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Posts Tagged ‘Ross Douthat’

Ross Douthat Damns Hitchens With Grace

Posted in Books & Literature, Essay, tagged , , , , , , on January 6, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I was going to let Christopher Hitchens rest (lest he is in heaven chafing at the sound of me typing) but then got a nose-full of this warm, cuddly obit, for him by The New York Times‘ boy conservative Ross Douthat.  I’ve written here before that Douthat as a thinker gets everything backward, not looking at the world with true inquisitiveness so much as constantly articulating an a priori conservative identity for himself that the world and facts conform to later. (We start with a love of Ronald Reagan and then try to figure things out from there.) Now he fondly teases another dead man. He cites Hitchens’ bluster about godlessness and says it tacitly reveals what must have been some sort of basic belief in a deity–that Hitchens was constantly saying “no” to a non-entity and was thus not atheist but rebel (Like Job!) So, really, could his anti-theist polemic have happened in a vacuum? Wasn’t there some entity there to argue with? Or, as Descartes argued, isn’t the ability to grasp a perfect being proof that that being is real?

Actually, Hitchens spent a great deal of time trying to find an antidote for this age-old fallacy, one that in one form or another has befallen many Christian intellectuals, that the very concept of a God (or the fight against the concept) is proof he exists. This 1,000-year-old plus ontological hard sell, pushed by Descartes most famously, has been flushed down the toilet often, by Kant most memorably, who said that this reasoning boils down to a maddening tautology, “We know God is because God is.” Hitchens himself took to task the similar logic of C.S. Lewis: Anybody who came up with the idea of a God would have to be mad … so the fact that somebody came up with it despite it all that means God’s existence must be true!

It would have been a really funny, ironic article if Douthat had merely said Christians loved Hitchens because he was a really smart and charming atheist and just too damn irresistible to hate and because love is (or ought to be) the Christian tool with the most reach. It’s another thing to try to indoctrinate a dead man after the fact into a silly cosmology, try to make a net wide enough for Hitchens’ clear-eyed rationalism to be somehow folded into Douthat’s fairy tale and made whole with it. If I were Hitchens, I’d prefer it if somebody told me I was going to rot in hell while fox hounds snacked on my intestines.

The end of the article is simply an insult to everybody who thinks: “Rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor,” says Douthat. OK. If I am not allowed to call Douthat stupid (after all, he went to better colleges than I did), then I can at least call this sentence infuriatingly patronizing. If you see off to the right of my page here, there are some 34 pieces of music. I want to testify that every one of them was made while I was drunk on the pernicious wine of rigorous atheism–the knowledge that there is no God (and perhaps even no listeners). I’ll be harsher. I’ve lost relatives, some of them as close to me as my heart, that I have no hope of being reunited with ever. That sad fact is made warm by the knowledge that loving them was a process, that I loved them first with the selfish love of an infant, then that of an adult with some understanding. That love was born, grew, matured. And all processes come to an end, something children come to understand, at least seemingly until they turn into adults. I don’t need a “God” to make those relationships meaningful or the false idea of perpetual life to give them a perspective they don’t require or deserve.

Douthat, who has in the past arrogantly imposed rigidity in the thinking about international affairs (in Libya, for instance) as a cold slap at inchoate humanitarian aims, suddenly falls short in sangfroid when it comes time to attack the most horrible idea: hope is no excuse for illusion.

Perhaps we should turn to Spinoza, who did talk a lot about God, but tended to see “him” as process, as nature in motion, unfolding in mind, which was inseparable from the imperfections of the wasting body, and not as a white bearded celestial mountain man watching over us. All humans are blessed with intuition, and feeling the presence of a greater power is part of that particular spiritual talent. I guess you could make the sensual argument: just because we perceive the color red on a tomato doesn’t mean the color red doesn’t exist, and thus if we feel a God there must be something to that. But intuition might also lead you to a plethora of Gods, goddesses, voodoo rituals, wiccan love spells, space aliens and other ideas your intellect cannot be accountable for and reason won’t accommodate. It leads you to abdicate your responsibility to your here and now.

I don’t think Ross Douthat is dumb; I just find him, for lack of a better word, incomplete. But we’re all a lot more incomplete without people like Hitchens. So maybe I’m not so much angry at the article as sad, because now Hitch is gone and all of us incomplete people are running around free of his delimiting logic to continue chattering our incomplete ideas thinking we’ve been made, by some abstract god, whole.

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Liberal Wars

Posted in Politics, tagged , , , , on March 21, 2011| Leave a Comment »

As we watch the crisis unfold in Libya, here’s a reminder to you liberals about what happens in liberal wars. Because liberals spend so much time building consensus, they never clearly define objectives the way a strongman would. Inadvertently, they cause more bloodshed. By contrast, more successful wars (by conservatives, we assume) tend to limit violence by creating strict guidelines, rules of engagement and precise military goals.

So what Ross Douthat is saying, I guess, is that conservative wars like those waged in Iraq go off without a hitch. Meanwhile, the U.S. intervention by liberals in places like Yugoslavia are nightmares. After all, the Yugoslavian War continues to drag on to this day while Iraq finished nicely. Rwanda is another good example. Thanks to our restraint there, Rwanda took care of itself. Just as certainly as Libya will.

I often read Douthat’s column only because it’s a fascinating character study of Ross Douthat himself. The guy is often reasonable, but he suffers from a personality crisis. People ought to define themselves politically by dealing with facts on their face. When they start to interpret, that’s when they figure out whether they are on the liberal or conservative side, generally. But Douthat is one of those sad creatures who does it backwards–like too many conservatives I know. Their identity as conservatives becomes more important to them over time than any particular beliefs. They seem to value mostly their membership in a team. If they are reasonable and consider their philosophies against the realities of the world (and that’s a big if), then like Douthat they must constantly draw and redraw the stencil lines of their political identity and then see  how the world fits into it.

Doesn’t work, kid.

Should I go the ultimate course, help Ross out and remind him what the “liberal” and “conservative” labels are–meaningless fictions? Changing styles that ought not to be defined so much as alluded to in generalities, as green phosphenes that disappear on the back of your eyes? Is being liberal or conservative really going to help you put the Libyan upheaval into a perspective? No. I think Ross would be a better writer if he realized this. Yes, I know, his being a young, idealistic conservative is the only thing that got him his job at the New York Times. But there are hordes of better (more experienced?) conservative columnists around. And his presence there sometimes seems to serve the same purpose that Alan Colmes’ did on Fox News–to look weak-chinned and not-so-bright next to the real stars.  Is it because he’s dumb or a bad writer? No. But he is a chalk artist of sorts–a man trying to constantly clarify for us skeptics what conservatism is in a changing world and who ends up trying to draw a figure in a rain storm. Yes, we know you all think Ronald Reagan saved the world. Doesn’t help us or you at this point.

At best, Douthat ends up looking like the kid in the choir trying to show how well he reads the book of hymns to the faithful. At worst, he ends up writing nonsensical articles like this one that needlessly insult the foreign policy victories of the Clinton era and especially insult those who took on wars for humanitarian issues alone, as if without a revenge factor, a war is a waste of time. Insulting humanitarian issues for one war (like Kosovo or Libya) and then hiding behind them for a war of aggression (like the one in Iraq) makes you simply an asshole.

The fact is, no war is good, even those that are sadly necessary. All of them begin to end political chaos and yet all of them ironically increase political complexity once they are started (even morally defensible ones like World War II). You often get to a point you never intended to be, and end up fighting for things you never started fighting for. You can’t control a war’s outcome, not if you’re a high-minded humanitarian trying to stop a massacre or if you’re a bullying empire trying to get more land. All you can do is try to control the variables. A good political leader might have tried, for example, to control American revenge lust in 2003 rather than exploiting it.

So there’s no need to pollute our arguments with ridiculous paradigms like conservative and liberal. When I explain to a person that the estate tax repeal was an abomination that was engineered by a few and served even fewer, I should not have to deal with the counterpoint, “You’re a liberal.” Ross Douthat is not as dumb as that, and yet he and the dummy who says it are thinkers of the same kidney. If you had just stuck with the facts, kid, “Maybe only a ground war could take Qaddafi out,” then I would have taken your article seriously and said you had a point. Instead, you want to make every article about Ronald Reagan and hometown values and a lot of other insipid garbage. It gets obnoxious and irritating to watch you grow up in public.

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