Mongrel Magazine
It’s just after noon on Bloomsday, and Christopher Hitchens – author, Vanity Fair columnist, professional contrarian and ridiculously high-functioning alcoholic – is making preparations to begin his day’s drinking. He opens the hotel room mini bar, glowering contemptuously into its interior, before deciding there’s nothing in it to meet his exacting requirements. He hands me a quarter bottle of white wine and rings down to reception. His urbane boozehound’s speaking voice is as suavely self-possessed as his prose.
‘Hello, it’s Hitchens here in room 409. I can’t get room service to answer the phone. Could you intervene for me? It’s very easy. I just want them to pour a large Black Label Johnny Walker scotch. With no ice please. And that’s all I want. If I can get a rush on that, I can’t tell you how grateful I would be. Thank you, happy Bloomsday.’
This small but important piece of business out of the way, Hitchens repairs to the en suite from where he talks loudly at me through the open door, whilst pissing, about a party he is going to at Paul McGuinness’s house in Wicklow that afternoon. Colm Tóibín is picking him up after the interview and driving him down. His “new best friend, Mr. Boh-noh” will be amongst the guests, he assures me over the trickle of his own micturition. Having flushed, he emerges from the bathroom and begins to enthuse coolly about Tóibín’s charm as he buttons up his flies. ‘He’s the best conversationalist I think I know, apart from maybe Mr. Rushdie. Maybe even better. I don’t know how he does it, quite; it’s sort of magical. He’s unbelievably charming on any number of topics. Very witty. I’ve watched him in the hope of picking up a tip or two.’
It takes a particular kind of charm to get away with this sort of concentrated name-dropping, but Hitchens manages it, somehow. It’s difficult to believe that someone is trying to impress you, I suppose, when they’re talking to you over their shoulder and pissing with the door open.
Christopher Hitchens likes a good argument. Since starting out as a columnist for The New Statesman in the early 1970s, hardly a week has passed where he has not attacked – or been attacked by – someone or other. He has published book-length harangues against Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa of Calcutta. He has instigated intellectual dust-ups with Noam Chomsky, George Galloway and Tom Wolfe and was, for quite some time, a hate figure for the entire American left after his acrimonious defection from its ranks in the wake of 9/11 and subsequent zealous support of the Iraq war. Hitchens has even clashed with one of his closest friends, Martin Amis, over the latter’s public airing of their disagreement over Stalinism in his book Koba the Dread. In 2005, he was named fifth in a “Top 100 Public Intellectuals” poll held jointly by Prospect and Foreign Policy. More recently, as a columnist with Vanity Fair, he has become a kind of shit-stirrer in residence for the American mainstream media. In the last year or so alone, there has been a tipsy and truculent interview on The Daily Show, an incident on HBO’s political talk show Real Time With Bill Maher in which he gave the finger and sneered ‘fuck you! fuck you!’ to Maher’s ‘frivolous’ audience, as well an irascible appearance on Fox News the day after the death of fundamentalist televangelist and Christian Right leader Rev. Jerry Falwell in which he declaimed – over a rising, tumultuous tide of signature music – that ‘if you gave Falwell an enema you could bury him in a matchbox.’ Christopher Hitchens has been in more spats than Fred Astaire.
It was clearly only a matter of time until Hitch took a fortifying swig from his hip flask, rolled up his elegantly rumpled linen sleeves and prepared to duke it out with The Creator himself. His new book, God is Not Great: The Case Against Religion, is the latest strike a current wave of attacks by heavy-hitting atheists such as Daniel Dennett’s Breaking The Spell, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. The book is .a 287 page denunciation of theism that is every bit as witty, as fractious and as frustratingly impervious to counterarguments as its author.
Once the Scotch arrives, Hitchens is ready to begin the interview in earnest. After an abortive struggle to get the window open and a perfunctory apology for the dense fug of Silk Cut smoke that pervades the small, rather cluttered room, he settles into a chair and we get down to talking about the book.
We’ve had Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Daniel Dennett’s and Sam Harris’s books on religion, and now you’re weighing in. Would it be fair to say that there’s something abrew at the moment?
I think there’s actually a zeitgeist change. The proof of it is that Dawkins sold a gigantic number of books, to the point where I was beginning to think mine was going to come out too late. But I’m quite sure that the extraordinary sales that my book has had – if I do say so myself – is not because of my blue eyes. It is partly because of Dawkins and Harris and Dennett. We’re having to think of a name for ourselves now because we’ve already been called The Four Musketeers, which I think is a bit lame. But my only suggestion so far – come up with a better one if you like, and I wish you would – is ‘The Four Horsemen of the Counter Apocalypse.’ It takes a bit too long to say, I think. But the reception to all these books is a minor but definite zeitgeist change. People are fed up with religious coercion and bullying, and they’ve found that they can’t take the secular enlightenment for granted as they once thought that they could. Wherever you turn there’s an example of some unbelievable clerical nastiness, stupidity or both, and I think people have had enough of it.
You discuss in the book the need for what you call a ‘New Enlightenment’, and you end it by talking about the need to fight. What do you mean by both of these things?
‘New Enlightenment’ is kind of a catchpenny phrase, and I’m unhappy now that I used it. But I suppose I mean the old Enlightenment, more or less. I think there’s no reason at all to think that God exists but there’s no way to disprove it. To be religious you have to say that you know God exists which is much more than you can know. So you’re already starting with an unprovable point. You know his mind and you’re on good terms with him. You know what he wants you to eat, who he wants you to go to bed with. Now that’s patently absurd; that cannot be the case. No one knows that, so you can exclude from the argument – intellectually at any rate and, I think, morally – anyone who does make such a fantastically arrogant assumption.
A lot of religious belief is not genuine belief, though, so much as professed belief. There are a lot of people who tell themselves and others that they believe something that they actually don’t.
Yes, I know this to be true from my book tour around the southern states. It’s all over the place. It’s all a la carte, all cafeteria. I made a mistake with one guy on a radio station in Seattle. I said I don’t think anyone really believes in the virgin birth and he said ‘I do.’ I said ‘you don’t really’ and he said, ‘I do, I believe absolutely in the immaculate conception.’ I told him he’d got it wrong and he said ‘What do you mean I’ve got it wrong? I’ve been a Catholic all my life.’ The immaculate conception and the virgin birth are two different concepts. He didn’t get this, but he believed in both. Well, I thought, what else could I get him to believe while I was at it? Why not the Tooth Fairy in that case?
You’re obviously not preaching to the converted then.
One of my aims with this book has been to spread unease among the faithful, and I think I’ve been successful. I did a long exchange on the Christianity Today website. The religious press is reviewing the book and a lot of them have said they have to agree with some of what I’m saying and that they need to sharpen their arguments as well. I debated [African American civil rights leader and social justice activist] Reverend Al Sharpton. That was easy. He’s a very obvious religious charlatan.
You don’t think he’s genuinely a believer?
I think he’s a fraud. He wakes up every morning pinching himself, thinking ‘by the time I go to bed tonight, three different limos will have taken me to three different studios where everyone calls me Reverend.’ Unbelievable hustler
Even though I suppose I’m an atheist, I can’t quite get myself to believe that the world would be a better place without religion.
I didn’t say that it would, it’s just that … You know, why do you pity an atheist? No one to talk to while getting a blowjob. The reason why I don’t want religion to die out is that I’d have no one to argue with.
Do you genuinely mean that, or are you just being glib?
Yes, I do. It’s a very critical argument. Everyone should force themselves to decide what they think about why we’re here if there is a why. Also religion is part of our history: it was philosophy before there was any evidence or information. It’s what we did when we knew fuck all. But what I’m arguing for is for people who believe it to make it a private belief. I don’t have a big friend like you who is a redeemer and also a dictator whose rule will never come to an end. I can’t stop you thinking that but don’t you teach it to my children, and don’t you try to enact it in law and don’t come round to my house, and don’t attack civil aviation, and then it’s fine, you can believe all you like. But I do insist on those conditions, because otherwise it’s not a difference of opinion, it’s a fight. And you would lose. That said, my youngest daughter goes to a Quaker school because they have a serious education system.
Does that not strike you as slightly contradictory?
Well, the religious aspect of these schools is not what it used to be in the states, as with here. The Quakers have Meetings for Worship, which is simply just kneeling in silence. Not a bad way of starting the day, as a matter of fact.
Your book is about the pernicious effects of religion on the public sphere, and yet if you look in the index there are only three references to George W. Bush, and they’re all very fleeting and inconsequential. Are you avoiding a thorny topic?
Bush’s supposed devoutness is invariably overstated. He says Jesus got him off the booze, but I’m as sure as I can be that he’s not telling the truth, because I know why he did give it up. I know the date and the time and the place. As has been said by previous wives in Texas and is probably being said by a Texan wife as we speak, are the following words: ‘It’s Jack Daniels or me, asshole. Pull that shit again and I’m leaving and taking the girls.’ That’s what happened But he’s not going to say that’s why he gave it up, now is he? He says he got help from above? Bullshit. To agree that he’s as religious as some people believe he is is to accept the validity of his claims, which I’m not willing to do. He said something that I know he doesn’t believe anymore, which is that Vladimir Putin is a wonderful guy because he was wearing his mother’s crucifix. Well fuck that! He must be deeply sorry he said that. I would say that that – and bear in mind the strong field of competition here – is the second stupidest thing he’s ever said. The stupidest is that Islam is a religion of peace. I mean, I ask you! That isn’t usually what his leftist opponents hold against him, incidentally. For them he has to be a Christian crusader to fit their clichéd view of the world, and that doesn’t fit it. They need him to be a certain way and they exclude any evidence to the contrary, which is a very crudely ideological view.
You’ve had to defend this guy in the past, particularly over Iraq. Yet it’s clear from what you’re saying that you’ve no time for him.
I’ve no time for any religious simpleton.
I very much enjoyed your obituary for Jerry Falwell on Fox News, by the way. Stirring stuff.
Thank you. Well, they garbled the last bit. People couldn’t hear what I was saying, they played music over it. I said if they gave him an enema they could bury him in a matchbox. I think they slowed it down and someone decoded it. It wasn’t directly audible, to my intense annoyance.
Do you prepare lines like that in advance, have them all cued up and ready to go?
No, no. I didn’t know what I was going to say before I went on. They drove me to it. I can prove that. If I’d had it prepared I wouldn’t have been saying it at the end when the music came up. You need to get through a few rounds before you find out what you’re going to say.
As persuasive an argument as you mount in the book, I couldn’t help thinking that, with a lot of what you’re talking about, the problem is really human perversity, and that religion is just one of the channels that perversity flows through.
Yes. I mean, when there would have been a fight in say Beirut or Bosnia, there would’ve been a tussle over turf and people would have acted very badly on the basis of national or ethnic rivalry. I dare say in any case religion is a very powerful reinforcer and gives permission to behave in a very uncivilized way. If there was a mass outbreak of secularism in these places I don’t think it would be as bad. Anyway you can be an atheist and a nihilist, or an atheist and a sadist or a fascist. Most fascists were believers, as it happens, but there’s nothing in atheism to stop this kind of thing. Atheism is just clearing the underbrush out, getting a more lucid picture of the way things really are and emancipating yourself from certain superstitions. And that’s good, but all your work is still ahead of you.
You say in the book that fascism is more or less a synonym for Catholocism.
Yes, fascism is the name given to the Catholic right wing in Europe and America too. I don’t think it’s questionable; that’s almost an identity. Twenty-five percent of the SS were Catholics, and no one was ever threatened with ex-communication. Apart from Goebbels, however, who was ex-communicated for marrying a Protestant. You know, ‘that’s it – you’ve gone too far now, sorry, we do have our standards.’ I mean, come on. One has to get real at a certain point. What is this stuff? How long has the human species been on this planet would you say?
I’ve no idea.
Probably, having been fucked around with a bit, not more than 120,000 – 250,000 years. Not even a milisecond of evolutionary time, but a long time for us. People get born, they struggle, strive, die probably in their 20′s, wisdom teeth will kill most of them. At one point it seems in Africa, humanity was down to about 2,000 people from the effects of plague and a volcano. So only in the last 6,000 years God decides to intervene? And only in certain remote parts of the Middle East? Heaven watched, thinking ‘who cares about the redemption of this riff-raff?’ And then, just about yesterday: ‘ah, I better send a son to be torn to shreds in a remote part of Palestine, that’ll sort them out.’ Come on! It just isn’t possible that this is the case.
