A brief response here to Mr Platt’s second indictment
As evidence of my supposedly ‘overbearing ’tone (also, as I recall, self-righteous and high-handed) Mr Platt proffers the following.
‘Delving into his (my) blog at random I find this from 6th February 2:48pm under “Stalingrad Revisited”: “Mr L’Eplattenier sets himself up as an intelligent contributor, and he can obviously write clear, literate English. Can he read it?” Or this from 11 July 2012 under “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”: “Welcome once again to the Peter Hitchens remedial school for people who don’t know how to argue. Your homework has been marked.” Well thank you, teacher! Further insight into how he views his readership may be gleaned from this, posted on 27 October 2010 under “The Great Depression”: “Only grown-ups, genuinely capable of changing their minds, are unafraid of the truth and willing to go where it leads them. They alone can argue properly. And there are very few of them, as we see here all the time.” Again he is the grown-up, lecturing naughty children. From the same post: “…anybody who thinks there is, is displaying not the lofty knowledge implied by Mr Smith's dismissive attitude, but a profound ignorance of scientific method.”’
PH : Is that it? I see nothing even slightly wrong in any of these moments and look back on them with undimmed pleasure. Anybody who comes here to argue with me presumably doesn’t do so because he admires my emollient, empathetic style. Such jibes are perfectly normal in the sort of debate I do all the time, and don’t in any way compare to the sort of thing I get from my critics, including declarations that I am stupid (unsupported by evidence because the writer feels no need to provide any, it being so evident to the writer) suggestions that I, rather than my late brother, should have died and ( as we have recently seen ) suggestions that I should be stabbed in the larynx by a fellow-passenger on a train. Nor do they compare to the oafish, semi-literate and wholly unresponsive tripe which recently arrived here by the lorry-load, in reply to my latest posting on cannabis.
In fact, they don’t even fall into the same category. I am, as it happens, a grown-up. Not only am I 61 years old. I have 36 years of experience as a specialist writer on national newspapers, not to mention five years living as a resident correspondent in Moscow and Washington. I have visited 57 countries on assignment. I have seen death, famine and the face of war, met the powerful, and undergone danger.
Most of this information is readily available on the web to anyone interested. I have written and had published five substantial books. I have, demonstrably, changed my own mind on many major issues and readily confess to (if you like) or boast of ( as I see it) having done so (a rarity in public life, as it happens). On top of that, I benefit from having been given my basic education in a period when this a far more serious business than it is now (and during which teachers would feel free to hurl a board-rubber at me if I didn’t pay attention, and good for them).
I am reasonably widely read, and do a fair amount of public speaking and debating against skilled and well-informed opponents.
Frankly, these are the only reasons why anyone should read this blog at all. I see no reason for false modesty about any of the above. Anyone’s welcome to comment here, provided he obeys some very simple and just rules, but if you fear a sharp answer, don’t invite one. In any case, most of my supposedly whimpering, hounded and downtrodden victims don’t even come here under their own names, so their humiliation (if it can be so described) is entirely private.
Mr Platt then moves on to what I believe is his real point. That is, he doesn’t like my religious views or the way in which I defend them.
Mr Platt says : ‘He is so used to being high-handed that he does so even when the subject under discussion is something he consistently demonstrates little understanding of. He cannot stop himself. He asks for examples of hounding his critics for responses. What about his refusal to respond to posts by Mr. Crosland on the grounds that Mr. Crosland long ago failed to reply to one of his e-mails?’
Well, this is a funny form of hounding, I must say. I thought hounding involved a relentless pursuit, rather than a reasonably polite attempt to avoid the society of someone whose company and conversation one does not enjoy. I have not found it profitable to engage in discussions with Mr ‘Crosland’ (not his real name) as he doesn’t in my view ( and we have had many, many encounetrs over the years) argue fairly or generously, and I have no obligation to carry on having exchanges with someone from whom I have decided I cannot learn, or from someone who constantly seeks to bring every argument back to the same King Charles’s Head.
This, by the way, is a literary reference to the unfortunate but loveable Mr Dick in ‘David Copperfield’, who could not address any subject without King Charles’s Head somehow finding its way into it. For Mr Crosland, his desire that everyone else should share his Godless convictions, and his Darwinist certainties, appears to me to be his King Charles’s Head. Why, if we began arguing about the Dock Labour Scheme, or Comprehensive Schools, or Lady Chatterley, or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or Bretton Woods, it would not be long before old Charles Darwin somehow came into it, and the fossil record. Most London clubs have one or two people like this, usually to be found in the bar, awaiting all comers for a knock-down discussion. There is a name for them, but I forget what it is.
Mr Platt continues his excoriation of my behaviour: ‘What about entitling a post “The Quieter Millican” in which he said: “the Professor has not yet addressed the points he so concisely set out”, prompting the professor to respond that 24 hours had not yet elapsed and calling for patience?’
To which I reply. Yes, and what about it? It was a play on words, a reference to a well-known book(twice filmed) called ‘The Quiet American’ . Professor Millican’s name lent itself to such harmless jests (see also ‘the Millican Brief’ and ‘Millican, Begin Again’) which I regarded as harmless amusement, and a more interesting sort of headline than ‘Millican Replies – Part 3’. Professor Millican didn’t seem to mind.
It is true that journalists, accustomed to deadlines, tend to write faster than academics and are sometimes puzzled by how slowly non-journalists write. But this hardly qualifies for the word ‘hounding’. My main response here is ‘don’t be silly’.
Mr Platt then gets to his real red meat.
I am asked for examples of points he has failed to respond to. Very recently Professor Jerry Coyne rebutted all the nonsense Mr. Hitchens had been posting about evolution, answering in detail all of his concerns about evidence, observations, the ability of the theory to make testable predictions, and so on. This *demands* a response!’
I must repeat here that my alleged ‘nonsense’ consists of saying that the theory of evolution by natural selection may be right. Professor Coyne, so far as I know, never came here to make his points. I tried, once or twice, to engage with him and his little society of admirers at his blog (which, unlike this one, appears to attract an entirely unanimous audience) . But I received nothing but huffy abuse, and decided not to continue. As I have said before, I think a basic generosity to opponents is essential in any serious debate. I felt there was no such generosity there. No moral or other rule obliges me to tangle in discussion with people who despise me. Others have also drawn attention to Professor Coyne’s remarks about me and my late brother. I have no duty to engage with people who behave in this way.
Mr Platt then shows that his apparent concern for courtesy is in fact nothing of the kind.
He declares : ‘Anyone having their life’s work in science contemptuously dismissed as a mere “cult” is fully entitled to be discourteous ‘.
This is actually wholly ridiculous. Professor Coyne does not personally own the theory of evolution by natural selection (about which I remain agnostic) , nor does he personally own the snide, dismissive, arrogant know-all cult of aggressive modern atheism which has adopted evolution by natural selection as its dogma and subjects any dissenters to heresy hunts . Both these phenomena have many adherents and many leaders. Even if he were their very embodiment, there is nothing personally abusive in attacking the ideas expressed by someone else. I have no knowledge of, and have never made any reference to, Professor Coyne’s personal character nor to his family. I assume that he is an intelligent, informed person. I do not seek a quarrel of any kind with him. I believe that he genuinely believes the theory he espouses to be true. I concede that he may be right. But I do not think he (or anyone else) has established with certainty that it is demonstrably so.
What on earth is one to do about a person who goes out of his way to seek an argument with someone he has never met, and who has never voluntarily sought any contact with him, who concedes that he may be right? And how is one to respond if this mysterious uninvited , unprovoked assailant conducts his attack with bad-tempered scorn dripping from his every phrase? In my case, it is as if an angry person, of whom I know nothing , plants himself in the street in front of me and commences to lecture me crossly on my (undoubted) faults, saliva flying in all directions. Here is what I do. I turn away. I cross the street, and hope he does not follow me.
I would say that I did try, to begin with, to respond reasonably and peaceably, to what was being shouted at me. But the shouting simply intensified ( as it always does, whenever I discuss this subject, which is why I no longer do so, ever, and will not again) . So, as I say, I crossed the street.
Mr Platt continues ‘…and for Mr. Hitchens (who often tells us he has a thick skin) to use this as a convenient excuse to avoid further engagement smacks of someone desperate to avoid a bruising encounter which they know will once again result in their deep ignorance being exposed to the world for all to see.’
This is nothing to do with the thickness of my skin. It is to do with the futility of arguing with people who know they are right (but cannot actually prove it, and so get angrier and angrier and angrier with anyone who doubts them, hunting down such doubters with extraordinary zeal, for what they are really hunting are their own misgivings). They know, deep down, that they cannot prove it, and loathe, above all, any reminder of this difficulty. This is because the theory, which they hope above all things is right, is important to them not because of its correctness, but because of the explanation of the universe (comforting to them, dispiriting to me) that it provides. That is why even my mild statement that the evolutionists ‘may be right’ brings swarms of hornet-like critics round my ears, from thousands of miles away. They can sniff my heresy across an entire salt ocean. And they cannot bear that one tiny pocket of such heresy should exist. ‘What do you mean ‘may be’!!?’, they yell and screech. ‘Nothing short of ‘is’ will do!!! Submit!!! Submit!!! Recant!!! Sign!!!’ . By comparison, I am only too happy to share the planet with people who doubt my faith, which I freely acknowledge to be a belief and a choice.
As Don Maclean once sang, and as so few people seem to have understood , ‘I’d heard about people like me. But I’d never made the connection’. The next song on that record (I seem to recall) began with the words ‘Everybody loves me, baby. What’s the matter with you?’
Mr Platt then tries to inveigle me into yet another evolution argument with the dogmatic rage-filled battalions of the Darwinist Cult’s heresy-hunting department.
Why, after all, would anyone not want to do that? Even so, he will have to be content, yet again, with my repeated statement that he may be right.
Before he admits that he had (as I well knew) misrepresented me in spirit by twisting my declaration of faith in God so long as the tiniest scrap of evidence for His existence could be found (which I here repeat) into ‘there are certain things he would continue to believe no matter how hypothetically flimsy the evidence for them became’, Mr Platt then ludicrously suggests that the drinking of coffee is to be compared with the use of mind-altering drugs.
It was when I read this twaddle, too silly to be worth countering, that Mr Platt attained the category of background noise, with added lasagne, to which I fear he must now be assigned. I did give him the chance.
