For the second, which similarly calls to mind the dundridge mentality of officialdom against which I inveighed earlier,*3 I quote from my memoir, Brief Candle in the Dark:
At Oxford railway station the car park was guarded by a mechanical arm, which rose to allow each car to leave when the driver inserted a token of payment in a slot. One night Colyear had returned to Oxford on the last train from London. Something had gone wrong with the mechanism of the arm and it was stuck in the down position. The station officials had all gone home, and the owners of the trapped cars were in despair as to how to escape the car park. Colyear, with his bike waiting, had no personal interest; nevertheless, with exemplary altruism he seized the arm, broke it, carried it up to the stationmaster’s office and plonked it down outside the door with a note giving his name, address and explanation as to why he had done it. He should have been given a medal. Instead, he was prosecuted in court and fined. What a terrible incentive to public-spiritedness. How very typical of the rule-obsessed, legalistic, mean-spirited dundridges of today’s Britain.
And a little sequel to that story. Many years later, after Colyear’s death, I chanced to meet the distinguished Hungarian scientist Nicolas Kurti (a physicist who incidentally happened to be a pioneer of scientific cookery, injecting meat with a hypodermic syringe, all that sort of thing). His eyes lit up when I spoke my name.
‘Dawkins? Did you say Dawkins? Are you any relation of the Dawkins who broke the arm at the Oxford station car park?’
‘Er, yes, I’m his nephew.’
‘Come, let me shake your hand. Your uncle was a hero.’
If the magistrates who imposed Colyear’s fine should happen to read this, I hope you feel thoroughly ashamed. You were only doing your duty and upholding the law? Yeah, right.
* * *
*1 My father’s middle brother Bill predeceased him by a year. I delivered this eulogy for my dear uncle (and godfather) at his funeral at St Michael and All Angels Church, Stockland, Devon, on Wednesday, 11 November 2009. Since it was a family funeral I obviously referred to members of his family by their first names without explanation.
*2 My mother, who was close to her brother-in-law (two ways, for the two brothers married two sisters), recently told me Bill would never talk about his wartime experiences. No wonder, given where and how he had spent those years.
*3 ‘If I ruled the world…’, this page.
Honouring Hitch*
TODAY I AM called upon to honour a man whose name will be joined, in the history of our movement, with those of Bertrand Russell, Robert Ingersoll, Thomas Paine, David Hume.
He is a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion wider than anybody I know. And I live in Oxford, his alma mater and mine.
He is a reader, whose breadth of reading is simultaneously so deep and comprehensive as to deserve the slightly stuffy word ‘learned’ – except that Christopher is the least stuffy learned person you will ever meet.
He is a debater, who will kick the stuffing out of a hapless victim, yet he does it with a grace that disarms his opponent while simultaneously eviscerating him. He is emphatically not of the (all too common) school that thinks the winner of a debate is he who shouts loudest. His opponents may shout and shriek. Indeed they do. But Hitch doesn’t need to shout. His words, his polymathic store of facts and allusions, his commanding generalship of the field of discourse, the forked lightning of his wit…I tried to sum it up in my review of God is not Great in the Times of London:
There is much fluttering in the dovecots of the deluded, and Christopher Hitchens is one of those responsible. Another is the philosopher A. C. Grayling. I recently shared a platform with both. We were to debate against a trio of, as it turned out, rather half-hearted religious apologists (‘Of course I don’t believe in a God with a long white beard, but…’). I hadn’t met Hitchens before, but I got an idea of what to expect when Grayling emailed me to discuss tactics. After proposing a couple of lines for himself and me, he concluded, ‘... and Hitch will spray AK47 ammo at the enemy in characteristic style’.
Grayling’s engaging caricature misses Hitchens’ ability to temper his pugnacity with old-fashioned courtesy. And ‘spray’ suggests a scattershot fusillade, which underestimates the deadly accuracy of his marksmanship. If you are a religious apologist invited to debate with Christopher Hitchens, decline. His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed and beautifully spoken words, would threaten your arguments even if you had good ones to deploy. A string of reverends and ‘theologians’ ruefully discovered this during Hitchens’ barnstorming book tour around the United States.
With characteristic effrontery, he took his tour through the Bible Belt states – the reptilian brain of southern and middle America, rather than the easier pickings of the country’s cerebral cortex to the north and down the coasts. The plaudits he received were all the more gratifying. Something is stirring in this great country.
Christopher Hitchens is known as a man of the left. Except that he is too complex a thinker to be placed on a single left–right dimension. Parenthetically, I have long been surprised that the very idea of a single left–right political spectrum works at all. Psychologists need many mathematical dimensions in order to locate human personality, and why should political opinion be any different? With most people, it is surprising how much of the variance is explained by the single dimension we call left–right. If you know somebody’s opinion on, say, the death penalty, you can usually guess their opinion on taxation or public health.
But Christopher is a one-off. He is unclassifiable. He might be described as a contrarian except that he has specifically and correctly disavowed the title. He is uniquely placed in his own multi-dimensional space. You don’t know what he will say about anything until you hear him say it, and when he does he will say it so well, and back it up so fully, that if you want to argue against him you’d better be on your guard.
He is known throughout the world as one of the leading public intellectuals anywhere. He has written many books and countless articles. He is an intrepid traveller and a war reporter of signal valour.
But of course he has a special place in our affections here as the leading intellect and scholar of our atheist/secular movement. A formidable adversary to the pretentious, the woolly-minded or the intellectually dishonest, he is a gently encouraging friend to the young, to the diffident, to those tentatively feeling their way into the life of the freethinker and not certain where it will take them.
We treasure his bons mots and I’ll just quote a few of my favourites.
From the penetratingly logical…
That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
To the cuttingly witty:
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.
To the courageously unconventional:
[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.
The following is vintage Hitch:
I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with ‘you’ in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.
And what about this:
Organised religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.
And this:
Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of ‘the flock’.
His respect for women and
their rights shines forth:
Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy.
Though not a scientist and with no pretensions in that direction, he understands the importance of science in the advancement of our species and the destruction of religion and superstition:
One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.
He has inspired and energized and encouraged us. He has us cheering him on almost daily. He’s even begotten a new word – the hitchslap. We don’t just admire his intellect, we admire his pugnacity, his spirit, his refusal to countenance ignoble compromise, his forthrightness, his indomitable spirit, his brutal honesty.
And in the very way he is looking his illness in the eye, he is embodying one part of the case against religion. Leave it to the religious to mewl and whimper at the feet of an imaginary deity in their fear of death; leave it to them to spend their lives in denial of its reality. Hitch is looking it squarely in the eye: not denying it, not giving in to it, but facing up to it squarely and honestly and with a courage that inspires us all.
Before his illness, it was as an erudite author and essayist, a sparkling, devastating speaker that this valiant horseman led the charge against the follies and lies of religion. Since his illness he has added another weapon to his armoury and ours – perhaps the most formidable and powerful weapon of all: his very character has become an outstanding and unmistakable symbol of the honesty and dignity of atheism, as well as of the worth and dignity of the human being when not debased by the infantile babblings of religion.
Every day he is demonstrating the falsehood of that most squalid of Christian lies: that there are no atheists in foxholes. Hitch is in a foxhole, and he is dealing with it with a courage, an honesty and a dignity that any of us would be, and should be, proud to muster. And in the process, he is showing himself to be even more deserving of our admiration, respect, and love.
I was asked to honour Christopher Hitchens today. I need hardly say that he does me the far greater honour, by accepting this award in my name. Ladies and gentlemen, comrades, I give you Christopher Hitchens.
LAST WORD
This intrepid warrior for truth, this cultured, courteous citizen of the world, this devastating, coruscating enemy of lies and cant – well, maybe he has no immortal soul – none of us has. But in the only meaning of the words that makes any sense, the soul of Christopher Hitchens is among the immortals.
* * *
* Christopher Hitchens died of cancer in December 2011. Two months earlier I travelled to Houston, Texas and conducted a long interview with him for the New Statesman. I think it was the last major interview he gave. I had been invited to edit the Christmas issue of the magazine, and this interview was one of the main features of ‘my’ issue (another was ‘The tyranny of the discontinuous mind’: see this page). The day after the interview, he attended the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston. In 2003 the Atheist Alliance of America had introduced an annual award, the Richard Dawkins Award, to honour those who raise public consciousness of atheism. I play no part in the annual choice of recipient, but I’m usually invited to present it at a conference, in person or by video. And I feel hugely honoured myself by every one of the illustrious names on the list, now fourteen strong. In 2011 the award went to Christopher Hitchens, and it was to be presented to him at the Texas Freethought Convention. He was too weak to attend most of the conference, but he entered towards the end of the banquet, to a thunderous and highly emotional standing ovation. I then made the speech reproduced here. At the end of it he came up on the platform, we embraced, and he made a speech of his own. His voice was weak and interrupted by fits of coughing, but it was a tour de force from a valiant fighter, the finest orator I ever heard. He even found enough stamina to take a large number of questions at the end. It is a privilege to have known him. I wish I had known him better.
In memory of
Christopher Hitchens
Sources and acknowledgements
The author, editor and publishers gratefully acknowledge the permission of copyright holders to reproduce material in this volume.
I. The value(s) of science
‘The values of science and the science of values’: Edited version of Amnesty Lecture delivered at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, on 30 January 1997 and subsequently published as ch. 2 of Wes Williams, ed., The Values of Science: Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1997 (Boulder, Colo., Westview Press, 1998). Reproduced with permission of Westview Press.
‘Speaking up for science: an open letter to Prince Charles’: Originally published in John Brockman’s online salon The Edge, www.edge.org, and in The Observer, 21 May 2000.
‘Science and sensibility’: Originally delivered as a lecture at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 24 March 1998, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 as part of the series ‘Sounding the Century: what will the twentieth century leave to its heirs?’
‘Dolittle and Darwin’: Abbreviated version of text first published in John Brockman, ed., When We Were Kids: how a child becomes a scientist (London, Cape, 2004).
II. All its merciless glory
‘ “More Darwinian than Darwin”: the Darwin–Wallace papers’: Slightly abridged version of speech given on 26 November 2001 at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and published in The Linnean, vol. 18, 2002, pp. 17–24.
‘Universal Darwinism’: Slightly abridged version of speech at the 1982 Darwin Centenary Conference in Cambridge, subsequently published as a chapter under the same title in D. S. Bendall, ed., Evolution from Molecules to Men (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986). Reproduced with permission.
‘An ecology of replicators’: Slightly abbreviated text of an essay first published in special issue of Ludus Vitalis celebrating the centenary of Ernst Mayr: Francisco J. Ayala, ed., Ludus Vitalis: Journal of Philosophy of Life Sciences, vol. 12, no. 21, 2004, pp. 43–52.
‘Twelve misunderstandings of kin selection’: Abbreviated version of paper first published in Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie: Journal of Comparative Ethology, vol. 51, 1979, pp. 184–200 (Verlag Paul Parey, Berlin und Hamburg).
III. Future conditional
‘Net gain’: First published in John Brockman, ed., Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? The net’s impact on our minds and future, Edge Question series (New York, Harper Perennial, 2011).
‘Intelligent aliens’: First published in John Brockman, ed., Intelligent Thought: science versus the Intelligent Design movement (New York, Vintage, 2006), pp. 92–106.
‘Searching under the lamp-post’: First published on the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, 26 December 2011.
‘Fifty years on: killing the soul?’: First published as ‘The future of the soul’, in Mike Wallace, ed., The Way We Will Be Fifty Years from Today (Nashville, Tenn., Thomas Nelson, 2008), pp. 206–10. Copyright © 2008 by Mike Wallace and Bill Adler. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson. www.thomasnelson.com.
IV. Mind control, mischief and muddle
‘The “Alabama Insert” ’: First published in Journal of the Alabama Academy of Science, vol. 68, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1–19. A revised version was published as ‘The “Alabama Insert” by Richard Dawkins’, excerpted from Charles Darwin: a celebration of his life and legacy, edited by James Bradley and Jay Lamar (Montgomery, Ala., NewSouth Books, 2013).
‘The guided missiles of 9/11’: First published in the Guardian, 15 September 2001.
‘The theology of the tsunami’: Fir
st published in Free Inquiry, April/May 2005.
‘Merry Christmas, Prime Minister!’: First published as ‘Do you get it now, Prime Minister?’, in New Statesman, 19 December 2011–1 January 2012.
‘The science of religion’: Abbreviated text of the first of two lectures given at Harvard University in 2003 in the series of ‘Tanner Lectures on Human Values’ and published in G. B. Peterson, ed., The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 2005).
‘Is science a religion?’: Edited text of a speech given to the American Humanist Association in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1996, in acceptance of their award of Humanist of the Year, and published in The Humanist, 1 Jan. 1997.
‘Atheists for Jesus’: First published in Free Inquiry, December 2004–January 2005.
V. Living in the real world
‘The dead hand of Plato’: This article is largely taken from ‘The tyranny of the discontinuous mind’, in New Statesman, Christmas double issue, 2011, combined with parts of ‘Essentialism’, in John Brockman, ed., This Idea Must Die: scientific theories that are blocking progress, Edge Question series (New York, HarperCollins, 2015).
Science in the Soul Page 41