Hitchens on 9/11: "Simply Evil"; Wilson on Hitchens: "Simply Incoherent"

Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate on 9/11, argues:

The proper task of the "public intellectual" might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either. To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and "unbelievers," and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.

Douglas Wilson, writing at The Gospel Coalition, praises (most of) the article: "All this is Hitchens doing what Hitchens does best, and he does it for most of his article. And then, fulfilling the promise of the title ('Simply Evil'), he veers into incoherence at the very end when he only had about two column inches to go." Specifically, Hitchens says that "The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called 'evil.'" Wilson of course agrees. But who is Hitchens to say?

Hitchens has to borrow capital from the Christian worldview to make this work. Wilson explains:

Evil? Imagine there's no heaven, Lennon urged us. It's easy if you try. No hell below us—nothing to kill or die for. If you say things like this, certain other things follow. Hitchens has been in the front ranks of the new militant atheists, and he has made a great show of being the kind of contrarian who is willing to say absolutely anything, provided it only be true. We have to grow up, Hitchens has said. We have to reject outmoded concepts. We have to get rid of the idea that there is a God in heaven, telling us the difference between right and wrong. But if these things be true, then there are other things that follow. For some reason, Hitchens is willing to affirm the premises but will not own any of the obvious conclusions. You cannot throw away your suitcase at the beginning of your journey, and then, as you are nearing the end of the trip, pull out all the things that you packed in it. There may be shrewd ways of avoiding baggage handling fees, but that's not one of them.

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