Bad Days and Worse

By AM Sunday, September 5, 2010

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To be an unbeliever is not to be merely “open-minded”. It is to be, rather, a decisive admission of uncertainty that is dialectically connected to the repudiation of the totalitarian principle, in the mind as well as in politics – Christopher Hitchens.

The polemicist Christopher Hitchens is dying. He announced as much during a discussion with Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic National Correspondent. The exchange between the two men, at one point joined by the writer Martin Amis, was simply billed as ‘A Conversation With Christopher Hitchens.’ It covered much more ground than that of the illness gripping the author of God Is Not Great and numerous other books but his outlook, intensely focussed as it is on his mortality, was what I found of primary interest. The rest we have sort of heard before.

While Hitchens' political perspective over the past decade has been a persistent source of irritation to me I have long admired the power of his mind. Never content to be told by someone ‘read our paper, nothing else, and you will have the right politics’, I always found the arguments presented by Hitchens engaging and forceful although not persuasive. My wife bought me his memoir Hitch-22 as a birthday present which his accelerated dying process, as he put it, will accelerate the speed with which I get around to reading it. A bit of bookish queue jumping is excusable under the circumstances.

The cancer that began in his oesophagus has spread to his lymph nodes. It isn’t good. Having undergone chemotherapy Hitchens is showing the physical signs and seems to have succumbed to the notion that his cancer is much too virulent for the treatment. He wants to live so took his chances with a trying and tiring treatment in the knowledge that chemo not miracles can cure potentially fatal illnesses.

This was what the discussion with Goldberg was really about – facing death without any belief in god or an afterlife. That Atlantic featured it at all is an indication of how what happens to us upon death still grips people. There is no widespread easy acceptance of the fact that death is what happens. All individual life ends with it and proceeds no further. The Mark Twain view that he had been dead for millions of years before he was born and found nothing wrong with it is not one that reassures many.

Hitchens describes his dying as being made up of bad days and worse days. An apt way to put it, given that for the vast majority of us, the final furlong to the final fence where by necessity we must fall rather than jump, is not something to which we joyously gallop. There is a preference to tighten the reins and slow down to a jog trot. If the other guy wants to shoulder us aside in order up get up the queue a place or two don’t interfere with him. Be considerate to his needs and ask him to invite his friends.

Hitchens remains able to read and write so he is able to regale us with his take on many of the issues hovering over our times. Describing himself as a realist he thinks he will be a lucky person to live another five years. He does not find it insulting for people to pray for his recovery but would be angered if they were praying for him not to recover but to be ‘saved’. It would be a warped type of mind that would happily see him dead but ‘saved’.

When asked would terminal illness ever prompt him to state that he had been ‘saved’, or washed in the blood of the lamb as the pompously pious might put it, he was clear. Wittily quoting Jeeves to Bertie Wooster he said ‘the contingency is a remote one’. There were, he explained, circumstances that are conceivable where a patient, whose cancer had spread to the brain inducing terror and raving, might make such a ‘ridiculous remark’. He drew attention to the existence of an old game played by religion where its adherents would spread falsifications that people had on their death bed abandoned their deeply held scepticism and embraced what they had never believed. As examples he highlighted the cases of Voltaire, Thomas Paine, David Hume and Charles Darwin. In his case he was confident that such a fabrication would not be believed by any who know him.

I have little doubt that there are those who will respond to news of Hitchen’s illness with perverse religious glee, seeing in it some sort of heavenly retribution because he refused to believe what they believed. It will reinforce their belief that their god is a good god and the proof of it lies in their holy god having fired a cancer volley into the unholy body of the unbeliever; just as he has in the past sent tsunamis and hurricanes to regions of the world as a blow against gays.

The ‘dearest friend’ of the Hitch, Martin Amis, interjected to argue that it is irrational and premature to state there is no god given that we know nothing about how 86 % of the universe is made up and very little about galaxy formation. The only rational position to hold is that of an agnostic ‘teetering on the very brink of atheism.’

Hitchens was not overtly hostile to this idea, claiming that on the subject of god’s existence he is certain he knows as much as - maybe more than - the pope knows about it. For him religion is man made and all the gods found so far have been man made. If there is a higher intelligence no one yet has found any proof of its existence and none can claim to act in the name of a higher power or tell us, either with or without infallibility, that they know something about god’s existence because of divine revelation that the rest of us don’t

It was a lucid and dignified performance by a man many of whose critics want to see him near the end screaming repentance and begging forgiveness so that their own lingering doubts can be assuaged.