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It has become one of the great clichés of the
last few months to observe that the events of September 11th, 2001, have
‘changed things’ forever. Like many clichés, it has resonance because
there is something true in it (another cliché), and yet says so very little
that it can be filled out with whatever vague contents the specific circumstances
of the utterance demand. The more interesting commentators have been the
ones who, foregoing the good theater of empty proclamations, have gone
about the actual work of dealing with something new in a new way. This
is what has made the post-9/11 pieces by Christopher Hitchens so intriguing.
They simply run against the grain of what seems to be the more typical
Left response—they have had a kind of rippling shock effect even among
those who are often sympathetic to the Leftist heterodoxy of previous
Hitchensia. Of course, the Blumenthal affair, the Rushdie affair, the
Bosnia affair, etc., have all proven that Hitchens prefers a more solitary
route than that often chosen by even the most critical of critics. It
should, perhaps, have been no shock at all that someone as consistently
anti-clerical as Hitchens would balk at any hedging over the question
of the Taliban or Al Qaeda. And yet, at the same time, there is something
undeniably provocative about Hitchens’ position that raises some bigger
questions both about his underlying commitments and about the situation
confronting the Left at the beginning of the 21st Century.
Interestingly,
while Hitchens has been producing his ongoing assault around these questions
he has also published a small book entitled Letters to a Young Contrarian
that, among other things, serves as a kind of handbook for
Hitchensian methodology. Presumably, one should be able to discover some
direct links between the more formal guidance Hitchens provides in Contrarian to the specific content of his most recent salvos. Presumably
again, one should be able to pinpoint some of the assumptions (and we
all have assumptions) that guide
Hitchens’ overall project—insofar as he can be described as having an
overall project.
I
The
‘contrarian’, the ‘rebel’, or the ‘radical’ is a fairly recent progeny,
a product of the enlightened public sphere created in the 18th Century.
Of course there have always been iconoclasts—witness Socrates, Luther,
or Bruno—but not before the eighteenth century 18th Century was there
an institutional space for the criticism and radical contestation of existing
conditions. The creation of an institutional space for the modern ‘contrarian’
has gone hand in hand with the creation of a liberal self-understanding
in which we regard ourselves as individuals who have irreducible desires
and goods. It is this liberal individual who is the bearer of formal juridical
rights as well as the one who enters into formal capitalist relations
(contracts). This type of self is also the one who has engaged in radical
criticism, first of the society of orders and then later, of liberal society
itself. The question that always haunts a position based upon the irreducibility
of the individual is: criticism in the name of what?
I
think it can be fairly said that this question can also be asked of Hitchens’
new book Letters to a Young Contrarian
(which, though we have often admired Hitchens’ prose, has the feel of
having been written during a short coffee break).
Hitchens, of course, does have
substantive positions and he argues for them forcefully. But, it seems
that what is more important to Hitchens now (perhaps opposed to ‘then’
i.e., when Hitchens was an unapologetic Socialist) is not the content
of one’s beliefs, not what one
thinks, but how one thinks (3). As Hitchens says of the contrarian life:
“Now you ask me, to what purpose is such a life to be devoted? In a way,
you miss my point, since I believe (and I hope I argued) that such a life
is worth living on its own account” (35). To this we agree; curiosity,
skepticism, rhetoric, and agon
in general are values that must be upheld for their own sake. They are,
as it were, essential constituents of the good life. However, we wonder
whether it is as unimportant as it might seem on Hitchens presentation
that one be right in some specified sense about what one believes. A stress
on getting it right might seem to reintroduce a dogmatism that is the
obverse of the healthy skepticism a true contrarian needs. But this is
not the case. One must earn or be entitled to claims of rightness and
even then one’s positions are fallible. But without the concern for getting
things right, the whole point of curiosity, skepticism, rhetoric, and
agon are undermined.
Similarly, does not the stress on the method and practice
of being a contrarian lead to a bit of ‘false consciousness’, since people
necessarily do have substantive
beliefs and values that inform their discriminations and eventual decisions?
One is never a contrarian period, one is a contrarian who operates in
a political context and who operates out of an animating conception of
the good. This animating conception of the good is not a formula that
one can apply to situations in order to deduce discriminations and decisions,
but is rather a fairly loose nexus of values and beliefs through which
situations appear to be X rather then Y. Why not be honest with oneself
and say ‘this is my positive conception of the good (as far as I know
it) and my decisions are informed by it’? In practice, one can
see a positive conception of the good that informs Hitchens’ discriminations
and decisions. This comes out in the Contrarian book when Hitchens says: “The next phase or epoch is already
discernable; it is the fight to extend the concept of universal human
rights, and to match the ‘globalization’ of production by the globalization
of a common standard for justice and ethics” (136). The goal is not the
equalization of global wealth or the lessening of exploitation, but the spread of a liberal juridical regime throughout the
world. Hitchens’ idea of the good is precisely this global cosmopolitanism,
a world in which people like Christopher Hitchens are always necessary.
II
One wonders if Hitchens’ thinking has not undergone a subtle
but important shift over the last few years that has brought him to the
above conception. To put it simply, Hitchens has moved from a position
that at least left open the possibility of a substantive transformation
of society to one that accepts, at least implicitly, some version of the
‘end of history’ thesis. In the end of history thesis we are faced with
the proposition that liberal democracy has finally attained a one-to-one
relation with human nature. According to this thesis, modern Western democracies
and their free market economies are the imperfect balance between individual
and state that match the imperfect makeup of the human being—a social
being who is still, irreducibly, individual. This is not to say that Hitchens
has become as obtuse as a Fukuyama, but that he himself has begun to accept
a precept of the liberal self-understanding that he once held in some
suspicion. Caveat: we are not, a la
Herman, assuming that this means Hitchens has gone astray of the flock
and must be brought back into the fold or else excommunicated. The Left,
or anyone else for that matter, must be able to look the hard claims in
the face and put their assumptions on the line. But this is a genuine
decision, and a deeper understanding about what this decision entails
can only help toward the ultimate decision.
As an elucidation of the subtle shift in Hitchens’ thinking,
we offer the following evidence. In 1998, in a telling essay about Isaiah
Berlin—which is really a reflection on the foundations of liberalism and
a bit of a gut check—Hitchens wrote:
In 1933, the date of the first known reference
[to Kant’s line ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing
was ever made’], Berlin was only twenty-four, but he has obviously found
and seized on his essential dictum. It is of course a thoughtful and provocative
one, and full of implication. By the November of that particular year,
however, it must have occurred to many people that politics and policy
could indeed succeed in making humans more crooked, not to say more twisted.
And, this being true, is it worth considering whether the converse might
ever apply?
Full stop. With this cliffhanger lingering in the air Hitchens
goes on to take up a different line of inquiry. But the implications are
clear. In fact, one of Hitchens’ premier criticisms of Berlin in this
essay revolves around the fact that Berlin is ultimately hostile to a
Marxian project that would look beyond the current confines of liberal
capitalism. Further, Berlin does so through the lazy equation of Marx
with vulgar determinism. The crux, as Hitchens suggests, rests on a distinction
between necessary (economic) and sufficient (political) conditions. In
fact, Marx only utilized his economic analysis to show that capitalism
was inherently unstable and would constantly provide crises that would
then have to be taken advantage of politically. What human society will make of these opportunities is pre-written
nowhere. It might very well make a mess of it all. In the proper understanding
of Marx as the 1998 Hitchens understands him, the question of human nature
is an open one. The danger of Berlin’s form of liberalism—and by implication
liberalism itself—is that it has so settled into a comfortable and self-serving
picture of human possibility that it has become blind to both the negative
and positive capacities of said creatures. The Hitchens of the Berlin
essay refuses to accept this particular pair of blinders.
But if we look again to the Contrarian book an interesting emendation has taken place. At the end
of the fourth letter Hitchens makes essentially the same claim that he
had made in the Berlin essay:
My friend Basil Davidson, who wrote a splendid
memoir of his years with the anti-Nazi partisan fighters in the Balkans,
concluded from his experience that it was wrong to endorse the lazy proposition
that ‘You can’t change human nature’. At first hand, he said, he had seen
it become changed—for the worse. Ought not the corollary to hold—that
if it can be altered one way it can surely be altered the other?
So far, of course, the argument is essentially equivalent
to the lines in the Berlin essay. But this time Hitchens does not end
the paragraph here but adds some startling sentences:
Not necessarily: we are mammals and the prefrontal
lobe (at least while we wait for genetic engineering) is too small while
the adrenaline gland is too big. Nonetheless, civilization can increase,
and at times actually has increased, the temptation to behave in a civilized
way. It is only those who hope to transform humans who end up by burning
them, like the waste product of a failed experiment. (32)
It is clear in these sentences that Hitchens is not completely
comfortable with his new position. The comment about waiting for genetic
engineering serves to destabilize the hard-core naturalism that governs
the main clause. Still, Hitchens has seen fit to throw up a roadblock
to precisely that possible progressive element of the Left agenda that
he had made it a point to leave open in the Berlin essay. He has replaced
it with a concept of civilization that would presumably be quite palatable
to the conservative Liberalism of a figure like Berlin and uncontroversial
to the basic ontology of many neo-conservatives. The last sentence sounds
like it could have been written by Berlin himself and is a paraphrase
of almost every attack on Socialism that has ever been made. Further,
it is not exactly clear what ‘behaving in a civilized way’ actually entails
but it seems to entail something like ‘the fight to extend the concept
of universal human rights, and to match the “globalization” of production
by the globalization of a common standard for justice and ethics’. To
defend this civilization would mean defending the current system of production,
as well as the culture that surrounds it, as the only one capable of sustaining
the conception of the good that one would seek to defend. From this perspective, being a contrarian
starts to look less like a form of progressivism and more like a form
of conservation.
III
Of course, we can certainly agree with Hitchens that being
of the Left and being a contrarian are not co-extensive. The space for
critique and opposition was, in fact, opened up not by the Socialist left,
but by the Bourgeoisie attempting to assert itself in light of a declining
yet inertial society of orders. With the eventual victory of the Bourgeoisie
and the establishment of liberalism as the dominant ideology of the advanced
capitalistic countries, the space initially opened up for opposition was
left free, not only for liberal incremetalism but also for revolutionary
movements of both the Left and the Right. For the Left, this space gained
in complexity with the establishment of the Soviet regime. This gave Leftists
something to defend as well as a social order (liberal capitalism) to
attack. When the Soviet regime became repressive and eventually Stalinist,
the Left faced an unparalleled test. It could either stifle a critique
of the Soviet regime so as not to give comfort and aid to the capitalist,
or it could press forward with that critique. The first option was obviously
problematic; for beyond the moral aspect, a defense of a totalitarian
regime undercut the legitimacy of one’s own critique of capitalism. The
second option, while morally necessary, was also problematic from a tactical
point of view insofar as, with this critique, one was cut adrift from
any political movement that could effect social change. If one estimated
the hegemony of capitalism to be the dominant world system of which 'really
existing' Socialism was a counter, then one might be led to conveniently
overlook the problems in the Soviet bloc. Much of the Left took this route––to
its shame. However, as Hitchens points out, there were those who embraced
what could be called the Leftist 'double bind'; i.e., a rejection of the
dominant world system, capitalism—which, while providing comfort to a
small minority of its participants in the north, has provided misery to
much of the world over which it lords—combined with a rejection of the
Stalinist hegemony over the Soviet Bloc. To be counted among these Leftists
are Trotsky, Orwell, C. L. R. James, etc. To accept this double bind is
to accept the position of the contrarian, i.e., a being who stands alone
against social systems, or elements of those systems, while not standing
permanently for and with social forces that could take power (98). This
qualifier, 'permanently,' is important in that the contrarian can
and should join larger social
forces that will advance certain chosen positions. The point of being
a contrarian is to pose an oppositional force against X (to sometimes
advance position Y), and if one were afraid of temporarily joining up
with larger social forces to do so, then one would not be a contrarian
but a coward.
Christopher Hitchens is no coward, but the question is whether
he has begun to give up on the double bind from the other direction—that
is, not as an apologist for Socialism but for liberal capitalism. If the
position of the contrarian becomes so identified with the kind of society
that has produced it, then the contrarian, in the interest of the preservation
of his kind, begins to establish a set of limits beyond which the critique
cannot go. Such a self-imposition can often be detected precisely at the
point in which one makes a distinction between legitimate changes within
the boundaries of human nature and illegitimate ones that transgress those
boundaries. The Hitchens of the pre-Letters to a Young Contrarian era was a contrarian of the double bind, a true skeptic on
the question of the ‘whither and where to’ of the human project. The Hitchens
of the present is beginning to look like a different kind of contrarian,
one who accepts the basic boundaries of the society he lives in as essentially
final and seeks to fight the good fight from within them. This, indeed,
is the current dilemma of the Left and it is manifested in the ongoing
confusion about how to deal with events surrounding September 11th. Some
of the figures on the Left who have been savaged by Hitchens in recent
months clearly received a good dose of what was coming to them. They are
the type of Leftists for whom no historical situation could shake confidence in the application
of their political formulas.
But what Hitchens seems less willing to countenance is that
there may be those figures whose hesitation about jumping on the bandwagon
of Bush’s war also has something to do with their open-ended contrarianism
that Hitchens leaves unapologetically behind, glancing at it once or twice
from the rearview mirror. We can agree with Hitchens that ‘It was obvious
from the start that the United States had no alternative but to do what
it has done’, without, at the same time, abdicating the responsibility
to critique the war in Afghanistan in all of its aspects, including the
way in which it extends the America imperialist project. This is the situation
of double bind contrarianism. One must accept that theological absolutism
must be opposed vigorously while at the same time subjecting to withering
critique the ways in which the response to this phenomena is used by the
powerful to advance its agenda—without being afraid of making one’s allies
nervous (135). Hitchens seems comfortable in doing this when it comes
to issues like domestic civil rights and Ashcroft, that is, from within
the boundaries of liberal democracy. But his acceptance of the idea that
modern Western society represents the sine qua non
for even the possibility of the type of critique one wants to do means
that he becomes uncomfortable at the suggestion that the spread of liberalism
across the globe—while undoubtedly positive in some respects—has a dark
side that needs exposition. Hitchens, of course, is aware of the dark
side insofar as much of his journalistic mission has been to expose human
cruelty and barbarism. But for Hitchens today this cruelty and barbarism
only occurs when there is interplay between human failing and societal
breakdown. What he can’t seem to accept is that even when a liberal juridical
and economic regime is operating without crisis, it is a system that rests
upon unequal exchange. For someone who does accept this, any extension of American power is, ipso
facto, something to be nervous about.
Christopher Hitchens has, perhaps, finally come to the decision that the
extension of American civilization is, in essence, an extension of the
necessary minimum conditions for a desirable civil society. Given this,
the tension that even an earlier Hitchens would feel in making compacts
with such a power has been smoothed over—with some notable bumpiness no
doubt—by his latest version of contrarianism. To say that he no longer
feels this tension in the same way is not to say that he is thereby wrong
in any particular political judgment; he is very often right and still more
incisive than most. It is to say, as was often the case in the 19th Century,
that the universalism inherent in liberalism can lead one down the primrose
path to outright imperialism. And if this is indeed the path one chooses,
let’s at least get it out in the open.
(This essay appeared in a slightly different form in Radical
Society.)
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OTR Politics - November, 2003