Seven: Hitchens’ Sentence
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. (P. 150)
From ‘god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything’, Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Books, 2007
My pace of reading has slowed down, and the commitment to myself fading. The only excuse is that LIFE came in the way. But here I am trying to get it all together. I am currently reading a book, gifted to me by a friend, named Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. I have reached exactly the part where she speaks of Strategic Mediocrity. It is when you do not attempt perfection but strive for consistency. The primary reason for taking the extended break was the pressure I put on myself to get it perfect and make it sound amazing. Reading Le Cunff, I feel that I need to reduce that pressure to achieve an amazing piece and just concentrate on consistently putting something out there, not for someone else, but for myself.
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Back in September 2020, after the first COVID-19 lockdown and when things seemed like they were heading toward normalcy, I decided to buy a Kindle. The purchase was made with a similar commitment: a device that could hold several books, and with no distractions; the primary agenda was to read more. In this gusto, the first purchase was made of a book that I was meaning to read for quite some time, having had it in my Amazon basket for nearly a year: ‘god is not Great’by Christopher Hitchens. The device proved useful, and I quickly finished reading the book. I found out that God in the title is purposefully written with a small g and not a capital G. This is where Hitchens starts his attack by stating that god is, truly, not great and there is nothing great about the worship of god. Using fairly complicated terms and powerful arguments, the book is difficult to read, but most enjoyable. Imagine Shahi Tharoor on steroids.
The sentence resonated with me particularly because of the online mode of teaching that we were forced to adopt during the lockdown. Interactions with students and colleagues were mostly online, and the work produced by them was largely digital (I’m not sure how the second part is different now, but it felt very new at the time). Students started putting their work into a slideshow for an online platform and supplemented the lack of drawing with extended talking. This is also the time when I came across the song Talk is Cheap by Chet Faker. I choose to take his words out of context most of the time since it serves my purposes, and not those of Faker. Students drew less and spoke more. They expected that you, as the teacher, would be impressed when they used words to fill in the gaps where their drawings fell short. And so, talk slowly became the main means of discussion, and drawings became secondary. As an architect or a teacher in an architecture school, a drawing made using a standardised method is a universal means of communication. When talk supersedes the drawing, the problem begins. Not all people that we, as architects, work with understand our language and/or our complicated narratives. In my opinion, a good architect needs to produce good drawings that can be read by many people, who might not be architects themselves. In such a case, talk can truly be cheap and more so, confusing. Both the statements made by Hitchens and by Faker, in varying degrees of sophistication, came to embody what I had learnt as a teacher on an online platform, that our work must speak, and we must strive to speak less ourselves.
What Hitchens meant, which Faker did not, was that when people assert an argument without evidence, they do not have the right to demand evidence from people in the opposition. He specifically made the statement, in his book, concerning how religious people usually assert that the existence of god needs no evidence, using the logic of the god of the gaps to make their assertion, but in the same breath demand evidence from non-believers as to why they do not believe in the same god. Hitchens was pointing to the internal hypocrisy of the faithful that they choose to use scientific evidence to prove god’s existence, but then turn around and dismiss relevant evidence to the contrary. The book presents multiple arguments where Hitchens demolishes organised religion and its methods of justifying its own actions.
I enjoyed the book, though I needed some time, a dictionary, and a whole bunch of patience to get through it. Hitchens proved most useful in my own journey from faith and back to it in a different form. Though difficult to read, the challenge presented by Hitchens was one that I enjoyed at the time. Reading this book definitely made me feel briefly smart, intelligent even.
