And so even though there are parts of what he said in that last decade-if you can get out the laser and try to separate them from the bad parts-that are interesting and worthwhile, it is also the case that he did say all these things. But also there is the elephant with that inadequate body armor in the room, the horrifying positions that he took in the last 10 years of his life when he supported disastrous imperialist wars in the Middle East, when his commitment to strident atheism, which was a lifelong commitment, certainly assumed a different flavor under those circumstances, and I think got mixed up with those bad views. We’ve read his books, we’ve watched all this stuff and we do, even now, have affection for large parts of it. There are so many of us who do feel this way. BurgisĪnd that’s another part of what makes it interesting to me. We’re all quiet about it but it’s because Hitchens became kind of embarrassing. Has he admitted this publicly before? Is this an exclusive disclosure that Bhaskar’s a- Burgis He retains a huge soft spot for Hitchens and has read most of what he wrote. Your counterpart at Jacobin, Bhaskar Sunkara, and I had several conversations with him about this. And I think what you said just a minute ago, is actually, in my experience, not atypical at all. He’d often put things together at odd angles, and you can learn a lot from reading his writing. I still think as a polemicist talking and thinking about history and politics and literature and all that stuff, it’s still the case that on those other subjects he was a very bright guy. Yeah, I certainly get into that in the book. Yes, you go through a number of examples of that. I think even though Christopher Hitchens was sometimes out of his depth when he talked about philosophy, which is something you know, that you and I have talked about before- Robinson But most of this material, I think, a young socialist in 2021, who reads Current Affairs or who reads Jacobin, you know, would agree with vastly more than they disagreed with, and would really appreciate the style, the panache. Not all of it-there are important exceptions. So certainly, for the first 30 years of that, I think most of it is good stuff. The first book that ever had his name on the cover was published in 1971. Yeah, so I think that one reason that he still matters is that he spent decades writing about and debating topics that are still tremendously interesting and relevant to people now, and he actually did have quite a bit that I think is worthwhile to say about many of these things. So why do you think that Christopher Hitchens matters and is still worth talking about? Burgis So, with your book, part of the subtitle is why Hitchens still matters. When we first founded Current Affairs it said on the website “as if Christopher Hitchens and Willy Wonka edited a magazine together.” That eventually came off the website, and we got some hate mail saying “Christopher Hitchens was a warmonger.” But clearly, there’s some part of me that did see him as a model of what an interesting informed commentator would be like. There was a time when the was the model to me of what an intelligent, well-read person who could discourse on many subjects was like. BurgisĪnd we have to work through our thoughts on him because I remember he was a huge influence on me, intellectually, as little as I might like to admit it. And at first when I saw you were writing a book about Christopher Hitchens, I thought, “Why now?” Why pick Christopher Hitchens, of all people? And then, as I thought “it’s actually quite interesting that Ben’s picked Hitchens,” because I think you and I probably have a similar relationship to this guy. It’s on a public intellectual who has been dead for a decade, whose central contributions to the discourse were made many years ago, and whose legacy is, I think, quite unclear. The book you’ve written now has an unusual choice of subject. Robinson about the legacy of Hitchens and what the left can learn from Hitchens’ successes and failures as a public intellectual. The conversation has been condensed and edited for grammar and clarity. He recently spoke with Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. He is a columnist for Jacobin and the host of the Give Them An Argument podcast and YouTube show. Ben Burgis is the author of a number of books, including Give Them an Argument, Canceling Comedians While the World Burns, and the author of the upcoming book, Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters, now available for pre-order.
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