Christopher Hitchens and the Necessity of Universalism | Hacker News Reader

Christopher Hitchens and the Necessity of Universalism

salmagundi.skidmore.edu

If you enjoy that article I recommend reading "How Hitchens Can Save the Left" by the same author.

I just finished reading it (audiobook actually) and it was a refreshing take, amongst other things discussed in the article, on how the left is actually eating itself from the insides through identity politics.

If you are at all concerned about the way politics are going right now this might give you a foundation on which to build your arguments for change.

I hopped out of being a good Marxist when I realised that there was absolutely no room for dissent. You basically are just a empty vessel for activist praxis. In other words, you do as you are told.

Also, there aren't really compelling alternatives to Capitalism that havent been extremely tested, with horrible results. IF they come up with a NEW system, that doesn't involve literally euthanising its dissenters, I would be into it.

Capitalism is a joke, and its present late stage was predicted by Marx.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h...

Speaking of Hitchens, I highly recommend his “Letters to a Young Contrarian”. Or any writing of his, to be honest.

I highly recommend watching him speak and debate too.

The wrong Hitchens brother died

Peter was more sober thinker (probably literally and figuratively). Christopher was a better speaker, probably a better author but as I get older I realise how much more correct Peter was and still is.

I think the notion of tribalism has run its course. Everybody forms identities and then makes political alliances with people with whom they believe they share goals in common. To argue that Hitchens was above tribes, and this explains both his international socialism and his support for the invasion of Iraq doesn't pass muster. There was other people who shared similar commitments and with whom he made common cause. Nobody is going to label their own group a tribe, but everybody who opposes you is doing so because of base tribalism. It has no explanatory power.

Also, ironically, this article reads like an apologia for a saint, trying to square the circle of all his inconsistent opinions. Maybe Hitchens was a very clever writer and was particularly well-equipped to speak about his age, but he far from a great thinker.

How do you prevent post-tribalism from becoming yet another tribe?

That's the neat thing, you don't! The very idea of post-tribalism relies on a false narrative. There is an appeal to a mythical past when the Enlightenment was one wonderful big tent and everybody was pursuing the shared project of advancing the knowledge of the human race together. Then those mean and wily post-modernists came and upended the notion of truth. This is all blatantly false. Nobody has ever agreed on anything. As soon as you find a group of people who do agree with you, and there is another group of people who don't, then baby, you've got a tribalism going.

It's a rhetorical move to claim as your heritage some kind of truth that once went unchallenged and is now questioned by people with nefarious purposes. Nothing more.

Rhetorical moves are the primary vehicle of politics. You say something and people resonate with your message. You believe frivious "claims around heritage" are not deeply meaningful to people. Do you truly believe that should artificially overcome family ties, traditions, cultures, and, customs? (…Why would you even want to?)

Seems like it's all just a ploy for corporations trying to remake the world as suits them, helpful to have interchangable workers with no meaningful culture.

Fair point. But I guess my problem with the post-tribal narrative is that it feels especially hollow. It's not rooted either in some kind of particularist commitment to a religion or language nor some universal notion of human brotherhood or dialectical materialism. It's built on the myth of consensus. "We all used to agree about this! What happened?" That just feels like an insecure basis for an intellectual movement.

Do post-tribalists even make enough children for them to survive very long? I'm reminder of the Shakers, a religious group that rejected sexual relations between men and women and were famously celibate. They did adopt children at a rate far higher than non-Shakers, but when the supply of children to adopt dried up, their numbers plummeted. Today, there are only 4 or 5 of them left, and when they die, so too will their ideology/religion. Post-tribalism won't survive either, I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers

That was my impression as well. As TFA says, "Hitchens took no issue with efforts to mobilize people around identity-based causes", which is what I understand "identity politics" to mean.

He seems to associate "identity politics" with bad arguments as applied to those causes. Which, sure, same. Bad arguments are bad, regardless of what they're applied to. There are an awful lot of bad arguers whose goals align with mine.

In that sense, "identity politics" sounds identical to "woke" or "politically correct" or any other right-wing buzzword used to dismiss a left-wing idea out of hand. To quote Hitchens, "as if those two words constitute an argument".

The problem of our time is simply that the fruits of the global economy are distributed extremely poorly (jet set global urban intelligentsia isn't big enough) and there is no room for any nativistic or religious culture (call it spirituality, or whatever, it's important…). The folks left behind will simply replace the primacy of Corporate Memphis-style global capitalism with something cooler, economics and politics will be downstream from that culture.

There isn't a world where an living, breathing Christopher Hitchens wouldn't shed a tear at how internationalist, "steel-and-glass" culture has become in say, Paris, France. He also criticised the thinly-veiled American Imperialism ("democracy" or we shoot you) constantly.

By the end of his life, he was one of the most effusive cheerleaders for American Imperialism and had nothing but a posh accent to back it up.

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