We are all taught that it is impolite to speak ill of the dead, particularly in the immediate aftermath of someone’s death. For a private person, in a private setting, that makes perfect sense. Most human beings are complex and shaped by conflicting drives, defined by both good and bad acts. That’s more or less what it means to be human. And — when it comes to private individuals — it’s entirely appropriate to emphasize the positives of someone’s life and avoid criticisms upon their death: it comforts their grieving loved ones and honors their memory. In that context, there’s just no reason, no benefit, to highlight their flaws.

But that is completely inapplicable to the death of a public person, especially one who is political. When someone dies who is a public figure by virtue of their political acts — like Ronald Reagan — discussions of them upon death will be inherently politicized. How they are remembered is not strictly a matter of the sensitivities of their loved ones, but has substantial impact on the culture which discusses their lives. To allow significant political figures to be heralded with purely one-sided requiems — enforced by misguided (even if well-intentioned) notions of private etiquette that bar discussions of their bad acts — is not a matter of politeness; it’s deceitful and propagandistic. To exploit the sentiments of sympathy produced by death to enshrine a political figure as Great and Noble is to sanction, or at best minimize, their sins. Misapplying private death etiquette to public figures creates false history and glorifies the ignoble.

Though I’m proud to say that I haven’t seen evidence of what Greenwald is complaining about in the atheist blogosphere. (My guess is that what he says about the mainstream media is true, but I really have no idea). For example, Greta:

A fair amount of what he wrote irritated and angered me. And that’s one of the things I like best about the atheist movement. We don’t have to idolize our leaders and our heroes. We can disagree with them. We can recognize that they’re human. We can say to them one day, “Damn, that was brilliant”… and the next day say, “You’re being a fucking asshole, this is beneath you”… and the next day say yet again, “Okay, that was brilliant.”

Sometimes, Christopher Hitchens was a fucking asshole, and said and wrote things that were beneath him. Most of the time, he was brilliant. I’m deeply sorry that I never met him.

And PZ, after an initial post where he said only nice things about Hitchens, but followed up with a post titled, “The dark side of Hitchens” (though see my own post on the FFRF convention). Both Greta and PZ are basically saying what they were saying about Hitchens before his death. For much more in this vein, see Daniel Fincke’s roundup.

As Greenwald points out, one of Hitchens’ virtues was that he did not buy into the nonsense that we should stop criticizing public figures when they die. So when I look at all this criticism, I don’t think Hitchens would have it any other way. Well, he might call us bad names for disagreeing with him, but he wouldn’t expect us to shut up just because he’s dead.

What I mean by that is this: mostly, I think of Hitchens as a polemicist, someone who’s very good at penning take downs of whomever he wants to target, a category that over the years has included Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa, anti-war protesters and Sara Palin. He’s also good with rapid fire comebacks, the kind of person you want appearing across from Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity on Fox. There’s another side to Hitchens though: the literary critic who takes the humanities very seriously while not taking post-modern nonsense too seriously. This is something I’ve noticed before. Though my review of god is not Great was mostly negative, I noted that Hitches has a “recognition, often lacking elsewhere, of the fact that religions tend to be more about ancient traditions than the modern reasonings often conscripted in their defense.”

That was the side Hitchens presented in the debate. He spoke first, and his opening speech sounded like what I imagine a early 20th-century Oxford literature professor would sound like, getting up to give a speech on religion, focusing largely on the place of religion in human cultural history. Hitchens said that religion was our first attempt to do a lot of things, but it would be odd to think that we should settle for that first attempt, it would be odd to think that, if there is a creator of the universe, he would have given his ultimate revelation to humanity to a few people at one point in history on a small stretch of desert. Religion, Hitchens said and went on to say repeatedly throughout the debate, looks like something manmade. He also talked about science a little, but it was obvious he was talking about it as a non-expert who very often could just refer you to what the experts were saying, and talked about science mainly for the sake of thinking about humanity’s place in the universe.

D’Souza treated the event much more as a traditional debate, which could have worked very well for him if he were a skilled debater, but D’Souza sounded a bit clownish, trying to hard to to be funny and smart without having much in either department. On the “trying to be funny side,” D’Souza started out with a quote from Winston Churchill about the Boer War, which was supposed to describe how he felt about Hitchens’ speech, to the effect of “it was so exciting to be shot at without any effect.” This got some laughs accompanied by a certain uncertainty at how to respond, then Hitchens gave a bit thumbs down, which got laughs and applause. That set the tone for most of the visible audience reaction to the debate: D’Souza said things obviously intended to get laughs, but Hitchens knew how to get more with less. Also, D’Souza didn’t really follow the Churchill quote up with much, I guess the point was he didn’t think Hitchens’ arguments were any good, but it wasn’t really clear.

On the smarts side, the most obvious annoyance coming from D’Souza is that he used lots of jargon that he seems to have made up himself, for example, claiming that science rests on presuppositional arguments, whatever that is.* After the Churchill joke, D’Souza’s opening speech ended up being dominated by a fairly standard list of things which atheists, allegedly, can’t explain. It could have been effective in the hands of a better debater, but it was easy to get the sense that D’Souza not only didn’t know much about what he was talking about, he also didn’t understand how out of his depth he was.

These opening speeches were fifteen minutes each, after that, Hitchens and D’Souza were supposed to get five minutes each to respond to each other. They both ran significantly over their allotted time, which was good, since five minutes is a ridiculously small amount of time to respond to a fifteen minute speech. Even so, they didn’t work as hard as they could have to seriously interact. The rebuttals made clear that Hitchens mainly wanted to talk about actual religions like Christianity and Islam, while D’Souza wanted to debate to be just whether there is some sort of God. I’m sympathetic to Hitchens here: I think he correctly perceives that the truth of particular alleged revelations is what most really serious believers really care about, and given that, it’s odd how unenthusiastic believers are about talking about those things in public. Still, it made for a less interesting event.

After the rebuttals was Q&A, which started off with the moderator, Mike Rea (who’s a philosophy professor), asking them one question each, and neither of them seemed to understand the questions. Oh well.

I was also disappointed that Hitchens never contradicted D’Souza’s claim that we must either believe that God created life, or a modern cell sprang into existence all at once by chance. This is scientifically ignorant, and someone who’s done as many debates on religion as Hitchens should be able to explain what’s wrong with common misconceptions like that.

On the other hand, there was one very good interaction in the Q&A when D’Souza claimed that Hitler was a secularist, Hitchens responded by quoting a place in Mein Kampf where Hitler claimed to be doing “the Lord’s work,” and D’Souza responded that Hitler faked belief in Christianity and really wanted to revive Teutonic paganism, and therefore was an example of secularism. Rather than belabor the silliness of blaming atheists for the actions of an apparent pagan, Hitchens thanked D’Souza for retracting his previous claim about Hitler, which was probably the right response.

That kind of interaction was rare, though. I suspect the quality of the interaction could have been improved considerably just by having three mircophones at the central table, rather than giving one mircophone to Rea and making Hitchens and D’Souza have to be at a podium in order to say anything. It probably made them feel like they had to make a speech in response to every question, instead of being able to have a conversation with each other.

Once it came time to end the debate, Rea suddenly declared that their response to the last question would double as their closing remarks. The question was about the meaning of life, and directed at D’Souza, which meant the last thing the would hear would be Hitchens talking about the meaning of life, and Hitchens made pretty good use of that fact. He said that the reason he does things like give blood and try to help Iranian dissidents is that he enjoys it, he enjoys knowing that he’s helping others, and enjoys meeting the people he meets pursing political causes. He rambled on a bit in these comments, and there was some awkward laughter when he used the word “pleasurable” to describe giving blood, but on the whole I think Hitchens managed to make a very good impression.

I know Hitchens leaves a lot of things to be desired, but I think he also does a lot of things well that few people who make a career writing and speaking about religion bother with. I think the video of the debate is scheduled to go up on the website for the Center for Philosophy of Religion, once it does and I find the time, I actually plan to study it to try to learn as much as I can from Hitchens’ performance.

*It pretty clearly wasn’t Calvinist presuppositionalist apologetics, even though I thought D’Souza might go there for a second.

But this version of the conversation [the version represented by Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens--ed.] has gone on too long. We have allowed three people to frame it; its terms—submitting God to rational proofs and watching God fail—are theirs.

But this approach to discussing religion far pre-dates Harris. It’s found in much of the usual list of great religious thinkers: Augustine, Anslem, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Clarke, Berkley, Kant, Paley, and many others, up through Richard Swinburne and William Lane Craig in our own day. The historical ignorance required to attribute this approach to discussing religion to a few recent atheist writers is breathtaking. Beyond that, of course, trying to define this issue and ask what can be made on both sides is how normal people who care about the truth discuss things.