this clever blending between race and faith has tied all tongues. This law springs from a cult of phoney racial/religious respect that makes it harder than it ever was to dare to criticise, let alone mock. There is a new caution about “causing offence”. What kind of offence? Not to people’s race but to ideas in their head.

Remember what Stephen Fry said at Hay about the two words that have taken on creepy overtones lately? Remember what the words were? I knew, I knew before he said them – I said the second one aloud before he got it out of his mouth. Everyone knows; it’s obvious. Respect and offence. ‘I’m offended,’ Fry said in a mincing voice. ‘Well so fucking what?!” Exactly. May the god of the atheists shine its everlasting light on Fry and Toynbee – and Atkinson and Rushdie and Hitchens. Bless all articulate atheists, amen.

I’ve been reading a little Orwell lately – prompted partly by my offhand comment in an email to Norm that Orwell was good but Hitchens is better – which itself was prompted by Philip Dodd’s introduction of Hitchens on ‘Night Waves’ in which he quoted someone (someone unnamed, I think) as writing in a review that Hitchens is as good as Orwell, or almost as good as Orwell, or some such. That annoyed me. It is my considered opinion – despite the offhandedness of the comment alluded to above – that Orwell is over-rated as a writer. Really quite seriously over-rated. That his language is very often decidedly tired and uninspired, even banal, and that there is a lot of commonplace thought in it. Phrases like ‘dirty little scoundrel’ come to mind.

But when Harry at Crooked Timber did a post about Fascinating Hitchens in which he quoted Norm quoting me there was a lot of disagreement (along with some agreement) with my relative estimation of the two – which is why I got Orwell off the shelf to check my impression again. And – I still agree with myself. He’s good, he’s interesting, he’s definitely worth reading, but he is not a great writer or stylist or thinker. He’s not as good as Dwight Macdonald, for instance.

That’s just a flat assertion, obviously. It would take extensive quotation to make my case – because he is good, so I can’t just quote a terrible sentence and leave it at that. But if you read a good chunk of him, the flatness and uninspiredness become increasingly noticeable.

But! As I say – he is good. I’m just saying he’s not the best; but he is good. On religion, for example…

It also appears from my correspondent’s letter that even the most central doctrines of the Christian religion don’t have to be accepted in a literal sense. It doesn’t matter, for instance, whether Jesus Christ ever existed…So we arrive at this position: Tribune must not poke fun at the Christian religion, but the existence of Christ, which innumberable people have been burnt for denying, is a matter of indifference.

Now, is this orthodox Catholic doctrine? My impression is that it is not. I can think of passages in the writings of popular Catholic apologists such as Father Woodlock and Father Ronald Knox in which it is stated in the clearest terms that Christian doctrine means what it appears to mean, and is not to be accepted in some wishy-washy metaphorical sense.

There. So yaboosucks. Exactly what I’m always saying – when people start with that ‘Oh but religion doesn’t mean, you know, literally believing in [trailing off vaguely] – it just means a way of feeling, a way of looking at the world, a framework.’ No it doesn’t! A feeling, a way of looking at the world, a framework, is not a religion, it’s something else. Christian doctrine means what it appears to mean, it doesn’t just mean a fondness for daffodils and clouds. Religions do make truth claims about the real world, so don’t tell me they don’t. It ain’t honest.

If you talk to a thoughtful Christian, Catholic or Anglican, you often find yourself laughed at for being so ignorant as to suppose that anyone ever took the doctrines of the Church literally. These doctrines have, you are told, a quite other meaning which you are too crude to understand…Thus the Catholic intellectual is able, for controversial purposes, to play a sort of handy-pandy game, repeating the articles of the Creed in exactly the same terms as his forefathers, while defending himself from the charge of superstition by explaining that he is speaking in parables.

Bingo. Exactly. A handy-pandy game for controversial purposes. Parable, nothing. If it’s all just a parable, then what is all the fuss about? If it’s all a parable, atheists and theists are the same thing and can stop arguing – and all those people rioting at theatres, and threatening MPs and writers and BBC producers, and sticking knives in people – they’re all just confused, they’re taking literally what everyone else means metaphorically. Yeah right.

So – I still say Orwell is way down the list of best essayists I know of, but he’s nowhere near the bottom.

That by the way was an As I Please, from 3 March 1944.

Katha Pollitt rocks.

So it’s 2005 and this is the academic question that has driven the Daily News and the right-wing New York Sun into apoplectic fits, and caused heartburn all over CUNY: Should Tim Shortell, an atheist, be allowed to assume the chair of the sociology department of Brooklyn College? You know, an atheist–someone who doesn’t believe in God. An anticleric. A disrespecter of religion. A mocker of Christianity.

This is what I’m saying. This is why atheists sometimes use noneuphemistic language. It’s because atheism is viewed and treated and spoken of as a crime and an outrage and something that ought not to be allowed. And that’s why the habit of just bashfully not mentioning the fact that theism is about truth claims that are not true, gets a little tiresome. There is a real problem here. I’ve said it before (so those who are tired of hearing it should leave now and go get an ice-cream soda or something), but I’ll just restate it again. There’s a real problem when the people who don’t say there are invisible supernatural entities (or entity) operating the cosmos are considered reprehensible, while people who do, are considered virtuous. That’s backwards. It’s the wrong way around. It reverses the terms. One might as well give prizes to bullies and sadists and throw kind helpful people in prison (which is exactly what happens in some places, and let’s not go live there).

You might as well say no Southern Baptist should be chair, since someone who believes that women should be subject to their husbands, homosexuality is evil and Jews are doomed to hell won’t be fair to female, gay or Jewish job candidates. Or no Orthodox Jew or Muslim should be chair because religious restrictions on contact with the opposite sex would privilege some job candidates over others. But nobody ever does say that. As long as a believer ascribes his views to his faith, he can say anything he wants and if you don’t like it, you’re the bigot.

Sad to say, she’s right. I’ve been seeing a certain well-known atheist (and self-proclaimed anti-theist) called a ‘bigot’ lately myself. The benefit of the doubt is always with the people of ‘faith’ (despicable word) and always against the people of reason. Well, enough of that. (Though I’m still not going to start calling myself a Bright. There are limits.)

My colleague didn’t get lost yesterday, and I did manage to figure out which square Starbucks in a square outside the entrance to Westlake Mall he meant (it was kind of unmistakable, in fact, a freestanding little glass mansion of Starbucks all on its own), so we did meet up as opposed to standing around stupidly in the wrong place. They wanted to go someplace pretty and not too far away as they had to get bus back to the airport quite soon, so we went to a park on the water about a mile north of downtown. Then we argued about whether this park beat Nonsuch or not – I said no!!, they said yes!! – but then we agreed: Nonsuch is better as a park, Elliott Bay Park has a far more spectacular location and view. It’s too bad there was a good deal of cloud draping the horizons yesterday, because it meant Mt Rainier was entirely invisible (as it usually is) and the Olympics nearly so – we could just make out the foothills, and I had to inform them that in fact there are spectacular mountains rising just behind those. Never mind – they’ll familiarize themselves with the look of the Pacific Northwest over time. And there was plenty to look at – water, islands (which they refused to believe were islands – but they are, it’s just that the ends aren’t always easy to make out), peninsulas, ferries, sailboats. It’s true – the actual view from Nonsuch doesn’t compare. (The view from Richmond Hill, on the other hand, is another matter, and the one from the lawn east of Kenwood is not so dusty either.)

Now, back to unfinished business. Or not so much business as pontificating. But hey, if the pontiff can pontificate, so can the rest of us. So back to unfinished pontificating then. We were discussing this question of whether religion can motivate people to be good – not in the sense of motivation through fear, which as James Mill pointed out is a revolting selfish motivation, but in the sense of externalizing and personalizing an idea of goodness and then deriving motivation from that external personification. I think that is one – only one, mind you – way religion can work.

But of course one of the problems with that is that the result is only as good as the conception of goodness is – and all too often people’s conception of goodness is absolutely crappy; is in fact worse than common or garden badness would be. All too often, people’s conception of goodness boils down to making other people submit and obey and be under rigid control. All too often it hasn’t got a damn thing to do with kindness or generosity or compassion or mercy, and in fact looks far more like cruelty and lust for domination. As Mary McCarthy famously said, religion is only good for good people; for bad people it’s terrible.

And then there’s the larger problem, which has to do with the role of religion in public morality and public debate; with the fact that religion is wrongly but widely thought to have some kind of expertise in moral issues, and therefore public debate is cluttered up with bishops and priests and mullahs, who in fact have no expertise at all, but rather a deep knowledge of Authority, which is no help. Religion may at times with the right people under the right circumstances motivate goodness – benevolence, courage, altruism – in individuals, but religion is not a useful contributor to public discussion of morality. Either it has nothing whatever to add that is not available to secular thinkers, or what it adds is the wrong thing to add. In other words – sure, sometimes religious talking heads manage to say something sane, but that’s because they’ve done some thinking, the kind of thinking we can all do, and because they’ve been influenced by various humane ideas in the culture (that racism is bad, that capital punishment is not the way to go, that justice and equality have something to be said for them), not because they have some special religous wisdom. And other times they say things that are absurd or downright hateful, because they think their deity hates contraception or women who are not enslaved. So what is it that they add? Nothing.

Public discussion of morality has to be secular and rational, because the other thing just doesn’t work, and can’t work, and shouldn’t work. If you tell me your God thinks the babies should have their heads dashed against the walls of the city – I’m not going to be impressed, am I. ‘God says so’ just doesn’t cut it in public discussion, any more than ‘my gut says so’ does. But there are people of the ‘God says so’ party on every ethics panel and many chat shows. That’s a bad situation. That’s one reason there is a need for energetic resistance, and even, at times, rudeness.

Norm has a post on religion and Hitchens and the vexed subject of ‘contempt for religious believers and what they believe’ that I have – however reluctantly! however ashen with misgivings, trembling with nerves, tottering with distress, quaking with anxiety, keening with regret – disagreed with him about in the past.

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.

Yes – up to a point. Or maybe not so much up to a point, as depending on how you define contempt. In fact that’s what I disagreed about last time I disagreed – I didn’t, and still don’t, think that what Polly Toynbee expressed was contempt. What she expressed was something more like outrage, and it was directed primarily at the Vatican, the news media’s sycophantic coverage of the Vatican, and Blair’s knee-bending to the Vatican. Now, given the Vatican’s murderous condom policy, I think that outrage is highly appropriate.

But this time it’s a fair cop. Hitchens does express contempt – and – I find what he says bracing and welcome in contrast to the endless diet of whining and reproof directed at atheists – but at the same time, I can see what Norm means. I’m not sure I agree with it – because of that endless diet – but I can see what he means.

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…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.

True. I think that is one way – one of the few ways – religion can work in a kindly as opposed to brutal way. I think the analogy is more literal than Norm means it in this argument – I think many people do think of God that way, and that that thought is what inspires them to do good things. I think that God serves as a sort of Platonic idea of what a completely good, kind, loving, benevolent, compassionate being ought to be (it may be Mary or Jesus instead, because God-God is a god of wrath). Once you have that idea – of an entity that is all about kindness and goodness – then you want to please it by being kind yourself, and not pain it by being cruel. That’s a crude way of putting it, but I think that is how it works. Unfortunately not nearly often enough – unfortunately all too often it is the punitive, vengeful aspects that loom largest – but sometimes.

But that’s only one aspect of the problem. There are others that have to do with secularism, democracy, rational discussion, education, the media – with the extent to which ‘democratic and pluralist societies’ can survive in a world of theocracies. But that’s a large subject, and I have to go. My colleague is briefly in town, and if he doesn’t get lost, we’re supposed to meet up for a chat. I’ll tell him you said hello.

All right, we’ve made this separation; we’ve put the veracity or epistemic question on one side of the line, and the consequentialist question on the other. We’ve further said that the epistemic question comes first: that is, that for the sake of clarity, it ought to. So then what happens on the other side of the line? How does that discussion go?

One way it goes is to say that even if there is no good reason to think religion is true (unless religion is defined so thinly that it bears no resemblance to what most people mean by the word), it still doesn’t do to say so, because saying so would (to put it somewhat hyperbolically, as people occasionally do) ‘rot the fabric of our civilization.’ Or it doesn’t do to say so because saying so might rot the fabric of our civilization. Or it doesn’t do to say so because what if saying so rotted the fabric of our civilization? Or it doesn’t do to say so because it is possible to imagine that saying so could rot the fabric of our civilization. Or some such variation on the theme. Which is a way of saying No, the epistemic question should not come first, the consequentialist one should; or else it’s a way of saying the separation is a bad separation, and the two are not and should not be separable: that one should consider the epistemic question and the consequentialist one simultaneously.

But how? How is that possible? Especially for people who don’t have an ingrained habit of thinking that way? Or for people who once did, but have learned not to, and are damned if they want to start again. It’s not an easy trick. If you don’t believe in Santa Claus or God, it’s very difficult – probably impossible – to convince yourself that you do for the sake of some other goal. It’s easy enough to lie about it, but not to believe it.

But that’s all right, belief is not required, lying is all that’s expected. All Philip Dodd was urging Hitchens to do, apparently, was to shut up – and burn his essay on Bonhoeffer. Not to change his own beliefs, just to keep silent about them. That’s easy enough, surely?

Perhaps, in a sense, but why is it expected? Because religion is a ‘pillar of society,’ because religion is good for social cohesion, because religion is the anti-fabric-rot of civilization. Therefore people ought to lie, at least by omission.

But first, how does anyone know that religion is any of those things? How does anyone know it’s those things more than it’s their opposites? How does anyone know, in short, that religion does more good than harm? It would take an enormous amount of counting and surveying and compiling to know that, surely. And what of the opposite argument? That religion causes wars, hatreds, genocides, persecution, oppression, and therefore should be undermined by noisy atheists without delay?

And second, isn’t it rather sleazy and condescending to tell people not to disclose, not to put into circulation, their opinion that there isn’t much reason to think religion is true, because it might upset the poor weak masses who haven’t heard the news yet? And isn’t it also slightly absurd? ‘Psst – they can hear you!’

And then – how does it work anyway? Or how would it work? How would, for instance, various scientific endeavors go forward if the deity always had to be taken into account? They wouldn’t, would they. So then what? How do we arrange all those complications.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying I don’t think these arguments that we may be atheists ourselves but we shouldn’t say so in public, are at all convincing or persuasive. (Philip Dodd said he was a secularist himself – in the midst of his rather vehement rebuke.) I can think of arguments I do find persuasive, for why we shouldn’t always give voice to our atheism in personal contacts and relations. But for shutting up about it in books and journalism and on websites? Nope. Nothing so far.

There are many ways one can divide up religion and arguments for religion in order to discuss or analyze them, many ways one can draw a line down the middle of the room and put all the Xs on one side and all the Ys on the other. (And then draw another line and sort the Ys, and then draw another line and sort their progeny, and so on, until everyone goes mad and the game is over.) One way is to separate questions about veracity from questions that leave veracity aside. To separate the epistemic issues from the moral and aesthetic and emotional, one might say. So on this side of the tavern we argue about whether there is any reason to think religion tells the truth or not, and on that side we argue about what social purpose religion serves, or whether religion is necessary for a sense of wonder or a sense of meaning, or whether without religion everything is permitted.

That sort of argument has been going on in the comments lately. But there’s a problem with it, it seems to me. This is the problem: if religion is lacking in the veracity department, then what’s the point of saying ‘yes but it’s good for social cohesion’? Or at least – if religion is lacking in the veracity department, there is a serious problem with saying ‘yes but it’s good for social cohesion.’ There is grave danger of intellectual dishonesty and sloppiness in saying that. There is a risk of getting everything wrong and confused. We can see why via analogies, I should think. It would be good for social cohesion if every human on the planet had a magic bowl that would fill with whatever food we wanted whenever we asked it. Yes. But that is not the case, so is the fact that if it were the case, that would lead to social cohesion, some sort of argument that one should respect the idea that it is the case? It doesn’t seem to be, does it. The idea seems silly. So why is it otherwise with religion?

In other words, why do we talk about whether or not religion is useful for social cohesion, or provides a sense of meaning, or is necessary for a sense of wonder, before we ask whether or not there’s a shred of truth in it? Isn’t that slightly back to front? It is, you know. Because if it’s just a load of nonsense, then what good is it to say it’s good for social cohesion? Lots of things would be good for social cohesion if they were true, but they’re not, so what good does that do? Next time social cohesion breaks down in your neighbourhood, tell everyone ‘We wouldn’t be having this quarrel if Bugs Bunny were here, we’d be too busy asking him how Elmer Fudd is doing.’ See if that helps.

No. The first question to ask about religion is, surely, whether or not its truth claims are true, whether there is any evidence for them or not, whether they are anything more than a human invention. If the answers are all No – then asking all those questions on the other side of the line is a little dishonest, isn’t it?

This was an odd item. The Economist’s review of the Oxford Companion to Philosophy edited by Ted Honderich (which, you’ll be fascinated to know, has an entry, or is it two entries, by my erudite colleague) and The Future of Philosophy edited by Brian Leiter. It ended with – with what certainly looks to an impartial observer (by which I mean me) like a dig.

Although plenty of philosophers consult the Gourmet, it makes others of them cringe. Two years ago close on 300, including some from top-ranked New York University and Rutgers, wrote an open letter complaining that Mr Leiter’s table measured reputation, not excellence, and that it was driving good students away from middle-rank colleges in a race for the top.

Interestingly, seven of Mr Leiter’s 12 distinguished contributors to “The Future of Philosophy” are on his advisory board. None of them signed the letter of complaint. Who said philosophy was out of touch with the world?

That’s the last thing in the review – that’s the note it ends on. Doesn’t that look like a dig? Like a wink wink nudge nudge?

Leiter sent them a correction.

Your review of my collection “The Future for Philosophy” insults, gratuitously, the contributors to the volume, and me as the editor, by implying that senior academics were invited to contribute to the book not because they are internationally recognised leaders in their areas of philosophy, but because they did not sign a letter of protest about my online guide to graduate study in philosophy…Simple fact-checking by your snide, but lazy, reviewer would have prevented this irresponsible insult to the eminent philosophers who contributed to the book.

And look what they appended to the correction:

Editor’s note: Our complimentary review of “The Future of Philosophy” made no such accusation, even implicitly. We pointed out that Mr Leiter’s online ranking, the Philosophical Gourmet, is controversial, but to do so was proper, not snide.

No such accusation? Even implicitly? Even implicitly? Really? What’s that ‘Interestingly’ then? What’s that last sentence about being out of touch with the world? Very odd. Irony is notoriously tricky, but I could have sworn that was a dig. Oh well.

Hitchens certainly was busy while he was in the UK. Multiple talks at the Hay Festival, Start the Week, and finally Night Waves. Did I miss any? Did he also fill in for Melvyn Bragg on ‘In Our Time’ and do the weather report on ‘Today’? Did he open Parliament and drive the number 85 bus? Did he announce the trains at Victoria and carry a sandwich-board up and down Oxford Street and sell tickets for the Eye? Was he, like, everywhere, or only almost everywhere?

Whatever, he was on Night Waves, and it’s quite – no, very – interesting. But there’s an irritating bit near the end where Philip Dodd tells Hitchens with much emphasis that he has one enormous blind spot: religion. But he doesn’t do much of a job of explaining why Hitchens’ attitude to religion is a ‘blind spot.’ Maybe he thinks it’s so obvious it doesn’t need saying – but it isn’t. It needs saying clearly and spelling out, because as I’ve mentioned a time or two, it’s not obvious, why religion should be treated with deference or piety or respect or any of the cant.

But it’s not a huge surprise that Philip Dodd thinks it should be. He’s the one who hosted that annoying Night Waves with the ‘postmodernist theologian’ Philip Blond as well as Julian Baggini, Norman Levitt and A S Byatt in April. He’s the one who said ‘Maybe it’s time to call science’s bluff…[to Blond] Do you think science is overly revered at present?’ and the one who let Blond do way more than his share of the talking – who in fact let him dominate the discussion, do most of the talking, interrupt the other participants, and generally carry on as if he had the upper hand and the platform and the right to run the show. Kind of a put-up job, I call it. Kind of a ‘the fix is in’ situation. So he would think Hitchens has a ‘blind spot’ about religion, but I don’t think the clarity of his vision is much to boast of.

Humans, humans, humans. One despairs sometimes, one really does. How can one help it.

Police and child protection experts are to investigate the extent of child abuse linked to religious practices after three adults who branded an eight-year-old child a witch and tortured her for months were yesterday convicted of child cruelty offences. The girl, known only as child B, was an orphan from war-ravaged Angola and brought to Britain by her aunt who falsely claimed to be her mother. She was cut with a knife on her chest, had chilli peppers rubbed in her eyes, was starved and repeatedly slapped, kicked and beaten…In one incident child B was bundled into a laundry bag and made to believe she would be thrown in a river by Kisanga and her aunt, who believed the girl was possessed by evil spirits…Police say child B was discovered by a street warden near Kisanga’s east London flat on November 24, 2003. She had cuts and bruises and was shivering…Once all three adults surrounded the girl: “One kicked me, one slapped me and one pushed me. I asked myself, ‘What have I done?’

Was anything left out? The child has lost her parents, her country is racked by war, an aunt takes her to the UK – and then turns on her. She’s eight years old and alone with three adults who are not her parents, who don’t (chances seem to be pretty good) love her the way parents (unless things go wrong) love their children. She’s eight years old, in a strange country, and all, all alone with three people bent on torturing her. She’s eight years old, wondering what she’s done. And there are others in the same situation.

Why do people need to come up with these ingenuities? Isn’t just everyday ordinary bad-temper and meanness enough, are these refinements necessary?

One day in November 2003 Kisanga and Ms X told her they were going to kill her by throwing her into the New River, a canal near her home. She was told to take her clothes off and was forced to get into a large red and white laundry bag, which was then zipped up…Ms May said Pinto intervened to save the child and soon after the girl was dumped on the street and was spotted by two Hackney Council street wardens. She was taken into care but because she did not tell the police about her abuse she was allowed to return to Ms X on Christmas Eve 2003…Ms May told the jury when the girl finally opened up about the abuse she had undergone she also admitted to having been traumatised. “She told her interviewers that she had been suffering nightmares about people trying to kill her,” said the prosecutor.

It’s not just Africa or belief in witchcraft, either. Don’t forget the Candace Newmaker case. She failed to bond with her new adopted mother (hardly surprising at her age), so a ‘therapist’ decided she had ‘Reactive Attachment Disorder,’ meaning she hadn’t bonded with her new adopted mother. (Listen, if someone adopted me right now, it would take me a good long time to bond with her, I can tell you that. I don’t care who it is.) Well hey, it was in the DSM-IV, so it must be a real disease or at least disorder, right? Of course. So the treatment for RAD – a new and not much tested ‘treatment’ but hey, nothing ventured nothing gained, right? – was ‘rebirthing therapy.’ Wazzat? Well, what you do is, you roll the child up in a mattress and pile a lot of stuff on top of her so that she feels squashed and can’t breathe properly, and then you tell her to fight her way out. When she says she can’t, and she can’t breathe, either, you tell her she’s a coward and has to try harder. When she starts to cry, you call her a lot of names. When she says she’s dying, you call her more names, and say ‘Good, die then’ for good measure. When she dies – well, you may feel slightly stupid, but it’s too late.

The people in both cases apparently really believed they were doing the right thing. It’s hard to get the mind around that, but it appears to be the case.

Oh dear – that’s one of the best laughs I’ve had in – well, a few hours, anyway. It was the surprise, partly. You know how a surprise can yank a loud sudden blurt of laughter out of you without your consciously intending it. It was that kind.

What, what, you eagerly cry, tell us so that we can laugh too. It was just a letter on the Letters page about my silly parodic wall article, which said ‘This is one of the silliest things I have ever read.’ Well good! That was the idea, so I’m delighted he thinks so! Mind you, he seems to have missed the fact that the silliness was intentional, but that’s all right – all the better in fact. Shows that it’s plausible enough. That was intentional too – I did try to make it enough like the real thing that the parody would be about something as opposed to merely absurdist. (That’s the basic thinking behind the entries in the Dictionary, too, I suppose. They’re meant to be hooked onto the real thing enough that they’re not just random cartoons. In fact my co-author often had to check a tendency in me to go past the borders of credibility. ‘I just don’t believe that one,’ he would say coldly. I would argue and shout and throw things, but in the end I usually gave in. I put most of the rejects on the B&W version of the Dictionary. I finally removed one of those a few days ago, after the fourth or fifth person emailed to tell me that I had ‘Chinatown’ and ‘The China Syndrome’ confused. I knew I did, that was the joke, but if so many people didn’t realize that – well that must have been a joke that didn’t work.) Mind you, I also included one or two fairly broad hints that it was a joke. The bit about decaying corpses, for instance – I’d have thought that was a bit of a giveaway. But probably the reader was so irritated and incredulous by the time he got to that part that he didn’t quite take it in. And rightly so! If you’re not already familiar with B&W, you wouldn’t asume that it’s a joke, so irritation in that situation is the correct response.

All this reminds me of an article Ellen Willis wrote in the Village Voice in response to the Sokal Hoax. I like her writing, but her partiality for the hoaxed Stanley Aronowitz may have clouded her perception on this occasion. Whatever the reason, she made a surprisingly glaring error:

Roger Kimball, who himself had been totally fooled by Sokal’s parody and blasted it at length in an anti-Social Text polemic in the new Criterion…

But – Ellen – oh dear, don’t you see, don’t you get it? The fact that he blasted it means he wasn’t fooled by it, not that he was! The fact that he thought Sokal meant it literally is not the point, the point is that he recognized what Sokal wrote as bullshit, which Aronowitz signally failed to do.

Quite an embarrassing mistake, that.

H. E. Baber reminds us of this splendid item, which I’d read before but forgotten.

Go into any of the little cafés or horlogeries on Paris’s Left Bank (make sure the Seine is flowing away from you, otherwise you’ll be on the Right Bank, where no one is ever seen) and sooner or later you will hear someone say, ‘Les choses sont contre nous.‘ ‘Things are against us.’ This is the nearest English translation I can find for the basic concept of Resistentialism, the grim but enthralling philosophy now identified with bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed Pierre-Marie Ventre.

All accidentally (as Henry James might have put it), I was gesturing toward the same idea – but not because I remembered Resistentialism. The inspiration was that review of a history of barbed wire we were discussing last week. I was trying to inflate the element of paranoia as much as possible – and ended up in much the same place. Which is quite funny, really.

Clark-Trimble was not primarily a physicist, and his great discovery of the Graduated Hostility of Things was made almost accidentally. During some research into the relation between periods of the day and human bad temper, Clark-Trimble, a leading Cambridge psychologist, came to the conclusion that low human dynamics in the early morning could not sufficiently explain the apparent hostility of Things at the breakfast table…

I have a longstanding, consuming interest in human bad temper. I consider myself an expert in the field.

And speaking of writing and thinking – as we so often are, one way or another – here is a good article on the subject. Unfortunate that it was first published in the Weekly Standard, but sometimes things fall out that way. It is republished in Theory’s Empire.

…bad academic writing nowadays has become something worse than an aesthetic offense…Academic writing in our own time, however, exhibits a disregard, not merely for style, but for truth. Once upon a time, no matter how badly they wrote, scholars imagined that they were contributing to knowledge. But no longer. Much of the scholarship now published in the humanities—primarily in English and comparative literature, but increasingly in history, musicology, art history, and religious studies—has no other purpose than to confirm the scholar’s own status and authority. It is not a contribution to knowledge, but to political power.

A harsh comment, but all too believable. I say ‘believable’ in that waffly way because obviously one can’t know for sure – we have no way of knowing for certain what people’s motivations are for writing what they do. But it is believeable, because when you look at the actual work in question, it simply is very difficult to think that anyone writes it in order to contribute to knowledge. That just doesn’t seem to be what’s going on – what’s going on looks like something else entirely.

Although she agreed that even leftist scholars “should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life,” Butler insisted that academic writing needed to be “difficult and demanding” (her words) in order to “question common sense”—the truths which are so self-evident that no one thinks to question them—and so to “provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.” If the only choice is between academic obscurity and the pseudo-clarity of “common sense,” who wouldn’t choose the former? But who said that’s the only choice? In the limited range of options she offers us, Butler reveals much about the real politics behind bad academic writing.

Thus – and so soon, too – we meet the false dichotomy again. Who, indeed, said that’s the only choice?

The desire to “question common sense” is merely the self-congratulation of someone whose “sense” is different, but no less “common.” Although Butler wishes to disrupt “the workings of capitalism,” the effect of her writing is exactly the opposite. Its effect is to safeguard the power and privilege of academic capitalists—among whom she is one of the great robber barons.

Wishes, or perhaps claims to wish to disrupt those workings. I myself (suspicious rat that I am) tend to think it’s far more of a claim than a wish.

What Butler’s writing actually expresses is simultaneously a contempt for her readers and an absolute dependence on their good opinion. The problem is not so much her lack of concern for clarity; it’s her lack of concern for clarification. If Butler took seriously her academic responsibility—her duty to teach—she would take pains to make herself clear. Her concern, though, is not to clarify a difficult subject but to justify her position in the front ranks. Hers is not writing to be read and understood; it is a display of verbal majesty, which is to inspire awe and respect. Its one purpose is to confirm Butler’s authority as a leader of the academic left.

A knock-down point, I think. The lack of concern for clarification is telling.

But you can sense the strength of Butler’s party even more strongly among those who support the Bad Writing Contest. In the last two years, at least five young scholars have submitted entries, asking that their names not be released if they should win. In an unsigned June 1997 letter, one entrant confessed that he was “loathe to upset senior scholars in my field,” since alienating them could do “significant damage” to his career…In the current crisis of hiring freezes and intense pressure for tenure, the need to publish is perhaps greater than any time before. Yet to publish in most journals means flinging the jargon, toeing the party line (which is somewhere to the left of gibberish), and quoting the usual suspects (Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida, Said, Jameson, Butler, etc.). I’m often appalled at my own writing, but since jargon, rather than substance, gains a publication, I succumb to verbiage.

Maybe they all hate it, maybe even Butler does, maybe they’re all caught in a trap of their own making. Let’s hope they find the way out soon.

Let’s test our writing skills, shall we? Let’s write an essay on one of these questions:

“Is it more important to follow the rules exactly or to base your actions on how other people may be affected?”

”Are people motivated to achieve by personal satisfaction rather than by money or fame?”

Okay let’s not. Let’s instead curl a lip at the stupid impoverished vacuous questions, and do something else instead. For instance we could wonder why those are the only possibilities on offer, and why the terms are so undefined, in fact meaningless. ‘More important’ – to whom, when, where, in what context? What ‘rules’? Rules pertaining to what? Football? Taking an aptitude test? Morality? If the latter, what rules are meant? What ‘actions’? What am I doing, and what rules apply to what I’m doing, and how do I know, and who issued them? Where are we? What ‘other people’? ‘Affected’ in what sense? To ‘achieve’ what? What kind of achievement are we talking about? What kind of ‘personal satisfaction’? What if ‘money’ and ‘fame’ aren’t real options? Where (again) are we? And why such incomplete choices? The best answer to both questions would be simply ‘No.’

The author of the article points this out.

The real problem with the SAT persuasive essay assignment isn’t what it conveys about spontaneity or style but what it suggests about how to argue. Students are asked to ponder (quickly) a short excerpt of conventional wisdom about, say, the advisability of following rules, and they are then instructed to ”develop your point of view on this issue.” But if the goal of ”better writing” is ”improved thinking,” as the College Board’s National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges has pronounced, perhaps it’s worth asking whether practice in reflexively taking a position on any potentially polarizing issue is what aspiring college students — or the rest of us — need most. As those sample essay questions at the start reveal, and as any test-prep book will confirm, at the homiletic heart of the SAT writing assignment is the false dichotomy. The best strategy for a successful essay is to buy into one of the facile premises that inform the question, and then try to sell it as if it were really yours. Essayists won’t be penalized for including false information, either, according to the official guide for graders. ”You are scoring the writing,” it instructs, ”and not the correctness of facts.”

Ah. The point of the test is to score how closely students resemble Bill O’Reilly. Wonderful.

…the test-prep industry bluntly says that a blinkered perspective pays off on the essay — and nobody knows better than the professional SAT obsessives. ”It is very important that you take a firm stance in your essay and stick to it,” insists Kaplan’s ”New SAT.”…”What’s important is that you take a position and state how you feel. It is not important what other people might think, just what you think.” This doesn’t bear much resemblance to an exercise in critical reasoning, which usually involves clarifying the logic of a position by taking counterarguments seriously or considering alternative assumptions…In fact, self-centered opinion is exactly what the questions solicit…You have to hand it to the College Board: the new essay seems all too apt as training for contemporary social and political discourse in this country, and for journalistic food fights too. But don’t colleges want to encourage the ”strengths of analysis and logic” that the Board itself has said are so important to ”the citizenry in a democracy”?

It doesn’t appear so.

We’ve been discussing the personal argumenative habits of Hitchens in comments lately, so this seems like a highly relevant item. Also hilarious, also interesting. I mean to say – if he takes such obvious pleasure in publicly fighting with his brother, it’s hardly surprising that he fights with other people too, is it. My only claim is that whatever rude remarks he makes at the dinner table, they’re not likely to be secret or underhanded – on the contrary, the chances are excellent that he’s just made them on tv or in the Guardian, and will do it again but with more embellishments tomorrow.

His brother knows that, at least, even if not everyone else does:

You should have done what you do in almost any other occasion when you disagree with someone, you should have argued about it, and then we would have reached this position much earlier. Silence is never an answer to anything.

I disagree with that last remark, by the way. Sheer nonsense. Silence is often an answer to many things. People who irritate, for instance. One doesn’t always want to go to all the trouble of explaining to people why one finds them so immensely irritating and therefore won’t be talking to them anymore, does one. Especially if one of the chief reasons they are so irritating is the fact that they can’t seem to figure out for themselves what is so irritating about them, and stop being that way. I mean, why should we do their homework for them? I don’t see it. If they want to know why we don’t like them anymore, they should just give the matter some good hard thought, that’s what. That’s not our job.

It’s a great credit to our father, who was very conservative, that he never attempted to inculcate any politics into either of us, there were no heretical positions in the family. The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural. I’m a materialist and he attributes his presence here to a divine plan. 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 horrible repulsive thing.

See what I mean? No need to wait for a convivial dinner table or gathering at the bar; there it all is right out in the open. And a fine thing too. Peter makes a very silly (and extremely, maddeningly, familiar) reply. I’m not on speakers with Peter either!

He has several faiths. He has the faith I think of Darwinism, which is just like Christianity, an unproveable theory, which you can believe if you want because you prefer that arrangement of the universe. I happen to think the arrangement of the universe based on the belief in intelligent life is more tolerable than both morally and aesthetically, but he prefers another. I dislike only the attitude that his atheism is not a faith, because it is.

No. It. Isn’t.

And note the linking of what you ‘can’ believe with what you prefer, the casual closing of the is-ought gap. And that’s not even true, actually. It is not possible to believe things we would prefer to be true if we don’t in fact believe them. Everybody knows that.

IK Are you two friends?

PH No. There was an old joke in East Germany that went, Are the Russians our friends or our brothers? And the answer is, they must be our brothers because you can choose your friends.

CH The great thing about family life is that it introduces you to people you’d otherwise never meet.

There’s something terrifically satisfying in that. Especially to someone tired of the cloying American diet of ‘family values.’ Are you friends? No.

PH They want everything to be all right.

CH They want a happy ending – that’s their problem.

That is the happy ending. Implacable hostility: that’s the happy ending.

Well, yes. To say the least. And about time too.

With the publication of his fifth collection of essays, it is time to acknowledge that Christopher Hitchens, as well as an exceptional political polemicist, is also one of the best literary and cultural critics of the past 20 years…It is time to take Christopher Hitchens seriously.

Well past time, actually. To pick just one example among many, one we have mentioned recently, he makes Joseph Epstein look a very pale flat unsparkling essayist indeed. He puts a good many overpraised current essayists in the shade. So well done David Herman for saying so. Some dreary enforcer shouted at Amardeep Singh for daring to say a good word for Hitchens as a critic at the Valve the other day. In fact (now I’ve taken another look) more than one of them. Ha. They should only write and think so well, that’s all. But obviously that’s out of the question, since they have exactly the kind of orthodoxy-enforcing mentality that rules out being able to think and write as well as Hitchens does. The non-orthodoxy and the thinking and writing are intimately connected, are part and parcel of one another, so obviously people who say things like ‘the presumed gap between the politics and the cultural/aesthetic here sounds more than a little bit like the “sure, the Bradley people fund Horowitz, but when it comes to the ALSC that’s just disinterested pursuit of literary appreciation…” from this site’s early days…’ and ‘Rather than throwing up your hands – “huh, he’s sold his soul to the neocons… but that doesn’t have anything to do with this review” – one might think that the proper approach to the topic is to look into the connection between the politics and the aesthetics…’ could no more write (or think) like Hitchens than they could fly like a swallow or bite like a barricuda.

Many people assume that Hitchens’s break with the left came over 9/11. That was a bitter falling out, part of a larger split within the Anglo-American left intelligentsia. But signs of the break are apparent earlier: over Salman Rushdie and the fatwa in 1989, then Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. Hitchens’s cause was always the same: secular, humanitarian, democratic.

Just so, as Hitchens has said many times. The Rushdie affair was the start. And he hasn’t broken with the left in its entirety, I don’t think – with the secular, humanitarian, anti-tyranny, pro-human rights, pro-universalism left, the same left wot B&W thinks of itself as part of. The branch of the left he has broken with doesn’t have a monopoly on the word or title or orientation.

At the end of the book [Letters to a Young Contrarian] he writes, “The next phase or epoch is already discernible; it is the fight to extend the concept of universal human rights, and to match the ‘globalisation’ of production by the globalisation of a common standard for justice and ethics.” The pieces on the fatwa against Rushdie had the same tone: it was “the chance to defend civilisation’s essential principle.”

Just so. Universal human rights. The ones Maryam Namazie and Azam Kamguian and Homa Arjomand and Azar Majedi and Kenan Malik appeal to. That is not my idea of ‘breaking with the left,’ it’s far more like trying to get the left not to break with its own basic and best principles.

In all these writers, Hitchens sees complexity, contradiction and “the idea of a double life.” Orwell/Blair, of course, is a classic case of this English doubleness, but the richest account is found in his essay of the early 1990s on Larkin. When Tom Paulin, Terry Eagleton and others rushed to bury Larkin under accusations of racism, sexism and worse, Hitchens dug deeper and found, both in the life and the poetry, more complexity and interest.

And there is a great deal more to say about Larkin than that he was a racist sexist or sexist racist. Blindingly obviously. Larkin wouldn’t be the best person to put in charge of the local Universal Human Rights declaration, but that doesn’t exhaust the possibilities, does it. It takes a certain lack of subtlety to think it does.

Hitchens, you feel, is on the move, drawing away from the littleness of today’s politicians and celebrity culture, towards the great writers of the early and mid-20th century. If that is where he finally pitches his tent, he might end up as the best literary and cultural critic of his generation.

Well, I think he ended up there a long time ago.