I watched Hitchens debate Dinesh D'Souza over religion back in 2007 while promoting his book God is not Great. I was already becoming a fan of his. Yet to see him go toe to toe so fiercely, so unapologetically was inspiring. A couple of years later I picked up a copy of his essential essays and read Breaking the Law in Michael Bloomberg's New York. Once again I found myself inspired. Making absurd laws to create a society based on one's morality is no way to govern and Hitch made the case against better than anyone else. Thanks for reminding me of that.
I saw Hitch on his final tour, very ill, still brilliant, he barely made it to the podium for the debate, then resoundingly crushed an evangelical opponent whom Hitch was friendly with. This was in Birmingham, Alabama. It was inspiring—and he inspired an evangelical friend of mine who was completely opposed to Hitch's atheism. Re: Harris. He hasn't entirely abandoned politics for philosophy, but he is stuck in an anti-Islamist rut that I think lacks nuance and makes his positions sound like cant rather than thoughftul analysis.
This sentence carries little weight to me because Hitchens became a US citizen only four years before his death, in 2007. I do not know his voting record in that short time. What I do know is that in 2004 he argued for the reelection of George W. Bush: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/oct/31/uselections2004.comment2
The cost framing is the whole essay, and it's worth making it exact: contrarianism is a costly signal, and a signal only carries information if it's expensive to fake. Hitchens's break was informative because it was ruinous. he lost the publication and the tribe, and refused the cheaper exit to the side that would have paid him. The price was the proof.
The cargo cult did something subtler than strip the cost out. They inverted it. Breaking with your tribe went from the thing that cost you everything to the thing the audience pays you for. The abandonment became the product. And once defection is rewarded rather than punished, the same gesture flips sign: "I broke with my side" stops being evidence of conviction and becomes evidence of market fit.
Which leaves a clean test that survives any politics. Don't ask whether a contrarian broke with their tribe. Ask whether the position cost them or paid them. Hitchens priced his conviction in losses. The performers price theirs in subscribers. Same posture, opposite sign on the signal, and the sign is the only part that ever carried information.
At the time Rushdie was near the end of his tenure as a guest faculty member at Emory, where he'd given the 2004 Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature.
I'm fairly certain that Emory would not have the courage today to have Rushdie on its faculty. Few US universities would.
Awesome. I am continuously amazed at how @MikeBrock pulls the incomplete thoughts and insights out of my mind and forms them into coherent essays that cut deeply through the dross and hit the bullseye.
Excellent stuff. He should have inherited Orwell’s mantle. But for Iraq. He was also superb on dying. His reflections on mortality are amongst the most insightful, poignant, and completely lacking in sentimentality. Of course, Hitchens always rejected the moniker ‘contrarian’. He said that that implied some automatic disagreement, positional opposition. He was a critic. As was Orwell. Often right. But not perfect. No one is.
My primary criticism of Hitchens is his arrogant dismissal of the media. Of course he's correct about the flaws in the institution, and he would be appalled by how standards have fallen off a cliff since his death.
But his personal take is elitist and unhelpful for anyone who wants to follow in his footsteps. He repeatedly said that one should never trust the media because the real story is always something else they're not writing about. And that his best and most reliable source of information was conversations with other journalists about what they couldn't get printed.
This all works very well for Christopher Hitchens personally. But it encourages conspiratorial thinking in curious readers who don't have his gifts and intellectual discipline. And it also sets Hitchens himself up as a priest with privileged access to a body of esoteric knowledge that only he and a few other top journalists and their sources may know. He would hate this observation because it is true, and I wish he had been stronger in democratizing the wisdom he produced.
Anecdotage (very creative), I fully understand what you state above. In my arena, medicine, and deeply immersed in it for 60 years, what is presented to the public and what really IS are quite different. By happenstance (serendipity more likely), I became involved early on with a novel therapy for prostate cancer that was a life-changer for many men with far-advanced disease. In time, our FDA approved of this NIH (not invented here) treatment (from Canada). Over the years, I would attend national and international conferences to hear "experts" present their spiel to the audience. So much of it was misguidance. So much of it was intrusive and destructive to the body and mind. This led to a foundational principle in medicine and for all of my life:
"Status begets strategy (SBS)."
We have to know the facts, get as close to the truth as possible, and when we do that, our strategy is far more likely to lead us towards an optimal outcome. It is Jack Webb; it is CSI; it is "the devil is in the details."
What Hitchens exposed was closer to the truth. He performed due diligence about Mother Teresa. He got closer to the truth and often when that happens it sounds far-fetched or conspirational.
"We like to believe we have the truth, or we have access to the truth. This is a very old dream. We will never have the truth... The best we ever have is a story." — --Barry Lopez
So we need to do our best to ensure that our story is closer to "that which is" or "our status."
I'm going to comment, but do so, abandoning my usual procedure of reading a half-dozen or more reader's comments first.
This is such worthwhile writing. It's a stellar class. I could see spending a month's retreat in some Delphi-like setting to "dissect" Brock's article and have an open discussion with others. This is rich in THLs (Take Home Lessons) or my preferred term "concepts."
Concatenate Our Notions, Create Enlightenment, Provide Tactic (CONCEPT)
*concatenate: To make into a whole by joining a system of parts
*notion: That which exists in the mind as the product of careful mental activity
I can see "The Last Serious Contrarian" as a book, with the MB commentary as the Introduction.
One concept that I believe to be universal is the focus on the accurate assessment of "that which is." I call this "status." Over and over again, major decisions, policies, life-changing acts are based on superficial assessment. It is an extension of "garbage in ⇢ garbage out." It is ubiquitous in medicine and virtually all the life sciences. It is what Paul Harvey would say "the rest of the story." It is the crux of the pathology and ugliness of Trumpism. In a way, it reminds me of an evocative quote:
"Beauty is skin deep, but ugly is all the way to the bone."
The above reminds me of why I do not like social media, texting, or other quick-and-easy pseudo-approaches to real relationships.
My son and I are completing a monograph on immigration. How badly this has been understood and presented to the Public. OMG. We are living in a Hans Christian Andersen world. The king absolutely has no clothes; that's a given. But the King is pooping all over this country. He is destroying America, piece by piece. I do think we should not call him President Trump but instead Comrade Trump.
Mike's commentary on Hitchens brings up another suggestion. So many of the Brock pieces are beautiful slices of the proverbial "pie." I wish there was a download to PDF link (yes, I know how to print to a PDF). And another thought: I would pay for a book of MB commentaries. I visualize the book as having 4-6 lined but blank pages after each commentary for reader's notes.
Now, I have to get back to work. What an inspiring way to start my day.
I think Christopher Hitchens writing about Augusto Pinochet helped get Pinochet arrested by embarrassing the British government.
He was right about so many things. But his support for the Iraq war overshadowed his legacy. It was difficult to understand, no I could not understand how he came to agree with the neoconservatives about the Iraq war and the GWOT.
The US was going to invade Afghanistan and pursue Al Qaida. That was appropriate but that was used as cover for so many wrong things.
Hitchens always was an honest man. Until I've read your article I believed he had become a neocon. Like how Al Hirsi ended up being a right wing Christian who attacks Islam instead of an atheist who attacks all religion but attacks Islam because of the harm she experienced as a woman and girl that was justified by Islam.
Your essay is so timely. I am no where close to being like Hitchens but so many times colleagues would say something and I would disagree. I was not being contrary to for the sake of being edgy or independent but because I would see they were mistaken. Many times when I hear someone say something I believed for so long I see it completely differently. I always acknowledge to my companions what just got revealed to me by hearing what I had just believed.
Sometimes I don't feel good about disagreeing with everything a colleague says but some things believed with such certainty lead away from liberalism.
I had not thought about what it means to be a contrarian for a long time because as you point out most contrarians are claiming they were kicked out for wrong think when they decided to leave for a platform that pays them well and gets them access to power.
Hitchens really did pay a cost. I didn't know about what he was trying to write in his last few minutes.
I felt sad when you wrote about what he would be saying now with all the receipts but he did his work it's up to us now. I remember at least he got waterboarded and said yes it's torture.
9/11 broke a lot of people's brains.
Thanks for getting me thinking about Christopher Hitchens again.
FYI, I forwarded your post to Hitchens' widow, Carol Blue.
Thank you, Mr. Hackman. That was very thoughtful.
I watched Hitchens debate Dinesh D'Souza over religion back in 2007 while promoting his book God is not Great. I was already becoming a fan of his. Yet to see him go toe to toe so fiercely, so unapologetically was inspiring. A couple of years later I picked up a copy of his essential essays and read Breaking the Law in Michael Bloomberg's New York. Once again I found myself inspired. Making absurd laws to create a society based on one's morality is no way to govern and Hitch made the case against better than anyone else. Thanks for reminding me of that.
I saw Hitch on his final tour, very ill, still brilliant, he barely made it to the podium for the debate, then resoundingly crushed an evangelical opponent whom Hitch was friendly with. This was in Birmingham, Alabama. It was inspiring—and he inspired an evangelical friend of mine who was completely opposed to Hitch's atheism. Re: Harris. He hasn't entirely abandoned politics for philosophy, but he is stuck in an anti-Islamist rut that I think lacks nuance and makes his positions sound like cant rather than thoughftul analysis.
"He never voted Republican."
This sentence carries little weight to me because Hitchens became a US citizen only four years before his death, in 2007. I do not know his voting record in that short time. What I do know is that in 2004 he argued for the reelection of George W. Bush: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/oct/31/uselections2004.comment2
What does this have to do with anything I said in the piece?
The cost framing is the whole essay, and it's worth making it exact: contrarianism is a costly signal, and a signal only carries information if it's expensive to fake. Hitchens's break was informative because it was ruinous. he lost the publication and the tribe, and refused the cheaper exit to the side that would have paid him. The price was the proof.
The cargo cult did something subtler than strip the cost out. They inverted it. Breaking with your tribe went from the thing that cost you everything to the thing the audience pays you for. The abandonment became the product. And once defection is rewarded rather than punished, the same gesture flips sign: "I broke with my side" stops being evidence of conviction and becomes evidence of market fit.
Which leaves a clean test that survives any politics. Don't ask whether a contrarian broke with their tribe. Ask whether the position cost them or paid them. Hitchens priced his conviction in losses. The performers price theirs in subscribers. Same posture, opposite sign on the signal, and the sign is the only part that ever carried information.
Thank you for remembering Christopher Hitchens. How I miss him. You are carrying his pen, and I hope you continue to carry on.
Thank you for all of this.
You might enjoy this recording of a program with Hitchens, Rushdie, and the filmmaker Deepa Mehta from Emory University 16 years ago.
https://youtu.be/owerxb8rSPo?si=-2hf0_sTmtQPw0RD
At the time Rushdie was near the end of his tenure as a guest faculty member at Emory, where he'd given the 2004 Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature.
I'm fairly certain that Emory would not have the courage today to have Rushdie on its faculty. Few US universities would.
Awesome. I am continuously amazed at how @MikeBrock pulls the incomplete thoughts and insights out of my mind and forms them into coherent essays that cut deeply through the dross and hit the bullseye.
Excellent stuff. He should have inherited Orwell’s mantle. But for Iraq. He was also superb on dying. His reflections on mortality are amongst the most insightful, poignant, and completely lacking in sentimentality. Of course, Hitchens always rejected the moniker ‘contrarian’. He said that that implied some automatic disagreement, positional opposition. He was a critic. As was Orwell. Often right. But not perfect. No one is.
Mike (if I may): regarding Popper and Xu Zhangrun, you might find the following to be of interest (by the by, your work is inspiring). Geremie
https://chinaheritage.net/journal/erewhon-its-enemies/
Your description about podcasts gave me words for what I've been intuiting about so many of them.
Even when I agree with the people on them and trust their intentions I don't feel drawn to them because there's generally no push back.
With social media and influence podcasts become a mechanism for people to promote each other. Everyone has to make a crust.
Elise Loehnen commented about how lots of male podcasters rarely invite female peers onto their shows. I can't forget that now.
I value the clarity, care and integrity you bring here all the time.
Awesome piece. Thank you.
My primary criticism of Hitchens is his arrogant dismissal of the media. Of course he's correct about the flaws in the institution, and he would be appalled by how standards have fallen off a cliff since his death.
But his personal take is elitist and unhelpful for anyone who wants to follow in his footsteps. He repeatedly said that one should never trust the media because the real story is always something else they're not writing about. And that his best and most reliable source of information was conversations with other journalists about what they couldn't get printed.
This all works very well for Christopher Hitchens personally. But it encourages conspiratorial thinking in curious readers who don't have his gifts and intellectual discipline. And it also sets Hitchens himself up as a priest with privileged access to a body of esoteric knowledge that only he and a few other top journalists and their sources may know. He would hate this observation because it is true, and I wish he had been stronger in democratizing the wisdom he produced.
Anecdotage (very creative), I fully understand what you state above. In my arena, medicine, and deeply immersed in it for 60 years, what is presented to the public and what really IS are quite different. By happenstance (serendipity more likely), I became involved early on with a novel therapy for prostate cancer that was a life-changer for many men with far-advanced disease. In time, our FDA approved of this NIH (not invented here) treatment (from Canada). Over the years, I would attend national and international conferences to hear "experts" present their spiel to the audience. So much of it was misguidance. So much of it was intrusive and destructive to the body and mind. This led to a foundational principle in medicine and for all of my life:
"Status begets strategy (SBS)."
We have to know the facts, get as close to the truth as possible, and when we do that, our strategy is far more likely to lead us towards an optimal outcome. It is Jack Webb; it is CSI; it is "the devil is in the details."
What Hitchens exposed was closer to the truth. He performed due diligence about Mother Teresa. He got closer to the truth and often when that happens it sounds far-fetched or conspirational.
"We like to believe we have the truth, or we have access to the truth. This is a very old dream. We will never have the truth... The best we ever have is a story." — --Barry Lopez
So we need to do our best to ensure that our story is closer to "that which is" or "our status."
A fine, balanced exposition of a remarkable thinker, writer and, perhaps, the most eloquent speaker of his generation.
A conversationalist beyond compare.
I'm going to comment, but do so, abandoning my usual procedure of reading a half-dozen or more reader's comments first.
This is such worthwhile writing. It's a stellar class. I could see spending a month's retreat in some Delphi-like setting to "dissect" Brock's article and have an open discussion with others. This is rich in THLs (Take Home Lessons) or my preferred term "concepts."
Concatenate Our Notions, Create Enlightenment, Provide Tactic (CONCEPT)
*concatenate: To make into a whole by joining a system of parts
*notion: That which exists in the mind as the product of careful mental activity
I can see "The Last Serious Contrarian" as a book, with the MB commentary as the Introduction.
One concept that I believe to be universal is the focus on the accurate assessment of "that which is." I call this "status." Over and over again, major decisions, policies, life-changing acts are based on superficial assessment. It is an extension of "garbage in ⇢ garbage out." It is ubiquitous in medicine and virtually all the life sciences. It is what Paul Harvey would say "the rest of the story." It is the crux of the pathology and ugliness of Trumpism. In a way, it reminds me of an evocative quote:
"Beauty is skin deep, but ugly is all the way to the bone."
The above reminds me of why I do not like social media, texting, or other quick-and-easy pseudo-approaches to real relationships.
My son and I are completing a monograph on immigration. How badly this has been understood and presented to the Public. OMG. We are living in a Hans Christian Andersen world. The king absolutely has no clothes; that's a given. But the King is pooping all over this country. He is destroying America, piece by piece. I do think we should not call him President Trump but instead Comrade Trump.
Mike's commentary on Hitchens brings up another suggestion. So many of the Brock pieces are beautiful slices of the proverbial "pie." I wish there was a download to PDF link (yes, I know how to print to a PDF). And another thought: I would pay for a book of MB commentaries. I visualize the book as having 4-6 lined but blank pages after each commentary for reader's notes.
Now, I have to get back to work. What an inspiring way to start my day.
He really died the way he lived. He lived with a purpose bigger than himself all the way to his last second.
I think Christopher Hitchens writing about Augusto Pinochet helped get Pinochet arrested by embarrassing the British government.
He was right about so many things. But his support for the Iraq war overshadowed his legacy. It was difficult to understand, no I could not understand how he came to agree with the neoconservatives about the Iraq war and the GWOT.
The US was going to invade Afghanistan and pursue Al Qaida. That was appropriate but that was used as cover for so many wrong things.
Hitchens always was an honest man. Until I've read your article I believed he had become a neocon. Like how Al Hirsi ended up being a right wing Christian who attacks Islam instead of an atheist who attacks all religion but attacks Islam because of the harm she experienced as a woman and girl that was justified by Islam.
Your essay is so timely. I am no where close to being like Hitchens but so many times colleagues would say something and I would disagree. I was not being contrary to for the sake of being edgy or independent but because I would see they were mistaken. Many times when I hear someone say something I believed for so long I see it completely differently. I always acknowledge to my companions what just got revealed to me by hearing what I had just believed.
Sometimes I don't feel good about disagreeing with everything a colleague says but some things believed with such certainty lead away from liberalism.
I had not thought about what it means to be a contrarian for a long time because as you point out most contrarians are claiming they were kicked out for wrong think when they decided to leave for a platform that pays them well and gets them access to power.
Hitchens really did pay a cost. I didn't know about what he was trying to write in his last few minutes.
I felt sad when you wrote about what he would be saying now with all the receipts but he did his work it's up to us now. I remember at least he got waterboarded and said yes it's torture.
9/11 broke a lot of people's brains.
Thanks for getting me thinking about Christopher Hitchens again.