Letters to a Young Contrarian

"I don’t think there is a better journalist than Hitchens writing in English. The power of his arguments – they’re so crisply written, they’re so forceful that, if you are on the other side, they almost strangle you. There’s nobody more compelling to read. Every time I read him, I learn something from him. His arguments are so tight, they’re hermetic. It’s very difficult to take them apart. I certainly don’t agree with him a lot of the time, but you can’t but be in awe of the way he can build an argument. It’s open to interpretation, but I think the answer is no. I don’t think so. A lot of what he is saying to you, as the journalist reading the book, is, ‘Don’t trust yourself. Always, always second guess yourself before coming to a conclusion. And once you’ve come to a conclusion, keep second-guessing yourself.’ His loyalty is to truth. He does not have a political home – I don’t think you can call him a conservative or a liberal. But you can call him a person of great principle. He rejects equivocation. He rejects moral relativism. Hitchens is the kind of reporter who says, ‘Don’t be afraid to pick a side, but always be prepared to be disappointed, and to watch your viewpoint unravel…’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The other thing about the book is that it has some really memorable quotes. There’s one: ‘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. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving “as if” they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.’ That to me sums up that book, and who Hitchens is. I don’t believe we’re in crisis. Obviously newspapers are folding. But there is nothing that has changed about the way people absorb information. We read it, or we see it, or we hear it. That’s how we’re hardwired, and whether you get it from a newspaper or a digital platform makes no difference. The demand for information is still there, and it always will be. Also, I don’t buy this idea that there was a golden age in journalism. CBS in the 60s and 70s was a golden age in television reporting, partly because they really threw money at it. CBS gave airtime to documentaries, to stories that exposed injustices in America and overseas. They didn’t worry about whether one of Murrow’s documentaries was going to make it a lot of money – because they felt it was a public service to do it. Reporters today – there’s no question they’re capable of doing that kind of work. I served as a judge for the Goldsmiths Awards a couple of years ago at Harvard. The kind of investigative reporting that is done every day in this country at newspapers like the Pittsburgh Post Gazette , or at ProPublica , is amazing. There are amazing reporters at CBS, at the New York Times , at NPR, at CNN. What has happened is that in some cases there isn’t always a clear outlet for their work. News has become commoditised, and it can’t always be commoditised. But it’s an easy narrative to say that journalism isn’t the same as it used to be. It took most of the press corps year s to expose the failings of Vietnam. Walter Cronkite only made his famous remarks in 1968. Before that, he would go to Vietnam, do profiles of men and officers and generals and describe what they were doing, sometimes in an uncritical way. We forget that. It’s not all that different. Reporters are human. They don’t always have crystal balls. And the fact of the matter is that in the old days, it was mostly men. Especially in Washington, they were very cozy with the people they covered. Back in the day, the White House correspondents really did know the president. They hung out with him; they played poker with him; they had drinks with him. It’s a completely different world now. There’s no question in my mind that there is far more of an adversarial relationship between the president and the people who cover him. Does it result in better reporting in aggregate? I would say yes. I was overseas for six and a half years. Reporting on a war, from a combat zone, there are a whole host of challenges, obviously. You want to survive. But from a reporting perspective, it’s some of the easiest reporting I ever did. Because you literally go outside, hold your microphone out, and do a story. In Iraq – certainly in 2003 – you could walk into a ministry building, and there was a good chance you could go and talk to the minister. They would say: ‘Wait here…’ One of the hardest jobs I’ve had is covering the Pentagon – trying to make that beat interesting to our listeners, day in and day out, when that was all I covered. It was incredibly difficult to find sources who were not only willing to talk, but willing to talk on tape. Talk about an impenetrable place."

"This is a wonderful book and it deserves to be a classic. Christopher Hitchens has long been a hero of mine and this book is one of the reasons. It’s more than a book about how to be a contrarian; it’s a book about how to think politically. His style is gorgeous, with all his literary references. The book itself is written in an incredibly rich and enjoyable way, and it’s funny too. It’s about the transformative power of argument, and how how one thinks is almost more important than what one thinks. There was a particular bit that struck me where he talks about the account of the Oracle of Delphi. His ultimate statement was “nothing too much”, and in modern times it’s lazily interpreted as “all things in moderation”. But Hitchens argues that if the balances are tipped, moderation in those circumstances is wrong. That is an extraordinarily important lesson for our times when the normal is unacceptable. It’s no good to be moderate. The other reason I love him is because of who he hates. He writes scathing critiques of everyone from Lady Diana to Henry Kissinger to the Dalai Lama. He’s a sublime puncturer of these ghastly mediocrities who have become celebrities in our culture, and for that I salute him. I’m not one of the occupiers, as they sometimes call the folks who actually live[d] in Zuccotti Park. One of the interesting phenomena of OWS which is not reported on a lot, because it doesn’t really happen down in the square, is these working groups that have been established. There’s about 60 or 70 of them now, which are trying to tackle particular issues from recycling to alternative banking. The alternative banking group has attracted an incredible array of people who you would not normally expect to see as part of a protest movement – a former SEC regulator, a professor of financial law and several bankers, all of whom are thinking about and discussing how to create a better financial system. I was pretty amazed, at the first meeting, at who showed up. That was early on and I think it was wrong of me to do, because one of the things that’s become clear about OWS is it’s not about manifestos. Its own manifesto is so broad that you could sit a hundred manifestos within it. It’s such a diverse movement that I don’t think anybody can claim to articulate what the movement as a whole wants. But in groups like the alternative banking group we are trying to substantiate a vision, a change through practical design. We are getting down to the details of what a bank or banking system would look like that is democratic but universally accessible – including, above all, to the poor. One that did not engage in the behaviours that the banks have indulged in recently which put the entire global economy at such risk. We’re not talking about setting up a little credit union, we’re talking about setting up something that is national or even global. That is much better than the current set of profit-seeking banks that we have, who not only have exposed all of us to extraordinary risk but also, frankly, provided a very poor service. It’s had an extraordinary impact. I passed a store today that, obnoxiously but nonetheless interestingly, was advertising its goods as “crockery for the 99%” – it used mock demonstration placards in its display, altered to advertise their crockery. When you see that happening, or you see the chef Mario Batali comparing bankers to Stalin, you know that you’re having a cultural effect. People are beginning to feel the vibration of what the Occupy movement is about. But in terms of its future direction and what OWS achieves as a movement, that is very much open to question at the moment. In the discussions I’m seeing down at Zuccotti Park, OWS is finding it very difficult to achieve the level of organisation that will enable it to gain momentum. That’s a problem, and it’s why the groups that are working on practical things like an alternative banking system are very important. I do think a political movement of this kind will be very limited if it is only about protest. I certainly think that voting is insufficient. But I don’t think it’s worthless. Government still has extraordinary power and it matters who runs government. It matters a lot. But my preferred model of change is not lobbying government to do things differently, or voting for different politicians. I think the existing system has been thoroughly corrupted and that therefore we have to build an alternative system. I don’t mean declaring an Independent Republic of Zuccotti Park. I mean building companies that are cooperatively owned and share wealth amongst partners, rather than having privately owned companies where CEOs are paid 300 times more than the minimum wage employees. It is not absurdly idealistic to imagine such companies. Indeed they already exist, and are very successful in Britain and Spain for instance. A bank of the kind I’ve talked about is a plausible possibility. I’ve talked to incredibly serious financial experts who really know this field and say this is doable. The method of decision-making down at Zuccotti Park – of what is called the deliberative democracy, where everybody is allowed to speak and where decisions are taken after talking collectively – is a much better model of how to govern ourselves than representative legislatures that are often corrupted and sclerotic. Systems of mass participation in self-government do work elsewhere. In Porto Alegre, Brazil, 50,000 people participate in the budgeting process. Studies show services are shared more equally where there is more equality and less government corruption. These seem to be desirable objectives, and the methods of achieving them are not pie in the sky. They’re not the declaration of some kind of utopia. They are very practical and achievable things, but they do require people to actually set them up."