Chistopher Hitchens: Dissenter Within Dissenters

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

By now, I have come to realize that I am quite the commited liberal. If people like me (freethinking, non-religious, etc) are to exist in the future, liberalism is the only path to follow. If we have a true comittment to a more equal society, liberalism is the only path to follow. If we want a truly moral society based on rationality and individualism rather than what an old book tells us to do, then liberalism is the only path to follow.

With that said, there is a certain element of self-delusion in modern liberalism. There is that "faith" that because we're right, because we know we're right and we know why we're right, than rationally others will agree with us. Perhaps that would be true if philosophy was required in every school, but until then, you cannot beat religious zeal in the "faith" department. The recent election is a testament to that.

As a result, I think people like Christopher Hitchens, who takes the same set of assumptions and facts that most liberals work with and arrive at a different conclusion, are supremely important. Some people looke at Christopher Hitchens and see a traitor to the liberal cause. That's not really true. Rather, he is more like a dissenter within the dissenters. He does the soul-searching that perhaps we should be doing more often.

Today, Hitchens's column at Slate is entitled "Bush's Secularist Triumph", which is sure to raise some ire in the liberal community. However, as always, Hitchens weaves a fascinating argument. The enemies of secularism, he warns, are not the fundimentalists, the homophobics, and the creationists...The real enemies of secularism are the Islamicists, those who wish to create fundimentalist states, such as Osama Bin Ladin. In that sense, he argues, Bush has done more for secularism than any modern liberal.

I'm not saying I agree with this argument totally. What I like about it is that Hitchens picks up on the fundimental sort of paradox in modern liberalism. Modern liberals are very quick to define a sense of objective right and wrong in domestic affairs. The Civil Rights movement is an excellent example here. The motivation behind that movement was clearly that racism and segregation were wrong, no matter what the argument. There was a very clear moral component at work there. And yet when it comes to foreign policy, the argument is that we should not interfere in other countries, that we should let other cultures define themselves. What happened to objective right and wrong? Hitchens does a very good job highlighting the problem here:

"From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda? Suicide murderers in Palestine—disowned and denounced by the new leader of the PLO—described as the victims of "despair." The forces of al-Qaida and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even, by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers."

Now, I don't for a second believe that the people that represent those views represent the core of modern liberalism. On the contrary, they are merely a very vocal minority. However, liberals have not disowned these people either, and that's Hitchens objection. If secularism really is the goal, and it is the goal because it breeds more peaceful, more open, and more free societies, why isn't just as much of a goal overseas as it is on American soil? Hitchens scolds that:

"Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL. I dare say that there will be a few domestic confrontations down the road, over everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the display of Mosaic tablets in courtrooms and schools. I have spent all my life on the atheist side of this argument, and will brace for more of the same, but I somehow can't hear Ralph Ingersoll or Clarence Darrow being soft and cowardly and evasive if it came to a vicious theocratic challenge that daily threatens us from within and without."

And what we have here, is the very definition of dissent.