Some kind words about my post from a poli-sci professor:
Yours is one of the best posts in the Corner I have ever read. Yours is a point I have made in a different way, but they are compatible I think.
I have often made a similar point to my students and to other professors: Hitchens acts as if there are moral standards that never change—take human rights. For Hitchens, human rights can never be contravened morally or rightly. In some sense, I argued, he believes in natural rights (as opposed to natural wrongs). To make it more interesting he is piously outraged when some rights have been violated. Hitchens may not believe in the personal God many do, but he does believe in a god that is a non arbitrary standard of right and wrong, good and evil.
As to this professor’s first paragraph, all I can say is that he must not read the Corner very often. But as to the second, he is quite right in pointing out Hitchens’s (almost Kantian?) passion for the moral law. The contemporary, reductionist understanding of Darwinian natural selection has no place for this; in that mechanism, it is the strongest and most adaptable—not the most moral, not the defenders of the rights of the weak—who survive. As another reader put it:
Mike, interesting observations on Mr. Hitchens. The fundamental flaw in all of his arguments is that he is very much a moral absolutist (a Puritan, as you put it), and cannot successfully explain how that is not completely absurd in a meaningless universe.
Hitchens’s passion for human rights has a source. Those of us who have a deeper intuition than he does—of what that source is—should consider ourselves fortunate indeed.