War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning

Via Julian Sanchez, I came upon a quote from Christopher Hitchens that I hadn't encountered before. It runs:

In order to get my own emotions out of the way, I should say briefly that on that day I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting.

This reminds me of nothing so much as the passage early in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, when the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, feels similar stirrings (albeit with vastly different political motivations) upon hearing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact:

The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.

Julian, riffing on Hitchens' remarks, expresses anger at George W. Bush for failing to nurture and sustain that rush of euphoria, of fervor in a righteous cause: "Before we could catch more than a glimpse through the window" that 9/11 opened, he writes, "it snapped shut." In my more anti-Bush moments, I sometimes feel the same way, but I'm not sure it's fair to imagine that the feelings that Hitchens and Waugh describe could have been sustained - or, for that matter, to imagine that it would have been a good thing, for America or the world, if they had been sustained. "It is well that war is so terrible," Robert E. Lee famously remarked at Fredericksburg, "or we should grow too fond of it." Much of what has gone wrong in the Bush years has been a matter of his Administration's misguided overreaching, but some of it is simply a matter of the unrefinable awfulness of war, which wasn't visible in those first stirring days after 9/11 but which would have become visible eventually no matter who occupied the Oval Office. And looking back on the feelings that Hitchens describes, and Julian celebrates, and that I myself shared (though I wouldn't frame them in quite the same way, since secularism, skepticism, and cosmopolitanism are not my first loves), I sometimes feel as Guy Crouchback did at the end of his own war - in a passage I've quoted before - years after his initial burst of enthusiasm:

"Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These Communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians-not very many perhaps-who felt this. Were there none in England?"

"God forgive me," said Guy. "I was one of them."

Though of course, as faithful Atlantic readers know, Hitchens didn't much care for the Sword of Honour trilogy.

Comments

Hitchens, for all his cool, cosmopolitan secular skepticism, is at bottom a hopeless romantic.

Posted by Bill | August 17, 2007 1:31 PM

By the way, totally off topic, I was thinking about Christopher Hitchens' ubiquity in the press.
The widespread notion in America that Christopher Hitchens is a Major Thinker is a puzzling one. I have to imagine that much of the reception he gets on this side of the pond is due to the naiveté of us Colonials about British journalists. Hitchens has the Fleet Street knack for being able to churn out publishable prose fast and fluently despite spending a lot of time in fashionable watering holes getting well-watered, in which condition he conducts publicized feuds with other well-watered British personalities. Few American hacks can long function like that. But an ability to type while nursing a hangover does not make Hitchens the second coming of John Stuart Mill.

I think part of his popularity with editors has to do with his literary criticism. You say he didn't like Waugh's "Sword of Honor" -- obviously, the Trotskyite Hitchens doesn't share Waugh's politics or religion -- but the point is that Hithcens reviewed Waugh at great length in The Atlantic. When I was in college, Waugh was largely ignored. What's distinctive about Hitchens is that he hitched his wagon a long time ago to the anti-modernist school of British literature: poetry that rhymes, like Kipling and Larkin, and novels that are easy to read, like Waugh and Orwell. These weren't popular in the middle of the 20th Century with academics and mandarin literary critics, who promoted James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. But Hitchens' literary tastes are popular with journalists who don't have time for high-falutin' stuff. So, Hitchens has been a favorite of editors because he endorses and validates their tastes in literature.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 17, 2007 1:39 PM

Well said, Ross. Elsewhere Hitchens has referred to the campaign after 9/11 as "a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate." It's difficult to imagine even Sir Walter Scott writing something so militantly and pretentiously romantic.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | August 17, 2007 1:51 PM

Christopher Hitchens' eulogy for Trotsky, in which he calls him "a prophetic moralist," can be read in the July 2004 Atlantic Monthly:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200407/hitchens

A reader who was an old drinking buddy of Hitchens points out that Hitch regularly had his own Mel Gibson Moments after a dozen scotches:

"When I knew him, he claimed to be the "world's biggest anti-Semite" and a great friend of the Palestinians. Then he "discovered" a Jewish great-aunt and began a reassessment of his antecedents, or just decided to give the flip-side a spin or two."

In 2005, there was an extraordinary on-stage dialogue between the long-estranged brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens over their infant rivalry.

What might look like ideological clashes on the surface are often actually just rationalizations for ethnic clashes between extended families, but the Hitchens Brothers represent an interesting case of an ethnic clash between brothers within a nuclear family. Tory Peter was the favorite of their English father, Trotskyite Christopher of their [possibly] Jewish mother, who committed suicide. Christopher is still a strident atheist, but as Paul Johnson pointed out in his "History of the Jews," it's been common down through the centuries for young atheist intellectuals to become more focused on Jewish ethnic interests as they age, without necessarily becoming theists. The conversion to the ideology of neoconism of Christopher, who, despite his hatred of religion, has taken to dropping in to synagogues as he travels to express his ethnic solidarity, is a good example of this venerable tendency toward gerontocratic ethnocentrism.

I suspect that Christopher Hitchens used to love Trotsky for being a Communist mass murderer, but now loves him more for being an ethnically Jewish mass murderer.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 17, 2007 1:54 PM

"Julian, riffing on Hitchens' remarks, expresses anger at George W. Bush for failing to nurture and sustain that rush of euphoria, of fervor in a righteous cause"

For those not clicking through, let me just quibble slightly with this summary. My complaint is not really with the administration's lack of righteous fervor--that they have in spades--but with the choice to exploit the fervor that emerged in the wake of the attacks divisively--tough Republicans against soft Dems, America against... well, everyone else--rather than making it the basis for a broader "Western front."

Posted by Julian Sanchez | August 17, 2007 2:46 PM

Hitchens, who favored the "multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan." versus Waugh's Crouchback who saw the "enemy plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle."

Now, this is a battle worth fighting without quarter. Why should anyone shrink from it? Waugh's side is, of course, right, which leaves no wiggle room for Douthatian meliorists.

Posted by Peter Leavitt | August 17, 2007 5:28 PM

"For those not clicking through, let me just quibble slightly with this summary. My complaint is not really with the administration's lack of righteous fervor--that they have in spades--but with the choice to exploit the fervor that emerged in the wake of the attacks divisively--tough Republicans against soft Dems, America against... well, everyone else--rather than making it the basis for a broader 'Western front.'"

What exactly would the purpose of this "Western Front" be? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm just curious.

Posted by Ashish George | August 17, 2007 6:42 PM

A small response to the Robert Lee quotation:

They had fought throughout the day under the eyes of Lee and Longstreet. The men behind the wall had only to crank their necks around and there the big men were, right above them looking on. The two generals spent the afternoon up on the hill coining fine phrases like a pair of wags. Longstreet said his men in the sunken road were in such a position that if you marched every man in the Army of the Potomac across that field, his men would kill them before they got to the wall. And he said the Federals fell that long afternoon as steady as rain dripping down from the eaves of a house. Old Lee, not to be outdone, said it's a good thing war is so terrible or else we'd get to liking it too much. As with everything Marse Robert said, the men repeated that flight of wit over and over, passing it along from man to man, as if God amighty Himself had spoken. When the report reached Inman's end of the wall he just shook his head. Even back then, early in the war, his opinion differed considerably from Lee's, for it appeared to him that we like fighting plenty, and the more terrible it is the better. And he suspected that Lee liked it most of all and would, if given his preference, general them right through the gates of death itself. What troubled Inman most, though, was that Lee made it clear he looked on war as an instrument for clarifying God's obscure will. Lee seemed to think battle--among all acts man might commit--stood outranked in sacredness only by prayer and Bible reading. Inman worried that following such logic would soon lead one to declare the victor of every brawl and dogfight as God's certified champion. Those thoughts were unspeakable among the ranks, as were his feelings that he did not enlist to take on a Marse, even one as solemn and noble-looking as Lee was that day on Maryes Heights.

Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

I'll let you all draw your parallels on your own, should you choose.

Posted by Donald | August 17, 2007 10:21 PM

Of course, Sanchez is not so motivated by this righteous war to actually, you know, get off the keyboard and pick up a rifle.

Posted by Malvolio | August 17, 2007 10:21 PM

And incidentally, Sailer is damned inescapable on this blog's message boards. Enough!! I, for one, have gotten the point already: all of human history is explicable in terms of race.

...

and Hitchens is a conniving Jew.

Posted by Donald | August 17, 2007 10:31 PM

Donald, 10:31pm said

explicable in terms of race.... and Hitchens is a conniving Jew.

But is it race or the struggle for parental approval that has become imprinted, part of character, not just a loyalty but a creed? Someone above claimed that Peter was his fathers favorite and Christopher his mothers. The father "had a good war", was conservative and had a strong Christian upbringing; Peter is pro-war, conservative and a fundie Christian (even believing in creationism). The mother must have left the father for a reason and there's no official, what's the word... chalour? between the bothers. Perhaps it's nothing to do with race - we are all the product of our upbringing.

Posted by Journeyman | August 18, 2007 6:05 AM

Peter Hitchens was against the war, is an Anglican rather than a "fundie," and does not believe in creationism.

Posted by James Kabala | August 18, 2007 12:01 PM

Bush has his share of blame for the unsatisfactory state of things. But most of the blame lies with the American people themselves, who were largely only too happy to cheer him on.

Bush just represented a deep-seated impulse that the general population had been holding for decades.

It's kind of like the end of the Oxbow incident where the lynch mob has managed to make a mess of things, and then they, naturally, turn on the man they appointed leader insisting the whole disgrace was his fault and that they were somehow not to blame for the hanging of innocent men.

You're not getting off that easy America.

Posted by Rathje | August 18, 2007 12:47 PM

Steve Sailer writes: "I suspect that Christopher Hitchens used to love Trotsky for being a Communist mass murderer, but now loves him more for being an ethnically Jewish mass murderer."

I suspect Steve Sailer loves Dumbya Bush for similar (yet ethnically and politically different) reasons of his own.

The blood still gets shed. Medals of Freedom for everyone!

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 18, 2007 3:13 PM

Christopher Hitchens has been calling himself Jewish since his discovery at age 38 that his maternal grandmother called herself Jewish. His estranged brother Peter, a devout Christian and prominent pundit, has calculated that they are 1/32 Jewish, but Christopher, the world-famous atheist tub-thumber, says it's all in the matrilineal line, so by Jewish religious law, he's Jewish. Christopher's new ethnic identity is all tied into Christopher's belief that his Chrisian father favored Peter, while he was his mother's favorite (his mother's suicide note was addressed to him, which he seems to feel has given him a permanent one up over his brother).

The problem with people who can write plausible-sounding persuasive prose, like Christopher Hitches, is that it's easy to assume that they are rational beings driven by a careful, reasonable consideration of the facts. In reality, Sigmund Freud would have made Christopher Hitchens a star case study illustrating who knows how many deeply personal complexes.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 18, 2007 3:16 PM

Actually, anyone who has met Hitchens can see that he is a rather porcine lush who trades with an upper-class English accent and a facile manner.

He stems from am ordinary middle-class naval father and a bright, partly Jewish mother, who gives him license to some sort of religious distinction.

Hitchens went to a series of second-rate English public schools and somehow made it to Oxford where he took a third-class degree in philosophy. For many years he was a devotee of the left who conveniently of late morphed into a rather testy rightist manque.

In England he would have been seen through; in America he somehow gets away with being a pontifical sage. One should pay scant attention to him.

Posted by Peter Leavitt | August 18, 2007 6:03 PM

Hitchens wants to hate in a group. Imagine George Will girding his loins -- try and tell me you don't see Hitchens.

Posted by dunnage | August 18, 2007 11:14 PM

I suspect Steve Sailer loves Dumbya Bush for similar (yet ethnically and politically different) reasons of his own.

Sailer loves Bush? Yeah, sure...

For many years he was a devotee of the left who conveniently of late morphed into a rather testy rightist manque.
Hitchens hasn't changed a bit. He loves the same things as before: secularism, progress, multiculturalism, the whole leftist constellation. When the Soviets were the revolutionary vanguard, he was a soviet sympathizer. Now he believes that the US is on the side of global revolution, and so he waves Old Glory, instead. His allegiance has changed, perhaps, but not his principles. American Republicans who take comfort in the leftist explication of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars offered by Messrs Hitchens and Bush have changed their principles to maintain their allegiance.

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