Memories

A book I recently had the occasion to read is Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens's relentlessly engaging and intriguing autobiography.  As far as format goes, the book is fairly typical of it's genre.  Hitchens begins by describing his reserved, but caring naval officer father and his mother, whose Jewish heritage she concealed from her husband and two sons for the entirety of her life.  He also relates his experiences in English boarding school and at Oxford, which lay the foundation for his later career as a journalist.  But in my view, what gives Hitch-22 an indispensable quality is Hitchens's recounting of his ideological evolution, ranging from his days as a student political radical in the 1960s through the War on Terror in the 2000s.

Some months ago, a reviewer in National Review remarked on the book's recurrent theme of Hitchens relentlessly insisting on being his own man.  Indeed, it is this quality that separates Hitchens from his compatriots on the political left with whom he worked during his days as a writer for The New Statesman and later The Nation.  Despite his assertion that he is no longer a "man of the Left,"  Hitchens's overall political orientation is still left-of-center, though not dogmatically so.  The greatest point of difference with his former leftist compatriots has been his fundamental belief in the just cause of the free and democratic West against the rise of Islamic radicalism over the past three decades.  While most on the left have effectively held to a position of anti-Americanism, regardless of the intentions of America's antagonists, and largely rooted in the belief that America is an impediment to the ever-ephemeral socialist paradise, Hitchens has come to understand the truth that freedom and liberty are laudable ends in themselves that must be protected from dogmatism of all stripes, secular or religious.  Thus, as regards the War on Terror, Hitchens has found himself aligned with those pejoratively described as "neoconservatives" - a term which once had significant political meaning but has now been reduced to a mere schoolyard taunt, often shortened to "neocons".

But if Hitchens's leftist credentials have been undermined by his pro-American, pro-Western stance against Islamic barbarism, they remain perfectly intact when it comes to the matter of religion.  Christopher Hitchens is now, more than ever, an avowed atheist who, per the subtitle of his recent book god is not Great, believes that "religion poisons everything."  That is, of course, a narrow-minded, facile understanding of religion and faith, one which Tom Kratman refuted in a manner far beyond my abilities in his afterword to The Tuloriad.

Religion, faith, spirituality, whatever term one may use to describe human metaphysical inquiry, is as old as humanity itself.  It attempts to provide an explanation to the age-old question of why we are here, and whether our lives have a greater meaning beyond our mundane day-to-day existences.  It is a point I ponder on this particular day, because it was today, three years ago, that my brother passed away at the age of forty.  His passing pains me still, and I continue to wonder why it was that he, a man with a family of his own, suddenly departed from this earth at such a relatively young age.  Why is it, as Woody Guthrie once wrote in his ode to the USS Reuben James nearly seven decades ago, that the worst of men must live while the best of men must die?

It is a question that may never be answered to my satisfaction.  But one answer that I will never accept is that his life meant nothing - that he was, like many an atheist believes all of us to be - little more than a cog in some great evolutionary machine constructed by mere chance.

God hold you in His heart, Richard, until we meet again.