May 5, 2009
THE OPENLY RELIGIOUS BROTHER VS THE CRYPTO ONE:
Dazzling divisions of the Hitchens brothers (Michael Gove, 5/05/09, Times of London)
[T]he tension between freedom and order, while it absorbs Peter, is not the heart of his book. The real confusion between Left and Right that concerns him is the way in which the War on Terror shook up old allegiances. When Charles Moore and Nick Cohen applaud the invasion of Iraq while Peter Hitchens and Harold Pinter oppose, the only thing that remains certain is that we’re in for some fantastic polemic.Of course, while these precise alliances are unprecedented, our history is rich with examples of conflicts provoking realignments. While Peter objects to the fellow-travelling of churchgoing neocons with muscular liberals, he skips lightly over the 1930s alliance between the old Imperialist Churchill and the trade unionists who opposed appeasement. Throughout the 19th century both parties, Liberal and Conservative, had isolationists and expansionists, arguing against each other within their own ranks. Foreign policy has always had the potential to make party lines blur.
Of course, if we are thinking of the curious new alignments that the Iraq war created, few are as striking as the embrace of George W. Bush by Peter’s elder brother, Christopher. The story of the militant atheist and “drink-soaked Trotskyist popinjay” Christopher joining the teetotal and born-again Bible- belt Republican Dubya, and finding himself fighting a new ideological battle against his deeply Anglican brother Peter, is a compelling drama crying out for a sharper pen than my own.
Peter’s, in fact. For those of you who may not like his journalism, let me assure you that this book has some passages of quite brilliant writing and it is at its best when Peter reflects on his own life and his disillusionment with the left-wing ideology of his youth. I long to see him take the next stage in his writer’s journey and examine, with his unsparing honesty, the rich human reality of the division he believes is now more important than the split between Left and Right — the deeper gulf between the restless progressive and the Christian pessimist. This division, the difference between between Prometheus and St Paul, the chasm that divides Shelley from T. S. Eliot, Lloyd George from Lord Salisbury, is nowhere better encapsulated than in the contrast between Hitchens major and minor. While Peter may feel that the choice between Left and Right needs proper definition, for many of us the choice between Christopher Hitchens and Peter Hitchens is the truly difficult one to make.
What Peter, not surprising in a Brit, doesn't grasp is that the peculiar genius of the American Republic is that it is progressive (small 'p') because it proceeds from universalist Christian pessimism.