Thinking about
the sick feeling of disgust that came over me when I learned that Christopher
Hitchens had publicly praised Lenin for crushing the Russian Orthodox Church, I
was reminded of the precise moment when I began to turn from the Left. I
arrived at college as a fairly convinced left-winger, and certainly an ardent
one. I joined the Progressive Student Network at my university — a small,
unpopular group, to be sure, but more interesting to me than the College
Democrats. I’d work the table in front of the student union building, passing
out pro-Sandinista literature and suchlike.
One morning, I
woke up at my apartment that first semester in freshman year, turned on the
news, and learned that the Achille Lauro hijackers had shot the
wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer and dumped his body over the transom. I was
gobsmacked by the cruelty of this act, and was still fuming when I turned up at
the PSN table to work that morning. When I expressed my views to my colleagues,
a tall, garrulous comrade griped that our corporate media always reported on
Palestinian terrorism, but never said boo about Israeli terrorism. And then —
I’ll never forget this — a short Puerto Rican fellow who headed the group sat
there calmly behind the table, looked at me through his Coke-bottle glasses,
and said calmly, “Well, if he was rich enough to take the cruise, maybe he
deserved what he got.”
I could hardly
believe what I was hearing. The sheer cold-bloodedness of it. He was prepared
to justify — no, was indeed justifying — the terrorist murder of an old Jewish
man in a wheelchair, because that old man had the money to take a cruise. My
thoughts were jumbled that morning, but I knew in my heart that I had to get as
far away from these lunatics as I could.
This instinct,
I think, is what made all my admiration for Hitchens, despite knowing his many
flaws, evaporate. Not his hatred of religion, but his willingness to justify
the murder of innocent people for the sake of cleansing the world of
“heretics.” In fact, I think it must have had something to do with my ultimate
decision to distance myself from the Catholic Church. In the end, I could not
stand to be part of something whose leadership was willing to endure the
sodomization of children by some of its clergy, and to justify tolerating it in
the name of the mission. To too many bishops, Catholic children and families
were simply collateral damage. Over the years of writing about this, as a
Catholic, I would look at my own little children in the evenings and think that
they, and their mother and father, are nothing to the bishops of the Roman
Catholic church. If a priest had sodomized one or more of my children, we would
have been treated in the very same way these people I was interviewing and
reading about had been treated. The human factor was not relevant to them. It’s
not the same as justifying murder, of course, but it’s on the spectrum.
This is not a
theological argument, obviously; I am simply saying that there is something in
my own emotional constitution that finds the violation of human dignity, and its
justification for religious, political, or otherwise ideological reasons,
abhorrent and intolerable. Every appalling thing Hitchens said, that I knew he
had said, I could live with and forgive, because as he puts it in his memoir,
it often happens that the right people believe and say the wrong things, and
vice versa. If I stopped admiring the good in people I know who believe
appalling things, my life would be lonelier, for sure. Some of the things I
believe strike others as appalling too, and I hope they will, in their
humanity, tolerate my beliefs and look for the good in me.
But there is a
limit. As disgusting as some of Hitchens’s opinions were, and as wrong as he
was about consequential questions (as, of course, I have been), nothing he said
that I was aware of ever struck me as — what’s the word? — as defiling, in some
foundational spiritual sense, as his justification of mass murder and torture
for the sake of exterminating religion.
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