IAMA: Christopher Hitchens | reddit's top ten questions

well mr. peace day which I think you must be because I don't think there would be a mrs. peace take could I could I be wrong about that you want to know what historical figures events movements or books I feel have been ignored or under emphasized in the public education of young people here's a piece of advice about asking a question try and narrow it down a bit try and make it more incisive so I make it get under my skin you give me too much to choose from likely to get either everything or nothing and I certainly can't do everything I'll try not to do nothing if you mean in the United States I think that the the study of the founding of the country the emergence of the United States as the world's first and only still only secular Democratic Republic Federal Republic is terribly under studied these days and the the likelihood that there wouldn't ever have been a revolution if there hadn't been a inter imperialist fight between England Spain and France likelihood that it could have been just a rebellion of colonies wanting to hold onto their old English privileges the extraordinary odds against there being an Enlightenment revolution sponsored by people like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson who really believed that the United States should declare not just for its own rights but for the rights of all man which is the great breakthrough based on the writing of John Locke and other Enlightenment figures is the is the most ignored and under oversized instead we get happy stories about George Washington Crossing the Delaware and matters of this kind that are later replaced by the stories of parson Weems about George Washington being a moral hero and pseudo Superman which don't show the grit and the grain of how revolutionary our Revolution was if I could change one thing it would certainly be that and the great book to read since you imply I should mention one would be Theodore Draper's book a struggle for power which is a very good history of the germinal events without which the American Revolution couldn't have taken place I would have taken a different form scarier which isn't somehow suggestive name asks me from what he's read or she's read it seems I initially supported the intervention United States in Iraq and Afghanistan do you believe that it's had he asked so she asks a positive or negative impact on the growth and exposure Islamic extremism also given that the countries are still plagued with problems many years after the initial invasions what direction do you think US foreign policy should take now implied in that is the idea that the influence on the Islamic world is created by us it will by our intervention in fact in the salient case that you mentioned of Afghanistan the Taliban ization Afghanistan it it's it's a takeover by a very vicious cruel theocracy that ran Afghanistan into the ground and also invited al-qaeda as a partner into the country to help to destroy the patrimony of Afghanistan to blow up the treasures of Bamiyan and the Buddhists and other non Islamic statues and museums in the was only because the United States was disengaged Afghanistan it's very important not to forget that as with Somalia as with Afghanistan as with Saudi Arabia to some extent these jealousies arise because we're not looking and it's certainly true that Osama bin Laden used to say that he was not afraid of the United States because he thought it wouldn't fight not because it would and so I think a lot depends on once being able to say that he was wrong about that in other words it's not the case that we are disliked because we resist Islamic imperialism the attempt to create a new Caliphate a new Islamic empire in the world it's much more likely there would be despised if we don't take a stand against it and they will believe that this hastens the day when this grand new Empire will dawn so there's no choice but to resist it and it was a choice that was it some extent forced upon us but I think we should recognize it when it arrives board Greg asks in a rather laconic way where I get my news and I would say that I was once quoted in some online dictionary of quotations I drove able to find it again my son went to judge me as saying that some I became a journalist because I didn't want to rely on the press for information with partly true I I am get most of my information from other writers other reporters other journalists based in other countries or journalists based from other countries who are assigned to Washington what they tell me is all the stuff they couldn't get into their own paper or past their own editor and that's that's my main source of information I rather pity people who have to rely on the output of the journalistic profession Jim to be informed and then there are one or two websites I sometimes look at but generally speaking I'm old enough now that people will send me things that they think would interest me and from all over the world so that's that's what I do as soon as I flap through the New York Times in the morning which I do so as to be sure that I know what other people think is going on or what the news is Dee Roberts 982 says that I've stated the litmus test for the Obama administration is Iran how is the president doing in this area well litmus test is of course a cliche I hope I didn't use it in that term that voice but um it still wouldn't be untrue there are two senses in which we're in confrontation over Iran one is it has a regime that's illegally trying to acquire and to conceal its requirement of thermonuclear weapons so we'll soon find out what our most ancient worry will look like by almost ancient warrior I mean almost maybe our deepest modern worry what will it be like when people who have a fanatical apocalyptic ideology get hold of Masonic weapons well we'll soon find out what it's like to have to be nice to people like that because they're they're driving their country into bankruptcy in order to produce this program and lying to United Nations to the International Atomic Energy Authority to the European Union and to everybody else about the ways in which they've been doing this for live in-court line repeatedly they make a profession of lying that's the first thing this in other words the evidence for what we believe does not come from some overworked CIA the second thing is that we have every reason to believe in that someone has visited the country I would want to tend to confirm that Iranian public opinion especially among the young is overwhelmingly anti theocratic and sympathetic to United States and wants a restoration of good relations with us so the question is this movement having been proven to exist in the recent I won't even call of elections in the recent attempt to fake an election in Iran whether we can synchronize our policy so as to say we're both the democratization and the deep nuclearization of Iran since the two things are connected Iran can only come back into the comity of nations where it is a democracy and when it is proven that its nuclear program is early for peaceful and economic purposes after we're willing to build them the reactors were willing to give them all the centrifuges they need on the assurance that that's all they want a very generous offer well the president's line on this is that it's night would be nice to have the Islamic Republic of Iran as you put it back in the family of Nations when my response to that is it's because it's an Islamic Republic that it can't be in the comity of Nations because it's because it's an Islamic Republic that it mal treats and oppresses and tortures and kills its own people and also it's because it's it is an Islamic Republic that it conducts this covert insane nuclear operation designed for blackmail against it's mainly Sunni Arab neighbors by the way it's not really intending it at least at first to attack Israel let alone us but it will be used to blackmail the Gulf states that have less capacity to defend themselves so that the problem with the president's policy is that he believes that the disagreement between ourselves and the Islamic Republic arises from a misunderstanding and I can't be persuaded that that's really true it's not a cultural or psychological matter it's a radical difference of interest and nothing is really going to be able to happen until the Iranian people are allowed to interfere in their own internal affairs so we have a government we can show is their choice and it so we can be certain that they're not simply running out the clock of diplomacy in order to equip themselves with illegal weaponry so yes that could be described as a litmus test khalid or i can't decode that name asks if i am my fellow horsemen richard dawkins Daniel Josh and Samuel Harris as sometimes referred to collectively as New Atheists what does this mean to you do you embrace it what would you hold this nothing particularly new well and he asked me also if I agree with the mention of the word brights as a definition of the unbeliever the the four horsemen was very cheap idea was my own actually supposed to be the four horsemen of the counter apocalypse it's just too happy happy coincidence that four of us published books around the same time but the inclusion is absurdly flattering to me Richard Dennett sorry Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and Simon Harrison are great men of science in the respective fields anthropology in neuroscience in Richards case pre-eminently biology they've they would be great educators and educators for the theory of evolution and for human reason even if they'd never said a word about religion but they all decided that in the present crisis where we're threatened on all sides by different sorts of theocratic mad Israeli settlers Islamic jihadists Christians who won't have garbage taught in American schools and so forth a paper C that says that aids may be bad but condoms are worse that there has to be a push bag has to be a resistance I'm the least of these I don't think there's anything particularly new about it we all agree on one proposition which was the great late friend Stephen Jay Gould himself a tremendous educator and paleontologist was wrong and when he said that science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria we do believe that essentially these things are incompatible or to any rate very very difficult to reconcile I did quarrel with my some of my comrades by saying I thought that to call ourselves brights would be in the first place very conceited and in the second place very misleading we do not say of people who disagree with us that they are stupid and many very very intelligent people have been persuaded by Thomas Aquinas ontological arguments for the existence of God for example there's no it's not an IQ question I thought it was a false issue and I'm rather glad to see it gone to some kind of eclipse basically let's see 1984 is not a manual excellent name if you were the prime minister of the UK what would you do to combat or just extremism also can assure the UK government try to encourage atheism and if so how well combating extremism is not done very easily if you grant its first premise what the Labour government in Britain has been doing is trying to find ways of negotiating with the fairly large settlement of Muslim citizens in the UK mainly from Pakistan and Bangladesh and it's made what I think is the historic mistake of assuming that these communities are represented by their mosques by their mullahs instead of by their teachers by their community leaders and others and this has been a terrible concession it's led as far as the head of the Anglican Church Rowan Williams head of the Church of England actually saying that there should be separate courts for Muslims Sharia Courts in the United Kingdom in other words giving up the essential idea that the law is the same for everybody and everybody is equal under that law not if you're a Muslim you can go to your own court now we have in Britain now cases of honor killings of girls who are said to have disgraced their families say by marrying out of Islam or marrying out of the clan we have forced marriages we have imported marriages people go back and effectively buy brides in Pakistan these we have instances of genital mutilation of female children this kind of thing is is not I think to be excused as a cultural difference it is to be brought within the ambit of the law and to be judged as if it would be if it was a non-muslim person doing it so the surrender by the Labour government to clerical forces in this matter and by the Church of England is a terrible concession the terrible appeasement I think the whole society will soon come to a crime dingle dog has a heartfelt question for me saying that he or I guess accomplished a single dog is a nationally ranked policy debater in college and despite years of the Beijing practice in research I'm occasionally stumped by question asked by my opponent has there ever been a question asked for what you had no good answer and if so what is your typical strategy in dealing with those situations well in principle that number of questions should be going up because Socrates tells us that the only definition of being educated let alone learn it is to begin to understand how little you know and it's only when you have grazed on the lower slopes of your own ignorance and begun to understand the great vistas of non knowledge that you have that you claim to have been educated at all so it ought to be the case that I'm refrigerant leak infractions with questions like that in fact I suppose the one that is most often asked is how can I say I know there's no God and these are from people who don't understand the ABC of the atheist argument which is that we don't say and can't prove that there's no God but we will say there's no good evidence and there's never yet been involved a good argument for saying that there is that's why we're more modest than we perhaps look sometimes whereas those who say there is generally say there is because that means they've won an argument but they say there is in order that they can claim the authority of that God to tell other people what to do so they make an extraordinary claim with only very ordinary best evidence sometimes obviously fantastic evidence fabrication and they make very very large claims for themselves they say well now I know what God wants you have to do what I want we repudiate that and we say no there are a couple of easier simpler questions that you haven't answered yet like the difference between being a deist and a theist for example so I like to think that at least while I'm debating with people of that kind they're not going to come up with a quest before Olivia knows whether it was paleontology biology political economy anthropology I would expect that there would be an infinite number of questions to which I wouldn't even begin to have now so because I simply wouldn't know that's really the principal difference if you if there's something where there is doubt don't claim you're certain it's amazing how relaxing it is not to pretend to know more than you do and I'm surprised that those who claim to speak in the name of God don't take more advantage of this relief so adlai or Martha opaque says you've called yourself a Marxist but you say you no longer consider yourself a socialist this issue was addressed in a recent article a while ago could you elaborate for instance is the power of the unaccountable corporation no longer a major concern for you you've also been eerily silent on the health care debate as far as I know why as far as I know comment why well in a way I can't stop myself thinking in in the way I was first trained to think which is someone who believes in the material conception of history thinks that people act not according to their proclaimed ideals so much as they do according to their interests in other words that the Crusades for example were not entirely a spiritual event but were to do with unresolved rivalries and contradictions in the material world actually it's almost commonplace now to do this almost all historians are Marxists in that sense they they don't judge people by their opinions of each of themselves but by some more objective standard Marx used to having understood that capitalism was very revolutionary and praised it for being so revolutionary so dynamic hope that the working class could learn from capitalism and take over its dynamism but with out its contradictions and without its cruelties I'd have to say that that didn't work out in quite the way that had been hoped and then in fact capitalism survived a number of its crises and near collapses and has reemerged are still a very dynamic and innovative force so I feel that's a historical defeat for the socialist idea if not for the Marxist one I hope that's not too glib reply as to whether private corporations can do more damage or are equally dangerously unaccountable as our governments or States or bureaucracies I'm willing to split the difference if you like I mean it depends really in which country you live but I certainly think that the worst outcome ever achieved was probably in Eastern Europe before the overthrow of communism where there were all the disadvantages were not accountable industrialism pollution waste ecological desperation secrecy exploitation misery on the assembly line and in the workplace with absolutely none of the advantages of the innovative forces of capital it was suddenly was parasitic on loans from the rest of Europe so I think it's worth bearing that in mind and of course in China at present you have an absolute collusion between supposedly all-powerful state which still officially operates in the name of communist ideology and a very large number of very unaccountable private corporations both Chinese located endogenous if you like local to China and multinational corporations that want to take advantage of them so there's no necessary opposition between these two things you can easily get a synthesis of them either positive or negative on the healthcare debate wake me when it's over I remember Richard Nixon getting a Soniaji healthcare also we all thought that I've become a little bit cynical about this I someoneís think health care is the default position of politicians in a corner that the seems to be something about the United States I sometimes think that sort of doesn't really want health care that even people who could most benefit from it in this country don't want it I almost think it's psychic sometimes or psychological I mean they'd rather live dangerously they'd rather not live in a country where they were taking care of I hope this doesn't sound flippant but I don't expect there ever to be socialized medicine in the United States if if that's what you mean not even if everybody did wanted which they I think don't hope that doesn't sound too cynical pol 7 has identified the essence of the question what consensus exists between socialism and libertarianism well he hasn't identified the essence he's only put the question how did this creep end how did this guy make the cut just kidding I suppose will it at least at the beginning of each movement the thing in common that the Socialists and movement had well there wasn't a libertarian movement in the early days of the Industrial Revolution you don't really get libertarian movements until there's a certain amount of peace democracy and prosperity and with the hard task of building a state and creating the nation has been done so it's a historic question in some ways but let's say that socialism begins Marxism certainly billions by looking forward to the end of the state to the withering away of the state as Marx and Engels famously put it and too as they better put it actually to the replacement of the government of men by the administration by men of things and that bit of the of the ideal got dropped out in the terrible struggles in in Europe and elsewhere in the 20th century over nation-states Wars crises and revolution but the idea certainly the original idea was that the state was not the arbiter of social disputes but the product of them and that if you could remove certain contradictions there would be less and less need for an absolute authority the libertarians have got the same point in a different way but I think that they they always suffer to me from the disadvantage of being I think I said before a historical what would have been a libertarian position on the franco-prussian war on the on the collapse of Czar ISM in Russia on the rise of fascism on the military-industrial complex on all these things the so many things of which there's no neutral libertarian position to take what's a libertarian view of the Vietnam War say or the Chinese Revolution it's a bit thin it's a bit faint but nonetheless I've always said and believed that I don't trust anyone who doesn't have a bit of the libertarian and the anarchist within them someone who says that I don't I don't make the presumption the burrs in charge know better than I do I also generate the presumption that they have the right to tell me what to do unless they've they repeatedly have earned that right and so it's very important that one has some libertarian and anarchists elements in one's own makeup I believe UK wants me to say why my speaking style but it's unlike the norm today and then he goes on to say some needlessly flattering things what goes into this effect are there any other speakers or schools of rhetoric you draw from what do you think of the state of rhetoric and public debate in America if you if if he doesn't think I'm dodging your question I'll answer it backwards um there's a real difference between the the culture in which I was brought up and the American one that's prevailing now I was put up to debate whether it's a clear-cut notion win or lose sharply drawn either in school debating society later on at the Oxford Union model in a way of the parliamentary system where in addition to being able to do your own presentation as sharply this toughly as you could make it you will also expect it if the case should arise to be able to take the other person's position on the other side of the despatch-box and know their own case well enough to put it yourself if you had to just for an exercise I think that is a good training in the United States the whole model is opposite the Constitution is based on consensus building now probably for a good reason very plural very various country there's never been a debate in the Senate that I've heard that being such things reported as having occurred there's never been one as far as I know all that happens is that different senators or representative the speech they were going to give anywhere and then said they don't exchange they don't do thrust and parry any level at all it's just I here's my view on this and now the Honorable gentlemen give his there's no interpenetration of offices the same is true of presidential debates now which in fact I think are wrongly so called you the ground rules of the presidential debate so the two candidates can't speak directly to each other that means by definition it's not a debate it's all run through the moderator it's more like a joint press conference by contrast most TV supposed debates of merely shouting matches well there's no attempt to really state contrasting position so my conclusion from this video sink rat ik might be interesting to you is this the reason why the courtroom drama is such a big feature of American life and one of the great things that America is given to the world in television and film and some novels too is that the courtroom drama fascinates people in this country is for once they're watching something that isn't fixed that they know really is a debate where the outcome isn't predetermined which shows that there's a hunger for rhetoric and flair and debate and conflict and irreconcilable opposition where someone's got to go down at the end of this it's not going to be a big handshake at the end and that's what I want out of it out of the debate and so my own version of it is an improvisation of the English one where you hope to try and be able to be funny about serious things but also serious but amusing ones and see if you can keep people on their guard and then try and catch them off it as well yeah I mean I could add one thing if you liked I mean that the method is sometimes called this the Socratic one where you start by asking questions and you go on until the questions being exhausted so that it's in a way a process of elimination it's them sometimes called also the Platonic symposium the the Passover Seder is vaguely modeled on and derived from this where people sit around usually with wine not one of the few Jewish cemeteries that doesn't says don't why questions are asked in Italy in a certain well-known order but to the youngest person present who gets the chance to be brightened by the process of questioning things are elicited that's not exactly a debate but it's a good means of ordering the mind and a lot better than getting together in a church to give regular incantations where everyone has to be reminded again for the how many times a week it is time that they all believe the same thing and that they're absolutely United and agreed upon it and you feel that that's always a sign of insecurity rather than confidence

Channel: Reddit

Views: 1,601,803

Keywords: author, questions, atheism, reddit, history, Iama, afghanistan, iran, debate, christopher, god, reddit.com, religion, obama, hitchens, politics, interview, atheist

Id: 78Jl2iPPUtI

Length: 30min 44sec (1844 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 28 2009