Book

Letters To A Young Contrarian

Christopher Hitchens

This was a great read. In essence, it discusses the merits of going against the grain and challenging conventional thinking.

Adlai Stevenson once said to Richard Nixon: “If you stop telling lies about me I’ll stop telling the truth about you.”
Most people, most of the time, prefer to seek approval or security… those desires are not contemptible in themselves… There are in all periods people who feel themselves in some fashion to be apart. And it is not too much to say that humanity is very much in debt to such people… Don’t expect to be thanked, the life of an oppositionist is supposed to be difficult.
Zola’s letters in 1897-1898, particularly those on the Dreyfus affair may be read as a curtain-raiser for most of the great contests that roiled the 20th Century.
While courage is not in itself one of the primary virtues, it is the quality that makes the exercise of the virtues possible.
On Ron Ridenhour: “he was lying in his bunk and overheard a group of fellow enlisted men planning a nighttime assault on the only black soldier in the hut. Ron sat up and said “If you want to do that, you have to come through me.” As so often, the determination of one individual was enough to dishearten those whose courage was mob-derived.
Bertrand Russell’s grandmother gave him a bible upon which was inscribed “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.” This allowed him in later later life to be unafraid of belonging to small minorities. It’s rather affecting to find the future hammer of the Christians being “confirmed” in this way. It also proves that sound maxims can appear in the least probable places.
The Strange Death of Liberal England
Rilke on wanting to become a writer: “Confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write… if you meet this question with a strong, simple ‘I must’, then build your life in accordance with this necessity.”
The Hindus had the wit to see and the courage to proclaim the fact; Nirvana, the goal of their striving, is nothingness. Wherever life exists, there also is inconsistency, division, strife.
Humans do not desire to live in some Disneyland of the mind, where there is an end to striving and a general feeling of contentment and bliss.
In life we make progress by conflict and in mental life by argument and disputation. There must be confrontation and opposition, in order that sparks may be kindled… To the notion that argument produces ‘more heat than light’, we know as a law of physics that heat is the chief, if not the only, source of light.
If you care about the points of agreement and civility, then, you had better be well-equipped with points of argument and combativity, because if you are not then the “center” will be occupied and defined without your having helped to decide it.
It’s often been observed that the major religions can give no convincing account of Paradise. They do much better in representing Hell.
Karl Popper: It is very seldom that in debate any one of two evenly matched antagonists will succeed in actually convincing or “converting” the other. But it is equally seldom that in a properly conducted argument either antagonist will end up holding exactly the same position as that with which he began.
John Stuart Mill said that even if all were agreed on an essential proposition it would be essential to give an ear to the one person who did not, lest people forget how to justify their original agreement.
Conflict may be painful, but the painless solution does not exist in any case the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness; the apotheosis of the ostrich.
I cringe every time I hear denunciations of “the politics of division” - as if politics was not division by definition. Semi-educated people join cults whose whole purpose is to dull the pain of thought, or take medications that claim to abolish anxiety.
Through a glass, rosily Orwell on the importance of speaking the truth.
F.M. Cornford: “The Principle of the Wedge is that you should not act justly now for fear of raising expectations that you may act still more justly in the future - expectations that you are afraid you will not have the courage to satisfy.” Microcosmographia Academica.
On authors not supporting Salman Rushdie post fatwa: Had his novel perhaps been ‘offensive’? Were the feelings of pious Muslims not to be considered? Several senior Western statesmen, often of the law-and-order and “antiterrorist” school, took refuge in similar evasive formulations.
Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine.
Bertrand Russell at the gates of heaven: “Oh Lord, you did not give us enough evidence.”
I find something repulsive in the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form.
As Laplace is supposed to have said when demonstrating his model of the solar system at court, and on being asked where the Prime Mover was: “It can work without that assumption.”
I touched upon the threat of hell with which the devout have always reinforced their ostensibly kind recommendations, but just consider for a moment what their heaven looks like. Endless praise and adoration… just to spice things up, some religions promise a good deal of carnal bliss… All this proves is that religion is man-made, and that men have created gods in their image rather than the other way around.
Some of those who recommend religion - I am thinking of the school of Leo Strauss - are blunt enough to make this point explicit: it may be myth and mumbo-jumbo but it’s very useful for keeping order.
An old definition of a gentleman: someone who is never rude except on purpose.
On elitism and making justifications of ‘the people’: “Even the preamble to the United States Constitution, which was written by men who held other people as property, begins with the invocation “We The People…”
On the derision of anti First World War critics as elitist: “Governments normally suspicious of the franchise decided on this one occasion to take vox populi as vox dei. The enthusiasm of the populace could be directed at the ‘stuck up’ and the fancy and fastidious types, while the same populace was prostrate before throne and altar.”
Much the same can be said about literary and scientific or even medical matters. Books that were once banned or ridiculed or both, from the time of the condemned Socrates to the time of the forbidden Ulysses, have had to be saved not by the crowd, but from the crowd.
One must therefore be willing to risk the charge of “elitism” in order to say that the passive participants in this are often dupes, and that those who run the show are often real elitists. People in the mass or the aggregate often have a lower intelligence than their constituent parts.
Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience, that had decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to it.
One last straddle of my high horse, then (a beast which, as Gore Vidal once said, one must keep tethered conveniently within reach).
One must have the nerve to assert that, while people are entitled to their illusions, they are not entitled to a limitless enjoyment of them and they are not entitled to impose them on others. Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.
Noam Chomsky: “Speaking truth to power” is overrated. Power, as he points out, quite probably knows the truth already, and is mainly interested in suppressing, limiting, or distorting it. Ruthless and arrogant though power can appear, it is only ever held by mere mammals who excrete and yearn, and who suffer from insomnia and insecurity. These mammals are also necessarily vain in the extreme, and often wish to be liked almost as much as they desire to be feared.
All human achievement must also be accomplished by mammals and this realisation puts us in a useful spot. It strongly suggests that anyone could do what the heroes have done.
Gresham’s law on morality: Not only do we recognise the bogus, but we overlook and exclude the genuine.
The human race may be inherently individualistic and even narcissistic but in the mass it is quite easy to control. People have a need for reassurance and belonging.
An important paradox: of those who are drawn into oppositional activity… it can often be observed that they are rebellious or independent types. Yet the best of them are actuated by concern for others, and for causes or movements larger than themselves.
To look up: Antonio Gramsci, Karl Liebknecht, Jean Jaures, Dimitri Tucovic, James Connolly, Eugene Debs.
Distrust any speaker who talks confidently about “we”, speaks in the name of “us.” Distrust yourself if you hear these tones creeping into your own style. The search for security and majority is not always the same as solidarity; it can be another name for consensus and tyranny and tribalism… Always ask who this ‘we’ is; as often as not it’s an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs.
In one way, traveling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered… is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight… Freud was brilliantly right when he wrote about “the narcissism of the small difference.” When you hear bigots talk about the “other,” it’s always in the same tones as their colonial bosses used to employ to talk about them. (Dirty, prone to crime, lazy, untrustworthy with women and - this is especially toxic - inclined to breed rapidly.)
We still inhabit the prehistory of our race, and have not caught up with the immense discoveries about our own nature and that of the universe. The genome has effectively abolished racism and creationism… but how much more addictive is the familiar old garbage about tribe and nation and faith.
Have nothing to do with identity politics… It began as a sort of reaction to the defeats and downturns that followed 1968… I knew in my bones that a truly bad idea had entered the discourse… People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication, in even less interesting form, of the narcissism of the small difference.
“Today is the day they find me out.” I am consoled, when I suffer this very same apprehension, by the thought that the pope and the queen and the president all wake up every morning with a similar gnawing fear.
Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.