Remembering Christopher Hitchens
A comment on other comments about a commentator
It is often said of the Velvet Underground that while they didn’t sell many records, everyone who bought one started their own band. As public intellectuals go the journalist Christopher Hitchens can’t claim obscurity – least of all because he’s been dead ten years – but it is striking how many young-ish male writers cite him as an influence.
For those now warily drifting away from proper youth, Hitchens is a totemic figure. And I wonder if it is partly that many of us discovered him as teenagers while the New Atheist was loudly denouncing religion as a universal poison.
“The way he has become a kind of origin point for dude columnists is fascinating,” as the Sunday Times’ Josh Glancy noted on Twitter today. “There’s almost an Orwell-level obligation to define oneself in relation to this writer.”
I paid my own dues in the Critic today, and Glancy is right. Hitchens is one of the reasons I became a journalist. While trying and failing to make a living from music in the early 2010s, I became obsessed with his appearances on American public television in the nineties and noughties, where he would talk about what were then current affairs. It’s a mark of his charisma that these were still interesting to me.
Though I was aware of him during his lifetime for his role in New Atheism, I didn’t pay much attention to him then. Richard Dawkins was enough for me. Yet the appeal of dominating others through intellectual bombast was ultimately undeniable for a young man who hadn’t earnt much esteem through playing sports, or even academia.
Clearly I’m not alone. Ben Sixsmith and James Marriott, both roughly my age, have noted Hitchens’ influence in their own lives this month, for good and ill. Tomiwa Owolade, who is a bit younger, has done something similar for UnHerd, with the headline writers alleging a “cult” around Hitchens. A little older than me you have James Bloodworth and Janan Ganesh, both largely complimentary. Hitchens’ contemporary Oliver Kamm probably went a bit overboard.
There is a great deal of agreement nonetheless. Hitchens was charismatic. He had sex appeal, although perhaps the kind that appeals more to straight men than women. He also had an attractive debauchedness and freedom from constraint. “He wakes up when he likes, works from home, is married to someone who wears leopard-skin high heels, and conducts heady, serious discussions late into the night,” as the New Yorker’s Ian Parker wrote in 2006.
Many note also a tendency for boorishness, and getting things wrong with great conviction. “The qualities in Hitchens’ work that I (mostly) recoil from nowadays are the prevailing sense of certainty,” as Bloodworth says, citing as an example rants about Islam.
Both these combine into the savage intellectual aggression that Hitchens was famed for. “His vicious put-downs – or ‘Hitchslaps’ as they were nicknamed – were ideal for the age of the online video clip, with compilations released years after his death amassing millions of views,” as I put it.
Thought Kamm argues that he “rarely” chose to humiliate opponents, this may be doing the work of headlines about “mostly peaceful” riots that were justly mocked last year. I’d guess that for many of his younger, maler fans his talent for dominating others was much of the appeal.
And while there are female admirers of Hitchens’ I suspect the draw is largely male, much as most fans of self-help writer (and controversial psychological theorist) Jordan Peterson are male. The urge to compete with and crush opposition is not unique to young men, but it’s amplified.
In a similar way, Hitchens encouraged others to live their own lives, and to do so instead of pursuing “a career”. As Ganesh argues, his speaking and writing implores you to avoid teams if you’re interested in finding the truth and expressing it. For those finding their way such remarks are encouraging.
Those paid to write about long-dead journalists in national newspapers and periodical magazines can hardly claim to be marginal figures, nor to have lost all of life’s contests. But for those who came to Hitchens’ at that vulnerable pivot between adolescence and adulthood, I suspect his example will always speak to something. Whether his work is still relevant is for me besides the point.