Letters to a Young Contrarian (Art of Mentoring (Paperback))

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I think often of my late friend Ron Ridenhour, who became briefly famous when, as a service-man in Vietnam, he exposed the evidence of the hideous massacre of the villagers at My Lai in March 1968. A born contrarian, he makes entertaining mincemeat of self-satisfied politicians, and shreds received ideas and media-spun consensus with a fearlessness that is invaluable in our mealymouthed punditocracy. In fact I would go so far as to say that a refusal to read this book on personal grounds is as much a vindication of what it has to say as it is an objection to it. And it is not too much to say that humanity is very much in debt to such people, whether it chooses to acknowledge the debt or not. The unspooling of the skein of the genome has effectively abolished racism and creationism, and the amazing findings of Hubble and Hawking have allowed us to guess at the origins of the cosmos.

In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. However, this can't alter the fact that in life we make progress by conflict and in mental life by argument and disputation.

But I'm back in Saturnine dude's asteroid belt, the not-always-yes-man of a gravity-fed, dissent-spouting, impossibly well-read Oxbridge wit. Always ask who this 'we' is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs. One of the hardest things for anyone to face is the conclusion that his or her "own" side is in the wrong when engaged in a war. But… to make up for that rather horrible indictment, you can be reassured that the entire cosmos is designed with you in mind.

This was in stark contrast to those Stalinists on the left like George Galloway who flocked to defend Saddam and might therefore be described as being Right but for the Wrong reasons. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight. Yes, I am providing my belated, unasked-for, and pedantic tribute to the late Hitch, but this is as appropriate of a forum as any to do so, right?I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. No one is quite as good at being condescending and disagreeable and intelligent and hilarious all at once.

And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from the angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair”. The word hasn't completely lost this association even now, though it is less frequently used as an insult. There is good reason to think that such reactions arise from something innate rather than something inculcated: Nickleby doesn't know until the moment of the crisis that he is going to stick up for poor Smike. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison.In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere. James, representing a lost generation of people whose dissent and resistance was largely conducted within, and even against, the “Left” as it was generally understood.

Hitchens prompts this same thing in this wide-ranging, impeccably argued series of pseudo-epistolary treatises about what it means to be an independent thinker. As much as I love his railings against religion (around which most of his debates are centered), it is too bad that some people think that was the sole domain of his brilliance (or according to his detractors, his calumny/misguidedness).

It is not so much a treatise on any one subject – although his controversial opinion on things like religion and politics inevitably come up – as a dissertation on the very mindset a person should adopt if he or she is to successfully assume the role of the outspoken critic, and the various pitfalls of doing so. In the late Victorian period, Oscar Wilde - master of the pose but not a mere poseur - decided to live and act "as if" moral hypocrisy were not regnant. First, there's reading it as an inspirational tract on living a life of contrariness and dissent and all the baggage that comes with such a life. I cannot say that I agree with all of the author's espoused views, but he doubtlessly anticipated some such differences of opinion. However, adaptability can also constitute a threat; we may become habituated to certain dangers and fail to recognize them until it's too late.