On Hitchens and Education

This is a thing what I wrote the day after Christopher Hitchens died. I had intended to keep it private, but in rereading it, I liked how it turned out, so I decided to put it here instead. It doesn't exactly fit with the rest of this blog, but it's not as though I post here often enough for it to feel out of place!

Christopher Hitchens is dead. So it goes.

It might seem strange for me to feel moved to eulogize Hitch in this way. I cannot pretend to be a devoted follower of the man's work. Out of the seventeen books he published during his lifetime, I've read precisely none of them from cover to cover. Hitchens was more familiar to me as a journalist and essayist, and yet even within that realm I can safely say that my familiarity with his work would not scratch the surface of the man's prodigious output.

And, indeed, of the countless opinions to which Hitchens so tenaciously and publicly clung, only a small percentage ever saw the two of us standing on common ground. As a contrarian, Hitch would have it no other way. I'd guess that he would have been immediately suspicious of anyone who thought exactly the same way, down the line, as he did. This is one of the chief benefits—and curses—of possessing a sharp, hyper-aware mind; it is far harder to trust that others aren't yes men or trying to pull one over on you.

I first encountered Hitchens when, as a sophomore in college, I took a course about George Orwell. I wrote a paper about the curious tendency of politicians on both wings to try to claim Orwell as one of their own. Naturally, Hitch had been there before me, and while his book on Orwell was still too new to show up in the chain of bibliographic references I used to research this paper, at least one of his essays made the cut. It summarized exactly the point I was attempting to make in my own paper—that Orwell himself didn't have a single, consistent political perspective, instead presenting changing, ambivalent, and (sometimes) contradictory views throughout his career—and made me look under-prepared and schoolboyish by comparison. Of course, I quoted Hitch liberally in the final draft.

At that time, I had no idea who he was or what he stood for. Some cursory research told me he was a controversial figure, that he had (like Orwell) been a darling of both the left AND the right, that he had savaged Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton, that he had hobnobbed with the same neocons whose motivations I had already come to distrust in the dawning clarity that followed our national moment of post-9/11 unity. But I did not dig too much deeper than that and, aside from the occasional essay passed on to me via whatever digital channels we used pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter, I largely forgot about Hitchens.

That is, until his re-emergence with God is Not Great, which appeared shortly after my own “skeptical awakening,” during that crucial “less credulous than thou” phase gone through by all new “converts” to the skeptical movement. I listened to Hitchens on so many podcasts, watched his innumerable debates and speeches on YouTube and TV, and grew to admire him despite our disparate opinions and lifestyles. He was an inveterate rake and hard-liver; I was (and remain) a peevish, prudish non-drinker and non-indulger. About the only vices we shared were a proclivity for cigarettes—a proclivity that would, ultimately, prove costly for him, and which I thankfully never felt so keenly as to not be able to quit—and a deep-seated need to call others out on their bullshit, consequences be damned.

But my admiration for Hitch has little to do with his vices. Rather, it stems from the way his virtues shined a light on my own (less-enjoyable) vices.

Hitchens was a compulsive writer, with a work ethic that even cancer treatments and the inevitable decline of his own body failed to snuff out. I cannot fathom the cumulative word count Hitchens must have taken with him to his grave, nor the volume of words-yet-to-come his untimely death has robbed from us. Yet, in spite of his pen's profligacy, Hitchens's writing, even when playful or intentionally provocative, never gave the appearance of being tossed off, rushed, or in any way less than thoroughly researched and thought-out. The same holds true of his public appearances, whether he delivered prepared speeches or off-the-cuff remarks. He always gave the impression of having prepared ahead of time, of knowing his information backwards and forwards, of being able to shut down any opponents through the sheer cumulative heft of his knowledge.

It's this work ethic, this discipline, this drive to always keep learning that I admire more than anything else Hitchens did. I am a lazy man, a man who used his natural intelligence to cheat the system in school rather than achieving success through hard work and diligence. I have no doubt Hitchens would have shamed me within moments of commencing any conversation I might have chanced to have with the man. His ability to call to mind the precise words—culled from a seemingly-infinite supply of books, poems, films, plays, speeches, scholarly papers, and classics of all kinds which he committed to memory—to suit any situation points to a deficit in both my character and in the system of education in which I found my own moderate success.

Put simply, our system of education does not encourage the kind of effort Hitchens learned to put into every single thing he did. Our educators are forced to “teach to the test,” to facilitate bare-bones scholarship and scant, quote-mining research rather than in-depth study. We have no foundation in the classics, and without internalizing the compiled wisdom of those who came before us, how could we ever learn to marshal it in support of our own arguments the way Hitchens could so readily do? The priorities of our educational system, driven as they are by the needs of our post-industrial, service-oriented, late-capitalist economy, have taught us all to prize simply having the right answer over knowing why the answer is right, or how it was derived, or, indeed, questioning its rightness in the first place.

I'm not trying to say that appropriating the methods of English boarding schools or Oxford University (the places where Hitchens's budding intellect learned to blossom) would produce a nation of Junior Hitches, ready to dismantle the apparatus of religious or political control; England itself has, so far as I'm aware, produced only ONE Christopher Hitchens, and he was a singular man in all respects. However, what chance do the young people who COULD be the next Hitch have of reaching that potential in a land where even saying the word “evolution” in a classroom can, at times, be a punishable offense?

I understand that educators in this country have it hard. They are chronically under-funded and under-paid. They're forced to find a way to reach students of differing backgrounds and ability levels at the same time, with increased calls to “mainstream” students into heterogeneous classes where there's little common ground from which to start. There are countless social, political, and religious elements fighting to dominate the processes of book selection and curriculum building. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to provide everyone with the sort of wide-ranging, classics-oriented, independent research–fueled education that would create an adequate knowledge base for a Hitchens 2.0. And this is to say nothing about the motivations of the students themselves who, after all, are people entire-unto-themselves. with urges, wants, and needs not wholly consonant with the aims of any educational system.

But still, seeing the ease with which Hitch's twin swords of logic and rhetoric could cut through the arguments of any author, pundit, cleric, or celebrity unwise enough to engage him in debate, it's hard not to think that we, as a society, should all aspire to such skill. And yes, Hitchens had an inimitable style, a style that played well with the American media's love of controversy, false balance, and flash. But his flash was always rooted in intellectual rigor, a rigor that is absent from the vast majority of our commentators and candidates. While most of his fellow pundits pushed poorly-researched talking points, Hitchens always strove to let reason and research be his guides.

Sadly, in an America that privileges providing answers without showing your work, the distinction between Hitch and, say, Bill O'Reilly might not have been readily apparent to the majority of people out there. But Hitch was always a boots-on-the-ground sort of guy, willing to travel, put himself in danger, and seek out new sources in order to fully vet any stories and shore up the conclusions he might draw from them. No O'Reilly or Hannity could say the same. But we live in a country that is creating an unlimited number of Hannitys or O'Reillys out there, ready to “win” arguments by shouting the same thing over and over without ever bothering to prove the veracity of what they say. Given the status of our educational system, it's hardly a surprise that this sort of punditry is the dominant force in political dialog today. It is hard to imagine that the children raised on this nutrient-poor intellectual diet will reverse the trend when they take charge in a few decades' time.

If nothing else (and I'm sure there will be a great many things else), Christopher Hitchens's legacy should be an aspirational one. I wish young people of all stripes could see what a fearsome reputation—and, indeed, what a posthumous outpouring of praise—can be attained by education, determination, and devotion to doing the work a task requires for no other reason than the pleasure of doing a thing well. I have grave doubts as to whether our system could take a child, even one as driven and autodidactic as the young Hitch no doubt was, and turn her or him into as nigh-unbeatable a debater as the fully-fledged Hitch became.

It would take an uncommon courage, an uncommon fortitude, an uncommon level of guts to emerge from our uncontroversial, consensus-chasing, thoroughly-bland school system with the intact bellyful of fire needed to argue with reason in defense of an unpopular point-of-view the way that Hitchens always did. We should all take a lesson from his example, not only in regards to living life fully and without fear or shame, but also in regards to putting in the work needed to actually be the smartest person in the room rather than simply acting like it. Even if, like me, you fear it might be too late to gain something of his drive and work ethic for yourself, we owe it to the next generation to pass it on to them. There is nothing that frightens the elites more than a well-educated populace and, considering the example of Christopher Hitchens, is it any wonder why?