Gasbags Are Not Great: Christopher Hitchens as Crypto-Rabbi
Georgians and Genomes
The independent socialist George Orwell (1903–1950) was, it’s said, a central influence on the neo-conservative Christopher Hitchens (1949–2012). But this claim puzzles me. I’ve been reading Orwell all my life and I’ve failed to notice that he was a tedious, self-righteous, self-important gasbag who never used one word when six not unpolysyllabic lexical items might, perchance, be of utility instead. See? Puzzling. Maybe I’m not reading Orwell right. All the same, Orwell can certainly shed light on Hitchens’ psychology. Like his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, Hitch was a devout believer in the Miracle of Human Equality: he was sure that there is only one brain, the Human Brain, and that all human groups have an equal share in it. Bearing that in mind, please examine this passage from God Is Not Great (2007), Hitch’s best-selling diatribe against religion:
In 2005, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago conducted serious work on two genes, known as microcephalin and ASPM, that when disabled are the cause of microcephaly. Babies born with this condition have a shrunken cerebral cortex, quite probably an occasional reminder of the period when the human brain was very much smaller than it is now. The evolution of humans has been generally thought to have completed itself about fifty to sixty thousand years ago (an instant in evolutionary time), yet those two genes have apparently been evolving faster in the past thirty-seven thousand years, raising the possibility that the human brain is a work in progress. In March 2006, further work at the same university revealed that there are some seven hundred regions of the human genome where genes have been reshaped by natural selection within the past five thousand to fifteen thousand years. These genes include some of those responsible for our “senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.” (One of the great emancipating results of genomics is to show that all “racial” and color differences are recent, superficial, and misleading.) (Op. cit., ch. 6, “Arguments from Design,” pg. 34)
George Orwell
Thus Hitchens reveals himself as opposed only to some religions, quite at home with another. To a believer in brain-equality, everything leading up to the final parenthesis is heretical in tendency, because it suggests that separate human populations can quickly evolve differences in “brain function.” In other words, different races can have different psychologies and different levels of intelligence. Realizing the ideological danger, Hitchens resorts to piety and reminds himself and his readers of PC dogma: Race Does Not Exist (amen). Orwell satirized this slavish adherence to ideology in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948):
Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc [the ideology of government], and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. (Op. cit., Part Two, chapter 9)
I’ve read all of Orwell’s books several times and hope to do so again. I find it difficult to read anything by Hitchens even once. Orwell was a good writer and an honest man who was not inspired by vanity and hatred. Hitchens was a bad writer and a dishonest man who was definitely inspired by vanity and hatred. This is why I am puzzled by the claims that Orwell influenced Hitchens. I can’t see it myself.
