Book Review: ‘god is not Great’ by Christopher Hitchens

March 13, 2009  

 

Christopher Hitchens has written an exciting, powerful, and involving book, but one nevertheless inconsistent. This book is only periodically convincing, and Hitchens fails to give us a fully realized thesis. This is undoubtedly because that central thesis, that religion alone poisons all, that a completely secular humanism should drive religion out and take its place, is so draconian as to be insusceptible of demonstration.  

 

Further, his amazing confidence in himself is apparent on every page, and unfortunately finds its correlative in his fondness for radical statements: Hitchens seems inclined to believe that truth must always be wholly radical, that truth cannot be found in our everyday, red-state world. The book also has some vague similarities with radical leftist thinking in that human history, exclusive of Greece of antiquity, is mostly viewed as a crime, “a nightmare from which we are trying to awake,” and must be corrected. It couldn’t be, of course, that there was good in the past, but only in the ideal, Platonic, Darwinian future. Hitchens wishes to discard all religious elements without heed for the baby or the bathwater, to the detriment of his book.  

 

This book is indeed a passionate, intelligent plea for humanistic rationality, to be sure, and the point is well-taken that secular life has its glories, but one suspects at a certain point that at bottom Hitchens is really pursuing here his contempt for the non-elite, for the non-cosmopolitan, and that he simply couches this contempt in atheism. He has a pretentious and annoying habit in this book of referring repeatedly to people simply as “mammals.” Early on, Hitchens says to religion: “Leave me alone.” This is ironic since Hitchens has spent his life diligently seeking out violent religious hotspots — leave me alone? What? This book has high-brow aspirations, but mainly preaches to the choir with radical pronouncements. Hitchens is a brilliant fellow, but one wishes he wouldn’t lump things together so willy-nilly, for example, his implying moral equivalence between the Palestinians and Israel.  

 

Now, Hitchens’ central point is that religion is man-made, rather than revealed. This is the basis of all he goes on to say, and it is the strongest, most fully realized part of the book. Certainly fewer “mammals” today believe in the Virgin Birth, for example, than did a thousand years ago, say, and certainly, in any case, it is a less fervently believed in faith than heretofore. There has to be a reason for that: the gains of science. So Hitchens does adduce solid evidence that religion has an earthly and non-transcendent origin. But then, partly on this basis, he makes the mistake of positing that civilization and religion are distinct, that the former was possible without the latter. “We could have done without the whole thing,” is his attitude. But he adduces virtually no evidence, to my mind, for this further claim, other than his own opinion.  

 

Since religion has no transcendent authority or provenance, Hitchens continues, and since it is horrifically cruel and fanatical, it must go. Religion “plots your destruction.” There is a clash taking place between civilization and religion, and we must save ourselves and take up arms. But this is just the over-the-top radical rhetoric earlier referred to: it is actually only Islamofascism that we are threatened by, not religion as a whole, and even Islamofascism is unlikely to threaten all of civilization with destruction, given its power level. It can only threaten us with occasional, albeit horrific and murderous, acts of terrorism.  

 

If we step back a moment, the question plausibly arises as to whether civilization is not completely based on religion. Persia, Old Testament Israel, Greece, Rome, Sumeria, Mesopotamia — weren’t they all rooted in religion? Wasn’t religion itself, and not science, the creator of moral values? And aren’t science and rationality incapable of value-creation? And isn’t the well-placed, intelligent admiration we give to science a value that itself derives from the religious sensibility, a sensibility attuned to the larger-than-life? Isn’t the Bible, that is, the Old Testament, actually the Book of Nation-Building, and therefore the Book of Civilization? If all this is true, or even just some of it, Hitchens’ argument against religion is internally incoherent: he attacks religion and thereby unwittingly attacks the foundation of civilization. He praises his allegedly secular worthies and yet denies the source and wellspring of their awesome inspiration.  

 

It has been written that philosophy is the transition from myth to science. This definition suits me, and yet it should still be noticed that science owes myth for the magic bus ride: Thales, the first philosopher, from his abode in Asia Minor, near Egypt, stated that all is water. The significance of this is that when science took its first unsteady steps into a new method, empirical observation, it still relied on the myths of Egypt about the power of the Nile, and included those mythic elements in the scientific hypothesis. Well, now. Mighty, all-conquering science initially had one foot remaining in fanciful description even as it put its remaining foot into the certainty of empirical evidence. It is clear that the human intellect created myth, religion, and science, all three. They are of a piece in that. Their methods are different, and that distinguishes them, to be sure, but they have indeed different functions thereby. They do not displace each other, as Hitchens believes. Science is the mere gathering of evidence, so how can it posit moral values?  

 

The law-givers of history, be they religious believers or quasi-secular rational thinkers, have always known that law is a scar on the human psyche. Stubborn material, the human impulse. But the scar imposed by the law-givers had to be imposed to make civilization possible. In retrospect, the law-givers were in the right. Hitchens might disagree — he believes it is only religion that makes us bad. This is Rousseauist with a vengeance, however. Marquis de Sade, a younger man coming after Rousseau, wrote violent, disturbing scenes in his novels for a reason: to ridicule the optimism of Rousseau about mankind. I think that Hitchens’ rational man is just Rousseau’s natural man redux.  

 

Moreover, Hitchens believes we would behave better without religion, since it is precisely religion that makes us behave worse than anything else. Oh…..to have no moral compass gives one more moral compass. I see now. But wouldn’t humans be bad even if religion had never existed? Isn’t it the badness of ”mammals” that prompted the original religious activity, the law-giving?  

 

Towards the end, Hitchens anticipates an objection to his blueprint for a Brave New World of Secular Humanism. He knows that some of us will bring up Hitler and Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot. Aren’t they proof that the secular world of atheism is just as capable of atrocity as any type of society? And therefore, why bother with establishing its hegmony? The defense he gives here is the weakest part of the book, without doubt. He asserts that early religious societies, of the ancient world (Pharoah, Nebuchadnezzar, Darius, Aztecs, Incas, etc), were totalitarian. Thus it is religion that created totalitarianism, and thus the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century are on the conscience not of secular society, but of religious society. Secular society is innocent of all wrongdoing here. Now, it’s obvious that Hitchens is simply making an arbitrary rule at this point that states everything bad is from religion, and everything good is from humanism. But anyone can do that as he will.  

 

The mechanism that Hitchens claims transferred the totalitarianism of past religious societies to the twentieth century was the modern concept of utopia, and the age-old desire to perfect the human species. If only we hadn’t done that. But let’s step back. Didn’t Alexander the Great consider himself a god? And isn’t he a secular humanism A-Lister? And, even more compellingly, what in the world has Hitler got to do with the Aztecs? It is implausible in the extreme to assert that religious societies of long-ago created the psychopatholgy of Joseph Stalin, or contributed to it in any way.  

 

A much more recent, obvious, and plausible suspect would be Marxism. This much-vaunted theory gave us the idea, derived from Hegel, that history has a spiritual terminus, and that the economic interpretation of history is the precise key to understanding the gears of history. Doesn’t that sound a lot closer to twentieth century totalitarianism than the Incas? There really isn’t much description of the new secular order in Hitchens’ book. We’re on our own there. Ironic, too, that he feels so wholly threatened by religion — isn’t our society pretty much already a secular one, hasn’t he already won his victory, for the most part? This book reflects the bias of its time.  

Tony Downing