Hitchens vs Hitchens
By PETER HITCHENS - More by this author » Last updated at 22:40pm on 2nd June 2007
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Am I my brotherâs reviewer? A word of explanation is needed here. Some of you may know that I have a brother, Christopher, who disagrees with me about almost everything.
Some of those who read his books and articles also know that I exist, though they often dislike me if so. But in general we inhabit separate worlds â in more ways than one.
He is of the Left, lives in the United States and recently became an American citizen. I am of the Right and, after some years in Russia and America, live in the heart of England. Occasionally we clash in public.
We disagreed about the Iraq War â he was for it, I was against it. Despite the occasional temptation, I have never reviewed any of his books until today.
But now, in God Is Not Great, he has written about religion itself, attacking it as a stupid delusion.
This case, I feel, needs an answer. Most of the British elite will applaud, since they see religion as an embarrassing and (worse) unfashionable form of mania.
And I am no less qualified to defend God than Christopher is to attack him, neither of us being experts on the subject.
People sometimes ask how two brothers, born less than three years apart, should have come to such different conclusions.
To which Iâd answer that Iâm not sure theyâre as different as they look, and that itâs not over yet.
Christopher has quite often written and spoken about our upbringing and background, whereas I havenât, but I think Iâm now entitled to give a small account of what we have in common.
Because my father was in the Navy, we were brought up in a very old-fashioned Britain. Looking back, it often seems to have been a sombre landscape of grey warships and the stench of fuel-oil â but also of cathedral towers, bells and choral evensong.
Our boarding-school education, mainly on the edge of Dartmoor, took place in conditions closer by far to the Thirties than to now.
Our ancestry, so far as I have been able to dig it up, is a volatile mixture. On my fatherâs side, fierce West Country nonconformists mixed with gentle, rather saintly Hampshire Anglicans. One grandfather was a pioneer of the National Union of Teachers and a straggler from the First World War, saved from the trenches by being sent to India.
Well into the Sixties his house was a museum of the world before 1939: no telephone, no TV, but a quietly singing kettle always on the hob and a mangle in the porch, and he refused to read fiction because he thought it immoral.
As for the other grandfather, I have yet to track him down, and we were always told he was "killed in the war", which is true in the sense that he was run over by a bus in the blackout.
From what I can gather, nobody was sorry about this, least of all his wife, my motherâs mother, who had long before thrown him out of the house for his misdeeds.
She was partly Jewish, granddaughter of an immigrant from Prussian Poland, who confused things greatly (from the point of view of the racially obsessed) when he married a nice English girl.
Thereâs enough material in that background for quite a lot of fraternal variety, I think.
Christopher is an atheist. I am a believer. He once said in public: "The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural.
"Iâm a materialist and he attributes his presence here to a divine plan. I canât stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith."
I donât feel the same way. I like atheists and enjoy their company, because they agree with me that religion is important.
I liked and enjoyed this book, and recommend it to anybody who is interested in the subject. Like everything Christopher writes, it is often elegant, frequently witty and never stupid or boring.
I also think it is wrong, mostly in the way that it blames faith for so many bad things and gives it no credit for any of the good it may have done.
I think it misunderstands religious people and their aims and desires. And I think it asserts a number of things as true and obvious that are nothing of the sort.
At the heart of this book are two extraordinary, bold statements. One is a declaration of absolute faith, faith that religion has got it wrong, a mental thunderbolt of unbelief.
Christopher describes how at the age of nine he concluded that his teacherâs claim that the world must be designed was wrong. "I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong."
At the time of this revelation, he knew nothing of the vast, unending argument between those who maintain that the shape of the world is evidence of design, and those who say the same world is evidence of random, undirected natural selection.
Itâs my view that he still doesnât know all that much about this interesting dispute. Yet at the age of nine, he "simply knew" who had won one of the oldest debates in the history of mankind.
It is astonishing, in one so set against the idea of design or authority in the universe, how often he appeals to mysterious intuitions and "innate" knowledge of this kind, and uses religious language such as "awesome" â in awe of whom or what?
Or "mysterious". What is the mystery, if all is explained by science, the telescope and the microscope? He even refers to "conscience" and makes frequent thunderous denunciations of various evil actions.
Where is his certain knowledge of what is right and wrong supposed to have come from?
How can the idea of a conscience have any meaning in a world of random chance, where in the end we are all just collections of molecules swirling in a purposeless confusion?
If you are getting inner promptings, why should you pay any attention to them? It is as absurd as the idea of a compass with no magnetic North. You might as well take moral instruction from your bile duct.
Two pages later, speaking for atheists in general, he announces: "Our belief is not a belief."
To which one can only reply: "Really? And that thing in the middle of your face. I suppose thatâs not a nose, either?"
Christopher is not tentative about his view on God. He describes himself as an "anti-theist", so certain of his, er, faith that he wars with bitter mockery against those who doubt his truth.
Well, I wish I were as certain about any of these things as Christopher is about his anti-creed.
He reminds me rather more of the bearded Muslim sages of the Deoband Islamic university in India I met last year, than of the cool, thoughtful Anglicanism that we were both more or less brought up in.
For the purposes of this book, religion is identified as a fanatical certainty. No doubt there are plenty of zealots who suffer from this problem.
But it is obvious to anyone that vast numbers of believers in every faith are filled with doubt, and open to reason. The Church of Englandâs greatest martyr, Thomas Cranmer, was burned at the stake for changing his mind once too often.
The noblest thinker of that Church, Richard Hooker, enthroned reason, alongside tradition and scripture, as one of the governing principles of faith, and warned against crude literal use of the Bible to justify or prohibit any action.
Yet Christopher repeatedly asserts that believers "claim to know", not just to know, but to know everything. This simply is not true. Nor do we take the Bible literally.
I never imagined that scripture had the fact-checked authenticity of, say, an account in The New York Times â though as we know even that grand newspaper sometimes publishes made-up stories without realising it.
Did the Supper at Emmaus really take place? How I hope that it did, but I do not know that it did, in the way that I know a British soldier has recently been flown home dead from Basra or Helmand, or even in the way that I know that another such soldier will soon make the same sad journey.
Many decades have passed since I fancied the story of Adam and Eve was literal truth, if I ever did. Rather more recently I have realised the great warning against human arrogance that is contained in it, the serpentâs silky promise that if we reject the supposedly foolish, trivial restrictions imposed on us by an interfering, jealous nuisance of a God, then we shall be liberated.
As the serpent promises: "Ye shall be as gods." These may be the most important words in the whole Bible.
Take the enticing satanic advice, and you arrive, quite quickly, at revolutionary terror, at the invention of the atom bomb, at the torture chamber and the building of concentration camps for those unteachable morons who do not share your vision of a just world.
And also you arrive at the idea, embraced by Christopher, that by invading Iraq, you can make the world a better place.
I hesitated about mentioning this. Was it unfair, a jab below the belt? No.
Much of his book is devoted to claiming that religious impulse drives Man to do, or excuse, or support wicked and terrible things in the name of goodness.
Is this not a perfect description of the Iraq War, which he backed?
