Is there some name for the intellectual maneuver of waiting till an opponent is dead, then insisting he must really have agreed with you all along? “Respect,” I’m sure, is not it.
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The Edge of the American West 
17 comments
December 18, 2011 at 9:58 am
TF Smith
Who was it that Douthat replaced? Will? Buckley?
I wonder if he would use it as an argument that evolution is operating in reverse…
December 18, 2011 at 11:58 am
saintneko
The day I discovered that Op-Ed was secret synonym for “do not read” was the second best day of my life.
December 18, 2011 at 12:56 pm
BP in MN
TF, I think that would be hard to argue. Douthat actually replaced Bill Kristol, so it’s more an argument for some sort of principle of conservation of op-ed hackitude.
December 18, 2011 at 4:50 pm
politicalfootball
Okay, Douthat is being condescending here, but I don’t think he was particularly disrespectful of Hitchens’ convictions. Douthat isn’t saying that Hitchens would have agreed about God; just that Hitchens was wrong, and that deep down Hitchens must have intuited his error. He could have said something similar to or about Hitchens while Hitchens was alive.
I had a similar conversation once with a good friend that went something like this:
Friend: “I know, deep down, that you believe in God.”
Me: “That’s a terribly condescending thing to say – implying that I don’t know my own mind. Besides, I’ve always been pretty sure that you are aware, deep down, that God doesn’t exist.”
Douthat is right that among the New Atheists, Hitchens was the most amenable friendly banter of this sort, though Douthat is (by my reckoning) incorrect that Hitchens now appreciates his error.
December 18, 2011 at 5:14 pm
Anderson
I married into some Lutherans and have attended to their theology, which I think is consistent with that of Augustine and Paul. Belief in God is entirely the gift of God himself, unearned by the believer.
So on that old-school theory, it makes no sense to argue that Hitchens or any other atheist “really” believed in God. Disbelief is the normal, fallen condition, and no believing Christian has any right to condemn an atheist, given that the Christian is powerless to explain why he is not himself an atheist.
(Sure, Douthat is Catholic so probably has a complex workaround for why the foregoing is not R.C. dogma. Paul was not by any means a consistent theologian.)
December 18, 2011 at 5:16 pm
eric
Douthat is being condescending here, but I don’t think he was particularly disrespectful
It’s difficult to pull off both condescending and respectful. If it can be done, Douthat isn’t the man to do it.
December 18, 2011 at 11:48 pm
Moby Hick
Would you like a lesson, kind sir?
December 19, 2011 at 4:46 am
erubin
This reads more like The Believer’s Archie Bunker.
December 19, 2011 at 9:28 am
booferama
All this hinges, as many of the Hitchens tributes do, on “I partied with Chris Hitchens. What a nice man.”
December 19, 2011 at 11:34 am
Ralph Hitchens
booferama has it right; we’ve seen far too much booze-soaked hagiography. Still, I can hardly begrudge my namesake this posthumous recognition; where there is so much smoke there surely was considerable fire. As for Douhat, this was a clear case of wishful thinking, not at all malicious or duplicious. He’s done much worse.
December 19, 2011 at 12:03 pm
KSG
“But it also hints at the way that atheism — especially a public and famous atheism — can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation.”
Alas, he will never receive a Hitch-slap for that statement.
December 19, 2011 at 2:06 pm
ben
I rather like “duplicious”.
December 19, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Michael H Schneider
All the dead lurkers he’s contacted by E-Ouija agree with him.
December 20, 2011 at 7:44 am
rea
Belief in God is entirely the gift of God himself, unearned by the believer
I have heard Christian reconstructionists argue that god created us all knowing the literal truth of the Bible, and that anyone taking a contrary positon could not be doing so in good faith.
December 20, 2011 at 3:20 pm
Emma in Sydney
Given his belief in Hell and its role in providing humanity with meaning (see Delong for refs), Douthat is actually pointing out that Hitchens is at this moment experiencing eternal torment, and aware of why he is there. Which is more honest than most Christians usually are about what they think will happen to us atheists, but hardly respectful.
December 20, 2011 at 8:48 pm
TF Smith
BP – The entropy of conservative hackery?
December 21, 2011 at 5:07 pm
Indiana Joe
If I had more artistic talent, I would draw a cartoon of St Peter on the phone with his opposite number saying, “OK, if Hitchens isn’t down there, and he’s not up here, then where is he?”