Rage, God and the Other Hitchens

The "Other Hitchens" as some may have guessed is Peter Hitchens, the brother of the late and more notorious Christopher Hitchens.  Peter is, or was, a journalist by trade, and although I hesitate to say it having brothers of my own, is probably known to most of us as Christopher's brother.  This may be unjust; frankly, I don't know.

I recently read Peter Hitchens' book The Rage Against God subtitled, I think, "How atheism led me to faith" (I'm not sure, as no helpful if irritating colon appears between the "God" and the "How" on the cover of the book; which indeed wouldn't make much sense).

Peter like his brother writes quite well.  Unlike his brother, he believes in God.  He believes in Christianity in fact, which means to me--necessarily though in many cases without acknowledgement and even in denial--that he believes in a certain God, said to be the only one in being, though Father, Son and Holy Spirit).

The painting, or more properly altarpiece, shown above is The Last Judgment by Rogier van der Weyden, a work of the 15th century.  The book is a kind of account of Peter's youth, his lapse into atheism, and his return to the faith of his fathers, combined with as assault upon atheism and its adherents, including his brother, and the arguments they make against religion and particularly their attitude toward it and the religious.  If I understand him correctly, this painting made such a profound impression upon him that it was essential to his rejection of atheism and embracing of Christianity.

I should say first that I think that Christopher Hitchens, whose writings I mostly admire, Richard Dawkins and others of the "new atheists" are excessive and extreme in their criticism of religion and the religious.  So to a certain extent I sympathize with complaints made by Peter Hitchens in this book.  But for various reasons I think it fails in its effort to persuade (as I think he tries to do) that Christianity is necessary to civilization, morality, and most everything we fallen creatures do, think or say.

I think it's clear that Christianity, not religion in general or belief in a deity, is what is being defended and propounded.  This is because Christianity is the only religion he mentions except to the extent he refers to other religions (primarily Islam and Judaism) as examples of the the efforts made by atheist countries or societies such as the USSR and (Christian support of it notwithstanding) Nazi Germany.  This is part of his claim that such societies purposefully persecute religions because of a hatred of God and because religion is based on the belief that what is good and right exists outside of humanity and indeed outside of the universe.  Totalitarian governments do not want anyone to believe such things, according to him, because they persuade people to think there is something greater than the State, something by which the State is to be judged.

Also, Christianity in its Anglican form in the 1950s is what he looks back upon most fondly.  Its current version is not at all to his taste.  The first portion of the book is an indulgence in nostalgia, in fact.   The author longs for the days when England ruled the waves, and the sun never set on it empire.  It's unclear to me whether he believes that the acceptance of Christianity by England assured her success and dominion and its rejection caused its decline, but one does get that impression.

Those halcyon days having passed, and with them all glory, grandeur, poetry, courtesy, gallantry, honesty, the author perforce became an atheist.  There were a number of reasons for this decline, and Christianity played its part in it, by buying into liberal views on sex, on multiculturalism, on relativism, on egalitarianism, etc. 

Then came the day he saw the work of art pictured above.  He saw in the naked figures at the bottom of the work people who he says looked just like people he knew.  Their nakedness apparently helped foster this impression.  This was not because they were naked, but because they weren't wearing any of the peculiar clothes worn by people of that time.  As a result they could not be dismissed as different.  Most effective, though, was the fact that they were in terror of the Last Judgment, some even shown as vomiting in fear.  

It seems fear was a motivating factor in Peter Hitchens return to the faith.  Fear of judgment, presumably, and eternal damnation due to conduct contrary to the laws of God.  Fear certainly can motivate intensely.  However, being told to believe in God or else doesn't seem to persuade unless one is already in extremis as it were.  Also, it hardly seems to be a particularly Christian method of persuasion.  "Believe or burn in hell forever" isn't something one can picture Jesus saying, though some of his followers were apt to make this threat on his behalf.

If fear played a part in making him believe, I honor his honesty in admitting as much.  But he argues also that in the absence of belief in God, horrible things are done.  Witness the USSR and Nazi Germany.  This also seems one of his arguments in favor of having a religion.

It is at least something he thinks atheists like his late brother should acknowledge if they were fair, and gave religion its due.  Even cynics and likely non-believers like Napoleon (not his example, but mine) recognized it was necessary for the "common people" to believe in religion for the sake of order.  Thus his deal with the Catholic Church.

This may be an argument to the effect that religion has its uses, but again is not one which inspires belief in Christianity or any other institutional religion.  What is it that he believes inspired him, or should inspire others, to believe?

Here I confess I begin to lose him.  The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were horrible.  Were they horrible because they persecuted religion and sought to eliminate it, or for other reasons?  Maybe there was more than one cause.  If there was, can we claim as he seems to that it was their eradication of religion--Christianity in particular--that made them become evil?  Does it makes sense to contend that if they had tolerated religions--Christianity in particular--they wouldn't have been evil?  Or only evil sometimes, as Tsarist Russian was, as he seems to admit?

Whether he does so intentionally or unintentionally, he seems to maintain that Christianity alone can give us what we need to be moral and to have a just and true civilization.  A part of this is his assertion that it is necessary to have a standard of what is good and true beyond what humans can conceive in order for us to know what is good or true.  A part is his claim that only Christianity, with its injunction that we love one another, that can bring us close to God, to do his will.  The Christian demand that we love one another is superior to, for example, the Golden Rule.

He chides his brother for saying it is unrealistic to demand that we love one another as we love ourselves or are children.  He claims we show this love in dying to save others as in war, or to save a child in danger.  Well, certainly such selfless acts have been done, but despite the rhetoric employed these days not everyone is or can be heroic.  We are not heroes everyday.  Typically, we favor our children for example over those of our neighbors or total strangers.  It is unclear to me that we always love each other, and clear that we do not, and not having done so for ages suggests we aren't likely to  do so no matter how many gods command us to.

But in the end, and finally, I am again astonished by the arrogance of the Christian apologist.  For all the good points and respectable arguments he makes, other religions are hardly mentioned as guides to living life morally.  And no consideration is given to the fact that humansurvived, somehow, for ages before Jesus lived and even for a longer period before Christianity became what it is today, and in that time developed laws and theories of ethics and the good state, and good life, without belief in Christianity and even without belief in a personal, transcendent deity, that Christianity borrowed from assiduously.

I don't understand the rage against God or the religious felt by some atheists, but neither do I understand how such people as Peter Hitchens contend that the only choice to be made is to be atheist or to be Christian.

The Other Hitchens

The Rage Against God is a book written by Christopher Hitchen's brother Peter.  He and his late brother apparently were not close, as adults at least, and differed regarding God as may be guessed from the title of the book.  He writes well, though in my mind not as well as his late brother.  But I'm not certain just what he was trying to achieve in this book.  It would seem that the book was intended to be a kind of response to CH's (I'll use initials to distinguish them) voluble atheism as well as an effort to characterize and explain the rage which PH felt is behind the the New Atheists.  If that was the intent, I don't think it has the intended result.

In a way, the book begins much the same way as Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind (discussed in an earlier post) began:  with a summoning and nostalgic description of good old days, now gone, in part at least as a result of the decline in the Christian religion.  Is this sentimental recollection the result of age?  It would seem PH and I are not many years apart (perhaps Bloom was about my age, or older, when he wrote his book).

Do I do this too?  I have a certain fondness for the Catholicism of my youth, or at least for the aesthetics of it, and tend to be critical of the dullness and inanity of the current ritual and music.  But for me, at least, this fondness doesn't translate into a belief in the doctrine behind the older variant of the Church, nor is it a part of an insistence that the world has spiraled into a toilet due to the abandonment of that doctrine or variant.  PH indicates he is a Christian.  Just what that means and why he is one is not explained.

But it would appear the descent which is claimed to have taken place began even earlier than the 1950s.  PH believes that it all began after the First World War.  It makes sense to me that this cataclysmic event changed the world for the worst, and that it may have been responsible for a growing disdain for traditional religious beliefs which it seems both sides invoked in support of their efforts to kill.  But the belief that God was on the side of those warring against one another has characterized wars for centuries.

The wars of the 20th century dwarfed those of the past in magnitude, as a result of technology, but it is unclear the ferocity of those wars resulted from an abandonment of religion.  I think it is more likely that it resulted from the inference that given the technology available, it is necessary to engage in total war in order to defeat an opponent.  Victory on the battlefield is no longer as dependent on the skill and training of an opponent when one side can annihilate the other with mere firepower.  It's said that Napoleon's tactical brilliance declined as he came to rely more and more on massed artillery fire to win battles. 

PH is inclined to blame such things as the total war and atrocities of the 20th century on materialism.  He goes into detail regarding the character of society and culture in the Soviet Union where he lived for a time.  I'm sure conditions there were miserable for all but the elite, as he says, and share his disdain for Western intellectuals who it seems were incapable of viewing Stalin as a monster.  But in what sense was Russia better before the abolition of the Orthodox Church by the Bolsheviks?  Wasn't life miserable for all but the elite under the Czars?  Does PH think it was miserable in a better way under the Czars than it was in the Soviet Union?  Again, this is not explained.

I'm struck by the fact that this book, like that of Bloom's, is a series of assertions mingled with fairly frequent complaints.  There is no argument made in either work, properly speaking.  They consist of pronouncements, proclamations.

PH claims that morality is not possible without God, which is to say without belief in certain precepts which exist outside of what we consider reality.  If I understand him correctly, he maintains this is demonstrated though the concept of Christian love.  He notes that his brother CH wrote that it is not possible to achieve such love.  He distinguishes Christian love from the Golden Rule and believes the former provides a truer basis for morality than the latter, and the abandonment of the former is responsible for or demonstrates by its consequences the impossibility of a truly effective morality (he seems to acknowledge that reciprocity and decency are not dependent on the existence of God, but feels them to be insufficient).

Frankly, I've felt that what is called Christian love is impossible to achieve as well, and is something we honor in the breach, as it were.  We may tout it as an ideal, but we are better off practically speaking to try to do what we actually can do.  Regardless, though, I don't think it is accurate to claim that this love is something peculiar to Christianity, or even to religion in any institutional sense, at least.  PH appears to understand that Christianity is in many senses derivative of older religions, but he doesn't discuss this derivativeness in the context of his thesis.  I assume he must be aware of the writings of Celsus, who demonstrated long ago that the ancient pagan philosophers also referred to the need to love one another, to love others as we love ourselves, long before Jesus is said to have lived.

I'm no fan of the New Atheists, who do indeed sometimes seem enraged, and sometimes without good reason.  Their attitude seems to be one of contempt not only for established religion but for the religious or spiritual generally, and I think that is uncalled for and arrogant.

The book has a touching epilogue, in which PH notes that his last debate with CH was not bitter or contentious, and that they had some friendly time together before the debate.  The book was written before CH"s death, and there is no indication it was understood CH had terminal cancer when written.  One hopes the brothers reconciled fully regardless of their differences on this issue.

But this kind of response does little to defend traditional religion in general or Christianity in particular, in my opinion.  I keep looking for what I think would be a reasonable defense of a reasonable belief in God and do not find it.  Perhaps that's because the defenses made are dependent on a view of religion too tied to the myths and doctrines vested in established, institutional religions which must carry with them baggage which should be discarded.  Or perhaps that's because there is no reasonable defense.  I hope the former is the case.