Musings on a Sultry Friday Afternoon

Leafing through contributions during a rare tranquil moment today, I found this from Mr Nigel Falls, who has been besieging me with peremptory tweets about drugs and ‘addiction’. I can’t think of a worse medium than Twitter in which to hold such a discussion (for some reason Paul Embery, of whom we now see so little here, has turned up there too, anxious to re-engage me on the subject of God, another subject unfitted for 140-character snippets, as it has proved.) .

 

So I am pleased to welcome Mr Falls here, where facts and logic can be properly deployed, an index is available, and books can be recommended and even read.

 

He writes : ‘I am proud to say I am one of the tedious people besieging Mr Hitchens on Twitter about his infuriating belief that addiction does not exist. I must add that I am from Northern Ireland so the intransigent, siege mentality is second nature to me. Mr Hitchens puts absolute faith in the misanthropic musings of Theodore Dalrymple whilst scornfully dismissing the majority opinion of clinicians and the anecdotal experiences of former addicts on this matter. All Dalrymple's book ‘Junk Science’ proved to me was Mr Dalrymple was in great need of a career change as he so obviously despised the people he dealt with on a professional capacity but that is just my opinion. The crux of Mr Hitchens's argument seems to me a semantic one as addiction cannot be objectively defined by scientific tests its existence amounts to an absurd piece of conventional wisdom. Mr Hitchens frequently cites Orwell's brilliant Essay "Politics and the English Language" as a major influence in his highly readable (I grudgingly concede) journalistic style. In it Orwell says "Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this" Mr Hitchens is doing exactly what Orwell warns us against by reducing the argument for the existence of addiction to the absurd on semantic grounds. Anyway thank you for the interesting debate Mr Hitchens. I do apologise if I may have bored you almost to sleep with my arguments but then again some people pay good money for narcotic substances which have the same effect.’

 

Almost all of this, apart from the empty, ad hominem attacks on Dr Dalrymple, is dealt with in my exchange with ‘Citizen Sane’ , which is recorded here: http://citizensane.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/youre-gonna-have-to-face-it-youre-addicted-to-peter-hitchens/

 

I’m amused by the attempt to use Orwell against me here . The relevant passage (right at the end of that incomparable  essay, which can be found in full here  https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm )

 

 

Is as follows :

 

‘I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs. ‘

 

Well, I don’t claim that abstract words are meaningless, only that they cannot be used to describe material things, and that abstract concepts cannot be treated as if they had material existence. And I certainly don’t advocate quietism.  If addiction is abstract, as Mr ‘Falls’ seems to concede, then it cannot be a disease of the human body beyond the control of the person suffering from it, and so cannot be ‘treated’ as if it were .  It must be (as it is ) a concept. And a concept of what? Why, of a certain moral standpoint which denies the existence of free will. As this is fundamentally a religious question, one chooses whether one accepts the existence of free will or not, depending on what sort of world one wishes to inhabit.

 

This is the beginning of a sensible discussion of what it is, in that case.  But such a discussion can only be held once Mr ‘Falls’ has accepted the need to argue on the basis of evidence and fact, rather than on the basis of his passions. And, where evidence and fact run out ( as they do in questions of faith) to concede that certain things must, this side of the grave, remain a matter of opinion. Next, to see that a rival opinion cannot necessarily be classified as ‘wrong’. It must be admitted as a legitimate possibility to be considered.

And on what grounds should we consider it, and on what basis will we choose whether to believe it in preference to a rival idea? Here's why teh God argumnet matters so much.  The choice between them is then a moral or theological one. What the ‘addiction is a disease’ faction cannot accept is that their standpoint is a questionable opinion about free will, not an undeniable fact about physiology.

 

By the way, I have seen ‘Citizen Sane’ criticised for having in some way surrendered to me thanks to an alleged awe of my celebrity. Well, I see no evidence for this. he retains his indendence through our exchange. As for overaweing anyone,  I’m not that majestic a figure (5 feet nine inches in my socks, overweight, big nose,  bad typist etc ) and it’s amazing how many of my other Internet opponents manage *not* to be overawed by this effect., and address me as 'you ****'.  

 

To return to Orwell, ‘Fascism’ has actually become meaningless because of the abusive and lazy use of the word as an all-purpose insult or denigration by left-wing propagandists. Its only serious meaning now is ‘to do with the Fascist government of Italy under Mussolini’.  At the root of this problem was the difficulty which the Comintern, and later the Cominform, had with the expressions ‘Nazi’ and ‘National Socialist’ . ‘Nazi’ always called into mind ‘Nazi-Soviet Pact’, an event the Left wish to forget or (increasingly) have never heard of and would rather not hear of, thank you kindly.

 

 ‘National Socialist’ has obvious problems for any left-wing propagandist who wants to pretend that barbaric authoritarian despotisms are  conservative in origin. In fact it's utopian 'enlightenment' ideas that usually inform them. 

 

 I won’t even begin to discuss the problems of matching the NSDAP and Mussolini up to General Franco, or Salazar, or Marshal Petain. It would be as time-consuming and useless as trying to draw up a street plan (with bus map) of the Lost City of Atlantis.

 

But if one wishes to deal with the abstraction ‘Totalitarianism’ all one needs to do is to introduce such things as :

 

‘National Socialist Party’ , or ‘Gestapo’,  or ‘OVRA; or ‘Fascist Party’ , or ‘Pravda’ or ‘Voelkischer Beobachter’ or ‘People’s Court’ (and how like Judge Jefferys’ Bloody Assize was to Roland Freisler’s horrible trials, or Andrei Vyshinksy’s Moscow equivalents, can be seen in Conan Doyle’s tremendous description of Jefferys in action in ‘Micah Clarke’) , or SS, or Gulag, or NKVD; or in the modern day, the Chinese Lao Gai.

 

And then one can see that these things have actual objective, material and human manifestations which are far from abstract, can be measured, studied,  in many cases photographed, always documented.

 

Addiction has no such characteristics. It remains both physically unmeasurable and logically and verbally slippery, meaning one thing at one time, and another at a different time, depending on which part of the argument is being advanced. It was (as the record shows) through this question of definition that I managed to persuade ‘Citizen Sane’ of the (very simple) point that I repeatedly make. He was able to concede it because he was able to subordinate his passions and his desires to his reason.  Far from being a  demonstration of weakness or subservience, it was a considerable demonstration of character and intelligence.