The Decline Of Christianity In The West: The Rage Against God

from Hugh Hewitt and Alliance Defense Fund:

Peter Hitchens discusses the decline of Christianity in the West, and his book, The Rage Against God


Saturday, August 21, 2010

HH: The first two hours of today’s show, a special conversation with Peter Hitchens. Peter is the author of The Rage Against God. He is a columnist for The Mail on Sunday. Peter Hitchens, thank you for joining me, welcome. It’s good to have you on the Hugh Hewitt Show.



PH: It’s very good to be with you.



HH: The new book is The Rage Against God, but before we talk about that, first, congratulations on the award of the George Orwell prize. That’s really quite something.



PH: I was pretty pleased with that, especially since it annoyed so many left wing people who probably would have preferred someone else to get it.



HH: For the benefit of our American audience, the Orwell prize is regarded as the preeminent British prize for political writing. Three are given a year, one for a book, one for journalism, and one for blogging. It is supposed to honor writing that comes closest to Orwell’s ambition to “make political writing into an art.” Had you thought of yourself as doing that, Peter Hitchens?



PH: I don’t know about an art, but I think the idea that Orwell set out making your prose as like as possible to a window pane through which people could simply see what was behind it, has been in my mind every since I encountered his writing many, many years ago. It was certainly a huge delight for me to have any kind of an association with that, that was endorsed by other people, not my own claim, but endorsed by other people, particularly given that by his nature as a hero of the left, his, the prize in his name tends to be awarded to the left by the left. And on this occasion, it went to me, a conservative. So I have to say that it was one of the more pleasing moments of my life.



HH: Peter Hitchens, before we dive into The Rage Against God, could you walk us backwards through your writing career? As I said, you’re currently a columnist for The Mail on Sunday. But for long have you been doing that, and before that, what were your other posts throughout the world of journalism?



PH: All right, I’ve been doing what I’m doing now for about nine years. Before that, I had been a correspondent for another newspaper which changed so much since I worked for it that I’m slightly embarrassed to mention its name. But it was then called The Daily Express. And it sent me to Moscow as a resident correspondent there in 1990, and then to Washington, D.C. in 1993. And before that, I’d done a number of other tasks, writing about politics and industry and education and defense and diplomacy. And so I had what I call a pretty long education in the University of Fleet Street, which you probably know is the phrase we use here to describe our national newspapers.



HH: You’ve also written a number of books before Rage Against God. Can you tell people what your interests had been in before?



PH: Well, my main interest has been in what I describe as the cultural revolution, which has destroyed so much of my own country. And I use the phrase cultural revolution deliberately. I know it’s perhaps slightly exaggerated compared with the horrors that were unleashed on China by Mao Tse Tung, but it happened in slow motion, and elderly professors were not hauled from roofs, or systematically humiliated by Red Guards. But something of the same nature happened, and unlike in China, where Deng Xiaoping made some efforts to reverse some of the damage, most of the damage here remains unrepaired. In the first book, I wrote about that. It was called The Abolition Of Britain, which was published in Britain in 1999, and in the United States in the year 2000. And it’s still, as far as I know, in print. And since then, I’ve written books, which largely apply to Britain. I wrote one about the very curious problem we have here of crime, and the complete failure of the, of our state and our police force, and our courts to cope with it, which is called A Brief History Of Crime, and was republished as The Abolition Of Liberty, because the issue also got mixed up with the very severe attack on the liberty of the subject that’s been going on here for some time. And then a couple of years ago, I wrote a book called The Broken Compass about the strange thing which has happened to our politics, where the major political parties have become interchangeable, something which they demonstrated in the last election, with…that you actually ended up with a government of two parties which were supposedly bitterly opposed, one on the left, one on the right, but which get on fine in government, and how on, actually, seriously opposed by the other left wing party, which although it officially is different, hasn’t got any major criticism of them. So we now have an odd, three in one, one in three, one-party state.



HH: Now Peter Hitchens, would you have been considered a Thatcherite at the time that that term meant something?



PH: No, I wasn’t. I was still a recovering social democrat then, having gone through a lot of experiences what with having been a fallen member of the British Labour Party, and spent a lot of time with labor union members. I was a labor correspondent. And I still had some sentimental attachment to that, and I had some serious doubts about Mrs. Thatcher, which I still do, though they’re different than from the ones that I have now. So no, not really. But of course, if you’re remotely conservative on one subject, the left in Britain will tend to think of a rude name to call you, and will consider you’re a Thatcherite, even if you’re not. But no, it’s much more complicated than that. I’m what I would call a Burkian conservative, which means that the Thatcherite obsession with money, and also her almost total absence of interest in subjects such as culture, morals and education, simply aren’t enough for me.



HH: Now your brother’s been a frequent guest on my program, not long ago, actually, a long conversation…



PH: I know about the most recent visit…



HH: Oh, okay.



PH: …because I…there was a transcript of it, which was widely available on the web, which I read. I haven’t actually heard it, but I have read the exchanges.



HH: Well, then you know, we talked about your father, the taciturn commander of Hitch-22. Do you suppose he would be amazed by his sons’ collective output, if only for the amount of words you two have produced?



PH: No, probably not. I tend to have a slightly sunnier view of him than Christopher, and I remember him as having a very dry sense of humor about us. He needed to, because we gave him so much trouble. And I think he would probably be less surprised by the number of words we produced than by anything else we’ve done, honestly. Verbose, we always were. Silent, we weren’t. He wasn’t that taciturn. It’s just that he was a very, he was a very kind and patient man. I remember the one occasion when he lost his temper with me as a child. I ran to my mother saying daddy’s gone mad, and I was amazed.



HH: (laughing)



PH: And so I don’t, and he was the one who tried to persuade us to sign this treaty. This is why he’d never take Middle East peace efforts seriously. We actually signed the treaty of peace, Christopher and I, and under his stern…



HH: The Treaty of Cedarwood.



PH: Indeed, yeah.



HH: You refer to it at the end of Rage Against God, as well as in the Mail Online article about the gentle ghosts of Cedarwood.



PH: Yes.



HH: So the Treaty of Cedarwood, tell people about it.



PH: Well, (laughing) he got to exasperated by the way we fought all the time, and this would have been, what, when I was eight or nine, and he would have been, as he still is, two and a half years older. And it was just unending. And he just said well, this has got to stop, so he drew up this document, and we both signed it. And he framed it in the very practical way that he had, and hung it on the wall. And I think within two weeks, I had it down, out of its frame, and erased my signature, and revoked my participation in this Stockholm process. And that was the end of that. And I suppose hostilities have been going on, more or less, ever since.



HH: Do you recall any of the articles of the Treaty of Cedarwood by chance?



PH: It was a very simple declaration of a future intent to wage peace. I can’t remember the words.



HH: All right, we will come back and…



PH: It wasn’t, it wasn’t as long as a modern treaty. It didn’t require translation, and it hung in a pretty small frame.



HH: Now I do want to begin…



PH: I was the one who broke it.



HH: I want to get to the Rage Against God in the first segment here, and continue on. You detail in this, you’re sitting in endless chapels and reading the Book of Common Prayer as a young man, you know, trapped there, and rebelling against the Catechism, but drawn to other parts of the volume, and you greatly lament its banishment from most of the Anglican communion now. Four hundred years overthrown in a couple of decades, I think you write.



PH: Yes.



HH: But is it necessarily gone forever? You know, the Novus Ordo is retreating in various places now, so might not the bowdlerized Book of Common Prayer give way some day?



PH: Well, and may all the words of Arthur Hugh Clough, Say Not The Struggle Naught Availeth, it may be that victory is around the corner, and that people will discover that something of enormous value has been previously thrown away, and will turn to it. But I see in my own country no serious signs of it. I think what may happen is that in some way, it’s abolition by the official Church could possibly lead to its rediscovery by people who are no longer associating it with the established official Church, simply view it was what it is, which is the most astonishingly beautiful book of devotion and religious thought and poetry, and begin to read it, and it begins to circulate again among educated English people who recognize that alongside the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare, it is one of the great pinnacles of our literature. And out of that, also, would perhaps come a rediscovery of the things which it tries to convey. And one of the things that’s so terrific about it, is that it’s because Thomas Cromwell was a very bad man, and was under no illusions about that, right to the very end of his life when he shoved his own right hand into the flames when they burned him at the stake, because his right hand had signed the recantation of everything he believed in. But it’s precisely that that makes it so great. It’s full of the prayers and thoughts of somebody who knew how very badly he needed Divine grace, as most of us do.



HH: I’ll be right back with Peter Hitchens. His book, The Rage Against God, is linked at Hughhewitt.com and in bookstores everywhere.



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HH: Peter Hitchens, in The Rage Against God, you write that Great Expectations, Dickens’ Great Expectations, had near Biblical force for you. Why?



PH: Well, partly because of the awful treatment which the period metes out to Joe Gargery, the blacksmith, and the dreadful snobbery of the overeducated, over-pampered young man towards the person who’s effectively his parent, because Joe isn’t actually his parent, because his parent’s dead. And it always seemed to me, when I read that scene, when Joe goes to visit Pip, when he’s set himself up in style in London, and also, David Lean’s wonderful film of the book, where the same scene is terrifically portrayed by, I think, Alec Guinness and Vernon [John] Mills, it’s, it makes my flesh crawl in embarrassment because of the arrogance which at one stage in my life I felt towards not only my own parents, but also to the family from which I sprang. And it’s something which I ceaselessly regret, and can’t, of course, make up for now. And that’s part of it, and it is, as a book, I think, Dickens is not, and will never be an academically fashionable writer. But as a book, it remains to me one of the most powerful things ever written.



HH: Is it fair to say because it…



PH: But that is the center of it. It’s very, very important. And this youth who deludes himself through most of his life about what is really valuable, and then discovers at the end what, where his great expectations truly came from, rather than where he fancied they came from, and also discovers what is really valuable is to me, will always remain, one of the greatest things ever written.



HH: So to a certain extent at least, it’s because it convicted you of your own sin?



PH: Oh, yes, very much so. I think you could sum it up like that, and you don’t, there was a Don McLean song, wasn’t there, I heard about people like me, but I’d never made the connection. And when reading that as an adult, I made the connection, and it reverberates.



HH: Now you also reference very early on in Rage Against God, C.S. Lewis. When did you begin to read him?



PH: Late, and in fact, not as much as I should have done. And a lot of the reading of Lewis that I did was actually as an adult reading his supposed children’s books to my children. Now of course, if you read the Narnia books to children, you’re reading them on two different levels, as beautifully crafted adventure stories, which to English children growing up in Oxford, as ours were, were particularly accessible. But also, if you read them as an adult, you see in this the very strong and enormously learned understanding of the nature of such things as atonement. The other thing that I read, in fact, it was the reason for my calling my first book The Abolition Of Britain, was the shorts book, almost a long essay, called The Abolition Of Man, at which I found quite tough going, but which still seems to me also to be a devastating criticism of the way in which most of us think now. And then I found, when I read the Perelandra Trilogy, what’s sometimes called the science fiction trilogy, I found the ideas of The Abolition Of Man more accessibly set out in fiction. And much…when it comes to powerful ideas, I much prefer them in fictional form. I’m not really a particularly serious person when it comes to philosophy. I can’t take it in large chunks. And if I have to read something serious, it had better be history. But that’s really my acquaintance with Lewis. I’ve found, people have said to me, well, what about Mere Christianity? I sort of struggled most of the way through it, but I would much rather read Surprised By Joy, because in that snatch of autobiography, I find the ideas that he’s trying to set forth much more accessible. I live a surprisingly short distance from where Lewis lived…



HH: Oh.



PH: …and his old, his house, and the woods where he used to walk, and the places which he knew, are very close to me. So he’s often in my mind.



HH: Yeah, the last book of the science fiction trilogy, That Hideous Strength, is to me…



PH: Yes.



HH: …really an essay on what besieges so many of the anti-God people. Not your brother, by the way, because I think he’s much more open to the idea of the inner circle, and all the dangers. But Dawkins, for example, I mean, he’s a walk-on character in That Hideous Strength.



PH: I think you may well be right, yes. I think the awful institute, NICE…



HH: Yes.



PH: the National Institute of Clinical Experiments, is people with folk of that kind.



HH: Do you read Tolkien as well?



PH: Oh, yes. He also lived quite near where I live, so again, you’re constantly reminded of the presence. And I can see, sometimes, in bit of the Oxfordshire landscape, what he must have been thinking of when he described part of the great journey that begins in the shire.



HH: Your opponents in The Rage Against God, do you think they much go in harm’s way when it comes to the reading that might make more obvious to them God’s grace or God’s hand in things?



PH: I don’t know. I think that this is actually not a discussion about what people believe, but a discussion about what people want.



HH: Yes, it is. Well put.



PH: And that, at the moment, as I once did, they want there not to be a God. And I think that we would get so much further with them if we insisted in every discussion where they actually deign to talk to us, and treat us as so surfeit that is not to be worth talking to, that we concentrate it upon this question, which I notice the very interesting atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel admits as crucial. Why do they so much want there not to be a God? And if we can talk to them about that, then maybe the thing can actually be discussed in a way which gets somewhere, and which might conceivably bring them closer to where obviously you and I think they ought to be.



HH: Now you do not mention him in your book, Rage Against God, but as an English believer in the time that you are living, Cardinal Newman will be canonized by Benedict in a couple of months here. Do you read Newman? Are you closer to the Catholic Church than you much once thought it was possible?



PH: No, I mean, friends of mine do, and press it upon me, and I feel, I made a resolve many years ago never to pretend to have read things I haven’t. No, I haven’t, but I know that I ought to, and friends of mine say that I ought to. One of the things I slightly have against Newman is that he decided that he would leave the Church, I mean, go to the Church in Rome. And I regret that. I think it was a loss. I think he should have stayed where he was. I think the Church of England is, and remains an important tradition in its own right, and it doesn’t need to fall into the embrace of Rome to maintain its tradition. And I think he could have done better to have added to it. And I’ll stick by that if pushed. I am an Anglican, like it or not, and I…which means that I can be Catholic in the morning, and Protestant in the evening, and that’s all right.



HH: Doesn’t it feel, though, as though the temple’s falling down around your ears in a way that Christianity is not, generally?



PH: No, I’m afraid I don’t think any, there’s any abiding city in the matter of human institutions. I actually fear that after Benedict, the Roman Catholic Church is going to go through the most terrific convulsions itself, which are already being prepared. I just don’t, the Roman Catholic Church is so full of what I would call liberal dissent waiting to be released from restraint.



HH: Fascinating. Peter Hitchens, stay with me. I’ll be right back, America. The book is The Rage Against God.



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HH: But Peter Hitchens, I’ve got to tell you, it was sort of sad for me to read, and like many Anglophiles in America, I’m sure you’ll run into them, who are just astonished that you don’t much care for the cult of Churchill, which we are all bred on here, and upset that the bust has been sent back, and all that. And it’s just sad that you seem to have no hope for the country’s sort of return from the ditch. Is that fair?



CH: No, I wouldn’t say I had no hope. I’m not allowed to despair. I would say I have very little, and if I concentrate entirely on, relied on my own reason and my own perception on what was going on, I think things do look pretty black. We are a country in very severe decline of all kinds, and there is, at the moment, no sign whatever of any serious attempt to recover from that decline. On the contrary, it’s embraced by a large part of the population, and it, one of the thing about Anglophiles abroad is that even when they come here, they tend to see a country which is actually not the one that I live in, because the tourist visitor inevitably sees the nicer parts, and isn’t going to go to the sort of place where you discover that the feral youths loping through the streets, where they will kick your head in at the drop of a hat. But we see them, and we see the un-policed cities, and we see vast areas from which the economy has withdrawn, and where people live entirely on welfare. And we see the colossal baleful effects of uncontrolled mass immigration. And we see the effects of an education system in which people can spend eleven years in full-time education and come out unable to read, write or count. And these things are all there. They’re present. And even someone like me, who’s fantastically fortunate and lives a very good and comfortable life by comparison with most, I can’t actually avoid the effects of these things in my daily life as I travel about. And I feel it’s absolutely incumbent on me to say this is what is happening. And unless something is done about it very soon, then as a society, we will cease to function. We are becoming an uncivilized anarchy, and a very, very uneducated and immoral one as well. The other thing, the institution of marriage is in an advanced state of collapse here. Marriage simply doesn’t enter into the lives of many young people who set up home without even considering getting married. It doesn’t happen. It’s gone. The number of children being born outside wedlock is colossal. I think it’s now the majority.



HH: The grim but powerful movie, Harry Brown with Michael Caine, is sort of a visual of what you just said.



PH: Yeah.



HH: But how widespread is this decline, Peter Hitchens?



PH: Well, the picture conjured up there is confined to certain areas, I suppose, in London. It would be extreme to say that it was generally like that. It’s much more a position where for instance, you can go down to what would twenty years ago been a respectable but not particularly prosperous suburban area, and you’ll now see some twelve year old drug dealers wheeling about on their little bicycles. And you’ll see boarded up houses or burnt out houses. And also, if you venture into certain areas after dark, then you might well run into the sort of people you don’t want to run into.



HH: And how much of this is because…



PH: And it’s a lot of, there’s a lot of potential violence as well. There’s this terrible thing people will find that their street, which was previously peaceful, will attract, for some reason, groups of youths hanging around outside their houses. You go out and challenge those people at your peril. And as you get older and weaker, or if you have the misfortune to be female, this becomes very oppressive. And people begin to hide in their own homes. It’s very hard to measure. It doesn’t, you can’t measure it in crime statistics. How do you put it in crime statistics if you’re a pensioner couple in their 70s, living in a small house, against the walls of whose house youths kick footballs hard all day? You live with that, you go mad with fear and misery, because you don’t challenge them. There won’t be any crime statistics. No one will make a film about it. But it happens all the time.



HH: Now there is a theme in Rage Against God that part of this decline, if not most of it, is because of the collapse of Christianity. Is that a theory that you’ll stand by for this general malaise?



PH: Oh, well it’s obviously, Christianity penetrated this country so deeply that several things happened, particularly in the 19th Century, where the results largely the remoralization encompassed by the Wesleys, and their disciples, and Methodism, but other sources as well. Throughout the 19th Century, huge things happened. The working class, the poor of this country, gave up alcohol in large numbers, a huge temperance movement. And they supported the values of family and marriage and thrift. The Bible was universally known, as was that great companion volume to the Bible in the English tradition, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.



HH: Hold that thought, Peter, I’ve got to go to break.



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HH: You were saying, Peter, at the break that Methodism in its turn of the century rise around the 1800s powered a great age in Great Britain, and then the draining away of Christianity has powered the collapse of the edifice of that great age?



PH: Oh, very much so. We had this extraordinary combination, which very few nations and civilizations achieve of order and liberty. And people were free. There was no oppressive state. We were very lightly policed. The law did not weigh heavily on our shoulders. We weren’t told to do much. But we actually behaved ourselves, because as a people, we knew that there would be reasons to do so. And our language is full of Biblical allusion. And our music, certainly at that stage, also full of the great hymns of the English Church. Everybody’s minds were full of the injunctions of Christianity, and it was believed. I…there are many arguments about how its end came. I tend to think that the 1914-1918 war was probably the great blow to it, and a number of other institutions in our country. But since then, it has been in decline. And once people stopped believing in it, and become practical atheists, they’re not Dawkins, I’d say. They don’t go on and on about being atheists. They just are, and they are atheists in their everyday life. They believe that might is right, and they either act on it by being strong and frightening other people, or they act on it by being frightened, and having no recourse. There is absolutely nothing but force in the lives of many people in our country now.



HH: A couple of beautiful lines from The Rage Against God. You write that a cheap and second-rate modernity was to replace the decrepit magnificence of empire, and that the astonishing swiftness of the change was like the crumbling of an Egyptian mummy exposed to air. That is partially because of the acceleration of history that’s all around us. But couldn’t the reverse also be true? Couldn’t the acceleration of a renewed faith in God, and in particular, Christianity, occur because of the technology and the way in which we live these days, Peter Hitchens?



PH: Well again, I see no signs of it. And what worries me is that the new atheists who campaign now so vigorously, for instance, for Christianity to be excluded from schools, and who equate the teaching of Christianity to children as truth with child abuse, and who are therefore making sure that many, many more people grow up without any access to Christian belief or thought or the Scriptures, we have children who don’t know what Easter is about. And we will soon have children who don’t know what Christmas is about in very large numbers, for instance. What I think they’re doing is if there is a, really, this revival in this country, I’ll tell you who’ll benefit from it, and it’ll be the Muslims, because they make no compromises. They have absolutely no intention of giving up what they believe. They believe it sternly and strictly, and they’re very present in Britain. You can’t go into any major British city now without seeing the dome and minaret of at least one mosque, and often many more than that. They’re there. Their beliefs are simple, straightforward, easily explained. And I think if a religious revival comes, it may well be that thanks to Professor Dawkins and his friends, Britain becomes an Islamic country. I think they should think very carefully about that.



HH: Are you acquainted with the novels…



PH: They’re very intent on driving Christianity out, and what they’re not aware of is once they’ve swept and garnished the space, what may move in instead.



HH: Have you read the novels of Robert Ferrigno, which is the rise of an Islamicized America?



PH: No, I haven’t.



HH: All right, just something. Let me go back to science for a moment. The faith of a faithless age, you wrote, but what’s so funny about that, Peter Hitchens, is that Bill Bryson, an American who makes his home over there now, wrote in his book, The Brief History Of Nearly Everything, that almost everything in the science books that you grew up with, and me, too, I’m just a few years younger than you, was wrong. They were wrong about everything.



PH: Absolutely, yes. I know. And I mean, not just wrong, but incredibly rigid and dogmatic about its wrongness. If science had been taught to me the way I now understand it, as a search for truth in which everything was only probably five minutes way from disproof, then I would have been much more interested in it than I was. But I will say it was often taught as a series of things simply being assumed to be the case, without there being any necessitude to explain them. And I must say I think that we’re very weakened by this. It was largely, of course, a Victorian and Edwardian thing, the idea that science would one day explain everything. You go into the novels of C. P. Snow, in fact, that are quite interesting, the assumptions among the young scientists of the 1920s that you ran to the laboratory with their enthusiasm for science, because it was such a great thing. They thought that it was only a matter of time before they explained everything. And of course, it’s not clear, that they’re never going to explain everything, that it’s beyond them.



HH: Don’t you think that that certainty, the certainty of Dawkins and others, is about questions they cannot possibly ever answer, is going to…



PH: Oh, it’s very old-fashioned, isn’t it? It’s like somebody who thinks that a paddle steamer is modern.



HH: Yes.



PH: And they have an attitude towards science which is, and most of them don’t know that much about science, in my view, anyway. They have an attitude towards science which is tremendously Victorian, and contains almost no understanding of the revolutions that are taking place, most particularly in physics in recent years. They just don’t seem to have a clue about it. and I’m not a scientist, but I am aware, and I know people who are, and I’m aware of the fact that things are going on which would undermine, or certainly cast a lot of doubt, on a crude materialist explanation of the universe.



HH: And aren’t you encouraged by…



PH: And anybody who knows about it surely should acknowledge this.



HH: Aren’t you encouraged by the success of The Rage Against God, and sort of the counterattack against the new atheists?



PH: Well, I’m encouraged by any success. And as I say, I don’t, I am a pessimist…



HH: Yes.



PH: …because it always seemed to me to be a sensible view to take. You don’t get disappointed, and you sometimes get pleasantly surprised. But I’m encouraged by every step forward that happens. But I do think that, perhaps you looking across the Atlantic from a country which is still actually substantially Christian, don’t realize just how very severely Christianity has been undermined and destroyed in Britain, and just how weak a force it now is.



HH: Well, I have sat with the head of Young Life in your country, one of my favorite Christian ministries, and heard that it is, it’s just gone. It doesn’t exist, really, Christianity. I mean, just…



PH: Well, I wouldn’t go that far, and what we will have is that one of the crucial parts of our constitution is the coronation service, in which the monarchy is crowned in a way which is specifically and unquestionably Christian, and makes it plain in the basis of our laws and justice, is the Christian religion, and the Protestant Christian at that. Well, I have a feeling that the next coronation, which I hope will be a long way off, but by the nature of things, can’t be indefinitely postponed, will not be a fully Christian ceremony, and that will be the first time that’s ever happened in our country. That gives you an indication of how far it’s gone.



HH: We’ll be right back with Peter Hitchens.



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HH: Peter, some surprises in the book. I expected that you would spend a lot of time on the pulverizing nature of television, and you didn’t. And I didn’t expect to even come into the Suez crisis, and yet you hang on that much of the disaster that was post-war Great Britain. We only have two and a half minutes in this segment. Would you tell people that choice there? Not much scuffling about, about television, but a lot of focus on the collapse of empire?



PH: Well, I’ve said a lot about television in one of my previous books, The Abolition Of Britain. And I feel that all the books that I write should make a unity. And I hope that people who read this might read the others. But I felt that it had been said, and I didn’t want to repeat it. As for Suez, I think it explained, in my life, the way in which authority had drained away from certainly the figures in my childhood who ought to have radiated a Christian authority, and who no longer did.



HH: And in terms of whether or not that Suez is understood by your countrymen to be that pivotal, is it?



PH: I don’t know whether it is, but having seen the effect that it had on my own family, and on it spreading out through the people who taught me, and the people who I was supposed to respect, I don’t have any doubt. And I’ve gone into a little bit of the history of Suez, and how badly it was handled, and how basically it showed the people who were supposed to be our responsible, just and honest leaders as crude liars and incompetents. It was terribly devastating to a country which had believe itself, up to that point, to be a major world power, and a principled world power at that.



HH: Do you think the same thing is happening….do you think the same thing is happening now vis-à-vis the war in Iraq with the commission that is inquiring into Tony Blair’s motives?



PH: I think that the war in Iraq was seen very much more rapidly as having been a mistake, and a folly, and indeed a disaster, and a defeat. So I don’t think the inquiry is going to reveal very much that people don’t already think they know. But we were, we started that from a much lower base. We simply were not, at the beginning of the Iraq war, as convinced of our national greatness as we were in 1956 before we launched the Suez expedition.



HH: Quick exit question for this hour. Who among modern political figures do you admire, Peter Hitchens?



PH: I don’t admire political figures. It’s always a mistake. I sometimes admire actions which they take, but generally, they’ll let you down over something else pretty quickly.



HH: Who do you find least…



PH: Admiration of human beings is generally a hiding…



HH: Who do you find to be least disappointing, then?



PH: I’ll have to think about that. At the moment, I think they’re all pretty disappointing.



HH: Okay, when we come back from break, I’ll press him on that, because there’s got to be a spectrum of incompetent to deceitful and terrible. So at least we can get up to the incompetent end.



- - - -



HH: Peter Hitchens, when we were breaking, I’d asked you about political figures, and you don’t admire any of them, because they are political figures. But who has done the least bad at their job in public life over the last forty or so years?



PH: Forty or so years, who’s done the least bad…oh dear, you’re going to have to forgive me here. I look at this period as being one of pretty much unmitigated defeat for what I would describe as my side. I’m now almost completely unengaged politically, because although I long to be, and would very much like to go into British parliamentary politics, there is no party in operation at the moment which would have me, or which I would have, although it’s my belief that what I think and say probably resonates with a substantial number of people, because there is no party, and because democratic political systems operate through parties, and in a two party system, they are a gateway. I’m just standing to one side in frustrated fury. My life, at the moment, is devoted to the destruction of the British Conservative party, which I see as the main obstacle to conservative politics in this country. And I don’t, if asked to say anything about the politics in modern Western countries, I generally look with some disparity. I don’t find any reason for enthusiasm. I’m sorry, I just can’t.



HH: Well, I am puzzled. I’ll tell you why I’m puzzled, because one of the great benefits of The Rage Against God, especially for younger people, is your detained indictment of, and explanation of what you call the biggest false miracle of the last century, Soviet Russia.



PH: Yes.



HH: And Soviet Russia did not collapse of itself. It was brought down by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and John Paul II, in concert with millions of people behind the Iron Curtain, and Solzhenitsyn. But…



PH: Much more Solzhenitsyn than the other three, in my view. But I don’t, I think, and I would not necessarily agree with you that it wouldn’t have collapsed anyway. It was in the most dreadful state by the time Ronald Reagan came to office. I think Margaret Thatcher’s role in undermining it is probably exaggerated. His is, it thus exists. But having destroyed it, what did they do? And this is the problem. They didn’t…and the result of destroying the Soviet Union has paradoxically been, and this is covered in my previous book, The Broken Compass, the liberation in Western society of many people and ideas of the extreme and damaging left who were previously restrained by their association with the Soviet Union, and who now are not. And the spread of left wing ideas in the academy, and in the media, and in the publishing industry, and education, and just in general, and also in the churches since the collapse of state communism has been colossal. And I say in my book, The Broken Compass, that these ideas escaped to the West. When the Berlin wall fell, these ideas came streaming across it, the revolutionary ideas which had previously been contained, because everybody could see then, I used to day, and I’m not wholly unserious about this, that we should have got the Disney corporation to take over East Germany, and keep it in being, because the time would come very quickly when people would not believe that any such place had ever existed. And I think that they probably now won’t. But there was much, much more in common between what called itself the German Democratic Republic and many of the ideas that are now abroad in my country. Do you know, if you’re in the public services in Britain now, your contract of employment will contain a commitment to support two things called equality and diversity. Therefore, you’re actually officially obliged to support the political theory of egalitarianism.



HH: I did not know that.



PH: And diversity is just a polite name for political correctness. Everybody in the British public services – nurses, teachers have to, in their contract of employment, uphold these things. And on the basis of this contract of employment, people who have openly professed Christian views have been threatened with dismissal, or suspended from their jobs, and told by their labor unions that they won’t defend them, because the code obliges them to uphold diversity, and therefore to be specifically Christian is anti-diversity.



HH: Wow.



PH: That’s the state we’ve reached. It is amazing how many of these ghastly Stalinist ideas are now abroad in countries which consider themselves free. My own particular, and most of the Continental European countries have something similar. And you’ll possibly remember the case of Signor Buttiglione, the Italian who wanted high office in the European Union, was excluded form it because he was specifically Roman Catholic. The European Union is an overtly, explicitly anti-Christian, or not exactly anti-Christian, but non-Christian body.



HH: Right, right. And the Church has objected to that quite…



PH: …religion is extraordinarily prevalent all over Western Europe, and people don’t realize how serious it is, and what the implications of it are. And the reason, part of the reason for my going into such detail in The Rage Against God about the anti-Christian nature of the Soviet regime is to show the parallels between the language that they used, the methods that they used, the things that they thought, and the goals that they sought, and those of the modern anti-Theists and the secularists who are active in all the Western states.



HH: Yeah, the League of the Militant Godless, that you describe at length.



PH: Yes.



HH: That was news to me, and I thought I knew my Soviet history.



PH: No, it’s extraordinary. When I set out to do that chapter, I thought there’d be a standard work on the subject. In fact, I had to spend weeks in the library going from book to book, and footnote to footnote to actually establish a narrative of it, there’s so little written about it, and certainly very little that’s in print. And it is extraordinary how it hasn’t been assembled. There is actually a work on, for instance, the relation between the German Nazis and the Churches, but there is not standard work on this issue. And it is, I like to boast, that in the book, that piece of research is probably the fullest and most concise description of the horrors of what happened to Christianity in the Soviet Union.



HH: Oh, it is fascinating. And in fact…



PH: I can add to it my own experience of what had happened seventy years later, and how successful it had been, because it was successful. I have no doubt about it. It works.



HH: Now I have a friend, Bob Frey, who says that the Devil took down the Berlin Wall, because he was doing better on our side of it, which plays into that. But on the other hand, it hasn’t happened as quickly in the United States as it happened in Great Britain.



PH: No.



HH: Is there a point to The Rage Against God in part of at least being a warning to the rest of the West?



PH: Yes. Yes, every time I write about Britain for an American audience, I’m saying look, this could happen to you. Be armed against it. Do not be complacent. Do not imagine that these apparently small things are unimportant. The Hungarian communist dictator, Mátyás Rákosi, actually invented the phrase salami slicing for taking, piece by piece, civil society. But each piece was not quite large enough to engender a major protest or real opposition. But by the time he’d taken twenty or thirty slices, civil society was dead. And you must be aware of this tactic. You’ll be told that you’re getting outraged over nothing, when you’re actually fighting a crucial battle. And people should be aware of this danger. And of course, the overreaching of power by the United States internationally in the past few years is also awfully reminiscent of the similar folly by British politicians half a century ago. And it does seem to me to be a similar danger. Once your political establishment has shown itself to have failed, then all kinds of things follow in terms of demoralization.



HH: Now you mentioned last hour…



PH: The extraordinary thing, the growth of college education as a way by which, and I think Woodrow Wilson actually said this at one point, the whole point of it was to make a man think differently from his parents. Why should that be so? Why should American parents spend so much on sending their children to places which deliberately set out to wean them away from the lessons of home?



HH: Last hour, you mentioned the dire state of marriage in Great Britain.



PH: Yeah.



HH: As we speak, marriage is up, it’s a knockout punch that is being aimed at marriage in California.



PH: Yes.



HH: The consequences of that, do you have any opinion?



PH: Well, I think it’s immensely serious, and it’s also rative of a fight, because those who fight it on the grounds on which the left have chosen to make it a battle, can very easily be portrayed as bigots and intolerant and cruel, because it’s always an issue of allegedly giving something to somebody, and why are you against giving something to somebody? Are you a cruel person? Are you a nasty person? Are you a vindictive person? And it’s turned into that development. And this is partly, of course, because the battle over divorce, which both in your country and in mine, was made so ridiculously easy in the 1960s. The battle over divorce has already been conceded, and therefore marriage among heterosexuals is so weakened, that this assault on it is not seen for what it is, namely a further blow at what I regard is the constitution of private life, that the marriage contract is the basis on which private life can be lived. And the moment the state becomes more important, and the moment big corporations become more powerful than the marriage bond, then private life is over, and we’re all slaves. And this is the difficulty. You need to find, and the conservative movement on both sides, I think, need to find a language in which to fight this war without it being easy for the other side to portray them as bigots.



HH: A very difficult task.



PH: And that’s a great difficulty.



- - - -



HH: Peter Hitchens, this is not, when I opened it, I somewhat expected a spiritual memoir. It’s not, although there are inevitably some aspects of it which are your memoirs about when and how you reconsidered your abandonment of faith as a young person. But you really don’t talk about the key moment except by reference in your chapter on Somalia as to when you decided to come back to the Church. Why was that, why did you approach it that way?



PH: Well, because it’s the way it happened. I think I say at one point I can’t really remember the precise moment at which I resolved that I would do this, and that’s true. Part of the problem about writing memoirs is that an awful lot of what you hoped you remember, you in fact find that you can’t, even when you’ve gone through the family albums, and asked other people what you were doing and saying at certain times. It gets a little vague. But also, what I was describing was an Englishman’s experience. I think possibly to an American ear, it’s not personal enough. But there are points in my life which, as I say in the book, are both hackneyed clichés of experience and immensely profound, and also rather private, which I don’t dwell on, and I won’t talk about, which were influential in making me reach the position that I have. And I think that many people will recognize what those things might have been. And certainly, anybody who’s married and is a parent, and has raised children, will know where these things might have kicked in. But I don’t feel, first of all, that I’m entitled to talk in detail about those parts of my life which involve other people, and also, I don’t really feel comfortable with doing so. So I’ve stuck to what I can say, which are the experiences I can recount, which are both not clichéd and hackneyed, because you haven’t undergone them, and most people haven’t been to Mogadishu on a bad day, or indeed lived in the Soviet Union, or indeed done a number of the other things I’ve done, which influenced me in that direction. So that’s really it. It’s because I’m English.



HH: The Somalia chapter is really quite remarkable in not only the detail of the chaos and what you went through, but also the matter of fact observation of how quickly a society can go from a fairly developed and fairly stable to utter anarchy.



PH: Yeah, this is the thing. I got back from this hole, and I opened a magazine a few weeks later, with some historical reflections on Somalia, and I saw this picture of the street on which I’d been. And the street when I’d been there had been composed entirely of lakes and mud, and flanked by rubble with shell holes in it. And you couldn’t proceed on down it without an armed guard. But I could make out the lineaments of it. It was the same street as the one in the picture. And in the picture, there were pavement cafes, there were telephone boxes, there were crisply uniformed policemen with white gloves directing the traffic. And there were well-dressed people going on down the street. The surface of the road was smooth. There were hotels, and shops with plate glass windows. And this was the same place, and what, fifteen years before? And from one to the other. And anybody who’s seen that, as I’d done, just has to look at the world which surrounds him and say how vulnerable is this that I see now, that appears to be permanent and safe? How sure can I be that the civilization I see around me will survive? And as I say in the book, I decided from then on that religion was not merely a personal thing, but it was about the nature of the society in which I live, and because the civilization in which I live was infinitely precious, and all the more so because I’d been off the edge of it and seen what barbarism actually looked and felt like. Then, it was my duty to try to preserve it, so I do what I can.



HH: You push the dagger in, in a couple of places. In fact, at one point, you say don’t ever let a Trotskyite off. Press them on their man and his cruelties. And you cite Richard Pipes and Robert Service. I’m afraid I’ve let your brother off on Trotsky a number of times, but now I’ll have to…



PH: Oh, you shouldn’t do that.



HH: Yeah, but I’ll have to go back and revisit it.



PH: He does tend to get let off on that subject, partly because people don’t know…as an ex-Trotskyist myself, you see, I know what Trotskyists think. And he says things about Trotsky and Lenin which really ought to get your goat a bit more. But I can’t teach you your job.



HH: Well now, you’ve woken me to that. Recently, I interviewed Ken Follett, and I asked him about Trotsky, and he denounced him appropriately. So there, at least I’ve got the question in the catalogue now. But I did want to, you also push the dagger in on the point that I think the Dawkinsists will hate the most, which is that you can’t have a moral code that works without God. It just doesn’t work.



PH: Well no, I thought I everybody knew this. It’s just astonishing. And my brother, Christopher, keeps asking this question, is there something you can say that a believer could do that an atheist couldn’t do, or is it the other way around, I don’t really care. The point is not whether such a thing could happen. I’m sure there are terrible Christian people who would do ghastly things, and I’m sure there are atheists who would do wonderful things. But who is actually going to decide what is good and what is bad? And what is the point of a compass if there’s no magnetic north? It’s just a piece of tin with a little wiggling needle on it which shows nothing. What is your conscience if it refers to nothing in the same way? You might as well take moral instruction from your bile duct. This is such a basic, simple point. And yet when you put it to atheists, they look at you with blank astonishment and say what do you mean? How could that be?



HH: Yeah.



PH: They just don’t get it. And it’s, in my experience in many years of arguing with people, is when people don’t get something, it’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because they don’t want to get it. Just as when people get angry with you in argument, if there’s a lot of anger among these atheists, when particularly, if you have a website argument, and the atheists comment on it, and the contempt and fury that’s expressed in the contributions they make towards anybody who defends God and Christianity is astonishing. People get angry. Again, I used to get angry, so I know this, but you get angry when people voice your own doubts. That’s what gets people enraged, is when they hear somebody voicing doubts that they themselves are trying to suppress. There’s nothing more certain to get somebody enraged.



HH: You write about Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot that not only did she fear that he was more talented than she was…



PH: Yes.



HH: She also feared he was right about God. And I think there’s got to be some of that in some of the more…your brother is quite amiable in his conversations with people like me and Dinesh D’Souza and others, Mark Roberts. But not Dawkins.



PH: He’s more and more amiable in the past year or so, I think. And he’s made some remarks, I mean, a few months ago, he was at the Hay Festival, and he made some very generous remarks about my book. And he also said that maybe his hostility to religion was, I don’t want to, there’s a link on the Hay Festival site, and I also put it on my own blog, which you can find if you look up, oddly enough, Isfahan, the Iranian town, because what he said roughly was that he wondered if it might not be a failure of imagination on his part that he’d been so unsympathetic. And also, the interviewer asked him whether he thought that religion was wholly unredeemed. And he said no, of course not. I’ve seen Isfahan. Now I also have seen Isfahan, which is one of those most beautiful places on Earth. And it’s obviously the work of people who believe profoundly in God. So I was intrigued by that remark, and I’ve put it up on my blog, having transcribed it from the Hay Festival website. Of course, I thought that people should know about that. But oddly enough, as is so often the case with important things, and nobody even seemed to be interested in it.



HH: I’ll be right back with Peter Hitchens on the Hugh Hewitt Show.



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HH: Before I forget, Peter Hitchens, there are two pieces of art that figure prominently in The Rage Against God – The Last Judgment, and The Return Of The Prodigal Son. Would you explain to people both where you encountered these, and whey they had great impact on you?



PH: Yeah, my pleasure. The first is a Last Judgment, one of many, I have quite a fancy for Last Judgments. This is painted by one of the Flemish masters called Rogier van der Weyden. And it’s on display in the l'Hôtel-Dieu, which is a late medieval hospital in the beautiful Burgundian town of Beaune in France where many years ago I was on holiday with the woman who is now my wife. And we were just doing, as we’d do a lot in those days, going around France by train and bicycle, eating good meals and drinking good wine, and enjoying the architecture. And we took, as intelligent people should, the guidebook with us. And it said that we must see thing painting, and I thought oh, another religious painting, don’t these people have anything else to paint about? And with the excellent lunch settling on my stomach, I rambled in, and on a not very crowded weekday afternoon, and I looked at this painting, and my jaw dropped, because the people in it are being hurried towards damnation in the corner of the painting where that always happens looked just like me, and they looked just like the people that I knew. And as I say in the book, suddenly this thing wasn’t imprisoned under thick layers of time. It was real and present. And I have to say it put the fear of God in me, at a time when I wouldn’t really have acknowledged that I thought there was such a thing. I suddenly thought if there is a judgment, then I’m one of these, not one of the others. And it made me begin to think about things which I had been taught in childhood, and had been faintly aware of, but for a long time had been pushed to the back of my mind. It made me think, and continue to think, and it was one of those things which impelled me along the road which I’ve now taken. I must stress that I don’t, the process of my return to faith is entirely one of reason. I’ve had no religious experiences, no blazes of light, no swoons, no anything of that kind. It’s all been a longer process of reason, which I know some people find a little dry and passionless. Well, that’s how it’s happened to me, and I think that reason is actually embedded in the Christian faith.



HH: I agree with that, but you also are…



PH: So I just want to stress, this isn’t some kind of thunderbolt of Paul…



HH: No, and that comes through in The Rage Against God.



PH: It’s a moment of thought. And the other painting is by Thomas Hart Benton, I think…



HH: Yes.



PH: …in the gallery in Dallas, the Museum of Art in Dallas. And it’s entitled The Prodigal Son, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that if you saw it, because you must have read The Grapes Of Wrath. The figure in it is very reminiscent of Tom Joad at the beginning of The Grapes Of Wrath, a slightly downheel person and a bit straggly, poorly dressed, with a rather ancient motor car drawn up beside him, and returning to the old homestead, which is a ruin, and the windows are gaping. And there’s fatted calf. There’s just a skull, a horned skull lying in the long, unkempt grass. And he’s got back too late.



HH: Yup.



PH: And the idea that this story of the Prodigal Son has ended in a different way, and that the hopelessness of it, and this is brilliantly painted under this extraordinarily melancholy wind-whipped sky. And I just, again, stood in front of this. And the idea of that, the story in the Prodigal Son ended differently, and he came back too late, went very deep into my heart, because I had been myself a prodigal son. And in many ways, I had returned too late.



HH: To the Church, the Church to which you returned.



PH: Not just to the Church, but to a lot of other things as well, and I’d managed to recover some familial relations, and things like that which I’d lost. But in general, I’d made a pretty big mess of it. And it just went home. And I’ve, you can look up the paper, you can look up the painting. You can find it on the internet. And obviously, it doesn’t have the power that it does in its frame, but it’s, again, it’s a very, very potent piece of work, particularly to someone in my position.



HH: You also, in writing about the first one, fear playing a role, although you say it’s a rational process, a reasonable process, fear is very reasonable, as you say, when you lie down to avoid gunfire in Somalia, or the Russian experience with the police.



PH: Yes.



HH: But that is an emotional aspect of reason, and it’s a healthy one. It’s deep.



PH: Well, sorry, but fear is not irrational. Fear, on the contrary, makes you think very fast. I haven’t had this experience, but people who have been in horrible situations, do say that time appears to slow down. Of course, it isn’t. Time doesn’t slow down. What happens is that your fear of what’s going on enormously speeds up your own thought processes and your perception, and your reactions to danger, so you can think quickly and get out of this. Of course, fear is enormously important. Without it, we would…it’s like pain. Without it, we would be unguarded against an awful lot of dangers. But I also put that story, partly, it’s a disgraceful one to say look, yes, my motives of what I do are not all noble.



HH: We’ll come back to that. Peter Hitchens is my guest. Stay tuned.



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HH: We were talking about fear before the break, Peter Hitchens. The part I don’t want to not get to before the interview is over is your relationship with your brother, which you write about at length in The Rage Against God, the trip to Grand Rapids that you made, and the amazing reconciliation, the longest quarrel of your life being unexpectedly over. What was the quarrel about to begin with?



PH: I’m not absolutely sure. Those of your listeners, and you yourself, I don’t know if you have brothers, will have had one of many experiences. Some brothers get on, some are indifferent to each other. Some are tremendously close, and some just don’t get on. I don’t know whether it’s just two similar people in a confined space competing for attention or whatever, all kinds of sub-Freudian stuff we can speculate upon. But the fact is that from a very early age, we just didn’t seem to hit it off. And it went on and on and on. And we lived, for many years, more or less, separate lives. I suppose until I came to live in Washington, D.C. for a couple of years in 1993, we probably hadn’t seen each other for more than a few minutes for a very long time. And then, I came away from there again, and we were living on separate continents again. We’re both journalists, but of a very different kind. I went through the standard mill of the apprenticeship in provincial newspapers, and then getting on to national newspapers, being a reporter, hurrying around to press conferences, and strikes, and you name it, and eventually getting foreign assignments. He made his way through commentary and book reviews, and oddly enough, in the end, we found ourselves doing quite similar things in terms of foreign reportage, which is the nearest we’ve been to direct competition in all that time. But our lives are different. We’re different sorts of people. But on the other hand, we also, I think, would both be described as people who knew us as having quite large personalities, not necessarily in a complimentary way.



HH: Yes.



PH: And that, of course, in a small space, means that you rub up against each other quite hard. So that’s the basis of it. And I can’t, I don’t explain it, because I can’t explain it. I regret it. I wish that we had been closer, and always will do.



HH: Don’t you find it…



PH: But it is just so.



HH: Do you find it odd or intriguing that you have both addressed yourself to the issue of God as your careers have come, you know, to their heights?



PH: No, I have to be perfectly straightforward here. I was asked to write this book by an American publisher because Christopher had written his. And I resisted the idea for some time. And then eventually I concluded that quite honestly, he didn’t anymore like God than I did.



HH: (laughing)



PH: And on other subjects, there are some subjects on which I wouldn’t dream of challenging him, partly because I’m not as interested in them as he is. But on this, I thought well, okay then, but only if the book is in the shape and form which it’s come out. It’s not entirely what they would have wanted me to do. It’s much less of an apologetic than people would in some cases have liked. It has much less, actually, about religion than most people would like, but I can only write about what I know. I can describe my own long entanglement with atheism, which took place, and I can describe my return from that. And I can explain why, and I can also, which I very much believe, this is profoundly about politics. And this is about power. This is about the future of Western civilization. This is not just a side issue about which people argue on late night TV. If we decide to abandon Christianity in our societies, so it’s a purely private matter, that we’re no longer Christian societies, then there will be very severe consequences. And in the end, in my view, the darkness will fall. And given, pressed to take the opportunity to say that, I eventually said yes. It was very hard to write. It’s the hardest book I’ve ever had to write.



HH: You know, I find it to be…



PH: I don’t…I confess that there were moments when I wanted to chuck it to one side. And if it hadn’t been for one of the people at the publishers, Stanley Van Zeift (?), and also particularly my eldest son, Daniel, who as it were, came and said look, you’ve got to finish this, and helped me with it, it would have not got written.



HH: But it is, I have to disagree with you, it’s a very profound apologetic, though not of the sort which most people looking for apologetics are looking for. It’s about, it’s studying the thing which is believe in Christ by studying its absence. It’s a very…



PH: Well, it’s generous of you to say so. I think some people would, particularly those who are already confident and are well-versed in their faith, would be disappointed by its absence of theological content. And I know people lied, and those people who’ve sent in reviews to Amazon have said…I understand that, but I’ve always been a disappointment to my Christian friends.



HH: (laughing)



PH: …but my Evangelical ones. And my Catholic ones despair of me. I’m a hopeless heretic. But that’s, I’m afraid, the only way I can do it.



HH: So what is ahead now? What do you turn your attention to now, because for some, you don’t want to do, as you say, the road show with your brother, and we all pray for his recovery, even if he gets back and does it again himself.



PH: Yes.



HH: You don’t want to do that. What do you want to do with this subject? Anything?



PH: I don’t know. I think you write a book, and you hope that it enters into the conversation of the country in which it’s published. If it does, then it ceases in the end to be yours. All the books which are really influential take on a life of their own, because people read them, they discuss them, parts, expressions that they use, become currency. And the author is, loses his power over them anyway. And what any author really hopes for is that will one day happen to one of his books. And obviously, I hope that that will happen to this one, but who knows? Beyond…that’s what you do. You send these things out. And remember the scene, I think, back of Noah dispatching the dove. You don’t know whether anything will come back. And after that, whatever comes, whatever my right hand findeth to do. But I don’t know. I haven’t really thought beyond this at the moment. These things are, they take quite a lot out of you. It’s, in some way, apart from the actual physical pains, are about as near as the male human being comes to giving birth, is the writing of a book. And at the end of it, you’re exhausted, you’re sick of the sight of it, and you don’t want to talk about it, but you have to.



HH: Yes, you do. One more segment as well. Peter Hitchens is my guest. The Rage Against God is the book. I’ll be right back to wrap up with him.



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HH: Thank you for being very generous with your time, Peter. I didn’t get a whiff of sort of end of days millennial fanaticism here of the sort that many people like to enmesh themselves in. But I do get the sense you really are a pessimist about the West. What do you see happening?



PH: Well, I don’t know. It’s just…unless we get some kind of grip on ourselves, unless particularly people begin to realize that the great left liberal experiment has failed on its own terms…what worries my particularly is the intelligent and educated people of my country are, by and large, still determined to pursue a series of ideas which can be shown to have failed. And until there’s a recognition among in the academy and among those who dominate the media and the publishing industry, and all the other things which influence ideas, that this hasn’t worked, that the idea of progress, of material progress and egalitarianism has failed, I don’t see how we can get out of this, because this is the secular religion of our elite. This is what they want – more and more egalitarianism, more and more secularism, more and more political correctness, more and more personal self-indulgence. And I think part of the problem is that maybe people are extremely prosperous in their personal lives, and they do not see the consequences in the lives of the poor of the ideas which they’ve embraced, which are disastrous. And one thing which I find very interesting about my brother and about many other people on who I would still say were on the political left, and who are also as well in the anti-God front, the League of the Militant Godless, is they’re so profoundly uninterested in the minutiae of how society operates. They don’t, you never, they’re always writing about grandiose subjects like foreign policy and resistance to Islam and so forth. Well, okay, fine. These things are important. But you never, ever see them discussing how our society functions, and what’s happening, particularly what’s happening to the poor. And they don’t…plus, they don’t know. They’re all, everything has to be grandiose and never actually focuses on what’s happening to the person struggling to get his children through schools when the schools are bad. What’s happening to the person trying to raise honest children in a dishonest, crime-ridden neighborhood? What’s happening to somebody who’s trying to keep his marriage going when all the laws of divorce and property are designed to undermine that marriage? What’s happening to people who are trying to keep their children away from dugs when the whole of our culture, all the rock music and all the movies, and all the jokes, and half of the stuff that’s pumped out in the education system says drugs are okay? These disastrous things are going on all the time, and nobody in the elite seems to be aware of the awful damage being done to millions and millions of individual lives by it.



HH: An important point on which we must end. Peter Hitchens’ book is The Rage Against God. That’s the next volume, I think. Peter Hitchens, thank you.



End of interview.