What happens when two intellectual giants interview each other on their respective core beliefs as well as on “their common cause”?
The nominal interviewer was Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist and atheist who argues that humanity would be better off without religion or belief in God, and the nominal interviewee happened to be Christopher Hitchens, the noted English critic of religion and an antitheist who believes that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization.
Richard Dawkins (left) and Christopher Hitchens in conversation
FROM NEWSTATESMAN.COM
That mutual interview between Dawkins and Hitchens took place in late 2011 and, guest edited for publication by Dawkins himself, came out in the 2011 Christmas issue of the
New Statesman Magazine. It turned out to be Hitchens’ last media interview, for as it went to press, he passed away on December 15 of that year from pneumonia brought on by esophageal cancer.
Expectedly, the freewheeling interview took on a complementary, mutually reinforcing air over sundry subjects like Aldous Huxley (on sheer erudition from wide reading), Adolf Hitler (on his religiosity and Nazism’s concordat with the Roman Catholic Church when he was in power), Umberto Eco talking to Susan Sontag (telling her that his ambition was to be a polymath and her riposte that a polymath is “someone who’s interested in everything and nothing else”), North Korea (Hitchens describing it a theocratic state in every sense—“a necrocracy or mausolocracy”—and that in no way could it be said to be a secular state), Mother Teresa (Hitchens bemoaning her preaching that poverty was a gift from God and that women should not be given control over the reproductive cycle), and on religiosity in general (with Dawkins ruing that across countries of the world and across the states of the US, “religiosity tends to correlate with poverty and with various other indices of social deprivation,” and Hitchens observing that whenever a jihad or a sharia movement takes over any country, it becomes “a smouldering wreck with no productivity”).
For the sheer provocativeness of the discussions between the two intellects, that interview became a sensation when it came out in print in 2011. Now, for the first time, the
New Statesman has made it available to read online as a retrospective on the late Christopher Hitchens.
Read “Never be afraid of stridency”: Richard Dawkins’ interview with Christopher Hitchens in NewStatesman.com now!RELATED READING:In the second installment of his memoirs,
Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science, Richard Dawkins makes a self-assessment of what book reviewer Steven Shapin calls his wonderfully fulfilled life as a “public intellectual, defender of scientific reason, secular saint and hammer of the godly.” But, Shapin asks, is the “Dirty Harry of science,” for all his vaunted feat of crushing the Creationists, capable of not just teaching but effectively preaching what he passionately believes in? Shapin has a ready answer: “You don’t read Dawkins to be converted from faith to science – though that’s possible; you read him to be fortified in your secular beliefs and to be armed against the Dark Side with handy facts, gestures at powerful theories, and rich stores of satirical rhetoric.”
Read Steven Shapin’s review of Richard Dawkins’ Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science in TheGuardian.com now!OTHER RELATED READINGS:Agnostic English philosopher bashes Richard Dawkins’ brand of atheism“Richard Dawkins is Wrong: Religion is Not Inherently Violent,” a review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion by Laura Miller“How to Think—and Talk—About Islam” by Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post Writers Group
