He went warring and drinking and blaming gods: Hitchens and alcohol

Pharyngula has been the site for heated (and often off-topic) discussion about some recent comments by Christopher Hitchens at a "Freedom from Religion" convention in Wisconsin. Apparently, Hitchens took the opportunity to urge a more violently militaristic approach to the current tensions between the West and much of the Muslim world. If he's been reported accurately, he has, in effect, declared war on Islam and called for the infliction of massive casualties if we in the West are to prevail. 

This, it seems to me, is the last message that we need from a major public intellectual such as Hitchens. We may, in some metaphorical sense, be at war with terrorist networks, but to imagine that we are at war - literal war - with Islam itself, or with Muslims as a group, is starting to sound unhinged.

Many of Hitchens' critics blame his wilder comments on his supposed alcoholism and alleged penchant for drunkenness. Ho hum! It's amazing how readily some self-identified "rational" thinkers can resort to such moralistic garbage whenever they find themselves in radical disagreement with somebody. Despite the slightly facetious title of this post, I have no reason to believe that Hitchens has any serious problem with alcohol - or that any such problem, even if it does exist, has impaired his judgment. If, as widely rumoured, he does have a special fondness for whiskey, then good for him. I'm partial to a drop myself.

Can't we engage in intellectual debate without indulging in silly personal slurs? As I said on one of the Pharyngula threads, I wouldn't care if it turned out that Hitchens is a heroin addict who listens to Barry Manilow records and has sex with a parrot while dressed in a rubber suit. It's his ideas that matter, not his habits. 

But what about his ideas? Hitchens has been built up as some kind of hero to the cause of anti-religion. There's been a fair bit of rhetoric about "four musketeers" in that cause - Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and of course Hitchens. Dawkins' site has used this meme, but I wonder how wise it is when some of the muskets are, at times, more like loose cannons.

I love some of what Hitchens delivers - I greatly enjoyed God is Not Great, and he makes some telling points even in the speech that he gave in Wisconsin (from what I've been able to watch so far). But as we've also seen recently with Sam Harris, who doesn't even like the words "atheist" and "atheism", the "New Atheists" do not form a philosophical school. The more we see of them, the more we can see that they are very diverse individuals, sharing only a non-belief in deities and a knack for explaining difficult concepts clearly. That diversity of voices expressing powerful criticism of religion is healthy for our intellectual culture, but I do think that the four musketeers idea is rather lame, and that the "New Atheism" is a journalistic tag of limited value: it's more useful if we apply it to the entire publishing phenomenon of recent, high-profile books attacking religion (of which there are now many) than if it is simply shorthand for Dawkins-Dennett-Harris-Hitchens. 

Dawkins (along with his friend Dennett) might be safer associating himself with people like Alan Sokal, A.C. Grayling, and Philip Kitcher than with Hitchens and Harris. Never mind that Kitcher himself has been less than tactful in distancing himself from Dawkins! It was always apparent that there's no monolith of unbelief, but it's becoming more evident that Hitchens and Harris, in particular, have distinctive personal agendas and will never subordinate these to any "movement". Nor, of course, should they. They are entitled to say what they really think - just as we are entitled to think (and say) that Hitchens appears to have jumped the shark in his latest comments on Islam.