Swimming against or with the tide
Peregrine Worsthorne
LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN by Christopher Hitchens Perseus Press, £16.99. pp. 141, ISBN 1903985064 Anything written by Christopher Hitchens is worth reading since he is witty, highly intelligent, erudite and idiosyncratic, as well as blessed by a splendid command of plain and vigorous English; and this short essay on how to be a 'contrarian' in the form of letters to a student aspiring to this role — something between a dissident and a trouble maker — is no exception. But it would be no compliment to the persuasiveness of his essay in praise of contrariness if I were not to strike a dissentient note, which I do, all the more willingly, because the book is based, from beginning to end. on a false premise.
The false premise is that the world can never have a surfeit of contrarians. For that is precisely what the world now does have: far too many contrarians, all arguing the toss, challenging authority, putting their oar in, kicking over the traces, and generally trying to turn the world upside down. We are all dissidents now, just as a few generations ago we were all socialists. It is the new conformity. To be a genuine contrarian today would require one 'not to let it all hang out' and to be determined, until the skies fall, not to break ranks, So there is something a little embarrassing about this author, rather as if a contemporary bishop imagined he was putting his neck on the block by expressing Christian doubts or a contemporary columnist felt he might be risking his job by using bad language.
Nor does Mr Hitchens seem to suspect for a moment that he may have so many young admirers asking for his advice about how to be a contrarian, not because they are looking for a life of self-sacrificial martyrdom but because they are looking for a life of well paid self-indulgence such as he and his mentor, Gore Vidal, have been so successfully achieving. It pays to be a contrarian these days. Far from being a Calvary it is one of the cushiest paths to glory.
'Contrarians assert themselves', writes Hitchens piously, 'out of an unquenchable sense of dignity.' Some do for that reason, but a great many more, I suspect, do so out of egotism, a desire to make a splash. While Mr Hitchens is properly sceptical, not to say cynical, about the motives of those who write in defence of authority and order, a little scepticism, not to say cynicism from him about those who write in defence of freedom and disorder might be appropriate.
Another inconsistency is that while he warns his disciples 'to beware all those who invite you to annihilate yourself in the interest of preserving the state, he seems to have no compunction in urging them to accept unquestioningly all those who urge you to annihilate yourself in the interests of overthrowing the state, quite regardless of the fact that revolutionaries are just as liable to be doing the devil's work as tyrants. Worst of all, while Mr Hitchens encourages his disciples to be disputatious, if not aggressive and spoiling for a fight, he does not practise what he preaches; indeed I very much doubt if this bien pensant book will excite the necessary heat without which the physicists tell us there can be no light. If he had really wanted to engender that degree of heat, he should have taken a leaf, say, out of a book by David Irving. As it is, he exudes so much sublime certainty about himself always being on the side of the angels that any genuine contrarian would surely end up wanting to put a bomb under him.
Then there is a bad habit of namedropping. For example, there are references to 'my friend Martin Arnis', 'my old mentor Robert Conquest', 'my early tutor in radical journalism, James Cameron', Susan Sontag et al, which is fine by my book but surely a true contrarian might be slightly less anxious to show that he only has friends in exalted circles.
Nevertheless, there is much in the book to enjoy. For example, after quoting Nietzsche's baffling and new to me definition of a joke as 'an epitaph on a feeling', Hitchens helpfully comments: 'The feeling has hardly arisen when it is dissolved or dissipated in a burst of mirth or bathos.' Few pages are without comparably enlightening flashes, which help to make up for the intellectual shallowness of the central theme.
Previous page
