Letters to a Young Contrarian (Art of Mentoring (Paperback))

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And these same people, who would not surrender the principles that attracted them to the struggle in the first place, were obliterated and defamed as mere posturing “individuals” who furthermore dared to oppose themselves to “history. As a species, we may by all means think ruefully about the waste and horror produced by war and other forms of rivalry and jealousy. Therefore it is fitting that he celebrates those activists and thinkers who have proven most inspiring adept at living with, or through contradictions (of capitalism, of the gaps between the State's professed political ideals and lived reality, between what's currently popularly acceptable and the dictates of conscience), e. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.

Above all, Letters to a Young Contrarian is necessary for its exploration of the role of the dissenter in a time of too much politeness. However, this is not strictly an anti-religious polemic like his acerbic, if slightly inferior god is Not Great, but a multifaceted deconstruction of conventional wisdom and reverence. Hitchens was an anti-theist, and he described himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism, and reason. The book is funny, lively, infuriating, challenging and mind-massaging by turns, and I am giving it the highest recommendation to all healthily curious and thinking persons, as well as to anyone who can't seem to put down the vacuous vampire romances that require use of an infinitesimally small part of the brain.But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility.

The high ambition, therefore, seems to me to be this: That one should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with the maximum of skepticism, the maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality with the maximum of ironic self-criticism.H]e makes entertaining mincemeat of self-satisfied politicians and shreds received ideas and media-spun consensus with a fearlessness that is invaluable in our mealymouthed punditocracy. One of the hardest things for anyone to face is the conclusion that his or her "own" side is in the wrong when engaged in a war. Like every Hitchens book I've ever read (this is my fifth), it is loaded with little pearls of worldly wisdom. While he was once identified with the Anglo-American radical political left, near the end of his life he embraced some arguably right-wing causes, most notably the Iraq War. Fundamentalist religious indoctrination which seeks to stigmatize the act of reasoning itself as an unforgivable act of high treason.

Where Hitchens could recite whole passages of literature to support his cheekiness, this new crop seem only to care about being as cheap and nasty in as concise a way as possible. Therefore I suggest that this book is to be treated both as textbook and exercise book for developing an opinion on many controversial. The unspooling of the skein of the genome has effectively abolished racism and creationism, and the amazing findings of Hubble and Hawking have allowed us to guess at the origins of the cosmos. He mines a vast archive of historical and intellectual precedent in making his case and molding it all into original observations of his own.

the forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book. I have been proven wrong before, and I have changed my mind about things of which I have not been proven wrong. Worth a quick read for quotation extraction -- maybe I'll add some this weekend -- but I doubt I'll be reading much more of him.

there is something idiotic about those who believe that consensus (to give the hydra-headed beast just one of its names) is the highest good. The minute you hear a man of the cloth ranting and raving against the evils of Sodomy from the pulpit, set your watch and within the hour he will be found down on all fours in the nearest men's room giving it all he's got. The Hindus had the wit to see and the courage to proclaim the fact; Nirvana, the goal of their striving, is nothingness. To see him use his wit, charm and eloquence in defence of such a war was sickening, even while he managed to get in some powerful blows on the sycophancy and conservatism of the Anti-War left.His personal style of address helps to bring an immediacy to events which, as of this writing, are long since forgotten.