10, P.H.

(That's "Post-Hitchens", to you)

I didn’t register (and I doubt many except perhaps those closest to him did either) what the meaning of Christopher Hitchens’ death 10 years ago was. If memory serves, those of us fond of his work (never mind fond of the man personally, those lucky enough to have known him) were more sad at the loss of good, prolfic wit, prose, and commentary on all things cultural and political. And yet, as the years ticked by and the early 2010s gave way to the late 2010s and early 2020s, the sense of post-mortem distress seemed to only get more intense among those who followed Hitch’s efforts.

“What do you think Hitchens would have thought of…?” was a question I both heard and uttered more than once. The question of what Hitchens would have thought of the 2016 Election in particular has always been the biggest question looming over such conversations—and for good reason; for all the hatred he reserved for the “worst family” it’s incredibly hard to picture him voting for someone as crude and dishonest as President Trump. True, his supposedly contrarian nature and hatred of the Clintons may have pushed him in that direction—especially if he bought into Trumpian working class populism served up in a more high-brow concoction by the Traditionalist Steve Bannon and his ilk—but given his latter-day American patriotism and appreciation of symbolism, the (still overrated) events of January 6th, 2021 would likely have been a bridge too far for him. Then of course there’s the matter of the rise of antifa and radical right wing groups (if only in the public consciousness) from 2017-2019, the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent “summer of love” chaos (never mind Black Lives Matter in general, from its mutation of a universal sentiment to a signifier of devout religious denomination), and, of course, COVID-19. To give a good sense of how long it’s been, Occupy Wall Street was still relatively nascent at the time of Hitchens’ death. It’s almost as if world events—namely the Revolt of the Public—were waiting for Hitchens to get out of the way and shuffle off his mortal coil.

The fact is, we just don’t know what Hitchens would have thought of any of these things. He’s dead and gone, 10 years now. But the fact that so many of us yearn to know or to even merely guess, shows the endurance of his rhetorical skill and the power of not just his written word, but the written word itself. Whether it’s through the concise and plain-spoken wordplay of John McWhorter or the beautiful contrarian tendencies of Andrew Sullivan, what we could call the “soul of Hitchens” has remained with me—and never mind the multitudes of people Hitchens was able to call his friends who continue to make it clear they are cut from the same cloth and writers whose work I have yet to discover. Putting aside the offense Hitchens might have taken to my invocation of his soul (or even the soul), even in square quotes, I see maybe not the direct influence, but indeed the spirit of Hitchens’ work at work when I read material that only makes me pause and say “damn…” It isn’t to say he’s possessing the writers I enjoy or their work, but it’s that their work reminds me what I loved about Hitchens’ work in the first place. He didn’t open the door to other writers to speak honestly (unless they say otherwise), but rather, he opened the door to a lot of readers—I’d wager thousands many times over—to seek out other writers who do too. That is accomplishment; that is spirit—granting us a connection to our fellow man that we might not otherwise have sought.

This connection, in the case of Hitchens, was to seek out those who might dare to challenge orthodoxy; religious, yes, but to settle with that—as many who simply seem content to merely make vague references to Christian bigotry that may have been seen as edgy truth-telling in 2004—would be to squander that spirit I speak of. That is what Hitchens left behind—the realization to many that it was okay to clash with orthodox opinion, even if it was considered to be the socially acceptable one. Is this to say that his style or worldview—that of contrarianism—could lead one down a dark path that begins with Joe Rogan and ends with Richard Spencer, as likely many would suggest?

Yes. And that this doesn’t matter is the point.

You see, “bad opinions” are inevitable. A lack of principles is universal. There will always be those who lack the latter and develop the former and if you condemn or even try and remove the path down which they travel to reach those things will only coax them down a different path to the same destination, only with less opportunities to deviate than there likely would have otherwise been. That is the essence of free speech and free inquiry—the essence contains both the risk and the reward of where that goes. How one defines the risk and the reward is up to them, but it’s not up to anyone to tell us whether we can or can’t take that risk and those who try are, at their core, pathetic and poisonous cowards.

That is the “soul of Hitchens”; to make our own decisions on anything without needing to follow a script. Anyone who has studied improv (yes, I’m copping) understands why this is important—you have a structure and you sometimes have to get from point A to point B, but how you get there is up to you and your partners (to whom you better listen, even if you disagree). This allows for epic failure (such as supporting the Iraq War…) or profound success (such as calling a spade a spade with a certain political family…) and a bunch of insight in between, both correct and reductive (from the societal and psychological failures of religion to the funniness of women—but jeez, can we please let that last one go?).

We no longer have Hitchens the man to give us his own insight, but I hope I’ve demonstrated (through this essay and, if you’ll allow me a moment of delusional hope, all of my other work) that the “soul” of his work lives on 10 years—and beyond—after his death. In the years to come, I hope to demonstrate this further with something a little more in-depth and deserving, but in the meantime, I think we can see this “spirit” or “soul” in the last public appearance given by the man where he reminds us of, perhaps, one of the most important jobs available to those of us willing to try and take it:

“We have the same job we have always had, to say as thinking people and as humans that there are no final solutions, there is no absolute truth, there is no supreme leader, there is no totalitarian solution that says that if you just give up your freedom of inquiry…that if you simply give up your critical faculties, a world of idiotic bliss can be yours.”