(Update: Check out the comment section on this one – turned out fairly interesting.)

 

Finally. I present to you another post that is not about the man Douglas Wilson. This time, I write only about the men.  There are, of course, tens of thousands of Douglas Wilsons currently in the world.

 And Pooh cried from a dark corner of the Wood, “Christopher Ritchens! Help!”

Sure enough, a mixed story leans momentarily to the good.  He came. My Inbox has been full of good advice from my new friend. I will copy and paste my favorite selections.  (Imagine having to re-type them all out, what an enormous task that would be.)  Here is Christopher Hitchens’ ^[1]  advice to a middle-aged contrarian:

 

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You rather flatter and embarrass me, when you inquire my advice as to how a radical or “contrarian” life may be lived. 

 

. . . It may be that you, Michael, recognise something of yourself in these instances; a disposition to resistance, however slight, against arbitrary authority or witless mass opinion, or a thrill of recognition when you encounter some well-wrought phrase from a free intelligence.  If so, let us continue to correspond so that I may draw from your experience even as you flatter me by asking to draw upon mine.  For the moment, do bear in mind that the cynics have a point, of a sort, when they speak of the “professional nay-sayer.” To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.  And there is no decent or charted way of making a living at it.  It is something you are, and not something you do.

 

. . . Henry Kissinger, challenged on television to meet my accusation that he was responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, responded with a maniacal and desperate attempt to change the subject, and denounced me as a denier of the Nazi Holocaust. . . . I tell you about it not just in order to boast, though there is that.  It went to make up for many, many other months, when the celebrity culture and the spin-scum and the crooked lawyers and pseudo-statesmen and clerics seemed to have everything their own way.  They will be back, of course. They are always “back.” They never leave.  But the victory is not pre-determined.  And there are vindications to be had as well, far sweeter than anything contained in the meretricious illusion of good notices or “a good press.”

 

 . . . The essence of an independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks  The term “intellectual” was originally coined by those in France who believed in the guilt of Captain Alfred Dreyfus.  They thought that they were defending an organic, harmonious and ordered society against nihilism, and they deployed this contemptuous word against those they regarded as the diseased, the introspective, the disloyal and the unsound. . . . the figure of Emile Zola offers encouragement, and his singular campaign for justice is one of the imperishable examples of what may be accomplished by an individual.

 

Zola did not in fact require much intellectual capacity to mount his defense of one wronged man.  He applied, first, the forensic and journalistic skills that he was used to employing for the social background of his novels.  These put him in the possession of the unarguable facts.  But the mere facts were not sufficient, because the anti-Dreyfusards did not base their real case on the actual guilt or innocence of the defendant.  They openly maintained that, for reasons of state, it was better not to reopen the case.  Such a reopening would only serve to dissipate public confidence in order and in institutions. . . .. . . . the partisans of Dreyfus therefore had to face the accusation not that they were mistaken as to the facts, but that they were treacherous, unpatriotic and irreligious; accusations which tended to keep some prudent people out of the fray.

 

There is a saying from Roman antiquity:  Fiat justitia-ruat caelum. “Do justice, and let the skies fall.”  In every epoch, there have been those to argue that “greater” goods, such as tribal solidarity or social cohesion, take precedence over the demands of justice.  It is supposed to be an axiom of “Western” civilisation that the individual, or the truth, may not be sacrificed to  hypothetical benefits such as “order.” But in point of fact, such immolations have been very common. To the extent that the ideal is at least paid lip service, this result is the outcome of individual struggles against the collective instinct for a quiet life.  Emile Zola could be the pattern for any serious and humanistic radical, because he not only asserted the inalienable rights of the individual, but generalised his assault to encompass the vile role played by clericalism, by racial hatred, by militarism and by fitishisation of “the nation” and the state. His caustic and brilliant epistolary campaign of 1897 and 1898 may be read as a curtain-raiser for most of the great contests that roiled the coming twentieth century.

 

. . . . It’s always as well to remember, when considering “miscarriages” of justice, as the authorities so neutrally and quaintly like to call them, that the framing of the innocent axiomatically involves the exculpation of the guilty.  This is abortion, not miscarriage.

 

. . . One of the hardest things for anyone to face is the conclusion that his or her “own” side is in the wrong when engaged in a war.  The pressure to keep silent and be a “team player” is reinforceable by the accusations of cowardice or treachery that will swiftly be made against dissenters.  Sinister phrases of coercion, such as “stabbing in the back” or “giving ammunition to the enemy,” have their origin in this dilemma and are always available to compel unanimity.

 

. . . Quite often, the “baptism” of a future dissenter occurs in something unplanned, such as a spontaneous resistance to an episode of bullying or bigotry, or a challenge to some piece of pedagogical stupidity [or perhaps both in my case].  There is good reason to think that such reactions arise from something innate rather than something inculcated.

 

. . . this is what I have been telling writing classes for years. You must feel not that you want to but that you have to.  It’s worth emphasizing, too, because there is a relationship, inexact to be sure but a relationship, between this desire or need and the ambition to rely upon internal exile, or dissent; the decision to live at a slight acute angle to society.

 

. . . If you care about the point of agreement and civility, then, you had better be well-equipped with points of argument and combativity, because if you are not then the “center” will be occupied and defined without your having helped to decide it, or determine what and where it is.

 

. . . I was heartened to have your reply.  It is true that the odds in favor of stupidity or superstition or unchecked authority seem intimidating and that vast stretches of human time have seemingly elapsed with no successful challenge to these things. But it is no less true that there is an ineradicable instinct to see beyond, or through, these tyrannical conditions.  One way of phrasing it might be to say that injustice and irrationality are inevitable parts of the human condition, but that challenges to them are inevitable also.  On Sigmund Freud’s memorial in Vienna appear the words: “The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.”

 

. . .Conflict might be painful, but the painless solution does not exist in any case and the pursuit of it leads to the painful outcome of mindlessness and pointlessness; the apotheosis of the ostrich.

 

. . . Perfectionsists and zealots can break but not bend; in my experience they are subject to burnout from diminishing returns or else, to borrow Santayana’s definition of the fanatic, they redouble their efforts just when they have lost sight of their ends. . . . If you want to stay for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognise and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows that he is right.  For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle.

 

. . . In the average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority.  If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving “as if” they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.

 

. . . Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page.  “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” it says.  It’s been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine that most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there.

 

. . . I am not a supporter of materialist individualism in the Ayn Rand style, nor do I yearn for Nietzschean status.  However, there is something irreducibly servile and masochistic about the religious mentality.  And the critical and oppositional stance does ultimately rest on a belief in the capacity and pride of the individual, while religion tends to dissolve this into a sickly form of collectivism (remember “the flock”).  Even at its most beautifully expressed this has a coercive undertone; as a matter of fact the bell does not always toll for thee, however much you may believe in human solidarity.  Religion is, and always has been, a means of control. . . . Karl Marx was right when he stated in 1844 that “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.”  “Science,” as we call it, or objective and disinterested inquiry as it should be called, has helped contain and domesticate religion and vulgar Creationism but will never succeed in dethroning it.

 

. . . Many are the works of genius now in public libraries that would have been incinerated if a roll of opinion had been called.  And, since I appear to you to be fixated on this point anyway, I trust I will lose none of your respect if I remind you once again that the forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.  Do not think for a moment that I have exhausted this point!

 

. . .  [A number of years ago], I decided in my own mind that the then-president of the United States was even more of a crook and a liar than his most dogmatic ideological opponents had claimed.

 

. . .one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it.

 

. . . One is sometimes asked “by what right” one presumes to offer judgment.  Quo warranto? is a very old and very justified question.  But the right and warrant of an individual critic does not need to be demonstrated in the same way as that of a holder of power.  It is in most ways its own justification.  That is why so many irritating dissidents have been described by their enemies as “self-appointed” . . . I am happy in the ranks of the self-employed.  If I am stupid or on poor form, nobody suffers but me.  To the question, Who do you think you are? I can return the calm response: Who wants to know?

 

. . . I have never myself been in a situation of apparently hopeless oppression, or had to try to recruit the personal courage to resist such a state of affairs.  But from observing those who have, I conclude that the moment of near despair is quite often the moment that precedes courage rather than resignation.  In a sense, with the back to the wall and no exit but death or acceptance, the options narrow to one.  . . . Noam Chomsky, a most distinguished intellectual and moral dissident, once wrote that the old motto about “speaking truth to power” is overrated.  Power, as he points out, quite probably knows the truth already, and is mainly interested in suppressing or limiting or distorting it.  We would therefore do better to try to instruct the powerless. I am not sure that there is a real difference in this distinction.  Ruthless and arrogant though power can appear, it is only ever held by mere mammals who excrete and yearn, and who suffer from insomnia and insecurity.  These mammals are also necessarily vain in the extreme, and often wish to be liked almost as much as they desire to be feared.

 

. . . Those who need or want to think for themselves will always be a minority;  the human race may be inherently individualistic and even narcissistic but in the mass it is quite easy to control.  People have a need for reassurance and belonging.

 

. . . The essential element of historical materialism as applied to ethical and social matters was (and actually still is) this: it demonstrated how much unhappiness and injustice and irrationality was man-made.  Once the fog of supposedly god-given conditions had been dispelled, the decision to tolerate such conditions was exactly that – a decision. . . . Distrust any speaker who talks confidently about “we,”  or speaks in the name of “us.”  Distrust yourslef if you hear these tones creeping into your own style.  The search for security and majority and is not always the same as solidarity; it can be another name for consensus and tyranny and tribalism.

 

. . . I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist.  It’s as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book. . . . In one way, traveling has narrowed my mind.  What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight.  This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people.  In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere.  The two worst things, as one can work out without leaving home are racism and religion. . . . And when you hear the bigots talk about the “other,” it’s always in the same tones as their colonial bosses used to employ to talk about them.

 

. . .I make a minor specialism out of the study of partition. . . I have crossed most of the frontiers that freeze stupidity and hatred in place and time.  The Ledra Palace Hotel checkpoint in Nicosia, the Allenby Bridge across the Jordan, the “demilitarised zone” at Panmunjom in Korea (uncrossable still, though I have viewed it from both sides), the Atari border post that cuts the Grand Trunk Road between Amritsar and Lahore and is the only land crossing between India and Pakistan, the “Hill of Shouts” across which divided villagers can communicate on the Golan Heights (which I’ve also seen from both sides), the checkpoints that sprang up around multicultural Basnia and threatened to choke it, the “customs” post separating Gaza from the road to Jerusalem. . . I’ve stood in the sun or the rain and been searched or asked for bribes by surly guards or watched pathetic supplicants be humiliated at all of these.  Some other barriers, like Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin or the British army’s bunker between Derry and Donegal or the frontier separating  Hong Kong and Macao from China have collapsed or partly evaporated and are just marks in my passport.  The other ones will all collapse or dissolve one day, too.  But the waste of life and energy that has been involved in maintaining them, and the sheer baseness of the resulting mentality. . . . In some ways I feel sorry for racists and for religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human, and deserve a sort of pity.  But then I harden my heart, and decide to hate them all the more, because of the misery they inflict and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so.  It especially annoys me when racists are accused of “discrimination.” The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members of one “race” to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.

 

. . . Much depends, therefore, on how one handles the tedious part . . Few things, for example, are more forbidding than the elementary civic duty of taking up the case of the wrongfully imprisoned. Visits to the jail, writing letters to indifferent elected officials, meeting with demoralised or paranoid relatives, sessions with lawyers . . the Dreyfus moment almost never comes. A lot of class warfare can be the same way, keeping up the spirits of the strikers who have no savings, looking up dismal and complex records to find out where  the corporation has hidden its money, trying to interest a reporter in telling the story honestly.  In the case of some ground-down or ethnically cleansed faraway country, explaining to uncaring people where it is on the map and why it might either matter to them or be, in some way they may not whish to hear, their own responsibility. I don’t mean to make any of this appear to be soul-destroying; it will only seem like that if you hope for instant results.  The great reward, if that’s the right word, lies in the people you will meet when engaged in the same work, the lessons you will learn, and the confidence you will acquire from having some experiences and convictions of your own – to set against the received or thirdhand opinions of so many others.

 

. . . do not worry too much about who your friends are, or what company you may be keeping. Any cause worth fighting for will attract a plethora of people. . . . Those who try to condemn or embarrass you by the company you keep will usually be found to be in very poor company themselves; in any case they are, as I was once taught to say, tackling the man and not the ball.  In point of fact, I have never found myself in the same galere as an outright fascist, and I have never found, even when making common cause with neoconservatives, that I’m in the same camp as Henry Kissinger.  So there may be some platonic discrimination that saves one from the worst and acts as a kind of unseen compass.

 

. . . as often as not you will find that – whatever the high-sounding pretext may be – the worst crimes are still committed in the name of the old traditional rubbish: of loyalty to nation or “order” or leadership or tribe or faith. . . . The high ambition, therefore, seems to me to be this: That one should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with the maximum of skepticism, the maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality with the maximum of ironic self-criticism.  This would mean really deciding to learn from history rather than invoking or sloganising it.

 

. . . . Beware the irrational, however seductive.  Shun the “transcendent” and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself.  Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others.  Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish.  Picture all experts as if they were mammals.  Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.  Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.  Suspect your own motives, and all excuses.  Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.  . . . may you keep your powder dry for the battles ahead, and know when and how to recognise them.

 

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I would recommend buying the book ^[2].