The misanthropic humanist

The Lyndon Larouche supporters are two blocks away from my office parading their Hitler-mustachioed Obama posters and hurling epithets at passers-by, demanding more attention than I would even give the Salvation Army homophobes extorting money from well-meaning shoppers for their parody-paramilitary anti-gay crusade who are just one block farther. Huddling around the Park Street T stop, the Larouchers greeted me not long after a parade of ads on the side of the subway for another awful Christian scam, the Daybreak “crisis pregnancy” center, where young women who need help and honesty can be tricked into an evangelism session for the low, low price of one phone call plus their dignity and future. I prepared for work this morning while, on the news, the Beloved Successor stared dull-eyed at the casket of the bloodthirsty psychopath who recently left us to join his father in the Eternal Presidency of the DPRK. Surrounded by wailing North Koreans, I saw his eyes, no intelligence there, no glimmer of a better future for his people swimming between his chubby cheeks and his drooping brow – just a stillborn's gaze, staring blankly at nothing in particular as though surveying faces in the clouds.

Syria's latest crackdown preceded that story on the news, which was followed by Egypt's – the military is still undecided about how much power to concede to its next biggest competitor there, the budding Islamic dictatorship that sees its concessions over Sinai as the greatest offense to Egyptian national pride and patriotic anti-Semitism in its history. Those other protestors, the Occupiers, are nowhere to be seen on this broadcast, which segued nicely into the obnoxious cultural holocaust that is the standard playlist of badly-covered bad Christmas semi-squawking “music” screeching over invitations to buy, buy, buy. The Catholic League has a still shot of the Grinch on its website, demanding without irony that we remember Christ as the true meaning of the pagan nonsense that has become Christian nonsense that has become capitalist nonsense.

Christopher Hitchens died between Qaddafi and Kim Jong-Il. Survived by Henry Kissinger, the Pope, Bill Donohue, and so many of the rest of his enemies who in a just universe would be selling wilted single roses from dingy stolen shopping carts beside the Larouchers and the rest of their intellectual equals. Hitchens leaves behind a towering corpus of some of the most brilliant political writing, literary criticism, and humanist philosophy we've ever seen. The great misanthropic humanist is off to get the peace and quiet that Kaufmann promised him, the death that comes as a deliverance to the life lived with intensity – and as a theft to the life of great things left unfinished. The great things Hitchens deserved will never be finished. The cultist-kings of North Korea are marching boldly into the next generation. Our oldest idiots (seriously, is Lyndon Larouche even still alive?) are still pestering us on the subway, when they aren't busy sweeping away our democratic revolutions or telling us which superstitions might have the best angle on our reproductive choices.

I first encountered Hitchens after Harris and Dawkins but before Kaufmann and Epicurus. (He introduced me to the latter.) Atheism I came to slowly but inexorably, and it was fun. New converts know the intensity that grips you when you think you have stumbled upon a rare pearl at the beach. You want to show everyone, you want to make them understand its beauty, to see in it the same beautiful reflections you see. Hume and his kind had already been impressed upon me rather firmly by my classes, but the airy, blandly optimistic formulation of humanism we see throughout our movement did not ring strongly with me. Humanism is predicated on a notion I believed false: that humanity was worth it, that we can improve ourselves, grow, learn, that our potential and our science and our achievements and our culture is a treasure of this universe. No, this is a species of idiots, of small minds parading around their occasional great mind as the symbols of them all rather than the exception that despises them. Misanthropy and humanism do not mix, and they did not mix for me.

Hitchens rang particularly strongly with me because I saw in him the same general disdain for fools, for boring people, for blandness and predictability, all of which he hated as strongly as any of the war criminals he denounced or fraudulent saints he exposed. He had the rare combination of a vibrant personality and a powerful mind, a talent for wit and a fondness for irony that made him seem authentic in the face of not just the people he criticized, but of my own fellow humanists who blindly parrot nonsensical statements about how our species is worth it. It isn't – we didn't deserve Hitchens any more than we deserve the Kim Jong-Ils and Lyndon Larouches of this world, but we generated them, and for every fool we crush, berate, and expel from civil society, there are a thousand more in her or his place.

But Hitchens taught me how to cope with the brutality of our species. He taught me that it's OK to say mean things to bad people, that humanism has the nuance to it that humans best improve humanity by improving other humans. By being a loudmouth, by being a gadfly, by being an agitator, through brutal honesty and relentless criticism of our worst elements, we empower our best ones. It's fun to read Hitchens for this very reason, that you feel stronger in your own convictions, you feel more just in your humanism, when you read that humanity's own greatest minds agree with your occasional (or core) misanthropy. They engage with it, and make something useful of it. The blasé humanism of Paul Kurtz or Bertrand Russell or even some of the bizarrely, unexpectedly humanist French existentialists is bookended by Freud to the aft and Hitchens to the fore, a fitting successor to those humanists who know that humanism is not to humanity as Christianity is to Christ, but that humanism is to humanity as plumbers are to plumbing.

We have a job to do. We have battles unfinished, battles unbegun. They are marching around Park Street with Hitler-mustachioed Obama posters. They are running for president in 2012, and fighting in Egypt and Syria to make sure that nobody gets to run for anything in those places ever again. They surround us, and their net is closing, as it has been for two thousand years. Are you a humanist? Do you drape your affections over the backs of the brutes and buffoons who are your fellow half-baboons, or do you keep them to yourself and distribute them only to the worthy? Hitchens taught us how not to be bland or blind humanists, but how to see that our potential can be met only through work, through our minds, through being unafraid to use our own minds to criticize God, gods, demigods, man-gods, man-children, kings, presidents, Popes, saints, and any other idiot, liar, crook, swindler, thug, ruffian, theocrat, cultist, dictator, fraud, huckster, or superstitious rube who dares infringe on the great dignity that could be ours if only we stopped giving respect where none is due and paid lip service to nothing and nobody.

But perhaps the finest lesson Hitchens ever taught was that he offered in one of the parades of interviews he gave to reporters eager to get the deathbed confession on tape. Asked as he routinely was if he regretted and of it, the smoking, the drinking, knowing what he knows now, he said: no. No, a life such as his sometimes needed one more bottle to keep the night going with the great minds who were his entourage, sometimes needed smoke after smoke just to stay sharp around those who do not tolerate boring people. The cancer is awful, he said, the cancer is a pain indescribable, dying before seeing his children mature is a regret that cannot be assuaged, but for a life such as his, it was worth it. That the life lived intensely cannot be sustained but that it is worth living anyway. His humanity would have been nothing to him if not the freedom to abuse it to whatever ends required to live it fully. What could such a person have to feel guilty about on their deathbed? What deathbed repentance, be it from sin or mere temporal vice, could do service to so fine a product? None, I say, which is why we heard none – we heard only his deadlines met, his obligations fulfilled, his mind never slowing until it stopped.

And we are cheaper for it, but the battle yawning long before us commands our attention too closely to continue pattering about with our regrets and our mourning.