Christopher Hitchens’ final essay

[Jonny]

Christopher Hitchens last essay, titled The Reactionary, took G.K. Chesterton as its subject.

Benjamin Schwarz, literary and national editor of The Atlantic Magazine, in which the essay was published, writes in a separate article on the essay:

This essay epitomizes Christopher’s approach as a writer and critic. He was generous and took in many facets of his subject. But he knew that the received wisdom was usually wrong, and he was unafraid to make final and devastating judgments.

Cuddly contrarian that Hitchens was, more probably a case of being "eager" than "unafraid".

[Maolsheachlann]

It's hard to say anything about Hitchens because he is, after all, recenlty deceased and who wants to speak ill of the dead?

I skimmed the article. It wasn't the worst piece about Chesterton I had ever read. He was probably right that Chesterton's "join-the-dots" logic went a little too far and he saw undercurrents in history that just weren't there. Hitchens refers to Chesterton seeing the Nazis as a sort of decayed Protestantism. I could also refer to the passages in Irish impressions where Chesterton seems to think the Irish should have supported Britain in WWI because that made them on the side of French republicanism against Frederick the great and Bismarck, or something like that.

Some of his comments are just silly: "Chesterton’s overbuilt reputation for paradox was founded on his Paradox of Conservatism, which was to the effect that if you want to be a conservative, you had better not be too much of one." Really? You could probably pick five better paradoxes off a typical page of Chesterton! Nor is it Chesterton's most famous or typical or telling paradox. I suppose his "if something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly" might be his most famous. His deepest paradox? Who can say? Perhaps the insight that original sin is the jolliest of dogmas.

I found this funny:

At any rate, I don’t think even the best of the poetic quotations can redeem Chestertonianism from the reactionary implications of the prosaic ones: they put one too much in mind of another critique of his work by T. S. Eliot. Reviewing him on Robert Louis Stevenson in 1927, Eliot found him suffering “under a misunderstanding that we are not likely to labor under,” “attacking misconceptions which we had not heard of and in which we are not interested,” and putting forth “a style exasperating to the last point of endurance.”

Quoting T.S. Eliot in order to demonstrate that great poetry can't redeem "reactionary" views is surely a prize irony.

But you know...the man was dying when he wrote this. I pray his deathbed reading of Chesterton might have guided his final moments.

[Maolsheachlann]

Last time I looked, 289 people had viewed this thread and nobody had anything to say....come on, people! The world's second most famous atheist launching his final broadside against Chesterton must surely evoke some response...?

[Rusmeister]

Hey, Maol, it IS Great Lent. I'd expect traffic to slow down on a Chesterton site...
I had this on my "To do" list. I'll see if I can bump it up.

[Rusmeister]

Last time I looked, 289 people had viewed this thread and nobody had anything to say....come on, people! The world's second most famous atheist launching his final broadside against Chesterton must surely evoke some response...?

I do have plenty to say and I think I can kick Hitchen's ideas in the butt, but I'm in the middle of moving - generally not conducive to what it takes for me to do that. Hitchens IS a thinker, and a relative heavy-weight, but he himself makes too many assumptions and doesn't go as deep ad GKC. I do have this on my laundry list, but it requires peace and quiet, something I won't have much of until June.