Several years ago I skimmed Hitchens's God is Not Great. Disappointment, rather than disagreement, was the book's main effect on me. It is sophomoric for a modern intellectual to pose as Voltaire or Thomas Paine and rail against traditional religions. Why don't they show some real guts by taking on the conventional belief systems of the intelligentsia itself? These are well known, but seldom acknowledged and never criticized, by conventional intellectuals who want to stay popular within their own coteries. (They have to make a living after all, so they don't want to be on the receiving end of the subtle blacklisting that a Marxist or Green apostate would receive from an editor in the publishing industry or a reviewer at the New York Times.)
None of the obituaries that I've read about Hitchens really inspires me to read any of his books. But the threshold is far lower for magazine-length articles. A fair number of them are free and accessible at Salon.com. Indeed, it was refreshing to read him railing against the Liberal-Left's darling, Michael Moore, of whom he says: "It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery."
So far I've only scratched the surface. Hitchens might be the kind of writer that does me a bit of good as long as I agree to disagree with him 80% of the time.
None of the obituaries that I've read about Hitchens really inspires me to read any of his books. But the threshold is far lower for magazine-length articles. A fair number of them are free and accessible at Salon.com. Indeed, it was refreshing to read him railing against the Liberal-Left's darling, Michael Moore, of whom he says: "It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery."
So far I've only scratched the surface. Hitchens might be the kind of writer that does me a bit of good as long as I agree to disagree with him 80% of the time.
Comments
What's worse, is that you go a step further and claim that the man went soft for not pursuing the "real" controversial belief systems, ignoring the fact that he only wrote one book near the tail end of his career devoted to the topic of atheism. Furthermore, I assume by "Intelligentsia" you're referring to experts in their respective academic fields. Yes, right, I suppose physicists have become a little too complacent with the theory of gravity–after all it is just a theory.
It is a shame that the internet has democritized publishing, because it has given you the delusion that your opinion is worthy of it. Instead, why don't you continue puttering through the rest of your days in retirement that my generation will be paying for and take a break from transcribing your thoughts. You won't just be doing yourself a favor, but the whole web as well.