Tuesday Tomes - Havel and Hitchins

In the course of just a few days, the world has said good-bye to two exceptional writers and thinkers. Christopher Hitchens and Vaclav Havel were profoundly different men. Perhaps the only thing they would find themselves in complete agreement about would be their mutual love of cigarettes.

While both of them were brilliant thinkers and lucid communicators, they had decidedly different views and personalities. Hitchens had an aggressive and acerbic edge that could easily be mistaken for arrogance. Havel seemed a little shy and always approached his audience with a humble and respectful tone that could easily be mistaken for meekness. Hitchens was a journalist. Havel was an artist. Because of their intelligence, clarity of thought, and their outspoken and provocative points of view, both were important and influential in the public sphere.

Hitchens was a champion for atheism and believed religion to be poisonous to the world.

“One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody-not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms-had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.” [God is Not Great]

Havel championed conscience and spirituality, and saw atheism as a poison to the world.

But we are also living in the first atheistic civilisation, in other words, a civilisation that has lost its connection with the infinite and eternity. For that reason it prefers short-term profit to long-term profit. What is important is whether an investment will provide a return in ten or fifteen years; how it will affect the lives of our descendants in a hundred years is less important. However, the most dangerous aspect of this global atheistic civilisation is its pride. The pride of someone who is driven by the very logic of his wealth to stop respecting the contribution of nature and our forebears, to stop respecting it on principle and respect it only as a further potential source of profit. [Forum 2000 Address]

Havel and Hitchens saw things and approached things very differently, but both confronted boldly anything they believed to be untrue or destructive to humanity and the world. I don't know if they knew each other. Surely they must have had some occasion to meet. And if they did, I wouldn't be surprised to learn they had a good conversation and a cordial respect for one another. They were able to listen and engage in conversation with those with whom they did not agree. If bold confrontation combined with honest conversation is something we are able to learn from their lives and their writing, it will be a blessed tribute to their memories.

BOOKS FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens (Christopher Hitchens)
"All first-rate criticism first defines what we are confronting," the late, great jazz critic Whitney Balliett once wrote. By that measure, the essays of Christopher Hitchens are in the first tier. For nearly four decades, Hitchens has been telling us, in pitch-perfect prose, what we confront when we grapple with first principles-the principles of reason and tolerance and skepticism that define and inform the foundations of our civilization-principles that, to endure, must be defended anew by every generation.

Hitch 22 (Christopher Hitchens)
Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide. In other words, Christopher Hitchens contains multitudes. He sees all sides of an argument. And he believes the personal is political. This is the story of his life, lived large.

The Art of the Impossible
(Vaclav Havel)
This volume consists of thirty-five of these essays, written between the years 1990 and 1996, that manage to be both profoundly personal and profoundly political. Havel writes of totalitarianism, its miseries and the nonetheless difficult emergence from it. He describes how his country and the other postcommunist countries are learning democracy from scratch and are encountering obstacles from inside and out.

To the Castle and Back (Vaclav Havel)
From the former president of the Czech Republic comes this first-hand account of his years in office and the transition to democracy following the fall of Communism. A renowned playwright, Václav Havel became one of Czechoslovakia's most prominent dissidents under Communist rule – and the president after the Velvet Revolution, making him a key player in European politics. Here we see first-hand the challenges of creating a new government, tempered with Havel's revealing insights into the difficulties posed by an era of increased globalization and conflict.