Book Review: Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens (d. 2011) was a public intellectual known for his outspoken views on religion and politics and his often confrontational means of communication. His circle of influence included presidents, dissidents, revolutionaries, and academics alike, and he authored 30 books that continue to inspire and challenge people around the world. Letters to a Young Contrarian is primarily concerned with showing how to be a “contrarian,” that is, someone who intentionally and rigorously challenges the status quo. This is something that Hitchens himself made a career out of. Readers will enjoy seeing the contrarian methodology applied across the broad array of subjects this book addresses, including politics, economics, and religion.

Hitchens was a polymath, and wielded the English language skillfully, parrying and thrusting at the stagnant attitudes of modernity with elegance. The result is a book full of obscure terms and references with little explanation, but any effort given to understanding Hitchens’ arguments will be richly rewarded. However, some may find his narcissistic tone off-putting.

Letters to a Young Contrarian poses as a collection of letters between Hitchens the sage and an aspiring mentee who wants to make a change in the world. As a left-leaning humanist, Hitchens draws attention to flaws in religion, society, politics, and nationalism and calls readers to embrace the role of misfit in order to create a better tomorrow. The book is valuable for these critiques, and Hitchens does a good job of calling awareness to cognitive dissonance that many readers experience subconsciously, but have not felt permission to address head on. 

That being said, when Hitchens addresses a topic I know something about (religion), I find his critiques are valid against popular ideology, but do little to strike at the deeply rooted heritage of the traditions he opposes. For example, he rightly calls the notion of heaven as a "state of endless praise and gratitude and adoration" a "vision of tedium and pointlessness and predictability" (25). But Hitchens seems unaware that these beliefs are best categorized, shelved, and forgotten as pop theology and have little to do with the rich theological tradition which emphasizes the future state of humanity as a new creation—Earth renewed, with work, play, and relationships providing meaningful pursuits (cf. the work of N.T. Wright).
 
In another place, Hitchens critiques religion for claiming to know what the Supreme Being desires. He argues that they assume the conclusion from the beginning, while begging the question himself regarding the impossibility of divine revelation (57). It seems fair to state that both believer and skeptic stand on equal footing in this regard. If the divine exists, it seems right to assume divine self-revelation. When Hitchens states that divine revelation "degrades the whole concept of the free intelligence" of humanity, one wishes that he was familiar with Bonhoeffer’s theology of “the world come of age.” For Bonhoeffer, revelation is the preliminary guide for human intelligence, much as parental rules provide guidelines during early childhood development. Rather than degrading human intelligence, revelation provides the nurturing environment for it to flourish until it develops its full capacity.
 
Letters to a Young Contrarian concludes with a vision of the next epoch of human history, an era when the concept of universal human rights is realized, and when the globalization of production is matched by the globalization “of a common standard for justice and ethics.” Those familiar with the work of theologian Jurgen Moltmann will see clear parallels. But where Hitchens focuses on the result (a better future), Moltmann names the impetus for change as the Divine drawing humanity towards the Divine Self. Hitchens would do well to heed his own advice to avoid "the narcissism of the small difference" (59), and instead, work together with likeminded people, even people of faith, to advance "the immense discoveries about our own nature" that remain to be found (108).

Criticisms aside, Letters to a Young Contrarian is a refreshing, witty, thought-provoking book that should be on the reading list of every free thinker.

​Well here it is, my December reading list. Being a holiday month, and the end of the year, I chose books that intrigued me on a deeply personal level. All are highly recommended.

The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner
Philosophy has been an obsession for me ever since I read Plato's Republic in high school. If you were to ask for my favorite authors, philosophers like Charles Taylor, C.S. Pierce and Nancey Murphy would be high on the list.

Philosophy is intriguing, not for the answers it provides (answers are rare in philosophy), but for the way it sharpens the mind, helps us understand the framework through which we view the world, and aids us in asking better questions. If that sounds abstract, that's because philosophy is abstract (which makes it a lot of fun). But here's where The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner is different than your standard philosophy textbook. Instead of focusing on standard philosophy topics like metaphysics (what is real?), epistemology (how do we know?), ethics (what should we do?), or logic (how should we think?), The Worldly Philosophers is concerned with a much more grounded subcategory of philosophy; economics. 

In point of fact, economics is not, strictly speaking, philosophy. It is rather a marriage between science and philosophy. Heilbroner calls the great economists worldly philosophers because they "sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of all of man's activities-his for wealth."

Today we take for granted that economics is a discipline (even if we don't understand what it is), but this was not always the case. There was a time in history when humanity did not have a discipline devoted to predicting supply and demand. Instead, the survival of people groups was assured either by following tradition (do things the way your ancestors did them) or obeying authority (our rulers will whip us if we do not produce enough grain). It was only with the gradual development of the market system, in which individuals could pursue gains however they saw fit, that economics as a discipline became possible. 

In The Worldly Philosophers, Heilbroner us on an engaging and enlightening journey from ancient times to the present, tracing the development of economics. The most brilliant aspect of this book is its narrative form. Economics can be confusing, tiresome, or downright boring to those who do not have a general understanding of mathematics. This book tells the story of economics through the lives and contributions of great thinkers like Adam Smith, Parson Malthus, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes.

Whether you are a business owner looking to brush up on economic theory to stay competitive, or simply an interested consumer who is curious about the unseen forces driving everything from spending habits to international relations, The Worldly Philosophers is a must read!

I picked up Cry, The Beloved Country several years ago at a library sale, put it on a shelf and forgot about it. Then this summer, while backpacking in Asia, I befriended a couple from South Africa in Patong. They intrigued me with their stories, and when I found myself with some spare time I finally decided to read it. I knew nothing about the plot, but was quickly drawn in by Paton’s descriptions of a beautiful people on the verge of apartheid and a beautiful land ravaged by drought.

On the surface, Alan Paton’s 1948 novel, Cry, The Beloved Country, is about Africa, South Africa in particular, and the drought-plagued province of Natal, on the eastern side of the country. Paton writes movingly about rolling hills, deep, river-fed valleys, and grassy plains that for millennia served as sustenance for the people of Africa. The geography features so prominently in the narrative, that other reviewers have called the geography “one of the book’s most important characters.” But this novel is set during a period of physical and cultural drought. The land is as barren as the tribal system that European colonialism has broken, uprooted and tossed aside. Beneath the surface is a story larger than Johannesburg, larger than Africa itself. It is a story of heartache and hope amid racial tension, and the possibility of reconciliation.

Cry, The Beloved Country tells the story of two men, both fathers. One black, the other white. Their lives collide through the actions of their sons. Stephen Kumalo, the primary focus of the novel, is an African reverend. He makes the long journey from his rural village of Ndotsheni to the overflowing slums of Johannesburg in search of his sister Gertrude and his son Absolom. Kumalo represents the village elder—wise in his humanity, naïve to the ways of the city, rooted in community and tradition—faced with a rapidly changing world. As he embarks on the train for his first visit to the great city, we read: “The journey had begun. And now the fear back again, the fear of the unknown, the fear of the great city where boys were killed crossing the street, the fear of Gerturde’s sickness. Deep down the fear for his son. Deep down the fear of a man who lives in a world not made for him, whose own world is slipping away, dying, being destroyed, beyond any recall” (44).
In Johannesburg, Kumalo discovers that the city has broken his family, stolen their innocence. His sister is a prostitute, his son, Absalom, a killer with a pregnant fiancé. The city tries to break Kumalo too, but he is strong, and resists. He longs for his village, where the tribal rhythms promise peace and safety, and tries to convince his sister and his son’s fiancé to return home with him. His sister will not come.
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James Jarvis is a well to-do white farmer. His son Arthur lives in the city where he fights for the civil rights of the black South Africans. It was Arthur that Absalom killed. Jarvis travels to Johannesburg to understand what happened to his son. Jarvis did not know Arthur well, and in mourning, begins to read the articles and speeches he had written in his fight for justice. He meets Kumalo, the father of his son’s murderer, and they realize they live near each other in rural Natal. When Absalom is sentenced to death, both Jarvis and Kumalo return home to the barren countryside.

But something has changed. These men, so separate in wealth, status, culture and race, have both lost sons, one at the hand of the other. Their paths, always parallel, have now come together. Jarvis, who before was content to avoid thinking about the injustice in South Africa, begins using his wealth to help the tribes people in the village. He sends an engineer to show them how to plow the land in new ways that will prevent erosion. He begins work on a dam that will keep water through the next drought. His men show the African farmers how to corral their cattle and collect dung for fertilizer. But why is this progress necessary? Because colonials have segregated society, and pushed the tribes onto smaller and smaller pieces of land, where traditional farming causes erosion, and where water supplies quickly run out.

The novel closes in the early morning on the day of execution. Kumalo goes to a mountain to pray, and meets Jarvis at the foot of the hill, where they mourn together. On the final page, dawn breaks.

​Why dawn? Jarvis and Kumalo have come to embody a future South Africa that Arthur wrote about in one of his papers, a future made possible not through power or law, but through sacrifice and love. “There is only one thing that has power completely, and that is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power. I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black man desire neither power nor money, but desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it” (71).

Cry, The Beloved Country is not a utopian dream of easy answers and quick solutions. Rather, Paton reveals the complex nuances of racial and cultural tension and hints as the painful, tedious work that must be done to bring about reconciliation and open the floodgates for the rising tide that raises all ships, waters all fields, and provides nourishment for all our children. The title is derived from a passage where Paton warns about the danger of loving the familiar too much:
              “Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deply. Let                  him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red                  the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a                    mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.”

When we love our home, our culture, the things that make us feel familiar, too much, that love may turn to fear and violence in the face of a perceived threat to our norms. Cry, The Beloved Country offers a sober, beautiful reminder that another way is possible. ​

Book Review: Scoring Transcendence: Contemporary Film Music as Religious Experience
By Kutter Calloway
Baylor University Press, 2013 
​
  ​  As the title suggests, Scoring Transcendence by Kutter Calloway is concerned with parsing the theological implications of film music. Callaway’s thesis is premised on the notion that the divine Spirit is present and active in all human activities, including those activities outside the bounds of traditional religion. His goal in writing is to help readers become aware of the Spirit’s activity, particularly in our film experiences.[1]
        Callaway begins by showing that films, particularly film scores, have the potential to provide first-order spiritual encounters with the Transcendent. Using Pixar’s short library of animated films, his first set of examples will be accessible to most readers. Moreover, by starting with a list of films many would initially dismiss as “children’s movies,” Callaway is able to make a plausible case with more clarity and less effort than if he had begun with less accessible films like “The Tree of Life.”[2]     
          Methodologically, Callaway engages in second order theological reflection by analyzing film scores, while first-order theological experiences are drawn from personal interviews with movie-goers and from his own encounters with the divine in film.[3] This is essential to his argument that “’meaning’ emerges through the interplay between both the film’s form and the film’s reception.”[4] In other 
words, meaning cannot be solely deduced through the process of analytic logic from a distant observer, viewers engage a range of inherent meanings through the totality of their experiences. A two way hermeneutical movement occurs between our life experiences and our film experiences, so that what we experience in life affects how we watch films, yet our experiences watching films also profoundly impact the way we live our lives.[5]            
            Cutter argues that the hermeneutic by which we interpret our film experience arises not only from the images we see on the screen, or even from the plot. The music functions to create a surplus of additional meaning over and above the images and stories.[6] Calloway then uses specific examples from an array of films to show how a single musical theme or a major or minor key can change the way viewers interact with a story or scene.[7]
Critical Dialogue
            The above raises a question: Does God reveal Godself through anything and everything? Callaway wants us to believe that the “inspiriting presence” of the divine is permeating creation with redemptive activity. The transcendent power of film scores has little to do with second order theology or the knowledge of God, it has rather to do with the human/divine encounter in what traditionally has been called “general revelation.” [8] For a Protestant theologian like Callaway, this naturally leads to a second question: does this focus on the divine Spirit promote a low Christology? 
             Traditionally, Protestant theology has been concerned with a high Christology, insisting from passages such as Colossians 1:15-23 that all things were “created for him (Jesus)… that in everything he might be preeminent” (ESV). By emphasizing general revelation and the work of the Spirit in all of humanity, does Callaway risk missing out on the core of the Christian message? Callaway’s research on nonreligious viewer reviewing websites reveals that many people have experiences with the transcendent through watching film. The Spirit’s indwelling presence frees us “to move beyond pure critique, celebrating and affirming the ways in which cultural products like film reflect the presence and movement of God in the world.”[9]
            Thus, Scoring Transcendence provides readers with the tools to deepen their understanding of the film watching experience, by viewing it theologically, as something greater than cognitive-emotional reaction, as divine encounter. 


[1] Kutter Callaway, Scoring Transcendence: Contemporary Film Music as Religious Experience (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013), 4.
[2] Callaway himself told me this was unintentional, a recommendation from the publisher. Originally, the Pixar chapter was the book’s conclusion.
[3] Callaway, 50.
[4] Ibid, 109.
[5] Ibid, 131.
[6] Ibid, 106.
[7] Ibid, 119.
[8] Ibid, 155.
[9] Ibid, 191.

​Book Review: The Myth of Religious Violence
by William Cavanaugh
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)
 
In The Myth of Religious Violence, William Cavanaugh argues that the concept of religion as a transhistorical and transcultural entity distinct from secular social features like politics is a mythic construct, not rooted in reality (3). As such, the notion that one can distinguish between violence motivated by religion and violence driven by other cultural, political and social motives is patently false. This is a careful, philosophical book, in which the author takes time to define his terms and explain exactly what his argument is and is not, using more examples than will interest most readers in the cause of being thorough (7).

Cavanaugh’s stated goal in writing The Myth of Religious Violence is to show that the distinction between the categories “religious” and “secular” is a false, western, modernist construction that only came into existence with the rise of the secular nation-state (3). Prior to this, religion and governance comingled so that it never occurred to declare violence either religious or non-religious. These categories had not yet been teased apart. By identifying violence with religion, westerners are able construe reality in their favor, creating a false sense of distance between “safe” secular institutions and “dangerous” religious institutions. Yet the ideologies and institutions deemed “secular” can be just as irrational and absolutist as those that are termed religious (6).
​
To prove this thesis, Cavanaugh examines the motives behind the modern separation between politics and religion, showing that the violence occurring in religious communities has the same political and economic motivators as the violence that occurs among political and non-religious institutions. In fact, Cavanaugh goes so far as to say that since it is impossible to distinguish between religious and non-religious violence, the very notion of religious violence is a myth. Cavanaugh replaces this myth with a more nuanced and deeply rooted theory that violence arises from the socio-political, or “theopolitical” aims of various people groups (230). He achieves this through the following four steps.
​
First, Cavanaugh explains the roots of the myth and shows how three common arguments used to defend the link between religion and violence fail (17). These arguments claim that religion causes violence because it is absolutist, divisive, and insufficiently rational (18). Cavanaugh engages nine thinkers who promote these arguments, carefully defeating each in order to make his case. Drawing on the likes of John Hick, Martin Marty, and Richard Wentz, Cavanaugh shows that the distinction between religious and secular violence is based on faulty a priori logic. To refer to religious violence, one must first assume that religious violence can be distinguished from violence arising from other sources. Cavanaugh maintains that this task is impossible. For example, the twentieth century debate over flag burning in the United States was understood as a secular conflict, yet was rife with language presenting the flag as a sacred totem that should not be desecrated. These secular claims are identical to the claims religious adherents make about their sacred objects (55). Despite the supposedly secular status, patriotism and the belief in the righteousness of one’s own national cause often results in the same absolutist, divisive and irrational behaviors blamed on religion. Cavanaugh’s purpose in this example is not to show the similarities between religious and secular violence, but to show that the evidence does not substantiate a distinction between religious and secular violence. Rather, the roots of violence are the same regardless of whether a conflict is termed religious or secular (56).

Cavanaugh’s second step is to explain the invention of religion as a transhistorical, transcultural entity. He wants to show that attempts to differentiate between the religious and the secular are based on false distinctions. To do this, he deconstructs essentialist definitions of religion, whether they take substantivist (religion is defined as awareness of the Transcendent) or functionalist (religion is that which includes certain practices) approaches (58). Cavanaugh points out that all such approaches fundamentally fail because there is no universally recognizable “essence of religion” (58). It is, in fact, “a constructed category” that only exists when used diametrically in opposition to the term “secular” (58). Moreover, the defining characteristics used by leading scholars of religion are simply arbitrary (59). Cavanaugh asks why certain configurations of power lead to denoting some things as religions, that in other circumstances are not considered religions. For example, Confucianism is often defined as a religion by Westerners, but its Eastern adherents regard it as irreligious (119). This leads to an appropriate question: “what practices and shifts in power occur when religion is so construed?” One such power shift is the validation of the nation state. When religion is considered to be categorically different than secular institutions, a negative bias is created against religion and secular institutions are then presented as unquestionably neutral and thus worthy of allegiance in a way that religion is not. Thus religion becomes “part of the legitimating mythology of the modern liberal state” (122). It is not a transcultural, transhistorical entity in and of itself.

Third, Cavanaugh examines what he calls the wars of religion myth (120). The term “wars of religion” applies to a number of conflicts between Catholics and Lutherans following the Protestant Reformation. Proponents of the wars of religion term claim that these were conflicts between two branches of Christianity, and therefore were religiously motivated. Cavanaugh points out that the truth is much more complicated. During these conflicts, Catholics often killed other Catholics, Lutherans other Lutherans, and so on (11). As such, the roots of violence included not only religious affiliation, but also political, economic, and social factors, and it is unclear how these factors should be weighted.
The rise of the nation state is commonly posed as the necessary triumph of secular policing institutions that made peace between warring religious factions in 16th and 17th century Europe. Cavanaugh argues that this presentation of the raw elements of history serves primarily as a myth legitimizing the use of force by nation-states (124). But the transfer of power from the church to the state did not result in a more peaceful Europe; it simply changed what people were willing to commit violence for (12).

Rather than presenting the “religious wars” as secular, as other scholars have attempted to do, Cavanaugh argues that they were the origin of the religious/secular distinction and thus the source of the myth of religious violence (124). To make this case he draws on Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, as well as current historiography and political theory to explain how these wars came to be presented this way. Additionally, he notes that it is impossible to separate the religious goals of violence from political, economical, or social goals.  In fact, it was often the attempt to achieve political or state power that caused much of the violence of the so-called “religious wars” (177). Therefore the religious wars do not promote the myth of religious violence, but in fact, are a primary source of the myth.

Fourth and finally, Cavanaugh looks to the uses of the religious myth. Using a wide range of historical and contemporary resources, he shows how the myth of religious violence has served to both justify and overlook atrocities performed in the name of nation states (228).  “Religious beliefs do not lurk essentially unchanged underneath historical circumstances, waiting to unleash their destructive power on the world” (229). This is because no transcultural, transhistorical and essentialist religion exists. In a telling example, Cavanaugh points out that it was the CIA , invoking military action against Russia during the Cold War, that reawakened the concept of jihad. Prior to U.S. action in 1979, jihad had been dormant for close to four hundred years (230).

In using the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, Cavanaugh is again reinforcing that religious and nonreligious action cannot be separated. Instead, he prefers the term “theopolitical,” and notes that all violence is best understood this way (230). In order to understand violence holistically, Cavanaugh proposes a test: “Under what conditions do certain beliefs and practices – jihad, the ‘invisible hand’ of the market the sacrificial atonement of Christ, the role of the United States as worldwide liberator – turn violent?” (8). When we neglect this question, we fail to understand the nuances and complexities of the forces that shape history and create violence.
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Cautious readers would do well to recognize Cavanaugh’s catholic faith as a powerful motivator in this project, for it is possible that his faith could predetermine his supposition that the religious/secular divide is an artificial construct. That being noted, his argument is strongly supported, easy to follow, and well organized. A professor of theology at DePaul University in Chicago, Cavanaugh also holds a law degree and has spent a portion of his career working for the Center for Human and Civil Rights at Notre Dame University. This unique constellation of experiences confirms Cavanaugh’s capability to undertake this bold project that challenges popular assumptions about the connections between religion and violence. ​