Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Why Could Democrats Not Save the Estate Tax?

    Because they kept moving the goalposts rightwards.

  • Homosexuality Taboo Throughout Moslem World

    On the West Bank and Gaza gays face imprisonment and torture.

  • New SAT Question Relies on False Dichotomies

    Best strategy is to accept facile premise then try to sell it.

  • Frat Boys

    We’ve been discussing the personal argumenative habits of Hitchens in comments lately, so this seems like a highly relevant item. Also hilarious, also interesting. I mean to say – if he takes such obvious pleasure in publicly fighting with his brother, it’s hardly surprising that he fights with other people too, is it. My only claim is that whatever rude remarks he makes at the dinner table, they’re not likely to be secret or underhanded – on the contrary, the chances are excellent that he’s just made them on tv or in the Guardian, and will do it again but with more embellishments tomorrow.

    His brother knows that, at least, even if not everyone else does:

    You should have done what you do in almost any other occasion when you disagree with someone, you should have argued about it, and then we would have reached this position much earlier. Silence is never an answer to anything.

    I disagree with that last remark, by the way. Sheer nonsense. Silence is often an answer to many things. People who irritate, for instance. One doesn’t always want to go to all the trouble of explaining to people why one finds them so immensely irritating and therefore won’t be talking to them anymore, does one. Especially if one of the chief reasons they are so irritating is the fact that they can’t seem to figure out for themselves what is so irritating about them, and stop being that way. I mean, why should we do their homework for them? I don’t see it. If they want to know why we don’t like them anymore, they should just give the matter some good hard thought, that’s what. That’s not our job.

    It’s a great credit to our father, who was very conservative, that he never attempted to inculcate any politics into either of us, there were no heretical positions in the family. The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural. I’m a materialist and he attributes his presence here to a divine plan. I can’t stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith. I mean, that to me is horrible repulsive thing.

    See what I mean? No need to wait for a convivial dinner table or gathering at the bar; there it all is right out in the open. And a fine thing too. Peter makes a very silly (and extremely, maddeningly, familiar) reply. I’m not on speakers with Peter either!

    He has several faiths. He has the faith I think of Darwinism, which is just like Christianity, an unproveable theory, which you can believe if you want because you prefer that arrangement of the universe. I happen to think the arrangement of the universe based on the belief in intelligent life is more tolerable than both morally and aesthetically, but he prefers another. I dislike only the attitude that his atheism is not a faith, because it is.

    No. It. Isn’t.

    And note the linking of what you ‘can’ believe with what you prefer, the casual closing of the is-ought gap. And that’s not even true, actually. It is not possible to believe things we would prefer to be true if we don’t in fact believe them. Everybody knows that.

    IK Are you two friends?

    PH No. There was an old joke in East Germany that went, Are the Russians our friends or our brothers? And the answer is, they must be our brothers because you can choose your friends.

    CH The great thing about family life is that it introduces you to people you’d otherwise never meet.

    There’s something terrifically satisfying in that. Especially to someone tired of the cloying American diet of ‘family values.’ Are you friends? No.

    PH They want everything to be all right.

    CH They want a happy ending – that’s their problem.

    That is the happy ending. Implacable hostility: that’s the happy ending.

  • I Already Knew That

    Well, yes. To say the least. And about time too.

    With the publication of his fifth collection of essays, it is time to acknowledge that Christopher Hitchens, as well as an exceptional political polemicist, is also one of the best literary and cultural critics of the past 20 years…It is time to take Christopher Hitchens seriously.

    Well past time, actually. To pick just one example among many, one we have mentioned recently, he makes Joseph Epstein look a very pale flat unsparkling essayist indeed. He puts a good many overpraised current essayists in the shade. So well done David Herman for saying so. Some dreary enforcer shouted at Amardeep Singh for daring to say a good word for Hitchens as a critic at the Valve the other day. In fact (now I’ve taken another look) more than one of them. Ha. They should only write and think so well, that’s all. But obviously that’s out of the question, since they have exactly the kind of orthodoxy-enforcing mentality that rules out being able to think and write as well as Hitchens does. The non-orthodoxy and the thinking and writing are intimately connected, are part and parcel of one another, so obviously people who say things like ‘the presumed gap between the politics and the cultural/aesthetic here sounds more than a little bit like the “sure, the Bradley people fund Horowitz, but when it comes to the ALSC that’s just disinterested pursuit of literary appreciation…” from this site’s early days…’ and ‘Rather than throwing up your hands – “huh, he’s sold his soul to the neocons… but that doesn’t have anything to do with this review” – one might think that the proper approach to the topic is to look into the connection between the politics and the aesthetics…’ could no more write (or think) like Hitchens than they could fly like a swallow or bite like a barricuda.

    Many people assume that Hitchens’s break with the left came over 9/11. That was a bitter falling out, part of a larger split within the Anglo-American left intelligentsia. But signs of the break are apparent earlier: over Salman Rushdie and the fatwa in 1989, then Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. Hitchens’s cause was always the same: secular, humanitarian, democratic.

    Just so, as Hitchens has said many times. The Rushdie affair was the start. And he hasn’t broken with the left in its entirety, I don’t think – with the secular, humanitarian, anti-tyranny, pro-human rights, pro-universalism left, the same left wot B&W thinks of itself as part of. The branch of the left he has broken with doesn’t have a monopoly on the word or title or orientation.

    At the end of the book [Letters to a Young Contrarian] he writes, “The next phase or epoch is already discernible; it is the fight to extend the concept of universal human rights, and to match the ‘globalisation’ of production by the globalisation of a common standard for justice and ethics.” The pieces on the fatwa against Rushdie had the same tone: it was “the chance to defend civilisation’s essential principle.”

    Just so. Universal human rights. The ones Maryam Namazie and Azam Kamguian and Homa Arjomand and Azar Majedi and Kenan Malik appeal to. That is not my idea of ‘breaking with the left,’ it’s far more like trying to get the left not to break with its own basic and best principles.

    In all these writers, Hitchens sees complexity, contradiction and “the idea of a double life.” Orwell/Blair, of course, is a classic case of this English doubleness, but the richest account is found in his essay of the early 1990s on Larkin. When Tom Paulin, Terry Eagleton and others rushed to bury Larkin under accusations of racism, sexism and worse, Hitchens dug deeper and found, both in the life and the poetry, more complexity and interest.

    And there is a great deal more to say about Larkin than that he was a racist sexist or sexist racist. Blindingly obviously. Larkin wouldn’t be the best person to put in charge of the local Universal Human Rights declaration, but that doesn’t exhaust the possibilities, does it. It takes a certain lack of subtlety to think it does.

    Hitchens, you feel, is on the move, drawing away from the littleness of today’s politicians and celebrity culture, towards the great writers of the early and mid-20th century. If that is where he finally pitches his tent, he might end up as the best literary and cultural critic of his generation.

    Well, I think he ended up there a long time ago.

  • LFIQ Invites Hitchens and Galloway to Debate

    Hitchens has accepted Labour Friends of Iraq’s offer, Galloway is considering.

  • Respect and Communalism

    Jane Ashworth reports on the Bethnal Green and Bow election.

  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali Has Conveyed Her Message

    There are atrocities performed in the name of culture and religion.

  • Hay Highlights

    Hitchens everywhere, Raymond Tallis, Simon Singh, Timothy Garton Ash.

  • Hitchens Brothers Go At It

    Peter talks bollocks about religion, Christopher doesn’t.

  • Catholic Church Urges Magic on Students

    Asks them to wear wristbands calling on dead pope John Paul II to help with exams.

  • Yank Tourists Asking Stupid Questions in Abbey

    Information sheets correct factual errors in DaVinci Code.

  • Gravity, or Paranoia II

    Here it is, another day. Well, I must admit, we were all quite surprised. None of us expected it. For quite a while now all the old certainties have been collapsing – as you well know. After all, none of us is ever likely to forget that day when it was realised that gravity was merely a part of that Social Construct of the Western Male Patriarchy called ‘Science’.

    Now, things no longer fall to Earth as they used to in the bad old unreformed days and everything floats as freely as possible. We are no longer bound to the Earth by the patriarchal dictates of the White Male Industrial-Military-Scientific Hegemony and all float free in perfect equality, whatever our gender, race, creed or political beliefs. True equality is ours at last.

    However, I have heard malicious rumours that there are still some aeroplanes up in the sky, caught out on that day. Their crews and passengers – of course – all long dead as they circle the endless skies. Of course, they claim, no-one dares go up there to get them down, in case they too suffer the same fate. But, I think we can quite easily dismiss such talk as counter-revolutionary, and – equally – dismiss such notions of so-called ‘proof’ that ‘they are clearly visible up there’ as an unfortunate hang-over from pre-enlightened days. After all, what is ‘proof’, but yet another manifestation of the pervasive way that the old ‘scientific’ hegemony corrupted our natural – and therefore – pure and good right to see things the way we want to see them? Just yet another manifestation of that whole corrupting notion of alleged evidence, which is – as we all now know – little more than so-called science’s ideologically corrupt propaganda.

    It – of course – also has become a fair bit colder since the Earth began to wander off its orbit, and – as I said – days these days do tend to be a bit of a hit and miss affair. But there is no way any of us would go back – want, or need, to go back – to those bad old unenlightened days of The Dominant White Male Hieratically Imposed Semi-Fascist Ideology Of Science that so corrupted us all back in now what seems like another Dark Ages.

    Now – at last – we are truly free, as free as the Earth is to wander the solar system and beyond, free to make up our own equally valid personal realities, and to never again suffer the indignity of occasionally falling over that once so distorted our self-esteem and growth potential as full, free and equal human beings.

    This article was first published at Stuff and Nonsense and is published here by permission.

  • Where Are All Those Conservative Anthropologists?

    If there aren’t enough conservative scholars, how can Horowitz’ plan work?

  • Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry [audio]

    A discussion of blasphemy at the Hay festival.

  • David Lodge on John Carey

    Can aesthetic judgments be grounded? No. Then what?

  • Legislation or Judicial Ruling?

    Left debates whether to go for majority opinion or constitutional protection.

  • Wallification, or Paranoia I

    Bottom in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ playing Pyramus says, more shrewdly than he or Shakespeare had any idea of, ‘O wicked wall, through whom I see no bliss,/ Curs’d be thy stones for thus deceiving me!’ Shakespeare surprisingly often anticipated the insights of postmodernism in this way; it is quite poignant and heart-rending to realize he wasn’t in a position to know he was doing so. We are more fortunate.

    We are in a position to understand the insidious sublimated power of the wall in all its forms and manifestations, we can problematize its taken for granted status in our culture, we can interrogate the way it does its work, and thus come to an understanding of the regimes of separation, blockage, interference, interposition, interruption, and frustration in Western hegemonic structures.

    Walls are everywhere. A wall is a barrier, and barriers are everywhere we look. In fact, it is difficult not to conclude that Eurocentric Western hegemonists are so terrified of nature and the real world (if there is a ‘real world,’ but that is a question for another essay) that they can’t bear to confront any part of it without a barrier. Poor frightened paranoid rational bureaucratic neoliberals, cowering away from trees and flies and snow, constructing an artificial antiseptic world to live in and never smelling the flowers or the decaying corpses.

    Many of the walls and barriers are obvious enough: they’re the ones we already call walls and barriers: the walls of houses and prisons and asylums; fences and border crossings, and the like. Also roofs and floors. But there are other barriers, or walls – other solid objects that come between the Self and some piece or aspect of the outside world. Between Self and Other. These walls define the other as Other – that is the cultural work they do. There are more walls of that kind than a theorist can enumerate. Shoes. Hats. Socks. Clothes. Plates. Tablecloths. Chairs. Cushions. Beds, mattresses, sheets.

    All furniture is a barrier. Chairs and tables are barriers between us and the floor, which is a barrier between us and the ground. Plates and glasses are barriers between food and the table or floor or ground – and so on. Barrier upon barrier everywhere you look.

    All of our lives are infiltrated and saturated with barriers. Everything is blocked, interrupted, partitioned, channelled, frustrated. Our energies are clogged, our desires and impulses and hemmed in and corralled, our inspirations are siphoned and piped, our creativity is boxed up and fenced in. We are allowed free interaction and intercourse with nothing. (It is no accident that prostitutes can charge more for ‘bareback.’) Mosquitoes, flies, worms, bacteria, leopards, vultures, polar bears – we are forcibly separated from all of them.

    Band-aids. Umbrellas. Boats. Cars. Park benches. Bridges. All, manufactured artificial objects interposed between our breathing natural bodies and the earth. It is as if ‘civilization’ has done nothing but teach us a kind of hypertrophied paranoia in which we can’t stand to confront anything skin to skin. O wicked wall indeed.

  • Quebec Rejects Sharia Court

    Quebec legislature voted unanimously against allowing sharia to be used in the legal system.

  • Review of Simon Blackburn on Truth

    Equips reader to expose weaknesses in arguments of both Ratzinger and Rorty.