H-Lads.

By THEODORE DALRYMPLE [First Things] – Christopher Hitchens’ judgments are nuanced mainly when it comes to judging himself; otherwise, he lives in a Manichean world of good and evil. His brother, by contrast, appears to have undergone a real and painful repentance for all that he formerly was and did. Peter has discovered that it is he, and not just the world, that was and is imperfect and that therefore humility is a virtue, even if one does not always live up to it. The first sentence of his first chapter reads, “I set fire to my Bible on the playing fields of my Cambridge boarding school one bright, windy spring afternoon in 1967.” One senses the deep—and, in my view, healthy—feeling of self-disgust with which he wrote this, for indeed it describes an act of wickedness.

Peter’s memoir, written with less aplomb than his brother’s and with fewer personal details, is more personally searching. A lot of the book, however, is a response to his brother’s arguments in his previous book, God Is Not Great. There, Christopher was so anxious to prove the uniquely murderous quality of religious belief that he attempted to attribute the murderousness of the militantly secular Stalin regime to its religiosity, the rituals of the cult of personality having some kind of anthropological or psychological similarity to those of religion. This is special pleading of so transparent a kind that Peter has little difficulty in disposing of it. Apart from anything else, the extreme murderousness of Bolshevism began well before its cult of personality.

Perhaps the division between the two brothers is essentially this: One believes that man can live by his own individual reason alone; the other believes that something else is necessary and inevitable. Without being religious myself, I side with the latter.

Continued at First Things | More Chronicle & Notices.