From time to time I draw attention to the excellent 'Conservative Woman' website, which attempts to reclaim the word 'conservative' from the fraudulent party of that name, and which points out that modern feminism is by no means unequivocally devoted to the betterment of the lot of women.
Here is an interview of me by Laura Perrins, on the site:
As I feared, my attempt to argue reasonably with the Atheist contributor ‘James’ was not a meeting of minds. I don’t expect these encounters to be, normally, for the reasons I’ve discussed. The modern militant atheists have closed their minds, contemptuously, to the possibility that they may be mistaken and have erected a caricature of religious believers as stupid, uneducated, anti-scientific morons which leads to a certain ‘de haut en bas’ style in their approach, which they have done nothing to earn.
But the exercise wasn’t entirely useless. The response of ‘James’ and some other militant unbelievers makes their simple but unyielding misunderstanding of my position so plain that I can quite easily show it to any unprejudiced observer, and do so below with my inserted and marked comments. The difference between us is that they are trying to prove me wrong, which they can’t do, and I am trying to offer them some common ground, on to which they fear to advance. It’s like trying to give a free gift to someone who is convinced it is a trick.
The argument also produced some cogent counters to the arguments of ‘James’ from contributors, so good that I have included them below in this post.
Let me begin with the second epistle of ’James’:
'James' writes: 'At the risk of boring Peter Hitchens further, here is my reply. In any other sphere of discussion when presented with unconvincing arguments and bad or no evidence, you reject the position until new or better evidence is presented. All I argue is that our normal standards of evidence and rigour should be applied to arguments about God.
*** PH. Once again, there is a very simple reason why this cannot be so. We are here arguing about belief and faith, not testable knowledge. Both my religious opinion and the religious opinion of ‘James’ are just that – religious opinions about the unknowable. They cannot be tested like the various claims of scientists, historians, etc. Does ‘James’ accept this? I am not sure he does. I think he is convinced as any Ayatollah in the courtyards of Qom or as any hillbilly preacher, of the absolute truth of his claims.
‘James’: I would be happy to discuss the arguments further but Peter Hitchens is completely closed to the idea that an atheist could be motivated out of anything other than selfish hedonism
****PH writes: No, I am not. I have never said that *all* atheists are so motivated, and do not think so. I specifically said in my first reply to him ‘I do not believe I have ever used the word 'all' in this case '. I also said : ‘I am not making any individual or even universal claim, and any of my opponents are free to show that it is not their motive.’ He neither acknowledges nor attempts to rebut these points. Like all bad debaters, when he finds a difficult bit, he avoids it completely and pretends it doesn’t exist.
Indeed, he has the nerve to repeat the same false charge as if I had never rebutted it. ‘James' shouldn't make these things up. Let me give some more examples. Many atheists in our secular society , like many cradle Christians, believe in their faith out of conformism and fashion, and have never considered it deeply enough to have a motivation. ‘James’, by all appearances, may be one such. The recurrence in their arguments of the same tricks and stylistic habits, ‘gods’ in the plural without an initial capital, for instance, is often a sign of a faith casually and self-protectively picked up from a peer-group.
‘James’: (PH might do well to remember that he, along with everyone else, doesn’t actually know much about human nature, and that semi-autobiographical novels and his own former atheism are not evidence that atheists are generally selfish and hedonistic).
***PH replies: I am pretty confident that I know a good deal more about human nature than does ‘James’, my knowledge having been quite dearly bought in more than 60 years of far-from-saintly life. It is very interesting that he completely ignores the congruence, evident to any campus visitor, between the angry atheist surge and the ‘libertarian’ cry of ‘nobody tells me what I can do with my own body’ which is the slogan of the drugtaker and the sexual libertine. That’s why all my brother’s fans hate me so. They liked having an educated plummy voice telling them their hedonism was fine and their small-town pastors were stupid morons. They are doubly infuriated to hear my very similar educated plummy voice saying that actually it isn’t that simple. How dare I profane the sacred memory?
He also ignores totally my point that : ‘Because this (hedonism) is the demonstrable default position of humanity anyway, because it is equally true of many nominal religious believers, whose faith can quite rightly be judged by how well they keep to the precepts they claim to espouse.’ The truth of the first is so blazingly obvious that he couldn’t possibly rebut it, and the second is probably something he would say himself under other circumstances, but it doesn’t suit him to do so now. So he ignores it completely. Again. Duck and cover.
He concentrates instead on Maugham’s eloquent autobiographical passage, which I doubt very much he has read ( I wonder if he even knows who Maugham was or how he lived) , but dismisses anyway, and on my own undoubted personal experience, which he dismisses as of being of no worth at all. ***
‘Paul’: So, as he so rightly says in other contexts, when arguing with someone who won’t treat their opponent seriously and treat them with due respect, the only winning move is not to play. I will make a few brief points, as I don’t want to be thought to be ducking them, but I won’t bore PH with any further replies unless he is prepared to argue with me as though I were a moral and decent human being.
***PH : I have never said otherwise. I know nothing about him and have said nothing about him. For the third time, my speculation on the motives of atheists has never been all-inclusive and he cannot claim that it is directed at him personally. He is making things up, to suit him - an interesting characteristic in one so resolutely rejecting the idea that we choose our beliefs to suit us. He has chosen this one to suit him - it sort of gets him out of a corner from which there is no escape by actual argument. Alas for him, it is demonstrably untrue.
‘James’: On the point about the complex universe being evidence for a theistic God. This is, at best, an argument for pantheism or deism, not for theism, and certainly not for the Abrahamic God. No claims in the Bible are supported by the complexity of our universe.
*** PH: We are not here arguing about the Abrahamic God or any particular religion. Poorly-equipped anti-God people always make this silly mistake. The argument about the existence of God is entirely separate from arguments about individual faiths. Deism is a subdivision of Theism, not the other way round.
‘James’ : 'Einstein was a believer in Spinoza’s god, which has nothing to do with theism. He specifically rejected the idea of a personal God.
***PH writes: Quite so, which is why I specifically referred to : ‘the existence of something which might be called 'God' ' rather than to a personal God.
‘James’ All this is easily verifiable. His beliefs on God and its existence are far closer to mine, than to yours, not that it matters much.
***PH writes: I do not agree, either that it doesn’t matter or that Einstein’s position is closer to his position, of absolute rejection of anything resembling a deity than to mine, a belief that He may exist, accompanied by a strong desire for Him to do so.
‘James’: When Dawkins talks about aliens, he specifically describes them as “Godlike”, and different from the usual beliefs in God in one important way: Their complexity would only come about through a process similar to that of evolution. What this has to do with theism, I have no idea.
****PH writes: Then he is not thinking. Others have had no difficulty in seeing its relevance.
‘James’: On the topic of addiction. Fair enough, I concede that those who argue for addiction claim it is a fact, while you do not claim the same about God. This was a mistake.
***PH writes: I am glad to see him admit it. A rare glint of gold amid the mud.
‘James’: I would like to say though, that a lot of my taxes go in support of the state belief in Anglicanism,
***PH writes : They do? Perhaps he would like to tell me how much taxation is spent on the Church of England? Figures, please, and references.
which leads to absurdities such as the Windsor Family and the Lords Spiritual, with which I profoundly disagree.
***PH writes: I hope all readers will note the change of subject here, and the comic-strip republicanism which is also revealed.
'Paul': We both agree that a belief in addiction should not lead to state support, perhaps you would extend the logic to other beliefs like Anglicanism. On the general topic of hedonism and selfishness. It is entirely possible for these things to be criticised without needing to appeal to Christian Morality.
***PH writes: Yes, I know. But there is a great difference between disliking these things in a specific instance or because they affect you badly personally, or they damage the national budget or reduce industrial production, or whatever it is - and having an absolute prohibition on them because they are wrong at all times and in all places . This difference is important because so many wrong acts are done in secret, their culprits unknown to their victims and undiscovered by the authorities. There is also the human tendency, most obvious in dismembering, crushing, burning and suffocating foreign civilians and permitting abortions, to claim that various forms of wickedness aren’t, in this case, wickedness at all.
Finally, I have one question. As you believe that belief in God is a choice, how is it that objective morality can come from it?
**** PH replies: I don’t see that this is an inconsistency. I believe in the existence of objective morality and absolute truth. I do not state that they definitely exist because I cannot (any more than he can state that they don’t) . It is, of course, a claim but its point is that it requires absolute standards of goodness from those who make it. That is why I choose to believe in it. Large objective consequences can be shown to flow from the general belief in its non-existence, and likewise from the general belief in its existence. I can offer no other test this side of the grave.
Mr ‘Bunker’ then joined the argument, perhaps feeling left out, as ‘James’ has pretty much completely restated the case which Mr ‘Bunker’ first made here about 2,000 years ago. ****
Mr ‘Bunker’ wrote: ‘If (as I assume) Mr Hitchens is telling the truth when he says he is a believer, then let him prove that he is able to choose to believe the opposite - just for, say, one week as from tomorrow, in which we could argue with him about it. Then he could return to the belief 'of his choice'!’
Of course he could 'pretend' to believe God doesn't exist, if only for one week, but that's not the test. The test is whether he could 'truly' believe (just for one week) that God does not exist. And argue, genuinely and credibly, with believers on this blog that there is no God, that God is a figment of human imagination and that only deluded people can believe such rubbish.
I don't think Mr Hitchens can do that. I don't think that choice is open to him. He cannot choose arbitrarily to believe the opposite of what he does in fact believe - and neither can I!!! (There is some mysterious force preventing him!!!!!)’
****PH writes ‘There is nothing mysterious about it. The 'force' that is preventing me from choosing the atheist creed again just now is my strong desire, which I have developed rationally over many decades, to live in a designed, created and purposeful universe, to which justice, love and liberty are essential. I cannot unlearn the experiences or forget the knowledge which brought me to this desire, though I can, alas, imagine appalling circumstances which might make we wish once more for another kind of universe. As I say, the key is the desire. That is why the desire of the atheists is so interesting, and why they are so reluctant to admit this or discuss it. When you desire, you can and will choose what suits your desire. What does Mr Bunker desire, which enables him to choose the cruel, meaningless and purposeless chaos in which he seeks to live? He won't even accept that his choice is motivated by a desire, so he won’t talk about it. Note that, one again, I can easily answer his question. He won't even consider mine.
‘Paul Small’ also joined in to say:
PH's attempts to rationalise his beliefs just cause him further problems as his logical inconsistencies are exposed. He concludes this piece saying: "Knowledge of God's existence or non-existence is not available to us. Fact, reason and logic cannot take anyone any further than agnosticism, as he well knows." Yet earlier in the same post, PH wrote: "Belief in God, once it is accepted, requires the individual to reform and govern himself according to eternal laws which he cannot change - often to his own severe disadvantage." This is self-contradictory. If knowledge of God and His existence is unavailable to us, then so is any knowledge of His supposed eternal laws. Instead, PH's principle that we choose our beliefs must apply equally to our beliefs about these 'eternal laws': Does God exist? You can choose Yes or No. If you choose Yes, then is (for example) homosexuality a sin? Is it wrong, acceptable or a duty to kill non-believers? You must choose yourself because fact, reason and logic cannot tell us. The same is true for every belief about God, if it is true for the belief that He exists in the first place. How can you reform and govern yourself according to laws if you do not know what those laws are? On the other hand, if you do know what these eternal laws are, you must necessarily also know that God exists. In which case, it is not a choice.
****PH replies : Mr ‘Small’ is (this is so common) confusing two different processes. One, the choice of belief in a God or a comparable force (see discussions elsewhere about Einstein, Spinoza, etc) and two, the actual religion which the believer then adopts, or perhaps doesn’t. They are distinct. Once one has decided to believe that there *is*an absolute, one then has to try to discover what it is and what this fact means to us. This is the cause of philosophy and of theology, and of the huge energy devoted by so many very clever people over so many centuries to trying to establish this from the various instructions we appear to be have been given. You have to accept first of all that there are rules. You must then spend the rest of your life trying to discover what they are, and how to obey them. But Christ’s summary of the law, combined with the Sermon on the Mount and the parables, all in His own words, seem to me to me to offer a fairly straightforward guide to anyone seriously interested. But of course you have to approach them in that way, not as a teenage scoffer.
My thanks to
‘John Baker’, who wrote:
‘This concept of 'choosing' to believe something is really causing people problems. It shouldn't. It should be uncontroversial. Choosing to believe something is not restricted to the philosophical or the spiritual. People choose to believe all kinds of things, including and particularly of a temporal nature, every day of their lives. Most of the 'facts' people think they 'know', they have chosen to believe. It is impossible, for an individual to 'know' that a particular event or discovery occurred, if they were not themselves present, and it wasn't recorded on some reliable medium. They have to take the word of others. Or not take the word of others. Most of the 'facts' about events in the world are derived by individuals from media of some kind, or from word of mouth, not from personal experience. An individual may sit down to watch a BBC news report about some event that the BBC claims happened. Most individuals do not start phoning around to check if the news report is true. They believe the report is true, they believe the report is untrue, or they don't form an opinion. If they believe the report is true, they are choosing to do so. They base their choice on something they already believe. Such as, the BBC is a source of authority, and is trustworthy. If they believe the report is untrue, they are choosing to do. They base their choice on something they already believe. Such as the BBC is purveyor of propaganda, and is untrustworthy. It will often not be possible for an individual to verify the report, even if they wanted to, and had the time, and money to do so. A event could be between two other individuals who attest that something specific was said, but that was not recorded on any medium. Whether the first individual believes the other two individuals is a matter of choice. They can't 'know' what happened, if they weren't there. This extends to any event at which an individual wasn't present, or experiment they did not carry out themselves. People do not start carrying out an investigation, an experiment, or calculate probabilities, for every potential 'fact' that comes to their attention. It is as impossible for individuals to 'know' about most of the things they think know about, as it is for them to peer beyond the universe and 'know' if there is a God or no God. Everyone chooses to believe things, every day.’
Likewise to Peter Charnley, who wrote:
‘@James | 28 July 2015 at 02:27 PM ‘James’ is firing wide of the original mark with many of his replies. James:-“On the point about the complex universe being evidence for a theistic God. This is, at best, an argument for pantheism or deism, not for theism, and certainly not for the Abrahamic God. No claims in the Bible are supported by the complexity of our universe.” This has got nothing to do with the straightforward question of whether there is or is not a God - which is the original primary question as to whether extraordinary structured complexity arose naturally or as a consequence of a conscious act. James:-“Einstein was a believer in Spinoza’s god, which has nothing to do with theism. He specifically rejected the idea of a personal God. All this is easily verifiable. His beliefs on God and its existence are far closer to mine, than to yours, not that it matters much.” Again this is a dilution of the point under consideration. There are many people who believe in a Spinozistic or Deistic 'God of Nature' who or which leaves Nature and its creatures (including its human creatures) entirely to their own devices. I believe that Anthony Flew, famous for being ‘the world’s most notorious atheist who changed his mind’, moved through this stage. And he famously argued against Richard Dawkins that ‘natural selection’ does not explain the existence of life, affirming that there is today no satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the first emergence of life from non-living matter, or for the capacity of life to reproduce itself genetically, and observing that there isn't even any sign of such an explanation on the horizon 'if indeed’ as Flew suggested ‘there ever could be.' In short, James, the fact that a Spinozistic God has nothing to do with theism is irrelevant to the question of whether the universe came into being as a deliberate act of a conscious mind - i.e. a God. James:-“When Dawkins talks about aliens, he specifically describes them as “Godlike”, and different from the usual beliefs in God in one important way: Their complexity would only come about through a process similar to that of evolution. What this has to do with theism, I have no idea.” Again you are functioning wide of the debating mark, James – for largely the same reasons as above. James (now entering into the realm of a theistic personal God) :- “On the general topic of hedonism and selfishness. It is entirely possible for these things to be criticised without needing to appeal to Christian Morality.” You may very well abhor hedonism and selfishness as a self-proclaimed atheist. However, simply dismissing the origin of absolute morality does not discount that origin – whether you believe in it or not. James:-“Finally, I have one question. As you believe that belief in God is a choice, how is it that objective morality can come from it?” For the same reason as above. You can choose to acknowledge that origin or to deny it. However people who deny a definitive source of absolute objective morality are more likely to stray from it than those who don’t. The history of the human race, particularly the 20th century, makes that self-evident.’
Eric Metaxas is an American broadcaster and author (notably of a biography of the German pastor and anti-Hitler resistance hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer). He is also an organiser of debates and public discussions(usually in New York City) under the ambitious but enjoyable title 'Socrates in the City'. Last week , as part of this programme of public events, he came to Oxford and interviewed me (among others) in the very evangelical church of St Aldate's .Here, in two podcasts, is the result. It covers quite a few subjects but is based on my reent book'The Rage Against God'. Some of you may be interested. Some of you may not.
http://www.metaxastalk.com/podcasts/
For some time an audio version of my book 'The Rage Against God' has been readily available in the USA but not, for reasons too obscure to explain, in the UK. Now at last it can be found again in the UK here
I am most grateful to all those at Audible, Zondervan and Bloomsbury who helped make this happen. All of my three-dimensional books are now available in audio versions, except 'A Brief History of Crime' and its revised paperback version 'The Abolition of Liberty'. I'll see if I can do anything about this gap.
I have been asked several times if there are audio versions of any of my books. I am working on several, and recently completed a recording of 'The Cameron Delusion'.
Some time ago, I also recorded 'The Rage Against God', but was unable to locate it through normal searching.
I have now found that it can be obtained through this address, if anyone is interested.
http://www.amazon.com/Rage-Against-God-Atheism-Faith/dp/B003KJM5BU/ref=sr_1_1_title_2_audd?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1402428641&sr=1-1&keywords=rage+against+god+peter+hitchens
As this is Party Conference season, I though it a good moment to reflect a little on Hell (a place which we have been discussing elsewhere on this site) . I have stopped attending the party conferences, because I no longer see any point in doing so. I’ll get on to the Infernal regions in a minute or two, but first a word about those conferences.
Partly, I’m put off by the intrusive ‘security’ now required. Months before the event, the would-be attender must submit a vast form, not unlike a visa application to a particularly suspicious foreign country, including personal references, and great masses of intimate information which I would myself prefer not to give to anyone at all. What happens to it all? It’s perfectly obvious that people like me aren’t terrorist threats, and have attended many of these events before quite harmlessly, yet there’s the same rigmarole, over and over again, and then when you get there you have to shuffle through sheds, tediously emptying your pockets into trays and being screened for weapons and explosives. It’s excessive. It wouldn’t, in fact, have prevented the main terror outrage perpetrated against such a gathering, the planting of a timed bomb in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, long before the Tory conference took place.
But these things are a ratchet. Like the absurd gates in Downing Street, once they’re there, no bureaucrat will ever support their removal. Anything which then happened would be his fault.
I tend to think that the people are in much more danger from terror than the politicians are, and that the risk is exaggerated for all of us. It’s horrible when it happens, but the chances of it happening to any individual are tiny, and the chances are also that, as terror is based on surprise, our precautions will not have anticipated the next outrage. By making our lives in general less convenient, more stifled and surveilled, we have gained very little and lost a lot.
It’s a pretext for giving more power to the police and the state, and more contracts to private security firms, and it’s dispiriting and frustrating to have to submit to it (not even daring to laugh) as the price of flying anywhere, or going to these gatherings.
But at least flying does actually get you somewhere you want to go. The conferences are a nowhere destination, scrubbed of normal human beings, cut off from normal life, usually in buildings with even less charm than airport terminals.
If you dare to leave, to go and visit the (often attractive) towns and cities in which these events take place then you must queue up to be searched to get back in again. So most people stay put.
There are periodic mob events, in which the media, in their sheep-like way, get excited by a leak or a speech, as the spin-doctors intend them to do. But for the rest it might as well be a trade fair for the manufacturers of grommets. I know plenty of people who attend these entire events without once entering the hall in which supposed ‘debates’ are taking place. I always made a point of trying when I used to go, but the deathly, abandoned air of these futile discussions is almost enough to make me lose the will to live. I also find the business of meeting politicians increasingly lowering. Almost all seem to have been taken over by some sort of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, which has deprived them of the ability to think. There are one or two exceptions, but they don’t offset the general effect.
So not Hell, but perhaps Limbo, or maybe Purgatory.
As to Hell, what is it? I joked, in my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’, that Roy Jenkins had probably abolished it one unseasonably hot afternoon in the mid-1960s, slipping the Infernal Regions (Closure) Bill past a somnolent House of Commons. But it wasn’t entirely a joke.
Hell exists, first of all, in the human mind. There’s a John Wyndham short story in which a number of people arrive in what appears to be Hell (by London Underground train, I think) and simply mock it out of existence by refusing to believe in it.
You can see what he was driving at there. But I find the images of hell in art rather worrying, even so.The effect on me of Rogier van der Weyden’s ‘Last Judgement’ in the Hotel Dieu in Beaune , which I describe in my book ‘The Rage Against God’ is an example of this. As a child, I was particularly troubled by a small painting by Wlliam Blake called 'the Simoniac Pope', not because I planning to be Pope, or even knew what Simony was (I looked it up) but because it was so ferocious.
In the small Buckinghamshire village of Penn, once the home of the (atheist) novelist Elizabeth Taylor (whose rather good books and stories are now coming back into fashion), the church contains a famous painting of the Last Judgement, known as ‘The Penn Doom’. Visitors may study it by turning on a light . On a plaque by the switch are the words ‘For Doom, press switch’, which caused me to hestitate before doing so. There’s another fairly ferocious Doom in the church of St James the Great in South Leigh, near Witney, and some of the windows in Fairford Church ( one of the most astonishing collections of stained glass in the world) are downright frightening to contemplate, A lot of people actively dislike them. I’m not so sure.
What are they telling us? Do such creatures await us on the other side of the dark tunnel that is death? It’s funny how the conception persists. M.R.James, in his matchless ghost stories, produces a variety of hellish creatures which somehow escape, or are rashly summoned by people who don’t know what forces they are playing with, into the Edwardian world of cathedrals and Oxbridge colleges of which he writes.
It’s there in the Sistine Chapel roof. It’s in Hieronymus Bosch. Dante provided a sort of Baedeker's Guide, with maps and pictures. There’s a Tintin book in which the villains, in the course of drowning, find themselves suddenly surrounded by small red demons, shoving their forks into them. In the extremely popular film ‘Ghost’, terrifying cowled shapes appear from the depths, accompanied by a hideous noise, to drag away the damned to a destination that is plainly not going to be fun. One of the most disturbing demons in art is (I think) in the Groeninge Museum in Bruges (or Brugge, as we ought to call it, if we’re going to call Peking ‘Beijing’). It shows Judas, fleeing from the Last Supper to complete his betrayal. He is looking back at Our Lord and so does not see that he is rushing into the clawed embrace of a hideous, staring, beaked creature. No explanation or background is offered by the gallery. Then there are various forms of the Faust legend, or other diabolical temptation, enjoyably retold in modern times by Alan Judd, that interesting writer, in his book ‘The Devil’s own Work’.
'Room 101', in 'Nineteen Eighty Four'is also a form of hell, because it is always the thing the victim fears the most. The Thought Police have got into his head, like demons, and found this out, in each case. That is why we all know what is in there.
C.S. Lewis created Screwtape, a devil who plots the subtle corruption of nice English middle-class people, and went a good deal further than that in his so-called ‘Science Fiction Trilogy’. Mick Jagger suggested sympathy for the old gentleman. Stephen Vincent Benet introduced him to New England in that alarming story ‘the Devil and Daniel Webster’, in which a jauntily-bearded , witty and jesting Satan (known locally as ‘Scratch’) collects souls and keeps them, like fluttering moths, in his pocket-book. You can here their tiny voices crying to be let out. A rather good film was made of this, if you like that sort of thing. I t ends, as many good films do, with a jury trial. But what a jury.
And then of course there’s Ira Levin’s clever book ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, brilliantly filmed by, well, I never, Roman Polanski, in which the horned devil actually appears in modern New York City.
Well, I’ve met no such person, but I’ve seen, or learned in detail about, plenty of diabolical actions by humans, which are in their way quite as terrifying as the clawed, implacable monster of darkness which artists have produced out of their minds. These are the things we do when we (and this of course includes many religious people who wrongly imagined they had a warrant to be cruel) ignore the moral absolutes which we have been given. It’s amazing how quickly we can descend into cruelty, when we think we’re authorised to inflict it, as the Stanford Prison Experiment showed, I think , quite conclusively.
And it’s been my view for many years that hell can be (and often is) glimpsed in a human face (sometimes our own) in the midst of an act of cruelty or selfishness, in some kinds of laughter and in some sorts of silence as well.
As to the form that Divine Justice might take, if there is (as I both hope and fear) such a thing, I fancy that human imagination cannot really encompass it. That is why our forebears daubed crude devils on church walls, and also why geniuses such as Bosch and van der Weyden painted their worrying masterpieces. It was partly because they wanted justice, and partly because they feared it. It was also because they all suffered ( as we still do) from this great and puzzling gap in the human mind – the fact that we are born with a desire for justice, and yet so seldom see justice done in this life. That is the origin of Hell, and the worse the injustice, the deeper and more horrible is the Hell we imagine. Is it there? Don't bank on it not being, or in necessarily being the modern Anglican version, which I gather is a sort of absence.
Just to get my hand in this morning, I’m going to respond to a flailing, heavy-handed attack on me at a militantly Godless site, dealing with my riposte last week to Mr ‘Bunker’ and his ludicrous claims about atheism.
It is entitled ‘The bad seed: Peter Hitchens blames atheism for Stalin and Hitler’, posted here http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/the-bad-seed-peter-hitchens-blames-atheism-for-stalin-and-hitler/ on a site entitled ‘Why Evolution is True’ .
It reads: ‘We needn’t go over this dumb anti-atheist argument again, except to note in passing that Peter Hitchens, the One Who Went Wrong, has an extremely MILITANT column in the Mail Online called “Atheism kills, persecutes, and destroys. Wicked things are done in its name.“ This man obviously has no sense of nuance. That’s also evident from how he begins his column, with an attack on a pseudonymous commenter, possibly fictional, named “Mr. Bunker”:
And I long ago recognised that there is simply no point in trying to debate with Mr ‘Bunker’, as I still think of him. Whenever I encounter his debating style, a picture forms in my mind of a mossy, weed-grown, lichen-blotched, dank concrete structure, in some twilit corner of a fallow field, with a lot of voluminous vests, greyish thermal long-johns and track-suit bottoms flapping heavily from an improvised washing line outside, as a thin stream of smoke, perfumed with bacon fat (or perhaps the aroma of supermarket lasagne), issues from an even-more-improvised chimney. A three-wheeled motor car stands not far away. Next to this sad decay, a large peeling sign proclaims, with enormous letters ‘Bunkerism. World Headquarters’ This is, I should state, my image of the mind of Mr ‘Bunker’, not of the chap himself. No doubt he is a handsome and well-dressed person, living in a normal home.
This is simply bad writing: a heavy-handed, tedious, and overwritten depiction of a stereotype. Whatever genes for good writing segregated in the Hitchens lineages, Peter didn’t get ‘em.
He goes on (and I’ll mercifully omit the text) to refute Mr. Bunker’s claim that “no crime has ever been committed ‘in the name of atheism.’” Hitchens trots out the usual tropes about the Bolsheviks, quoting others to show that they made “this defiant and dogmatic atheism the basis of their action.” Certainly some religious figures were persecuted by the communists, but I doubt that the Doctors Plot was motivated by atheism. And they didn’t get rid of modern genetics—and persecute and execute scientists like Vavilov—because they were religious. Really, the harm done in the name of atheism is miniscule compared to the harm done to keep Lenin and Stalin in power. Contrast that with the harm done directly in the name of faith in the Inquisition.
Stalin killed at least 20 million Russians, Lenin millions more. How many of those died simply because they were religious? And was Stalin a murderous tyrant because he was an atheist, or simply because he was an evil man? I opt for the latter. Atheism does not turn good people bad. In contrast, as we know from Professor Weinberg, “for good people to do evil—that takes religion.”
Hitchens then segues to the Nazis, but that canard has long ago been made into confit, so I’ll pass it over. Hitchens ends his piece in a way that’s far more “militant” than anything ever said by Richard Dawkins. Remember the following words when you hear the tired old phrase “militant atheist” shoved in your face:
The exasperating and yet comically unshakeable conviction (held by Mr ‘Bunker’) that the assertion of atheism is not a positive statement, that it is a mere passive absence, is directly contradicted by the death-dealing, violently destructive, larcenous and aggressively propagandist application of their own passionate and positive atheism by the Soviet authorities, as soon as they had the power to put their beliefs into action. If atheism is merely an absence, why on earth should it need to do these things to those who did not share its allegedly passive, non-invasive beliefs? And why, I might add, were both the Bolsheviks and the National Socialists so profoundly hostile to the idea of the Christian God (or, as Mr ‘Bunker’ would sniggeringly put it ‘gods’ )?
Well, because these people, imagining mischief as a law, have set themselves up as their own source of good, and cannot tolerate any rival to their own beliefs, in the minds of men. One thing you can say for them : they understood very well what it was they believed.
Hitchens notes that he goes into greater detail about atheist evil in his 2010 book, The Rage Against God. I think I’ll give that one a miss, but I’m sure some brave readers have wallowed through it.’
For the information and ease of readers, I reproduce here my original article, much of which my critic has unsurprisingly omitted, in case any of his readers see what I actually said, and realise that, afflicted by some sort of red mist at the sight of anything that challenges his world view, my assailant has not read what I wrote with any care, and so has got the whole thing wrong:
‘Atheism Kills, Persecutes and Destroys. Wicked Things are Done in its Name.
I make it a general rule to pay no attention to people who post here with silly, pretentious multi-word pseudonyms, particularly in the wearisome, unwitty but self-congratulatory format of ‘The-person-formerly-known-as’ .
Who do they think they are? Why should we care what they used to be known as? And I long ago recognised that there is simply no point in trying to debate with Mr ‘Bunker’, as I still think of him. Whenever I encounter his debating style, a picture forms in my mind of a mossy, weed-grown, lichen-blotched, dank concrete structure, in some twilit corner of a fallow field, with a lot of voluminous vests, greyish thermal long-johns and track-suit bottoms flapping heavily from an improvised washing line outside, as a thin stream of smoke, perfumed with bacon fat (or perhaps the aroma of supermarket lasagne), issues from an even-more-improvised chimney. A three-wheeled motor car stands not far away. Next to this sad decay, a large peeling sign proclaims, with enormous letters 'Bunkerism. World Headquarters' This is, I should state, my image of the mind of Mr ‘Bunker’, not of the chap himself. No doubt he is a handsome and well-dressed person, living in a normal home.
But I felt it necessary to correct the following statement, issued from the Bunker Vatican on Wednesday morning, and posted on the ‘Miliband…’ thread, with that unjustified confidence, and that hectoring tone, which typifies so many of his pronouncements.
Here it is : ‘I find it tedious in the extreme to have to explain for the umpteenth time that no crime has ever been committed "in the name of atheism". By definition. Atheism is the non-existence of a belief, and nothing can be carried out in the name of something that does not exist. You are completely wrong on this point. You say that communism is a fundamentally anti-religious ideology. So what? The reason why atrocities were committed "in the name of communism" (not of atheism) was that the dictators you mention wished to defend and spread their ideology (not atheism). Don't you understand that? ‘
Well, yes, I do understand that this is what he says. And it is historically incorrect. I do not think Mr ‘Bunker’ has made any effort to study the historical record. Given that this is so, he should surely be more modest and cautious in his assertions. But this is precisely why it is so tedious to argue with him. The less he knows, and the less he understands, the more certain he is of his case. And the more totally defeated he is in argument, the more he glows and exults with genuinely-felt triumph, like the Monty Python knight who, reduced by unequal combat to a limbless trunk ( and perhaps even to a trunkless head, I cannot remember), continues to issue bloodcurdling, boastful challenges to his antagonist.
As Beatrice and Sidney Webb wrote in their admiring description of the USSR (‘Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, 1940 edition) : ’It is exactly the explicit denial of the intervention of any God, or indeed of any will other than human will, in the universe, that has attracted to Soviet Communism the sympathies of many intellectuals and especially of scientists in civilised countries’.
They added :’Lenin insisted, as the basis of all his teaching, on a resolute denial of there being any known manifestation of the supernatural. He steadfastly insisted that the universe known to mankind (including mind equally with matter) was the sphere of science….
‘…When the Bolsheviks came into power in 1917, they made this defiant and dogmatic atheism the basis of their action’
(these passages are from Chapter XI, ‘Science the Salvation of Mankind’) .
Then one must examine the practical record of *specific*, deliberate and planned anti-religious acts by the Bolsheviks, which gave material expression to their beliefs on the subject .
(The parallel but differing behaviour of the German National Socialists, who, thank Heaven , had only 12 years of power instead of the Bolsheviks’ 73, is a matter for another posting, but there is no doubt that the Hitler Youth, in particular, were taught scorn for the Church, its teachings and priests, and especially for the fact that Christ was himself a Jew. I will not here reproduce the exact words of a typical Hitler Youth song (recorded by Olivia Manning in her Balkan Trilogy) which explained that followers of the Fuehrer did not wish to be Christians because Christ was a ‘Jewish swine’. It rhymes in German. Even so, it seems to me that the message is clear. The chapter ‘Converting the soul’ in Richard Evans’s ‘the Third Reich in Power’ is useful in this discussion. As is J.S.Conway’s ‘The Nazi Persecution of the Churches’).
Thus, one of the first decrees of the new Bolshevik government (first promulgated on 26th October 1917 old style, and repeated and reinforced the following January) was Anatoly Lunacharsky’s, as Education Commissar: All religious teaching was specifically forbidden in all schools. In January 1922, a second decree went much further, banning the teaching of religion to all children, even singly, in church buildings, churches or private homes. Severe punishment ‘with all the rigour of revolutionary law’ , up to and including the death penalty, was prescribed for those who broke this law.
The Soviet state, while encouraging the destruction, desecration, befouling and plundering of hundreds of churches (or the seizure of their buildings for deliberately squalid and degrading secular purposes, such as the use of the lovely Danilovsky monastery in Moscow as a reformatory for juvenile delinquents, a wicked act from which this building triumphantly re-emerged during the Gorbachev years), the public mockery, by state-sponsored groups, of religious ceremonies, processions, feast-days and rituals, the theft and melting down of their bells and the persecution , imprisonment and state murder of their priests and congregations, also set up large numbers of anti-God museums, and sponsored the publication of atheist materials, including the magazine ‘Bezbozhnik’ (‘The Godless’) . A 'Union of the Godless’ was also established at an ‘All-Union Congress of Anti-Religious Societies’. It later changed its name to ‘The League of the Militant Godless’. In a country in which all printing, meetings and speech were tightly controlled, this state-sponsored organisation was free to publish what it liked, and to mount meetings and demonstrations uninterrupted by the authorities. It attained an official membership of millions, unlikely to have been voluntary (this, by the way, is what we call understatement), and had 70,000 branches.
By contrast, in the year 1922 alone, 2,691 priests , 1,962 monks and 3,447 nuns were murdered by the Bolsheviks, often after having been provoked into defending themselves or their buildings by Bolshevik activists (Source for the figures of deaths is ‘The Black Book of Communism’ , Harvard University Press, 1997, Edited by Stephane Courtois) .
A distinguished American newspaper correspondent, who lived during this period in Russia, William Henry Chamberlin, recounted that ‘in Russia the world is witnessing the first effort to destroy completely any belief in supernatural interpretation of life’ (In ‘Russia’s Iron Age’, published 1935) .
Chamberlin noted energetic official campaigns against the bringing of Christmas Trees into Russian homes, campaigns to keep children from being influenced by their Christian grandparents, the severe persecution of priests and their children (denied both food rations and access to education, or employment, unless they renounced and denounced their fathers).
Mr Bunker might also learn (some hope, alas) from F.A. Mackenzie’s book ‘The Russian Crucifixion’ (1930) , which details the complex web of rules by which the Christian church was driven out of Russian life by legal persecution, plunder and violence (even Church sewing groups were banned by law).
Mackenzie quotes Susan Lawrence, a British *Labour* politician who, after a visit to Soviet Russia in 1922, noted that ‘the schools are propaganda schools, framed to inculcate a definite ideal, both in politics and religion. Communism is to be taught and religion to be exterminated’ , and the whole programme of the schools is to be directed towards this end’.
A fuller version of all the above is to be found in chapters 11,12 and 13 of my book ‘The Rage Against God’ published in Britain by Continuum, and in the USA by Zondervan.
The exasperating and yet comically unshakeable conviction (held by Mr ‘Bunker’) that the assertion of atheism is not a positive statement, that it is a mere passive absence, is directly contradicted by the death-dealing, violently destructive, larcenous and aggressively propagandist application of their own passionate and positive atheism by the Soviet authorities, as soon as they had the power to put their beliefs into action. If atheism is merely an absence, why on earth should it need to do these things to those who did not share its allegedly passive, non-invasive beliefs? And why, I might add, were both the Bolsheviks and the National Socialists so profoundly hostile to the idea of the Christian God (or, as Mr ‘Bunker’ would sniggeringly put it ‘gods’ )?
Well, because these people, imagining mischief as a law, have set themselves up as their own source of good, and cannot tolerate any rival to their own beliefs, in the minds of men. One thing you can say for them : they understood very well what it was they believed. ‘
And finally, my response to the attack:
First of all, let’s look at the title itself. ‘Peter Hitchens blames atheism for Stalin and Hitler’. I don’t mention Stalin at all. I don’t ‘blame atheism’ for either of them. My point was solely to refute (and I mean refute) one specific claim by Mr Bunker’, who most certainly does exist (perhaps he’ll let them know, and indeed, join the happy throng at ‘Why Atheism is True’).
What Mr ‘Bunker’ said, what I specifically sought to deal with, was this claim: ’…no crime has ever been committed "in the name of atheism". By definition. Atheism is the non-existence of a belief, and nothing can be carried out in the name of something that does not exist. You are completely wrong on this point. You say that communism is a fundamentally anti-religious ideology. So what? The reason why atrocities were committed "in the name of communism" (not of atheism) was that the dictators you mention wished to defend and spread their ideology (not atheism). Don't you understand that? ‘
I did not then go on to ‘blame’ the acts of Lenin (not, as it happens, Stalin) on atheism. I pointed out, from contemporary and in one case highly sympathetic sources, that a specific and active denial of God was an inescapable part of the Bolshevik world-view. I did not in fact say (and don’t think) that the Bolsheviks were Bolsheviks because they were atheists. I tend to the opposite view, that they were atheists because, as self-admiring world reformers convinced of their own supreme rectitude and virtue, they saw God ( and particularly the Christian God) as a rival whom they wished to get rid of. As I have said before, Atheists, unlike Christians, always have a very high opinion of their own virtue. It is, in all my experience, the most unvarying feature of the Godless person, that he is confident of his own goodness.
It’s my belief that he loathes the idea of God, and especially the Christian God, precisely because Christianity regards all humans as ‘miserable sinners’ in need of forgiveness and grace, subject to laws they cannot alter, and denies the perfectibility of man. They hate this idea. They think Utopia is possible, and that they are the people to get there. This accusation invariably produces paroxysms of spluttering fury among the atheists, largely because it is true (the only thing worse than being falsely accused is being correctly accused) . They seek to avoid any discussion of it with juvenile, undergraduate pseudo-philosophical pretences that their belief involves no personal choice ( See Bunker, passim). Of course it does. Belief is by its nature a choice. But we’ve dealt with that.
The next point is this. My reply tyo Mr ‘Bunker’ is wholly , narrowly specific. I could make many accusations against the Bolsheviks, starting with their putsch in October 1917, their suppression of the Constituent Assembly, with the opening of the first Gulag at Solovyetsky, or the suppression of the Kronstadt Rising. I could denounce them for their murders of the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, or of the former nobility, or of the Tsar and his family. I could attack them for the general merciless bloodiness of their conduct in the Civil War. I could go on to Stalin’s purges and the rest. I know how many people Stalin killed. I lived in Moscow. I visited the remnants of the Gulags and met their survivors. The corpses of Stalin's victims were being exhumed in Moscow while I lived there. But these, though they are the crimes of people unrestrained by any absolute moral code, are not my point in the article which has provoked this spasm.
My point is narrow. It is that the Bolsheviks pursued a specifically atheist policy, because of the atheism which was a central part of their belief system. They issued and enforced decrees against religion, of mounting severity and extent. They sponsored a specifically atheist movement which destroyed churches, persecuted priests and mocked the Christian religion in public places. They destroyed, plundered and demolished churches as acts of deliberate and open state policy.
I think it undeniable that these policies and actions are evidence of two things. One, that atheism has in human history been an active belief , held by powerful people; and two, that it has been the theoretical basis for measurable actions of violence, murder, destruction, censorship, persecution and theft.
Therefore the statement by Mr ‘Bunker’ is not true.
I’m sorry that my critic does not like my writing style. De gustibus non disputandum. I don’t much like his either, it’s too confident of its own rightness, and lacks any generosity of spirit, but it is the content that worries me more.
I did not say that The Doctors' Plot was based on atheism (it was based upon Stalin’s personal Judophobia, a strange mania which grips many people who have no religion at all, as well as people who are religious). I don’t say that the persecution (and, in effect, murder) of the botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was based on atheism. It was encouraged by his rival Trofim Lysenko, with Stalin’s backing. It has always seemed to me that this episode, in which dogmatic Communists destroyed a scientist for wishing to speak the truth, shows that the atheist left (for the CPSU was certainly atheist and certainly of the left) are just as capable of such actions as the Vatican ever was, and in modern times too. Good heavens, had the Vatican done to 20th century scientists what it did to Galileo, wouldn’t it have been even worse? But Lysenkoism happened in the lifetimes of people still living, and the regime that did it had the endorsement of people such as Eric Hobsbawm, and the Webbs. Which episode has more lessons for the modern world? Yet which is the better known?
But what is the relevance of the following complaint to anything I said :’Really, the harm done in the name of atheism is miniscule compared to the harm done to keep Lenin and Stalin in power. Contrast that with the harm done directly in the name of faith in the Inquisition.’
The word is ‘minuscule’. But even if this is so, so what? I don’t think the numbers of deaths of priests, nuns and monks I cite (for one year) can be so described. But in my moral system, one murder is a crime. In any case, all I sought to show was that specific acts were done in the direct name of Godlessness, which Mr ‘Bunker’ claims is not the case. They were killed *because* they were monks, nuns and priests. They were not just people who were killed by the Bolsheviks, who happened to *be* nuns, monks and priests. Can he really not see the difference? Probably not, but one must try, even with those most blinded by dogma.
I love, however, his grudging admission, worthy of the Hirohito Prize for Mountainous Understatement: ‘Certainly some religious figures were persecuted by the communists’. Damn’ nice of you to admit it, old bean.
Now for Hitler. I was careful to distinguish between the Bolsheviks and the German National Socialists, because they were different. I don’t believe I said anything about Hitler being an atheist. I strongly suspect him of having been a Pagan, with an affinity for the old Norse Gods that Heinrich Heine warned would one day return to Germany to smash the cathedrals. What he shared with the atheists was a loathing of the Christian God, and of the idea that Jesus was His son. Claims, by the way, that Hitler was a Christian tend to founder when examined. No-one has ever identified his confessor, if so, or can say which church he attended. The National Socialist hierarchy was full of adulterers and others who had transgressed against the Christian moral code, whom Hitler did not shun for their behaviour, rather the contrary. His own private life was not that of a believing Christian.
A commenter on my critic’s site points out correctly that Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy takes the form of a novel. But it is generally acknowledged by all critics and all who knew Miss Manning that the work is in fact almost entirely autobiographical. Anyway, there is no doubt that young Germans were taught in the Hitler Youth to hate and despise Christ, as a Jew, and to sing songs of the kind I quoted. Had the National Socialist Revolution lasted as long as the Bolshevik seizure of power, I think its hatred of the Church would have become clearer. Fortunately, it did not. But let’s not pretend, or deny the facts of history, or , come to that, forget in such silliness the noble courage of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Archbishop Clemens von Galen, amongst others. They were Christians. They fought Hitler, once they realised what he truly was, in one case unto death, in the other in such a way that he might easily have been killed.
Hugo Rifkind yesterday posted a response to my retort to him. Here is my reply to that (my answers are interleaved with his original words, and marked with asterisks ***) .
1) You ask "what is Nick Griffin doing here?" Well, you argue that his positions have no bearing on yours and that he does not share your principles. I agree with you. That is why I wrote that a traditional view of Britain has been “hijacked by the Nick Griffins of the world” and should not be “discredited by the unwilling association”. This, to me, seems to be exactly what you are saying. I am saying it, too. I am not using him to smear you. I am explicitly using him to say you should not be smeared. Why are we fighting about this?
***This seems to be having it both ways. If you think the traditional view 'shouldn't be discredited by the unwilling association', why mention him at all? He and his organisation are both busted flushes. They played no significant part in the Olympic controversy. I think his purpose becomes clear later, as I shall explain. You then give a summary of that sort of Britishness which is patronising, shallow and supercilious (scones, cricket and monarchy, tee hee).
2) I meet quite a lot of conservative opinions, as it happens.
I’m the child of a former Conservative cabinet minister, after all. I frequently manage not to “mutter ‘BNP’, or ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ and shut (my) mind” over Sunday lunch. I did not call you ‘racist!’ or ‘bigot!’ or ‘fascist!’ or ‘homophobe!’ as you seem to suggest. I called you wrong.
*** You'll be lucky to find many conservative opinions anywhere in the Conservative Party, let alone in the regions of it graced by your distinguished and charming parent. I strive, week by week and hour by hour, to dispel this particular delusion, that the Tory party has any connection with conservatism. I even wrote a book about it. I shall have to try harder. And no, you didn't call me any of those things, but you managed, in my view, ever-so-subtly to suggest that my opinions were, well, not quite respectable. But you did so in a willing-to-wound but afraid-to-strike way which made sure you would be miles away once the act was detected. We'll be back to that in a moment. But first I must deal with the assertion 'This is precisely wrong'. 'Wrong' is a pretty absolute word. I use it myself. It's quite easy to employ it when somebody has got his facts wrong. It's legitimate to say that such and such a policy is the 'wrong' way to achieve a certain objective, especially if you can demonstrate that it hasn't worked, explain why it isn't working or risk a prediction that it won't work (if it does, then you're the one who's 'wrong').
But to tell someone his opinion is 'wrong' is another thing altogether. 'Wrong'? You might argue that I was mistaken. But a world in which an opinion is 'wrong' is a world in which another opinion is 'right', and I think we know what sort of world that is. As elsewhere in your article, you don't actually know what you're doing.
First of all, as someone who isn't part of the cultural revolution and who has been opposing and criticising it for decades, I'm in quite a good position to describe how Mr Boyle's festivities strike people of my sort. You're not. How would you know? Nor do you explain. You just jump straight into a declaration that you admired the show more and more. I don't think you're 'wrong' to have done so. I just think that illustrates the division between us, which might be worth debating. You said 'I don't care if it was propaganda'. I do care that it was propaganda, because my experience of the Soviet Bloc told me that propaganda was (as I said on the radio), a device for telling the losers that they were powerless and beaten. Nobody believed all those slogans and claims. They just understood that the Party was vaunting its power. You asserted :' It was the sort of propaganda we need'. Who's 'we'? Not me. What did 'we' need it for? To say that I'm 'wrong' to hold my opinion is to presume an authority over which opinions may and may not be held which ( fortunately) you don't have. You disagree with me, that's all. The difference is important.
3) Frequently, you seem
*** Ah, it's that verb 'seem' again. I know not 'seems'. Do I, or don't I?
to be suggesting
*** and that word 'suggesting' that is so often coupled with it. If I have said this, you can take me to task for saying it. Otherwise, let's stick to what has been said.
that I, or others like me (I am not sure who these people like me are supposed to be, or why I am like them)...
***There are several sorts. There are the deliberate revolutionaries who are openly my enemies, like the New Labour apparatus which tried to stop me asking Mr Blair any questions during the 1997 and 2001 elections, and which actually tried to deny me credentials to attend Labour press conferences during the 2010 election - Shami Chakrabarti and the NUJ had to intervene on my behalf - and the various left-wing journalists who say rude things about me in their publications, too numerous to mention. And then there are the pseudo-conservatives who got cross with me for failing to join in the Cameroon revolution, so that my books stopped getting reviewed in their publications. Just for instance. Are you like them? Not sure. I've never met you, though when I read what you write you fit in quite well with the conventional wisdoms I dislike. The article in The Times is evidence that you might well be more specifically critical, though.
...are trying to silence your voice, and voices like yours, or are chiding you for holding the opinions you hold.
*** If 'This is precisely wrong' isn't chiding, I don't know what is. Look, I don't claim to be persecuted. This isn't Alexander Solzhenitsyn territory. I know better than most people how much worse off I could be. But that doesn't mean that some people wouldn't like to shut me up, or that I broadcast less than I'd like to, or that my writings get less attention than they might if I fitted in better with the Zeitgeist. if you have been directly told by a senior BBC executive that you will never be allowed to present a programme on Radio 4 (as I have been) or been subjected to a surprise show trial on that station in your absence (as I have been) or been told by a literary agent introduced to you by a friend that he will not represent you because of the political stance of your book (as has happened to me) or if you have had the same book turned down ( as mine was) by every major publisher in London (it subsequently sold more than 30,000 copies, and was published with reasonable success in the USA), then you might begin to think that you weren't exactly fashionable. Why, even one of my former editors, the delightful Rosie Boycott, said to me 'I think everything you write is complete ****'. She added a rather nice codicil, because she's a decent person with a laugh in her, but I'm sure she meant it. And I don't think she's that unrepresentative of the London media classes.
'Emphatically, I am not. Be as wrong as you like, with my blessing.'
***Funny sort of blessing. And why would I come to you to check to see if my opinions were wrong?
4) Regarding Mo Farah and Britishness, you write “unless he means that the new ‘Britishness’ is so loosely defined that it encompasses anyone”. This is precisely what I mean. Well done you.
*** Ah, well, yes, that is an interesting bit. In my view it is the most interesting bit . You wrote : ' Otherwise, Britishness is reduced to a trick for letting the aliens into the club without having to stop calling them aliens — a depository for all the folk whom other British identities still secretly don't want.'
Well, if that is so, what would be so wrong with being, as you said I was : ' somebody who feels that Britishness ought only to be the first of these, and saw a great spectacle designed to usurp it in the national psyche with the second.'
You've said that the second (Spice Girls) sort of Britishness is (if I have you right) ' a trick for letting the aliens into the club, without having to stop calling them aliens - a depository for all the folk whom other British identities secretly don't want'.
Let us be direct here. I cannot see any way of examining this passage without extracting the following meaning: A loosely-defined Britishness allows secretly prejudiced persons to pretend to be inclusive'.
That is surely a pretty grave accusation against this funky formulation. I should have thought it was devastating, actually.
So why would people such as me be 'wrong' to cleave to an older, deeper concept, more comparable (again, as far as I can see from your writing) to the concept of Englishness? Surely, by doing so, I reject any idea of a secret rejection, masquerading as a public acceptance. If I say Mo Farah is British, as I do, then I am welcoming him into the comity of nationhood fully and without reservation. Why would I then be *wrong* to reject a spectacle designed ( as you quite correctly state) to usurp the Britishness we believe in, and replace it in the national psyche with another, inferior version?
And why am I coupled in this with Mr Burley? As it happens, I think Mr Burley was quite innocent in this matter. The Opening Ceremony was indeed a wilderness of multiculturalism, which I and (in his Munich speech of 2011) the Prime Minister regard with some dislike. It was, as I said on the radio, a moronic inferno. But I don't agree with Mr Burley about the Rolling Stones, and I also don't do Nazi-themed fancy-dress parties ( and I think you'll accept that if Mr Burley hadn't attended a famous party of this kind, his tweet would have gone unremarked). Mr Burley has a similar role in this argument to the one played earlier by Mr Griffin.
Well, I've criticised you for using the word 'seems' and 'suggest' to portray me as having expressed opinions I haven't. So I won't go any further into this rather odd equation myself. But if you mean what you say, then surely I ought to be complimented for holding fast to a richer, deeper variety of Britishness. Yet I am not. There is an element missing from the calculation. I am not sure that you are conscious of the problem.
So let me strip it to the bone:
Shallow Britishness is bad because it allows bigots to pretend to be tolerant.
Peter Hitchens is against shallow Britishness.
Therefore Peter Hitchens is wrong.
5) You write “As I’ve said to him, I don’t think he has the faintest idea what I really believe.” I’m afraid you are right again. I’ve certainly tried, but your lengthy blog posts and columns perhaps leave it less clear than you imagine. I have thus never taken issue with what you might believe, only with what you actually said.
*** Not sure this is quite correct. See above
6) In the column which so upset you,
***Can we please dispense with this idea that I am 'upset'. I am not. Why should I be? I am more used than most people to being disagreed with and criticised. In quiet moments I can turn to the Internet to see the latest insults. As for Twitter, it is almost touching to see how many people think that the sentence 'Peter Hitchens is a ****' is an argument. As I so often need to say, I have over the years been insulted by experts. I didn't challenge your article because I was 'upset' but because I disagreed with it, and it gave me a chance to put my case before a new and wider audience. This patronising dismissal of opponents as 'angry' or upset is a rhetorical trick. Feel free to use it, but don't imagine that it works on me.
I examined your statement that the Olympic opening ceremony had been a political show intent upon "telling people who were not part of the cultural revolution that they had lost". I thought this was wrong. Not disgusting, not old and weird, not a view that should be silenced, just wrong.
***Once again, in a world where an opinion can be classified as 'wrong' , what is the next step?
I disagree with you, Peter. Are we clear on this? I do not thus feel you should be locked away.
***You don't. Some people do. And as our law protects freedom of speech and thought less and less, and there are more and more laws under which speech and writing can be limited (the most pernicious being the Public Order Act of 1986, but see my book 'The Abolition of Liberty' for examples of this process in action), they may well get their wish.
7) Rather, I thought it was, as you say, a reconciliation between a traditional view of Britishness and a modern one. Or, to put it another way, I thought that rather than being a development of New Labour Cool Britannia crassness, it was a reaction against that. The fondness for the past, the reverence for the monarch, the acknowledgment of a mythologised rural past at the core of British identity – all of these things are very anti-New Labour.
****Here I would challenge you directly. New Labour, and its allies among history teachers (see my 'The Abolition of Britain') rewrote the past in a way very similar to Mr Boyle's carnival. And was the treatment of the monarch 'reverent'? I can find you quite a few monarchists, including this one, who thought it part of the transformation of the Queen from a constitutional monarch into the nation's favourite granny, what an old trouper, eh? Dignified? Don't think so.
8) To me, then, Boyle’s vision of Britain encompassed conservatism in a way that Blair’s did not. You write that you are not personally reconciled. That’s fine. You don’t have to be.
***Thank you, sir. Most kind. But who, exactly, are you to give me permission to hold an opinion?
I’m talking about the reconciliation of ideas, rather than the reconciliation of people. You are perfectly free to remain as angry about this as you seem to be about everything else.
***There you go again. Patronising dismissal. You've never met me. You have no idea what makes me angry and I doubt if you ever will. It is possible for you to accept that someone might feel other emotions than anger about the dismantling of his country? Sorrow, regret, pain?
9) Like I said, I’m afraid I can’t quite figure out what you mean
by Britishness, or why – or indeed, if – you feel it is distinct from Englishness. I was particularly impressed by the way that Boyle managed to do this, and in a not anti-English manner. If you felt his vision so offensive, I’d love to know how you’d have done it differently. Remember, we’re talking about Britishness unswamped by Englishness here. It’s not easy.
**** Since you ask, I wouldn't have done it at all. A couple of hymns and some decent 1662 prayers, plus verses 7 and 8 of the 4th Chapter of St Paul's second epistle to Timothy, from the Authorised Version, would seem to me to be all that was needed. Why does an athletics meeting require a political opening ceremony? Leave that to less happier lands. Vast vainglorious propaganda displays of this kind seem to me to be, in themselves, profoundly un-English and indeed un-British. I've seen quite enough of them, in Moscow, East Berlin and Pyongyang. If you want to get an idea of what I mean by Britishness, take a look at page 92 of the Continuum paperback edition of 'the Abolition of Britain' ( mostly quotations from George Santayana and Rupert Brooke) . You might also look at page 48 of 'The Rage Against God' (Continuum 2010) for a description of the sort of British ceremonial I approve of.
10) You write, “He is the butterfly upon the road preaching contentment to the toad, I think.” I quibble only with the preaching bit.
George Bernard Shaw said rightly that no Englishman could open his mouth without making another Englishman hate him. As an Irishman, he could see from outside that the curious code of accents, mingled with class and education, as well as with region, was a potent form of wicked magic.
The British military and naval classes, into which I was born, were less sensitive about it than most because they lived their lives in strictly ordered hierarchies where there wasn’t much resentment. I think this was because of the shared danger and adversity, in which everyone had seen everyone else, scared, dirty and swearing, with the wraps off - and because so many people actually avoid responsibility. Who’d want to be an officer, the first to be blamed? It was cosier further down the list. This is a more common feeling than most people want to admit.
But by the late 1950s, even naval officers were beginning to disguise their cut-glass accents. They were all too redolent of a pre-1939 age which obviously wasn’t coming back, of ‘young masters’ and ‘my man’. It accelerated after that, thanks to TV, which gave other accents airtime and dethroned the old ones. In a way, I’m rather sorry about the accents, though not about the old class distinction – I share Nevil Shute’s loathing for the silly waste and snobbery it caused (very well described in a neat novel about the early years of World War Two, called ‘Landfall’, which I greatly recommend. Shute’s dislike of snobbery was one of the reasons he went off to live in Australia).
I get a thrill of recognition whenever I hear Celia Johnson, as the Captain’s wife in ‘In Which We Serve’. It’s almost as good a gateway into the imagination of the past as the sight and sound of a working express steam engine (not that I’d compare Miss Johnson to a locomotive).
But I digress. I never really understood how much my accent annoyed another people until I was in my late twenties, living and working for the first time in London, and heard my voice being mimicked, in an exaggerated lahdidah, as I went into a cinema in Swiss Cottage. I’m sure this wasn’t the first time this had happened. It was just the first time I had noticed it. I’d already unconsciously toned down my prep-school voice. But from that day on I toned it down still more. I noticed, a few years ago, that my brother, finding English public-school accents went down very well in the colonies, had actually become grander-sounding during his years in Washington, and though he would pronounce such words as ‘dynasty’ in the American manner (‘die-nesty’), he made no other concessions.
But in any case, there’s really no hope for me in the world of Estuary English and fake American. My voice (and my failure to disguise it further) immediately identifies me as privately educated. That is in itself a sin to many people. My use of formal grammar identifies me –accurately - as a believer in order, precedence and probably some sort of hierarchy. I think that’s what people mean when they describe me as ‘pompous’ a word they often can’t even spell. I think it’s what the crude caricature of me on ‘What the papers say’ was intended to suggest, plus a bit extra. These things are important. Czech exiles, returning from Britain after to the war to the new Communist Prague, were shocked to find that their precise grammar-school Czech was now considered too middle class, and that officials and political leaders were all speaking the Bohemian equivalent of Estuary, no doubt for fear they would sound ‘pompous’.
And I suspect it’s the near-instinctive recognition of an enemy, not by any means inaccurate, which gets the Twitter Mob going. Good heavens, they’re cross today, because I was on the Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme for a few minutes, talking about the Olympic Closing Ceremony. The item can be found here (introduced with a certain amount of anticipatory horror by Jim Naughtie).
The Twitter Mob, who always accuse me of never laughing or smiling, can’t actually have been listening because I open the item with a confession of having laughed quite a lot at the Ceremony (or Cacophony), as I did. It was, unintentionally, quite funny. But they know from my voice that I have no sense of humour, so, for instance, they expended a lot of energy trying to analyse my remark that ‘Even if I’d been interested, I’d have been bored’ and my confession that ‘I gave up listening to pop music in 1970, and saw no reason to regret that’. These, while statements of fact, are also, er, jokes. I called it even more of a Moronic Inferno than the opening ceremony, and sought to point out that the closing ceremony was explicitly anti-religious. It gave a central place to the anti-religious song ‘Imagine’, getting children to sing it (doesn’t that rather fly in the face of the Dawkinsite rage against children being brought up *with* religious belief? Wouldn’t the same difficulty apply to bringing them up with an active unbelief?).
And it gave an even more central place to the singing of ‘Always look on the Bright Side of life’, which was an important part of the puerile anti-Christian film ‘Life of Brian’. (Even more childishly, some people continue to deny that it was anti-Christian. Don’t bother.).
In case anyone didn’t get the message, this was accompanied by a chorus of Roman Soldiers (fresh from Golgotha?) and by a squadron of women dressed as nuns, speeding about the stage on roller blades. Well, I never, what a wheeze (I don’t think, actually, that many orders of nuns in this once-Protestant country were to be found wearing the elaborate winged coifs sported by these fake sisters, but what the heck, making a joke out of nuns has always been a key part of anti-religious agitprop, from the French Revolution onwards).
And so I shall continue to be pompous. It is my tragedy. By the way, although I don’t like the old Beatles numbers that were played at the closing ceremony (though I do quite like ‘Waterloo Sunset’, alas sung without much strength to it), the old songs have a certain power to them, and a memorability. It does seem to me that pop music since the 1960s has become utterly uninteresting by comparison. I think it’s because it’s now conventional, and has no power to shock, and also because it has already said all that it could possibly say. Listening to George Michael (which I’d never knowingly done before) was a form of torture. How can anyone enjoy this? It also seemed to me as I watched it that the closing ceremony failed on its own terms. I thought the praise for it this morning was a bit faint.
But the Olympic frenzy still has a little life left in it. Most of the media have lost all detachment, and are still reporting it as if it were a sacred ceremony rather than an event.And also see the separate item on the man who was arrested for not smiling.
Take this closing sentence from a BBC news report, on the Today programme: ‘The warm memories the games have a while yet to glow’. This sort of thing was rightly mocked, 30 years or so ago, in sycophantic reports of royal visits. But, as always, the revolutionaries themselves are just as bad as those they’ve overthrown, once they’re firmly in power. The slobbering over Mr Blair’s ‘great’ conference speeches by supposedly independent journalists was worse than any Royal toadying. And so is this.
I like this headline so much that I’ve decided to use it again. It so beautifully sums up the Dalek-like barking of the pro-Nutt faction. Not one of them, so far as I have noticed, has properly absorbed the significance of the uncontested fact that their hero
• Described as a ‘criminal sanction’ the so-called ‘cannabis warnings’ which involve neither punishment nor a criminal record.
• Wrote about a phantasmal BBC statement saying that the Corporation will not use me again.
Both these dollops of balderdash were uttered by him quite voluntarily in public places. I’m sorry but in these matters he is actually, plainly and incontrovertibly wrong. Despite his fan club’s efforts, there’s no excuse for either of them. Does the fact that he is a scientist, and a professor, mean that these significant errors don’t count?
Or do they rather make one worry about his rigour? I’d say myself that his description of our dispute on ‘Comment is Free’ is highly inadequate (I’m being polite), and that anyone who wanted a full account of it would be far better off reading what’s been written here.
Here’s another cause for joy. One of my critics is a Colin Walker, who three days ago posted the following:’ Prof Nutt may not be quite as good a journalist as you, though that is debatable, however you Peter are no scientist. The argument you’re having is a tabloid journalist and author on subjects of politics and religion against a professor with a PhD and years of research in the topic. I wonder who is going to have a better grasp of the facts in this one?’
I said I thought this was pretty unresponsive to what I’d written (which it obviously is).
Mr Walker now writes in again to complain about having the board-rubber thrown at him by teacher and while doing so makes some very important concessions, which some other contributors here might like to note as , though they are set about with various hostile and biting remarks, they pretty much accept my principal argument:
’ Peter, sorry 'Mr' Hitchens (or 'He who shall not be named' given a previous rant I've received from you), I hadn't realised that one of the comments you were referring to was mine when you accused people of not reading the article. I think it’s very clear I had read your article as I made reference to two points near the end of the article.’
I reply ‘Really? What were they? I am unable to see any trace of this in his original posting.’
Mr Walker continues ‘ I apologise for not giving a piece by piece critique.’
To which I reply : ‘No, no, Mr Walker, that is perfectly all right.’
He then explains, enjoyably covering his retreat with bluster: ‘ I just had a few minutes to kill, wondered what reactionary drivel you were spouting lately and got mildly miffed enough with your points to make a comment. Some of the points you make in the article are valid and in some you are pedantically stretching a minor point e.g. 'criminal sanction'.’
I respond here: ‘A *minor* point indeed? Does Mr Walker really think that there is no important difference between having a criminal record and not having one? Or between suffering a material punishment and not suffering one?’
He continues ‘ My point was that Prof Nutt may very well not be as good a journalist as you, you are well placed to criticise him on it given your qualifications and experience.’
I respond ‘ Actually, that is not what Mr Walker said at all. He said: “Prof Nutt may not be quite as good a journalist as you, though that is debatable.”. Still, perhaps Mr Walker ,too, is a scientist, and his accounts of recent events do not need to be subjected to the same rigorous scrutiny as do the accounts provided by us poor unscientists. I do however welcome Mr Walker’s important concession – actually the point of this whole argument – that I am well-placed to criticise Professor Nutt on matters where his expertise is not involved.
He adds: 'However you are no scientist and are not capable of criticising him on his scientific statements in a rational or a valid way. ‘
I reply ‘I completely agree. I yield to the professor on all matters of neuropsychopharmacology. I have always made this clear. What’s more, I don’t criticse his purely scientific statements. I criticise him on his statements about morals, politics and sociology, and his attempts to mix hard science with inexact social commentary .’
He then adds: ‘Your grasp of the scientific method does on occasion appear to be OK and I don’t doubt you understand the principles involved well.’
This too is a welcome change of tune.
So I really don’t mind that Mr Walker then tosses these words over his shoulder as he departs: ’ It's just a shame you so often abandon it and resort to self righteous anecdotes and vitriol when it doesn't help your argument. ‘
Self-righteous anecdotes, eh? I must curb those.
On a few other points. I was born in 1951 and can just remember (as I recount in my ‘The Rage Against God’) the outer echoes of the Suez affair. But manners, customs, fashions, manners of speech, etc. remained very much the same for some years after 1956 – it wasn’t until 1963 or 1964 (see Philip Larkin) that the cultural revolution began to be visible, and then quite tentativel, in established institutions.
So I’m working in part from memory, in part from conversations and correspondence with people who were older than me at this time, particularly veterans of newspaper offices in that era, and in part from such interesting and detailed fictional accounts of the age such as Margaret Drabble’s novel ‘the Millstone’ , and P.D. James’s ‘Shroud for a Nightingale’ which I cite in my ‘The Abolition of Britain’ . My basic point is that the drama completely fails to capture the spirit of the age, which is why I feel quite confident that its subsequent episodes will be as ghastly as the first.
I’m puzzled by the claim that period drama isn’t about the period in which it is set. Why, then, the elaborate attention to detail in terms of clothes, cars, smoking, old newspapers, music etc? If 1970s music were played, or a 1968 car appeared in the background, or a skirt-length from another era, there’d be sharp letters of complaint,. But when the most crucial thing of all - *what people were actually like*- is so wrong as to be laughable, nothing happens.
Poor old Shakespeare is going to be dragged in here. Personally I’m sick of seeing the histories set in the Third Reich and Richard III in Nazi uniform. But since his plays are crammed with a great deal of beautifully-expressed historical, personal, moral and political truth, they could be performed in boiler suits and you’d still get something out of it, even if ‘Julius Caesar’ were set in modern Kinshasa (and why not?).
Nowhere in the article do I say that 1956 was better than today. To criticise the present, and to point out that some features of the past were creditable, is not to yearn to recreate the dead past. It is to make suggestions for the future. I do grow weary of this stupid jibe.
I lived in the 1950s. I know what they were like, damp, smelling of stale tobacco, greyish- brown in colour, poorly-heated, stuffy, punctuated with horrible food and insipid drink, almost wholly devoid of foreign travel save the very rich. Many of the evils of the 1960s in terms of crime and immorality incubated in the de-Christianised and demoralised culture left over from the war. I have never said they were a ‘Golden Age’ because I don’t believe it.
But there were good things too, that we have lost, and it is false to deny it.
I thank Mr Demetriou for his suggestions but I am to some extent constrained by current events, I am simply unqualified to write about economics ( I am no longer sure who *is* qualified, but I am certainly not). Funny, isn’t it, that I get complaints that I won’t do that |( and even more complaints that I won’t discuss theology. Another subject on which I readily admit my lack of knowledge and understanding) , whereas if I dare to write (quite knowledgeably if without scientific qualifications) about drugs, I am told snottily not to do so. I should have thought my ready recognition of my own limitations might be a sign that I was careful to stick to what I know.
But I have written an enormous amount about education. I have pretty much said all I wish to say, especially in the chapter ‘The Fall of the Meritocracy’ in ‘The Cameron Delusion’
Oh, and Tim Wilkinson, over at ‘Surely Some Mistake’ has completed his reply to me on the cannabis issue. My thanks to him for taking so much time and trouble to make a proper, serious response. I hope he will forgive me if I now take some time to prepare my reply, which I hope will be in one part and as brief as I can make it. I have many other commitments and don’t want to rush.
