Dear Reader (and the growing ranks of “former readers,” if you haven’t left yet),
Christopher Hitchens is dead.
I knew Hitch pretty well (certainly well enough to never repeat the mistake of calling him “Chris”). For starters, we lived in the same building for a couple years. He had a palatial apartment on the top floor of the Wyoming (a great big pile of bricks in D.C.). My wife and I had something more modest on the ground floor. He got along famously with my parents, not least because all three kept alive the ancient journalistic tradition of punctuating their drinking with smoking. But also because my Dad could talk about forgotten dead Communists and my Mom about their shared animosity for Bill Clinton. Over the years we saw each other, if not often, then often enough. We weren’t close friends, but that was never an impediment for Hitchens to start a conversation – or an argument. I was even a referee of sorts to one of his many fights over God, when I wrote the introduction for this book.
Nobody who knew Hitch even a little lacks stories. Some have better ones than others. My friend Matt Labash has tales about getting booze in the war-torn Middle East. I have stories about my new dog – yes, a very young Cosmo – peeing in his apartment. Or getting absolutely pickled with him because, after all, it was a Wednesday. And there was that time Peter Beinart invited my wife and I and the Hitchenses to his house for a Sabbath dinner and Hitchens proceeded to go on an anti-Israel, anti-religion, anti-God tirade that made everyone check their watches a lot. It was an odd occasion for Hitch to bust out that whole shtick. Why go to a Shabbat dinner in the first place if you’re going to spout all that stuff? It was like going to a tailgate party at Notre Dame and badmouthing the Irish.
I once wrote somewhere around NRO that I thought that maybe – just maybe – Hitchens could be considered a “man of the Right.” He was no conservative. You can’t really be a conservative in the Anglo-American tradition and hate religion. You can be a non-believer, I think. But you have to at least have respect for the role of religion and maybe a little reverence for the role of transcendence in people’s lives. Hitch had nothing but contempt. It was one of the last truly asinine Marxist things about him.
But a man of the Right is something different. A man of the Right is not a doctrinaire conservative. What a man of the Right is, however, is something harder to define. We’ll get back to that in a minute.
I first got the idea that Hitchens might be a man of the Right after watching him on C-Span discussing the Odyssey. He was on with, among others, Jody Bottum and a left-wing female academic who (at least as far as I remember it) had little to offer other than blah-blah-blah-white-males-blah-blah (I’m paraphrasing). Hitchens had no use for the woman and really had nothing to say to her. Meanwhile, he could have a real argument with Bottum because they could at least agree that the text matters and that indictments of the heterosexist norms of the Pale Penis People were not that interesting. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that Hitch – who believed in the importance of Western Civilization (he said he’d rather defend Western Civilization than denounce John Ashcroft), gloried in the splendor of the Canon, admired other cultures but rejected utterly the asininity of multicultural leveling – was certainly not a man of the contemporary Left, or maybe not of the Left at all.
I no longer think Hitch was really a man of the Right, chiefly because you can’t be a man of the Right and reflexively, perhaps even childishly, reject the label. I’m not inclined to sugarcoat my take on the man given how he could be absolutely cruel when spouting off about the deaths of others. He could be mean, pigheaded, and insensitive (though never dull!). He could also be generous and kind. He was a brilliant and gifted polemicist who sometimes took the easiest way out by going after his opponents’ weakest arguments rather than their strongest. He defied easy categorization while having a gift for categorizing others. He’ll be missed because he was so damn good at being Christopher Hitchens.
On the Beaconsfield Position
In my universe, at least, the most famous use of the locution “man of the Right” comes from Whittaker Chambers. An ex-Communist like Hitch, though of a slightly different flavor, Chambers resigned from NR in 1959. In his resignation letter, he told Bill Buckley:
You [Bill] stand within, or, at any rate, are elaborating, a political orthodoxy. I stand within no political orthodoxy. . . . The temptation to orthodoxy is often strong, never more than in an age like this one, especially in a personal situation like mine. But it is not a temptation to which I have found it possible to yield. . . . I am at heart a counter-revolutionist. You mean to be conservative, and I know no one who seems to me to have a better right to the term. I am not a conservative. I am a man of the Right. I shall vote the straight Republican ticket for as long as I live.
I think Chambers was largely wrong here about Bill but right about himself. Chambers – much like Hitchens, Daniel Bell, Frank Meyer, James Burnham, and a zillion other ex-Communists – had a mind formed by Marxist categories and that categorizing impulse never left them. Chambers felt the tug of political orthodoxy the way an ex-junkie looks at a syringe or a drunk looks at a glass of scotch. He needed to resist the pull of ideology because he was a recovering ideology addict (I think Hitch had a similar addiction). That’s why he fled – literally fled – the affairs of men, for he could not handle the temptations of political life. He wrote to Bill:
If I were a younger man, if there were any frontiers left, I should flee to some frontier because, when the house is afire, you leave by whatever hole is open for whatever area is freest of fire. Since there are no regional frontiers, I have been seeking the next best thing-the frontiers within.
That simply wasn’t the case with Buckley. He did not flee the world of politics like a man fleeing a burning house. He rushed in like a firefighter, hoping to save what he could. But even a firefighter – especially a firefighter – must respect the fire. He must know when to attack, and when to fall back. When to fight for the salvageable and when to write off what cannot be saved. After long and heroic work in the trenches, Chambers understandably lost his stomach for such efforts. He preferred to escape to his inner frontier even as he understood the stark nature of the fight he was leaving. In a letter to Bill he wrote:
Escapism is laudable, perhaps the only truly honorable course for humane men – but only for them. Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms, must maneuver within its terms. That is what conservatives must decide: how much to give in order to survive at all; how much to give in order not to give up the basic principles. And, of course, that results in a dance along a precipice. Many will drop over and, always, the cliff dancers will hear the screaming curses of those who fall, or be numbed by the sullen silence of those, nobler souls perhaps, who will not join the dance.
Chambers called the decision to deal with the word as it comes “the Beaconsfield position,” a reference to Benjamin Disraeli, who was the Earl of Beaconsfield and a great conservative modernizer. What Chambers meant was that times change and, for conservatives to be successful, they must change with them. The “machine age” – the car, the tractor – is more of an enemy to opponents of change than intellectual radicalism will ever be. Conservative orthodoxy, warned Chambers, risks making itself – and the men who hold it dear – obsolete by not adapting to the times.
He claimed that he was not a conservative because he believed in changing with the times. But he was the one who fled. Bill Buckley, the alleged dogmatist, was the man who leapt from the bleachers into the arena to fight the gladiators as they came.
The fatalists flee and stay clean, those with hope for the future get bloodied.
What’s My Motivation?
Why am I writing about all of this? Well, partly because Hitch is dead and I am still sick of death (the closing of 2011, and the holidays that come with it, comes with too many reminders of my brother’s absence.).
But also because of the reaction to National Review’s editorial. I responded to some of the reaction here. I tried to make the point Chambers was making even as he retreated to his personal Shire in Westminster, Maryland: Conservatism, like politics generally, is not a science. Nor is it a matter of literary whimsy. It’s not an easy game where if you just read all of the manuals you’ll have all the answers. Nor is it a test where if you just fill in the oval for “(e) Most Conservative” you’ll be right every time. It requires making judgment calls, with limited information, about complicated human beings and how millions of other complicated humans beings will react to them.
Maybe it’s because I honestly and truly consider NR’s readers my friends, collectively and often individually, that I take real personal offense at the way so many critics cannot muster the intellectual courage to hold out the possibility that there’s simply a sincere difference of opinion at work here. It has to be that we’re selling out. It must be that we’re caving in. Somehow we lack courage or principles.
Why can’t we just be drawing different conclusions? I mean, I’m not asking anyone to defer to the fact that NR has a lot of smart, experienced, knowledgeable people who’ve dedicated their professional lives to this stuff. All I’m asking is that you don’t immediately assume that any disagreement withyou must be the product of stupidity, cowardice, or greed (particularly when you’re arguing that Newt Gingrich is the real outsider candidate now, but you were saying he was a sell-out six months ago – I’m not anti-Newt, but c’mon!).
I get being angry. I get being disappointed. But when I hear from people that they’ve lost all respect for me because of a perfectly defensible editorial I didn’t write, my reaction is not “Man, we blew it with this editorial.” It’s “I’m sorry I ever had your respect in the first place.”
If I sound pissed, it’s only because I am.
Various and Sundry
Sorry for the lack of pull-my-finger jokes, but I’m not really in the mood.