The remarkably unsubtle debating style of the late journalist Christopher Hitchens does not need to be seen to be understood. It can be inferred from the titles of the videos his fans have uploaded to YouTube: “Hitchens Owns Fascist Crackpot”, “Hitchens Slams Mother Theresa”, “Christopher Hitchens Ripping Islam Apart”. And so on.
Many of these videos have been viewed millions of times. I recall that “Hitchens Owns Fascist Crackpot” was particularly treasured by my university contemporaries for the commanding tone in which Hitchens chants the phrase “Fascist crackpot! Fascist crackpot!” at an audience member who is attempting to ask him a question — an almost virtuosically antagonistic performance that was regarded by a certain sort of politics-obsessive with the kind of awe other people reserve for inspired jazz solos.
At that time the casual denunciation of one’s antagonists as fascists was still an eccentric rhetorical strategy. Indeed, Hitchens, with his glowering pudding of a face and air of dissipated patrician righteousness, was an eccentric, even old-fashioned candidate for internet celebrity. But it is a celebrity that has lasted. The tenth anniversary of his death falls next week and, strangely for a journalist, he is remembered. New YouTube videos are uploaded almost weekly (Hitchens demolishes . . . Hitchens annihilates . . . Hitchens vaporises . . .) and his publisher has recently reissued no fewer than 12 of his books.
At a distance of ten years, it seems clear to me that he was not an old-fashioned figure but a futuristic one. His career and personal style were prophetic of the present collapse of intelligent public discourse. For Hitchens stood between two worlds: the old world in which serious political and cultural debate was conducted at length and in print, and our new world in which it is conducted glibly and furiously on screens.
Hitchens was perhaps the only “serious” journalist of his generation to successfully clamber from the old world to the new. And certainly the first to contrive, through the famously anarchic performances on American cable TV, to lower himself to the standard of the shock jocks and televangelists whose outraged style would soon become ubiquitous on social media.
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Once, a reputation as a public intellectual rested on the production of books and essays. Today it is just as likely to be built online, on Twitter and YouTube. Hitchens, a culturally transitional figure, worked in the analogue and digital worlds. In my opinion, the analogue stuff is overvalued. To be enjoyed, Hitchens’s prose must be read in his voice. If you lose the drawling Hitchens cadences, the windy orotundities and vacuous meanderings become harder to tolerate. The essays on literature especially are reminiscent of a fluent but badly briefed government minister trying to talk down the clock.
Almost all journalism of this kind — opinionated, essayistic — is to some degree a confidence trick. The writer must stage a performance of cleverness to convince readers. Hitchens at his worst is all trick and no substance. A magician so charming and talkative you never notice he has failed to produce the promised white rabbit from his hat. This hardly mattered, because what he did far more successfully was to build a brand that encompassed, just as a modern publicist would advise, multiple “platforms”: books, essays, radio, online video, TV.
The central feature of the Hitchens brand was the succession of pointless moral crusades, which he had an unusual genius for manufacturing. Most prominent among them was his bizarrely infuriated campaign against religion which, according to the intemperate subtitle of his polemic God is Not Great, “poisons everything”. At the time that book was published, religion was steeply declining in the West and had become an issue on which most of Hitchens’s educated readers were already in bland agreement. The war on God was an empty cause and Hitchens went into battle under the banner of his career.
Such empty causes proliferate more freely than ever on social media, where journalists and politicians have become used to embracing whatever positions, controversial or crowd-pleasing, will help them to public prominence. Many of them have also adopted Hitchens’s hair-trigger readiness to escalate the terms of a debate by introducing words like “fascist”. Reductio ad Hitler is the most ubiquitous rhetorical strategy on the internet.
His much celebrated habit of “destroying”, “owning” and “slamming” the witless audience members who dared to ask questions, such as the importunate crackpot mentioned above (who in fairness to Hitchens seems to have been a deranged conspiracy theorist), was a real-world precursor of the tedious social media tactic of ostentatiously denouncing one’s most crazed anonymous trolls to appear an intelligent and righteous hero standing nobly against the swarming armies of the stupid and deranged. It’s amusing, even exhilarating to watch but it does not constitute serious debate.
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Hitchens, it should be said, had no reason to guess in quite what dark directions all of this was tending. It’s also pointless to deny that he was one of the most charismatic speakers of his age, and the author of some good essays (nobody should miss his account of being waterboarded). But he was in the vanguard of those responsible for blurring the line between serious political discourse and entertainment. One Christopher Hitchens ebulliently denouncing a conspiracy theorist as a fascist may be regarded as an amusement. Millions of members of the public denouncing each other as fascists may turn out to be an intellectual tragedy.