Lawrence Krauss’ tribute to Christopher Hitchens
Below is a transcript of Lawrence Krauss’ tribute to Christopher Hitchens at the 2012 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne.
I’m going to depart from my normal procedure, which is to not prepare remarks, ‘cos I like not to know what I’m going to say, but Hitch was too important to give out random words, so I’ve actually prepared some remarks.
Christopher Hitchens was my friend. And even as I say those words I’m amazed. Every time I used to leave his apartment, usually pretty drunk, I’d walk out the door in amazement. I’d think, Christopher Hitchens is my friend! What’d I do to deserve this? Why on earth would he want to spend time with me?
Shortly after his death I was interviewed on CNN by a cloying and annoying interviewer who tried to suggest that she was intimately familiar with him by calling him Chris on every occasion, and if you knew anything about Christopher you knew that he’d immediately tell you his name was not Chris.
Anyway, I’d just forced myself to watch it to see how she introduced him, and she said “On the one hand he inspired the ideals of scepticism, free inquiry, and rational thought in many but at the same time he has been called a bullying, lying, opportunistic, cynical contrarian”. And she said that as if it was a bad thing! [laughter]
Christopher was a beacon of knowledge and light in a world that constantly threatens to extinguish both. He had the courage to accept the world for just what it is, not what he wanted it to be. That’s the highest praise I believe one can give any intellect. He understood that the universe doesn’t care about our existence or our welfare, and he epitomised the realisation that our lives have meaning only to the extent that we give them meaning. For Christopher, this came through the credo that guided his life, the courageous defence of the simple proposition that scepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence [applause]. You can applaud that, that’s his.
On a personal level, whenever I spent an evening with Hitch I came away saying when I grow up I want to be an intellectual. The moment you entered his house you were overwhelmed by a single obsession — books. Books were everywhere, on every surface. On the wall, on the floors, on couches, on tables, and in bathrooms, but unlike for many of us, myself included, the books on Christopher’s wall were far more than window dressing. They were arranged according to subjects and ideas in a way that made it clear that the books were regularly read. All of them. And consulted. That the knowledge contained within them was used in the sense that few of us really adequately exploit. It was humbling to witness close-up an intellect that was so capable of surrounding any subject, relishing it, exploring it for its own sake, critically soaking up everything that’s worth knowing. He was ever ready to incorporate this wisdom, to shed light upon old ideas or critically examine new ones, with the full weight of a lifetime of intellectual exploration combined with the playful and curious excitement of a child in a candy store. He embodied the delicious possibilities of existence and the profound sense of satisfaction that intellectual exploration, integrity and bravery can bring, especially when confronting power with knowledge. Even as he openly recognised that the possibility of a successful outcome in any such battle is always slim.
Those are the two features that were most crucial to what I admired about the man. It takes courage to speak out against injustice and ignorance wherever you see it, no matter whose sensibilities you ruffle. But it takes far more courage to do that when you realise that the odds are overwhelming that you will lose; that stupidity, prejudice, superstition, hatred, power, and money generally win. But it doesn’t matter. You can’t give up. But it’s that second feature, that unadulterated joy of ideas of the human experience, the need for irony and humour, and the recourse to the full banquet of human knowledge and culture that set Hitch apart from so many of the rest of us. Charm and wit when combined with actual knowledge is not to be underrated. Since his death I’ve been told by many people that that’s the greatest loss to the cause of reason that brings all of us here today. I have to state personally that’s what guides me. I remember on the day he died I told myself that to whatever small extent I could emulate any of those qualities in my own work, to keep the candle of joy and wonder and irony that he kept burning, I dedicate my life to that task. And many’s the day when I think how would I want to present something? And I’m guided by that simple question that so many religious people ask in their lives, but I changed the wording, and I asked “what would Christopher do?” [applause].
The last time I saw him our discussions ranged from subjects relating to the nature of nothingness, quantum mechanics, and the obscenity that is capital punishment. The madness that governs the religious fanaticism infecting both sides of the Middle East conflict, the embarrassment that is Catholicism, and a related subject — the intellectual laziness and pretentious nonsense that encompasses so much of religious faith and theological noise in our popular culture.
Christopher was not a scientist but he was fascinated by the power of science. Not merely its possible impact on human affairs, but more importantly for him and for me, the remarkable ideas that it generates. He was wise enough to recognise that the universe is far more imaginative than we are. As one who craved experience of all aspects of intellectual life, he was as eager to learn from the universe as he was from the world’s greatest writers, philosophers, and historians. On the last day I was with him, someone came to the door and I answered it for Christopher, and the person delivered a manuscript and asked if I was his manager or his agent. I said no, I’m his personal physicist [laughter, applause]. I can think of very few greater honours that I would bestow upon myself than that, in fact.
Through his questions and reflections he extended my own understanding and implications of my own work. Just yesterday I described how when musing on the material I talked about, he described nothingness as heading straight towards us as fast as it can. That idea didn’t terrify him. He realised that knowledge is not to be gained from comforting our souls but for enhancing the awareness of being alive.
There are two personal aspects of Christopher that may not be apparent to a broader audience, and I want to spend a minute on each. First, what I found so refreshing about talking to the man is that one could never be quite sure about what he’d say about any given subject. For many of us when we meet like-minded friends, we can remain complacent in the knowledge that we are pretty sure they’ll agree with us or at least we know what they’re going to say. But Christopher approached each subject in its own context, not in the context of liberalism or atheism or any ism. We debated the Iraq war late into the night and we never agreed. But that leads to the other quality I admired so much in him. His incredible tolerance. Now tolerance might not be the word that the public associated with him, listening to him and his public appearances. He had no tolerance for nonsense, for lying, posturing, and he was brave enough to attack even the self-serving pious evildoers like Mother Teresa, or popular liberal presidents like Bill Clinton. Even when it set him apart from popular myths. But on a personal level he separated ideas from individuals. He had close friends with whom he was diametrically opposed. Francis Collins, a friend of both of ours, is Head of the National Institute of Health. His religious ideas border on the nutty if you ever listen to them, but not only was he a close friend of Christopher’s, in fact he helped him tremendously in the last months of his life, and he served in fact as his medical adviser and friend. Justice Antonin Scalia, who is one of the bastions of evil on the Supreme Court of the United States right now, was nevertheless a regular guest at the Hitchens home, and I know his personal company was enjoyed by both Hitch and Carol on a regular basis.
Being able to befriend and charm even your intellectual enemies is something we can all learn from, that we can all emulate as we try to bring the light of reason into a world which so often shuts out. It requires courage and self-confidence combined with the ability to simply enjoy people as people.
I want to come close to the end with a bit of advice which he gave, and I think it is particularly pertinent to this meeting. In his book, Letters to a Young Contrarian, he said “We are an adaptable species and this adaptability has enabled us to survive, however adaptability can also constitute a threat. We may become habituated to certain dangers and fail to recognise them until it is too late. You exist at the whim of people whose power does not derive from your consent and who regard you as expendable and disposable. You merely failed to notice the moment at which you were conscripted. The normal life consists of living as if this most salient of facts was not a fact at all. Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine, to question the obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim ‘de omnibus dubitandum’ — doubt everything”.
In that regard, just before leaving his company on that last day we were together, in one of those poetic accidents that makes life so unexpectedly enjoyable, I was reading a newspaper at his kitchen table and I was reading about an emerging effort to ensure that young people at elite institutions preserve their Catholic upbringing both during and after college.
In the last sentence, when describing the temptations to depart from piety, the author wrote “exposed to Nietzsche, Hitchens, co-ed dorms and beer pong, such students are expected to stray” [laughter]. I reflected on what a remarkable tribute to the man that simple sentence represented [applause].
To be so overpowering in one’s cultural impact that one can be mentioned without explanation is one thing. But to be sandwiched between Nietzsche and beer pong [laughter], that’s an honour that very few of us can hope to achieve. And it is perhaps the greatest way that Christopher would want to be remembered, so I’ll leave it at that. Thank you.
The video of Lawrence Krauss’ tribute can be viewed on the AFA’s YouTube Channel.