An intellectual to learn from and a fraud to recoil from
- by: Angela Shanahan
- From: The Australian
- December 24, 2011 12:00AM
OVER the past fortnight two famous men died. One was a true intellectual, but above all a great and good man, who suffered persecution and imprisonment for the sake of the freedom of his people. The other, though an accomplished verbal conjurer and master of invective, was an intellectual dilettante much mistaken for the real thing by his media groupies.
The first was, of course, Vaclav Havel; the second was the journalist Christopher Hitchens. The reaction to Hitchens's demise tells us a lot about the modern media - none of it particularly good. In The Australian last week Tony Jones fulsomely lamented that the void left by Hitchens's death was " immense and unfillable ... because he was one of the great public intellectuals of modern times". Actually, he wasn't. Hitchens was just a journalistic commentator, and a professional contrarian who had some lucky breaks. I would describe him with the same scornful words he used to describe Malcolm Muggeridge, (a really good journalist whom, naturally, he hated) "a fraud and a mountebank".
It is an English thing, the Oxbridge talent for shock, fury and fulmination all delivered in the closed-mouthed plummy accent. On paper, Hitchens had a talent for insult: liars, cretins, hypocrites, despots, idiots looking for a village; and for festooning these entertainments with history and literature. To the dead earnestness of US public debates, where epigrams and puns are darkly suspected of betraying moral frivolity, he brought the exhilaration of wicked puns, the volcanic eruption of invectives, the excoriating similes, the savage reductio ad absurdum, the dismissive sneer. He was an entertaining writer, whose schtick was shock - and meanness. His campaign against Mother Teresa was the absolute epitome of that. It was not just Hitchens's proselytising atheism that infuriated his critics, but the sheer pointless nastiness of it. He called this woman, whose personal possessions amounted to a spare habit and pair of sandals, "a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers". No one is above criticism, including Mother Teresa, but the documentary Hell's Angel was almost deranged; a bizarrely gothic concoction - complete with a backdrop caricature that looked like something our own Bill Leak would have thought up. It was character assassination of a good and simple person, who like St Francis took Our Lord's injunction to treat your neighbour as yourself literally. Tied as this is to the concept of grace and true Christian charity, Hitchens was defeated. In the words of Cristina Odone, he was spiritually illiterate. And he didn't want to know. There was irrationality in this rage, this fundamentalist atheism. To read the gush over Hitchens in the same week as the death of one of the truly great intellectual leaders of modern times is at one level absurd; on another, deeply depressing. Havel was someone who, though not a practising Christian (although he will be given a Catholic burial), would have understood Mother Teresa. Havel understood that, without the personal virtues we cannot have a virtuous society. He understood, and was deeply respectful of, the spiritual dimension of life, as he warned after the "velvet revolution" against one materialist fallacy being replaced by another. In his lecture at the Prague forum last year, he lamented "the swollen self-consciousness of this civilisation, whose basic attributes include the supercilious idea that we know everything and what we don't yet know we'll soon find out, because we know how to go about it. We are convinced this supposed omniscience of ours, which proclaims the staggering progress of science and technology and rational knowledge in general, permits us to serve anything that is demonstrably useful. With the cult of measurable profit, proven progress and visible usefulness, there disappears respect for mystery, and along with it humble reverence for everything we shall never measure and know, not to mention the vexed question of the infinite and eternal, which were until recently the most important horizons of our actions." In a recent article, online editor Michael Cook (of BioEdge and MercatorNet) said that although Havel, like Hitchens, was not a Christian, "he defended the achievements of Christendom because it appreciated that man is a mystery and because it had preserved a commitment to transcendent values. He had suffered under communism and he knew what the alternative was. Unlike Hitchens, he knew that without God, anything is possible. Anything terrible and depraved." So let Havel have the last word. "In today's multicultural world, the truly reliable path to co-existence, to peaceful co-existence and creative co-operation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies - it must be rooted in self-transcendence. "Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe. Transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant from us in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world. Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction. "The (American) Declaration of Independence states that the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems man can realise that liberty only if he does not forget the one who endowed him with it."
Taken from: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/an-intellectual-to-learn-from-and-a-fraud-to-recoil-from/story-fn562txd-1226229597433
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