Normally I try to avoid what Mum would term harping on about things but I'm still not done with commenting on Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great, or at least aspects thereof.
My reference yesterday to the somewhat juvenile tone of much of the text, particularly regarding its modes of argumentation, finds a curious parallel with material from the earliest chapter in which Hitchens talks about doubting the religious instruction being given by his teachers and what that doubt felt like. Here's one such bit:
The headmaster, who led the daily services and prayers and held the Book, and was a bit of a sadist and a closeted homosexual… was giving a no-nonsense talk to some of us one evening. 'You may not see the point of all this faith now,' he said. 'But you will one day, when you start to lose loved ones.'
Again I experienced a stab of sheer indignation as well as disbelief. Why, that would be as much as saying that religion might not be true, but never mind that, since it can be relied upon for comfort. How contemptible. I was then nearing thirteen, and becoming quite the insufferable little intellectual.
The problem seems to me that Hitchens remains a fairly insufferable, and often little, intellectual. In the anecdote above, recounted from an adult perspective, I get no sense of recognition of the rather sad headmaster as a frail, silly man, trying to do his best to communicate something of the frailties of faith to the kind of over-bright students that he knows he's not connecting with. Of course it's contemptible, a great deal of what goes on in school is, but we learn to live with it, and grow to understand why the fatuous statements teachers are so prone to are necessary in negotiating the world around us.
At a guess I'd say the headmaster probably had deep doubts about his faith, as so many 'believers' do, and had been deeply hurt, as most of us have been, at the deaths of some he dearly loved, and knew that his clinging to faith had helped make some sense of the pain. And I guess he was making some kind of effort to let the boys get a glimpse of the pain of the real world awaiting them in a way that related to the dull conventions of their worship. But Hitchens doesn't allow his caricature, whom I take in a kind of bond of faith with the writer to have been a real human being and not just a convenience for another neat story to explain away all forms of religious education, to have any sense of depth at all. (By the way, it's easy to put together a number of explanations of the little scene that take us into Terence Rattigan country. The curious thing is that Hutchins doesn't do any of this - seems temperamentally incapable of doing so.)
I'm also curious about the head being a 'closeted homosexual.' How did the writer know this? Does Hitchens have no sympathies at all with homosexuals of that period who had to remain closeted or lose their jobs - especially headmasters? The implications of the line seem to me quite gratuitously nasty. If the guy is still alive I think he'd have fair grounds for legal action.
Incidentally I can remember at junior school, in my last year, aged eleven, being embarrassed for the headmistress, a lovely lady, when she was telling our class that when we left we'd find out that some of the stories we'd been told in religious class might not be literally true but we weren't to think that our teachers had been deliberately lying to us. Of course, most of us, probably all, had figured this out a long time before and being told all this so apologetically was contemptible, but also sweet and sad and sort of brave and honest and part of the nature of things. I can't remember being idiotic enough to feel superior, and I must say that makes me feel quite good about my younger self for once.
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