POP QUIZ!

Over at my place, an historian who-I-don’t-know-why-he-talks-to-the-likes-of-me noted:

Given the muck you slog through, I understand your appreciation of his rhetoric[.]

That’s true. But given the links in my previous post to the Goldberg articles and the general sentiment against Hitchens, I want to ask you what was asked of me:

If not Hitchens, what conservative (however so broadly defined) would you rather engage in a debate with?

That’s not a direct quotation, but you catch my drift. I’m genuinely curious here, so feel free to name anyone whose name doesn’t involve anything Au.

In Praise of Hitchens

Perhaps because I teach in one of the reddest counties in the country — Orange — but every quarter, I make it clear to my students that I’m not interested in indoctrinating them. I’m left of liberal in my politics, but when I’m in the classroom, I’m interested in one thing and one thing alone: teaching these students how to construct a stronger argument. When I argue with conservatives online, I’m arguing with people who don’t know how to argue (or whose idea of arguing involves suing people who disagree with them). I tell my students I’m looking to create a better class of opponents. That I’d rather disagree with people who can state their beliefs forcefully, so that I didn’t always feel like I’m beating candy from a baby.

Since 2001, in the back of my mind, I always imagined I wanted to train my conservative students into being a wee Hitchens.

I know I’ll take flack for this, but honestly, the reason the left reviled Hitchens as strongly as it did was because it realized that it had a formidable opponent. For the most part, the left argues with the likes of Grover Norquist, whose influence is undeniable but whose skills are very much comparable.

To everybody.

Who argues.

About anything.

Hitchens was different. We can turn a phrase, but he could cant and pirouette it. As I wrote after learning he died:

He’s basically our generation’s G.K. Chesterton: wrong about it all, but beautifully so.

I stand by it. He attacked Mother Teresa, and justifiably so, when he felt it necessary. And he embraced an unjust war, unjustifiably so, when he felt it necessary. But he also waterboarded himself, to justify himself, because he felt it was necessary, and he backed down. He was the opposition we should hate, because he makes his case so strongly; but he was also the opposition we should love, because he challenged us to make our argument in its strongest form and changed his mind to fit the facts.

Would that we always had opponents so eloquent and wrong.

UPDATE: Because it was brought up in the comments, I thought I’d at least shed a little light on how I deal with other “leading thinkers” in the conservative movement. I just don’t want anybody confused about the issue here, which is argumentative integrity, not correctness.

UPDATE II: Because someone brought up that I’d said it better before, here’s “Liberal Fascism: Two Words Next To Each Other.“

The Theologians

Near the end of his life, Jorge Luis Borges was visited by a then-little known English writer of the Left, who deplored the reactionary politics Borges adopted, or had at least seemed to adopt in his old age (Borges’ attitude toward politics, like his attitude toward the world in general, was sufficiently ironic that his true views on both were always difficult to discern), but who did not let this distressing fact interfere with his appreciation of the man’s immense literary gifts. Here is Christopher Hitchens’ description of the end of their meeting:

The hours I spent in this anachronistic, bibliophile, Anglophile retreat were in surreal contrast to the shrieking horror show that was being enacted in the rest of the city. I never felt this more acutely than when, having maneuvered the old boy down the spiral staircase for a rare out-of-doors lunch the next day—terrified of letting him slip and tumble—I got him back upstairs again. He invited me back for even more readings the following morning but I had to decline. I pleaded truthfully that I was booked on a plane for Chile. ‘I am so sorry,’ said this courteous old genius. ‘But may I then offer you a gift in return for your company?’ I naturally protested with all the energy of an English middle-class upbringing: couldn’t hear of such a thing; pleasure and privilege all mine; no question of accepting any present. He stilled my burblings with an upraised finger. ‘You will remember,’ he said, ‘the lines I will now speak. You will always remember them.’ And he then recited the following:

What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?

The title (Sonnet XXIX of Dante Gabriel Rossetti)—’Inclusiveness’—may sound a trifle sickly but the enfolded thought recurred to me more than once after I became a father and Borges was quite right: I have never had to remind myself of the words. I was mumbling my thanks when he said, again with utter composure: ‘While you are in Chile do you plan a call on General Pinochet?’ I replied with what I hoped was equivalent aplomb that I had no such intention. ‘A pity,’ came the response. ‘He is a true gentleman. He was recently kind enough to award me a literary prize.’ It wasn’t the ideal note on which to bid Borges farewell, but it was an excellent illustration of something else I was becoming used to noticing—that in contrast or corollary to what Colin MacCabe had said to me in Lisbon, sometimes it was also the right people who took the wrong line.

That Christopher Hitchens died on the very day that marked the official end of the U.S. war in Iraq is the kind of coincidence that would have led the ever-ironical Argentine to remark upon the mysterious ways of the God with whom Hitchens so famously quarreled.