There's stuff in God Is Not Great that is worth reading, despite my comments over the past few days. The demolition of certain forms of intolerance and fanaticism is bracing and Hitchens raises suitable levels of indignation at the follies described (sometimes honestly so.)
It could have been a good book if it had aimed its criticism fairly and evenly at human folly. But it didn't. Instead the argument revolved around the following thesis: Religion poisons everything. I know this because the statement is made more than once and it always appears in italics in case a reader is too obtuse to realise that this is the crucial point and it really cannot be argued with.
Connoisseurs of ridiculous sweeping statements might find much to admire in this one. There's the wonderful vagueness of 'Religion', which will later allow the author to argue for various forms of fascism as religious in nature. Then there's the extraordinarily almost willfully fuzzy 'everything'. And the verb itself - 'poisons' - who can argue with something that manages to sound extremely nasty whilst not actually meaning anything at all? The amateur psychologists amonst us might usefully notice the oddly totalitarian language employed by the writer. This kind of sounds like a throwaway line from the worst kind of fanatic. Just replace 'Religion' with a few other loaded nouns to see what I mean. It gets quite scary.
But enough of this. My fasting is going well and I've been dipping into a Collected Poems of Geoffrey Hill to restore some sanity (even though it seems most of them are by their very nature poisoned. Hah!) For those who enjoy a difficult read Hill is my recommendation. I reckon I understand about twenty percent of what's going on - but I have faith that the other eighty percent is equally wonderful. A bit like life, I suppose.
No comments:
Post a Comment