A Matter of Pride and Prejudice

Christopher Hitchens as Deity

In a recent edition of Vanity Fair, atheist Christopher Hitchens attempts to revise the Ten Commandments into something more suitable for modern man. He is not unmindful of the extreme hubris which necessarily attends such an enterprise. Accordingly he attempts to guild the lily with a self-deprecatory patina, but nonetheless Hitchens is serious--and, given his militant atheism, he needs to be. Intractable issues over whether there can be any ground for ethics and morality continue to dog all evolutionary atheists. Hitchens knows this.

Now it is pretty clear that there is plenty of stuff which Hitchens believes to be immoral. But before we consider his ruminations and suggestions, it is apt to consider the being and person of our new lawgiver. There are actually two Hitchens. The first is Hitchens according to his self-revelation or self-narrative. (We shall denominate this Hitchens as Hitchens-II.) He believes himself to be a creature of the evolution of matter--a process which has resulted in life forms moving from the simple to the horrendously complex over endless periods of time. As such, Hitchens II purports to believe himself (along with his contemporaries) to be the latest off the evolutionary production line--the biggest, brightest, and best yet seen in the universe--at least the universe as we see it.

We do not offer this summary of Hitchens-II's' self-revelation as a criticism per se; it is certainly not exclusive to him. It is a belief shared with millions upon millions of people, predominantly in the West. When it comes to ethical systems specifically, Hitchens-II believes quite consistently that all historical ethical systems are passe and, by definition, primitive. They are radically relative, situational, limited, temporary, and prejudicial. Thus, the Ten Commandments reflect an ancient, primitive, and ignorant world.

When it comes to lawgiving--which is what Hitchens-II turns himself to in the Vanity Fair article--he is thus not to be taken seriously. He knows that his new commandments ought not to be given any more than a scintilla of reflection, and only then, to be dismissed as a passing, temporary curio. Hitchens-II, if consistent, would ask for nothing more.
For Hitchens-II would acknowledge that, along with all other men, he is due to depart this celestial orb in rather short order. He will be replaced by forthcoming generations of the human race who will not be subject to the same temporary, limited, situational, and prejudiced conditioning as Hitchens-II was, and will have very different--and much more advanced, superior, ideas about morality, ethics, and law. Things like that happen in a random universe that is "ruled" by an evolutionary process of inevitable advance. Hitchens-II would insist that the views forthcoming in the future will be better than his own, because that's what evolution is all about.

So, the law-code of Hitchens-II must be considered a rather insipid affair. It has no law-giver worthy of fear. Why would mankind ever fear Hitchens-II? There is no sense of true moral guilt attached to the law-code of Hitchens-II. There can be no true guilt, nor meaningful or just punishment for sins against the code of Hitchens-II. At best it consists of a bunch of suggestions as to how we may proceed--without any consequences if we demur or move in other moral directions. After all, movement away from Hitchens-II is not only inevitable, he has to deem it as "good".

Here, then, is the law-code of Hitchens-II:

Still, if we think of the evils that afflict humanity today and that are man-made and not inflicted by nature, we would be morally numb if we did not feel strongly about genocide, slavery, rape, child abuse, sexual repression, white-collar crime, the wanton destruction of the natural world, and people who yak on cell phones in restaurants. (Also, people who commit simultaneous suicide and murder while screaming “God is great”: is that taking the Lord’s name in vain or is it not?)

It’s difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words “Thou shalt not.” But who cannot summon the confidence to say: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them? Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Hitchens-II quite consistently tells us that he has no basis to declare "Thou shalt not." But he wants to. He clearly believes it is appropriate to lay down imperatives such as, "do not ever use people as private property." But this is nothing more than question begging--why not? we find ourselves asking, over and over. We invite Hitchens-II to lay aside all the emotive baggage, and explain the ground of his imperatives from within the Hitchens-II world-view. The best that world-view would provide is reference to convention, habits, current practices, and pragmatic utility. But the precepts must ever remain qualified, tentative, suggestions, relevant only to a certain time and place, of temporary validity only. They can never reflect any more validity than administrative codes, such as road rules. One day we drive on the right side of the road, but the next day, the law may change to driving on the left (as happened in Samoa recently). This is why the law-code of Hitchens-II is nothing more than a curio and cannot be taken as a law-code at all. It can never be anything more than personal cant. Hitchens-II's precepts are not precepts at all, but preferences, and personal ones at that.

All talk of judgment in the Hitchens-II code has to be a non-sequitur. When he writes:

Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.

we are bemused. If one is successful in robbing people with a false prospectus and getting away with it, one ought to be respected and congratulated. Success, after all, is the ultimate affirming ethic in the Hitchens-II perspective. To have survived is the final affirmation of superiority of being in the evolutionary world-view, which Hitchens-II espouses.

But there is a second Hitchens, whom we will denote as Hitchens-I. Hitchens-I is made in the image of the Living God and he cannot help speaking in terms of moral absolutes and eternal law, even though he realises the incongruity of doing so in light of Hitchens-II. He cannot help fulminating against, for example, violence to, and harm of, children. He wants to present it as something nauseating, disgusting, horrific--worthy of judgment, even damnation--yet Hitchens-II will not bear such weight.

Hitchens-I knows the being and character of the Living God and fears him above all else. This is the real Hitchens, underneath all the charades and masks (Romans 1: 18--23). He knows that he has repeatedly and perpetually rebelled against Him, and broken His laws. His only defence is to hide away from God. Hitchens-II is the result. Hitchens-II is Hitchens-I with fig-leaves on. Yet, like a child playing a game of hide and seek, who believes that when you cover your eyes, no-one else can see you, Hitchens-I cannot stop intruding into Hitchens-II. He cannot bring himself to face up to the face that, although he hates with all his being doing harm to children, and wants to say so loudly, expressing his abhorrence at the idea, Hitchens II will never allow him to offer it as anything more than a suggestion for discussion.

Hitchens-II is nothing more than Hitchens-I covering his eyes, and thinking that he is invisible to everyone else. It is a sad and tragic thing. But, then again, so is all self-willed blindness, by which men try to hide away from the God who made them and in Whose image they are.

Postscript:

Christopher Hitchens has a brother, Peter. Like his brother, Peter has been for many years an atheist. Then, by the grace of God, his eyes were opened and his chains fell off, and he has become a Christian. He is about to tell his story in a book to be published by Zondervan, entitled The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith. More on this to come. Marvellous indeed are the works of our Lord Jesus Christ.