Letters To A Young Contrarian

By Christopher Hitchens

The short book began based on a challenge to Hitchens of whether he could “offer any advice to the young and restless; and council that would help the avoid disillusionment?”.The book is made up of letters to a certain student.

Letter III

Hitchens writes that he was reading the essays of Aldous Huxley and shares a paragraph that he marked along the way.

“Homer was wrong,” wrote Heraclitus of Ephesus. “Home was wrong in saying: ‘Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!’ He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away’…The Hindus had the wit to see and the courage to proclaim the fact; Nirvana, the goal of their striving, is nothingness.

Hitchens writes that it is idiotic to believe that consensus is the “highest good” for two reasons

• His first argument is that Human beings by their very nature do not desire to live in a “Disneyland of the mind” where there is an end to striving and a general feeling of contentment and bliss.
• His second argument states that even is we had this desire it would fortunately be unattainable as “in life we make progress by conflict and in mental life by argument and disputation”.

The point is made that if you truly are about “points of agreement and civility, then you had better to be equipped with points of argument and combativity, because if you are not then the “centre” will be occupied and defined without your having help to decide it”.

Letter VII

In this letter Hitchens supports the idea that in fact “many questions are actually quite simple” with this in contract to the supposed job of an intellectual who combats “oversimplification and reductionism”. Hitchens warns that “you must have noticed how often certain ‘complexities’ are introduced as a means of obfuscation”. Stating that at this point it is necessary to “ply with the glee the celebrated razor of old Occam…and proclaim that things are actually less complicated than they appear”.

Hitchens uses the example of his good friend Salman Rushdie who after the release of his book ‘The Satanic Verses’ had a fatwah issued again him. At the time many publishers and writers wrote critically of Rushdie — “Had his novel perhaps been offensive? Were the feelings of pious Muslims not the be considered?”.

When debating the topic in public Hitchens would simply ask “May I assume that you are opposed without reservation to the suborning of the murder, for pay, of a literary figures”. If the person answered that they were not opposed or gave a qualified answer he would not debate further.

Letter IX

In this letter, Hitchens discusses his views on Religion.

I am not even an atheist so much as I am an anti-theist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effects of religious belief, is positively harmful…I dot not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true…I am relieved to thing that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale;

In response to why he says that he wishes it were not true he writes that he cannot imagine anything more ‘horrible and grotesque’ then living under ‘permanent surveillance and monitoring’.

I have met many brave men and women whose courage in adversity derives from their faith…I have found myself appalled by the instant decline of their intellectual and moral standards. They want god on their side and believe that they are doing his word. They proceed from conclusion to evidence; our greatest resource is the mind, and the mind is not well-training by being taught to assume what has to be proved.

A true believer must believe that he or she is here for a purpose and is an object of real interest to a Supreme Being … I have been called arrogant but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator — that’s beyond my conceit.

Letter X

On Heaven Hitchens writes

Endless praise and adoration; limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea…Some religions promise a good deal of carnal bliss..All this proves is that religion is man-made, and that men have created gods in their own image rather than the other way around. Only a humourless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of the praise that, one has not choice but to assume, would be of the innate virtues and splendours furnished him by his create.

Religion is and always has been a means of control…Sigmund Freud was surely right when he concluded that religious superstitions is ineradicable, at least for as long as we fear death and darkness.

Letter XV

On Travelling, Christopher writes that “In one way, travelling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of species is very slight”.

Freud was brilliantly right when he wrote about ‘the narcissism of small difference’; distinctions that seem trivial to the visitor are the obsessive concern of the local and provincial minds.

Narcissism Of Small Differences

The narcissism of small differences is the thesis that communities with adjoining territories and close relationships are especially likely to engage in feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to details of differentiation.

Freud chalked it up to the innate human proclivity for aggression and the desire for distinct identity. To see one’s neighbors reflect and mirror oneself too much threatens a person’s unique sense of self, and superiority. It’s what political scientist Stephen Brooks calls the “uncomfortable truth of resemblance.” To alleviate this injury to one’s ego, one downplays their similarities with others and emphasizes their divergences — which can be amplified into seemingly unbridgeable rifts.