Apropo of nothing I’ve been watching old Christopher Hitchens videos. His appearance on an episode of the American conservative political discussion show Firing Line is, in particular, a real treat.

I don’t agree with most the big positions taken by Hitchens throughout his life, but it’s great to see him talk about something other than religion. There’s something oddly entertaining about him. Sharp and eloquent of course. But with it a strange mix of towering intellectual ego and self-deprecating condecension. He never appears flummoxed, or admits to being wrong. But he somehow gives off the impression he would like the person he’s arguing with to best him if they could. I don’t agree with most the big positions taken by Hitchens throughout his life, but it’s great to see him talk about something other than religion. There’s something oddly entertaining about him. Sharp and eloquent of course. But with it a strange mix of towering intellectual ego and self-deprecating condecension. He never appears flummoxed, or admits to being wrong. But he somehow gives off the impression he would like the person he’s arguing with to best him if they could.

I class him in the same category as Jeremy Clarkson. To quote the comedian Stewart Lee on Clarkson “he has opinions for money”. Chris Hitchens is more cerebal than Clarkson, sure. But like Top Gear star and columnist, Hitchens is an entertainer first and foremost.

It’s a shame he became hung up on religion and spent the last decade of his life railing against it. He’ll undoubtedly be remembered for god bashing going forward, since searching for his name on youtube returns a list of his greatest takedowns. All religion focused.

There’s something to note here for luminaries and commentators that are still alive. It’s often the last major topic you tackle that you get remembered for.

The last time he was truly on solid ground he was attacking the Reagan admininstration for the Iran-Contra scandal in the mid 1980s. For me, after that, his big arguments are weaker and have a sheen of attention seeking about them.

In perhaps his most surprising move, he criticised Mother Therese for her opposition to contraception and abortion. In doing so he discounted the lives she saved and slammed her ethical incompatibility with modern liberal progressiveness. A great example of perfect being the enemy of good. Hitchens is a reminder that the often suffocating virtue signalling that dominates online debate in the early 2020’s has many priors. And also a reminder that no public figure will escape being chastised by someone.

Elsewhere in the 1990s he attacked the Clintons, denouncing Bill as a womanising sociopath. Hitchens claimed to have spoken with women who were never publicly known about. The implication is that Bill Clinton’s woman problem was much worse than we know even now. The last part is difficult to get onboard with. More than twenty years after Bill left office, and given the current low barriers of modern media, we would surely now know if there was more “there there”. My supply of credit for conspiracies spanning decades in the internet age is close to non-existant. And it’s hard to get worked up about the level of infidelity when it happens less than it does in American society in general.

Womanising was the worst of Hitchens attacks on Clinton. The rest involved frankly yawn worthy money grabbing and political favours in return for influence. If Clinton was actually worse than any other president for this, it’s both difficult to quantify, and probably not by much.

In the 2000s Hitchens again confounded many of his friends and readers by supporting the 2003 US led war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Here Hitchen’s comes close to regaining a sure footing when he argued that Hussein was more than just a “bad guy”. In the wake of the end of history, according to Hitchens, Iraq was one of the last, but also perhaps one of the worst, totalitarian regimes.

When talking about Hussein, Hitchens is at his most convincing. He tells the story of Saddam executing half the Iraqi political class in such a way that you can’t avoid identifying with the unsuspecting beaurcrats that was suddenly and unexpectedly, led away and shot. They were picked almost at random to instill fear and obedience in those that survived. “Saddam Hussein was not just a bad guy” Hitchens says in a moody tone of voice, resenting the listener for not already knowing and being made to say it out loud.

It may be hard for future generations to understand just how much the Iraq war was despised by the left in both north America and Europe. It seemed to many that the US had decided to redo the Vietnam war, knowing ahead of time the kind of carnage would result.

Unfortunately, for Hitchens, supporting the war in Iraq became entangled with opposing Islam. Which morphed into an intellectual battle against organised religion. What had started with opposing a fascist regime. A practical argument very hard to disagree with. Went on to become a broad abstract decade-long polemic that involved a fair amount of Atheism pushing and veered deep into the realm of philosophy.

It’s likely Hitchens changed the subject because by 2006-2007, the Iraq war had become too difficult to defend, or even be tangentially associated with. After this time, Hitchens does still defend his pro Iraq war position when asked about it, and this is to his credit. But he doesn’t go out of his way to bring it up in conversation or progress the debate.

In this period the four horsemen of the apocalypse formed. A group of atheist intellectuals who set about picking apart organised religion. Stroking their beards while marvelling at the idea that so many people throughout history could believe in something that was obviously to them pure fantasy. You might think that they’d get over the novelty of this pretty quickly. No, they found the topic sufficiently fascinating that it was worth writing a book about. One book from each of them.

Hitchens’s book was titled “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”. In an inteview, he stated that most book subtitles are usually needlessly provocative to point of being untrue. In this case however, he was fully behind it. According to Hitchens, Religion really does poision everything.

He was also very clear about all religion was the problem. Whilst Hitchens was happy to bash islamofacism, he did not accept the accusation of islamophobia. His position was that christianity and islam were just as bad as each other. No religion escaped his criticism.

An thought experiment in response to this idea, whhy not try and imagine what human history would have been like if religion could somehow be subtracted from it.

I’m usually against counterfactuals, given how poor we are at predicting the weather, economic and academic achievement and myriad of other things. I’m extremely doubful we’re capable of mapping out a complex alternative history. But this counterfactual is worth exploring.

The first thing to note, is that if you only subtracted organized religion, you would still have some religiosity left over. Or at least some things that look an awful lot like religiosity. The communist and fascist regimes of the twentieth century, that caused so much carnage, definitely had some messianic and dogmatic features. This isn’t another attempt to lay genocide solely at feet of athiests though. Plenty of bloodshed can be attributed to organized religion. You could argue that the atheist regimes were significantly more competent at getting people killed than organized religion. But that’s a crappy competition that’s not worth pursuing, even if you lose you’re still on the hook for genocide.

If we could subtract all religiosity, what are we left with? I believe human history would have been far more violent without the moderating (most of the time) effect of religion.

There’s a contradiction in Hitchens’s argument. At some point, he realised that religion gave a lot of people meaning in their lives. And he was potentially going to take that away from them. His answer was replace it with science. He spoke about how the majesty of the universe’s nebulae inspired awe in him. Implying this should be enough for anyone to enjoy life.

But science is not religion. Science mostly reactive, it does not tell us how we should be.

Neither is philosophy much help. David Hume said “you can’t get an ought from an is”, essentially arguing there’s reason to make your bed in the morning, as far as philosophy is concerned. That’s nilhistic when taken literally and to the extreme.

Neither is science infalliable. It’s a human endeavor, and as such often as flawed as humans are. Newton’s laws were correct for hundreds of years, until Einstein overturned them.

Neither is science in any sense moral. When the Nazi’s were sterializing homosexuals and the disabled, they believed what they were doing was scientifically justified.

Sam harris has written a book about basing morality in science. And he had some fun-to-watch debates with Jordan Peterson about the idea. These debates are like a rorschach test. People hear exactly what they want to hear and come away thinking their man won. I’m on Peterson’s side. Harris fell at the first hurdle when he wasn’t able to clearly define what well-being means across cultures and across time. If I can’t “be well” without torturing or belitting others, who is science to tell me I can’t? Or, in the age of snowflakes, just competing with others is potentially enough to cause harm.

Neither is science complete. Richard Dawkins’s promotion of evolution is like a child playing with a lego set that doesn’t bother to ask where it came from. We believe we know exactly the conditions were on the early Earth when simple life arose. But we haven’t been able to replicate it in a laboratory, we’ve been trying since the 1960s.

And even if we solved life’s origins, there’s always the question of what the universe is. Does it have a beginning and an end.

If we can’t get life going in a lab, then that suggests something unusual happened. A divine supernatural entity is as plausible a speculation as any other. And the same is true for existence itself.

Science is inspiring. It’d be foolish to knock it considering the wonders and marvels of modern life. But let’s be clear on what science is and what it is not. It’s not a moral, complete, infalliable guide on how to live well.

Science has been lionised, to varying degrees over time and particularly in the west, throughout civilised history. Beginning with the ancient Greeks and their admirable commitment to abstract deduction and rationality. But do not be mistaken, science is primarily about satisifying how questions. And I suspect it will be unable to ever answer the ultimate why questions.

Science is cold and clinical. Fundamentally, science has nothing to say one way or another on the topics of emotion, personal relationships, ambition, and the frailties of the human condition.

There’s another serious problem will Hitchens’s decision to fall back on science. Science does not tell us that people are naturally good and want to co-operate with each other. Very much the opposite in fact.

A human being is primate, closely related to chimpanzees and great apes. These animals are extremely tribal and violently malevolent to those outside the tribe. Jordan Peterson has spoken about how chimp tribes will quite literally, physically, tear each other apart when they come across each other in the wild.

According to scientific evidence that at this point no one doubts, that’s our ancestry. The first humans walked no more than 250,000 years ago and no less than 100,000.

Primates, like all other animals, value their survival and the survival of their offspring. There’s no natural tendency to paint, write, create art, or do science and commit to rationality. Through human history, even recently, war has been the biggest catalyst for the greatest scientific achievements. The space race culminated in primates walking upon the moon in the middle of the cold war. And witness the absence of manned space exploration in the cold war’s wake.

David Hume is almost certainly correct when he claims we can’t logically justify acting in the world based upon its current state. Most philosophers do not dispute his argument. And I would not care to dispute the philosopical status quo. But the takeaway from Hume’s statement is that nilhism is easily justified. Taking this argument literally results in a cold and scientifically calculated world view.

There’s an inherrent disconnect between a purely scientific world view and the kind of world view that results in a soceity that is pleaant to live in.

If the vastness of the universe, and humankind’s position within in it, does not make you feel small, then you haven’t properly comprehended either.

If the idea of a child born and dying on the same day saddens you, you haven’t understood that it’s happened at scale many times throughout human history.

Many people might think this criticism is obvious. Of course you shouldn’t treat your loved ones as scientific curiousities. Of course you should be able to switch off your scientific brain when being social.

It’s Ironic that the observation that humans are animals and are capable of any of the malevolence that goes on in the animal kingdom, is itself a scientific observation.

But in demonising religion, and in praising science, Hitchens is constructing a peculiar world view.

In one interview, Hitchens is caught out. He’s asked about what stops people from doing terrible things and resorts to “well I would never do that”. It’s hard to hang a moral code on this single interaction. But if you tried it would be a kind of ego-based individual liberty. Forgoing collective morality seems a strange for someone who lifelong claimed to be on the political left.

Hitchens took the religous background of the culture that birthed him for granted. Progress