Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with Conservative journalist and author and Peter Hitchens. 26/06/2024
Peter Hitchens, Conservative journalist and author, is interviewed by host of The Sacred podcast, Elizabeth Oldfield.
In this episode, we spoke about Peter’s finding and losing faith in socialism, the role of journalism in forming our opinions, and his unexpected encounter with God.
Introduction: What does ‘fully aliveness’ mean to you?
Elizabeth
Peter, we are going to kick off with a new question that I’m asking people that hopefully will allow us to grasp towards something, even if it’s not your standard question you get asked every day, which is: what does fully aliveness mean to you?
Peter Hitchens
Well, in my life, it’s often associated with exhilaration and fear to things which intensify life enormously and make you realise who and what you are more intensely than anything else.
Elizabeth
Could you say more about where those things tend to show up?
Peter Hitchens
Well, in my life, they’ve tended to show up in the mad foreign countries that I’ve visited quite a lot of. When you’re far away from what is familiar and normal you’re more vulnerable to surprises and shocks and also more on your own, though, generally, these things have happened to me when I’ve been in company with valued friends.
Elizabeth
Are you talking about… you’ve written about being shot at, being caught up in riots, those kinds of moments?
Peter Hitchens
Yes, that sort of thing, but not always. Sometimes it’s purely joyous, the collapse of the communist regime in Prague on a couple of very cold winter’s days in 1989 had something of that feeling. Exhilaration was so strong at the fall of something wicked, and combined that with extreme cold, I’d actually bought some communist long johns to withstand the extreme cold, but it was still very cold.
Elizabeth
Have you sought out those kinds of experiences in your life to get that feeling?
Peter Hitchens
No. If you ask me that question, I’ll tell you that is largely the truth. I mean, there are obviously many other areas in life where you get something comparable or similar, but those are the obvious ones.
Elizabeth
Well, let’s we’ll come back to that. But I also want to ask you about your deep values and the language that I am familiar with is sacred values. They’re really these deep things that if someone offered us money to compromise on, we’d feel disgusted. We’d feel like something had been transgressed. You can think about them as the things that we want to orient our lives, that we want to live by, even if, of course, we sometimes fail at that as very fallible humans. Do any values come to mind that you have tried to live by that might take that sacred place for you?
Peter Hitchens
I don’t try to live by values. I don’t think that would describe the way I approach it at all. But I think I get angriest at attempts to pervert either truth or justice.
Elizabeth
Could you say a bit more about what those two things mean to you?
Peter Hitchens
Not really. No, they seem to me to be to be quite unmistakable when you meet them. And also, it seems to me to be quite obvious whenever you encounter anybody who is trying to destroy or overcome them, because it’s not a problem. The problem is, how and whether you resist.
Elizabeth
Yes. This is often how guests who are less clear on what those North Stars or compass points are for them. I often say, can you think of a time in your life where you felt the temptation to compromise something deep, whether you did or didn’t?
Peter Hitchens
Several, yes.
Elizabeth
Do you mind telling us a bit about that?
Peter Hitchens
I mind a lot. Yes.
Elizabeth
Tell us about your childhood, what were the big ideas in the air?
Peter Hitchens
There weren’t any. My childhood was just a sort of blissful dream when I was allowed to get on with doing what I wanted for months on end. Until quite late on in life, I wasn’t given any moral instruction of any real shape until I was about 7 or 8. Attempts must have been made, but they passed me by.
Elizabeth
Am I imagining you kind of running wild in the woods? Climbing trees?
Peter Hitchens
Yes, that sort of thing. Riding my bicycle over the South Downs on long afternoons, completely unsupervised, nothing. I had to carry four proper pennies in my pocket, so that I could ring my mother at some point and let her know roughly where I was and when I might be coming back. That was it.
Elizabeth
Sounds wonderful.
Peter Hitchens
It was, and it’s extraordinary how quickly it’s come to an end to the next generation of children.
Elizabeth
Yes, I spoke to Jonathan Haidt for our last series, who’s really arguing for this. We’re over–protecting children in the real world and under–protecting them online. And it’s really, I hope, shifting a generation of parenting to let children take risks again.
Peter Hitchens
Yes, not so easy though if you’re the one who takes the risk, and it goes wrong. That’s the difficulty. That’s the huge pressure on every parent. You think, all right, let’s try it the other way, and then it goes wrong and it’s your fault. It can go wrong. Actually, the people that go on about how people are afraid of having their children abducted and, of course, the whole Myra Hindley thing, which happened during my childhood, changed lots of attitudes. But the chance of that happening to is very slender, the real menace, as in so many other ways it is a menace, the real menace is motor traffic and the way in which it simply isn’t compatible with children.
Elizabeth
Yeah. And knowing where the edges of that is…
Peter Hitchens
We just didn’t have it. Yeah, cars came, and then there was a long gap before the next one came.
Elizabeth
Yeah, more space. Well, kind of in the background of that, and maybe becoming clearer as you went off to school, you’ve written about being sort of raised as a young English gentleman in an era where that was even passing away.
Peter Hitchens
Nobody said that. That was just what was around me and what I absorbed.
Elizabeth
Your father was a naval officer?
Peter Hitchens
Yes, but by the time I was coming into consciousness, his time in the Navy was coming to an end. One of the first things I can remember is the word ‘Suez’ being constantly on the radio, and of him one morning getting up and in full uniform, gold braid and the lot, getting up and getting a rusty old bicycle out of the garden shed, and pumping up the tires to ride to the nearest station. Because there was no petrol. Because one of the effects of the Suez crisis was there was actually petrol rationing, and naval officers don’t ride bicycles, at least they didn’t then. So that was all coming to an end. It was, in fact, Suez which put an end to his life of the Navy, because after Suez, so many of the great institutions of Britain and the Empire were wound up or shrunk, and he was one of the victims of that.
Elizabeth
Could you say a bit more about that? Because it was one of the things in Rage Against God that was new to me. You trace this kind of intellectual trajectory of this world that you were raised in, you said it was more like the 40s and 50s, than the 50s and 60s.
Peter Hitchens
The 30s really, I think if I met somebody who was raised in the 1930s in the class of naval officers’ children, I would have more in common with him or her than with anybody who grew up, even at the time that I did, who didn’t do that. It was a very old–fashioned world.
Elizabeth
Yes, and the sense that I had is, is a view being raised with almost this sense that the Empire was still present, that British power in the world, that these institutions and that Suez was this real turn?
Peter Hitchens
Well, it wasn’t. It just takes a long time for people to realise that things have gone, that institutions have lost their power, that morals have lost their force, particularly if you continue to live close to those things as you previously did in physical circumstances where the outward signs of them are still present. It takes a while.
Elizabeth
And it was a sense of a loss of legitimacy of authority, is that a fair summary?
Peter Hitchens
There was definitely loss of authority. You could tell they no longer had confidence in themselves. I didn’t know why it was. I’m naturally a nuisance. As a child, I was a nuisance the kind of the kind of child who doesn’t necessarily do what he’s told when he’s told to do it. And I found quite early on at school that, if you pushed against authority, it gave in in a way which I don’t think it would have done 20 years before, even 10 years before. And I think Suez was at the heart of that. They’d made such complete fools of themselves, nobody, from the vicar to the policeman, or the teacher, really had the authority they previously had. I say that now I didn’t realise that was what was going on at the time, but I did notice how easy it was to push. You know the Lenin Maxim.
Elizabeth
Which one?
Peter Hitchens
It’s take bayonet, insert it. If you encounter mush, continue to push. If you encounter steel, try somewhere else.
Elizabeth
There was a lot of mush around?
Peter Hitchens
There was a lot of mush around, yes.
Christian boarding school, brotherhood and the draw to left–wing politics
Elizabeth
You talk about your family not being particularly church going, not much Christianity at home, but really strongly at school.
Peter Hitchens
Yeah, every morning, we would have quite a substantial number of prayers, and always a couple of the of the more classic hymns. So that would be every morning. On Sunday, we’d have a full rig morning prayer out of the Book of Common Prayer.
Elizabeth
And do you remember a time where it was…
Peter Hitchens
I should just add to that, by the way, I went to several schools. One of the schools I went to was a Cathedral Choir school. And so, the intensity of the religious experience there was much, much stronger, although I wasn’t in the choir. I can’t sing, which was evident from very early age. The cathedral was about 100 yards from the back gate of the school, we’d all go across for evensong every day. So that was an unusual experience for most people. I tend to think that the combination of the Royal Navy and the Church of England at that point, very powerful influences on me, and I just got them both for nothing at those quarters.
Elizabeth
This feels like it’s potentially straying into psychobabble here, but the sense I have is that for some people raised with a religious formation, whether it’s through school or home, that for some people, it’s sort of background noise, and for some people, they have a deep sense of God, of an interior kind of religious life themselves. Which category would have you put yourself into as a younger child.
Peter Hitchens
Well, no I didn’t like it much.
Elizabeth
So, it wasn’t a great loss when you decided that you were an atheist?
Peter Hitchens
Well, it was a natural progression from where I’d been, I had begun to doubt, or practically anything, anybody had told me I was the usual 12–year–old troublemaker who didn’t take anything that he was told. And quite obviously, if you were going to be that person, one of the things you were going to begin to turn against was going to be religion, because so much fuss was being made about it by your teachers. So, you would.
Elizabeth
Yes. And you obviously, probably weren’t conscious of at the time, but looking back, do you think of it as related to that loss of authority, that loss of legitimacy of the generation above? You’ve spoken about them as really defeated and not wanting to…
Peter Hitchens
Not really, no. I don’t think so. I think I would have done that anyway.
Elizabeth
You famously invited an audience to burn a Bible.
Peter Hitchens
A small audience.
Elizabeth
A small audience, yes. Were they ticketed?
Peter Hitchens
No, it was just on a playing field. I think there was some stupid rugby game going at the time, And I and my companions were bored with it, so I said, “Let’s go and burn my Bible.” It wasn’t a success.
Elizabeth
They’re not very burnable.
Peter Hitchens
No, they’re not very burnable.
Elizabeth
You have to rip them up quite a lot, I think.
Peter Hitchens
I think maybe, but I hadn’t had any practice, so everybody drifted away. Yes, as an event, it was a flop. Yes, in fact, that’s probably why I remember it. The flops and embarrassing disasters in your life are the things which are carved deeper into your memory than anything else, I find.
Elizabeth
Yes, that shame acts as a kind of photographic developer on memory, doesn’t it? It really stays. You went to lots of different schools, and there’s a real thing at the moment about lots of people talking about boarding school experiences that were difficult. You’ve said you weren’t really cut out for some of them. How would you describe it?
Peter Hitchens
No, I quite, liked the boarding school I went from the age of about nine to the age of 9–13. It was beautiful grounds with a river running through it. We were allowed to do pretty much what we wanted most of the time. There weren’t too many silly rules, and actually, the teaching was extremely good. I never held anything against that. What I wasn’t really prepared for was, at the age of 13, going on to a minor public school, where I just continually thought, how have I come to be abandoned among these people I had nothing in common with and why I had to sleep in the same room as them at night? It’s never appealed to me this business of communal sleeping, and it appeals me less and less as I grew older. And my brother went to the same school and actually had, by his own account, a great time. It fitted him. He somehow got on with it, but not I. So, we came to a mutual disagreement, and I left.
Elizabeth
You left the same school that he was at?
Peter Hitchens
He left it by then he was older than me, right? I left, I think, the year after he had left. But that had nothing whatever to do with it. It was being caught trying to break into a government nuclear fallout shelter that brought things to a head! I think I was probably still rescuable had I wanted to stay and had they particularly wanted me to stay. But I think both of us realised that it wasn’t a relationship that was made in heaven.
Elizabeth
Okay we’re going to have to hear more about that!
Peter Hitchens
There’s not much to say!
Elizabeth
My guess is, that your socialism was already beginning to be quite live by that point?
Peter Hitchens
Leftism, whether it actually had the coherence to be called socialism, I don’t know. But a sort of general tiresome…
Elizabeth
So, it wasn’t a random prank? It was politically motivated?
Peter Hitchens
Oh no, it was nuclear disarmament and the Vietnam War and all that stuff as well.
Elizabeth
Who introduced you to it?
Peter Hitchens
Oh, my brother. He came home in 1964, I can date this very easily. I don’t think he’d been particularly political before. when he went off to this school, first of all, he came back, and he was just like any other public–school boy. But then the Christmas of ‘64 he came back, infused with political fervour. He’d been the Labour candidate in the school election during the general election of October that year, and I think that had brought it to a head. And it seemed to give him a great deal of fun. And it also provided a sort of scaffolding on which you could build all kinds of other things. And it appealed to me, so I took it on.
Elizabeth
Do you think you were looking for an ideology?
Peter Hitchens
I wasn’t looking for an ideology, but I was looking for a reason to do things. I mean, you might say that’s the same thing, but I don’t think I was anything like capable enough to require an actual ideology or worldview at that stage, that came later.
Elizabeth
Yes, I ask because you’ve written, I think, quite persuasively about actually, it’s very hard to function without a guiding set of ideas. And you’d received this the sort of Britain of the early 20th century had a guiding set of ideas, at least on the last legs, and they were failing. And so, the draw towards a way of explaining the world and giving you a role.
Peter Hitchens
I’m sure that was part of it, yes, no doubt I’ve said so, and it is. ‘Ideologies’ seems like quite a grandiose word for what I was actually experiencing.
Elizabeth
Paint me a picture of that season of your life. What were you up to? Who were you with?
Peter Hitchens
A lot of it, I spent at school sitting in classrooms! So, I that’s I fell into bad company at school, as some people do, and I did, didn’t help. But basically, I was, I would say, imprisoned, confined in this place until I was about 16.
Elizabeth
And then released and part of International Socialism?
Peter Hitchens
I joined the International Socialists in 1968, I don’t think I should have done I think, they may have had a minimum age, which I evaded. But I joined in ‘68, but that was more than a year after I’d left school.
Elizabeth
Yeah. It’s quite a common stage in a lot of people’s life, this draw to socialism, this draw to the left. We’re seeing it now, with a whole generation coming through some kind of revival.
Peter Hitchens
It’s a cliché. When people ask me that, so what? It’s so completely uninteresting that someone becomes left wing when he’s a teenager. Do you have anything else more important to ask about?
Elizabeth
I would love to know, in the most generous interpretation that you can either of your former self or the generation drawn to it now, what are they seeing? What are they longing for when they get interested in Marxism or its affiliation?
Peter Hitchens
Well, anybody who looks at the world with any care sees enormous amounts of injustice of people who are living lives worse than the ones you lead, particularly if you’re middle class, and quite possibly worse than they need to be. And so, you engage quite readily and quite reasonably in trying to think of ways of making that better. And if someone comes along and says to you, well, there are ideas by which these improvements could be made, which you might want to support, then it’s appealing. It’s not complicated.
Elizabeth
No. And help me understand the timeline here, because you had a lot of faith in that way of seeing, that methodology for making the world a better place. But you’re also becoming a journalist, which happened first?
Peter Hitchens
Oh well, I wasn’t anything remotely resembling a proper journalist, really until…
I mean, I put in my who’s who entry that I did a stint on The Socialist Worker in 1972, partly to annoy my old comrades, and partly because I absolutely refused to hide my left–wing past. But it was just summer job doing a few things, the occasional feature. I remember having what’s going down to write about some milk strike. But it wasn’t proper journalism as I now see it. I became a full–time apprentice reporter in 1973 and I started full–time work.
Losing faith in socialism: York, Swindon Moscow
Elizabeth
And as you were losing faith in the revolution, what drove that?
Peter Hitchens
Oh, it had no connection with reality. I was at university in York, which was one of the new plate glass universities of the late 60s, and I was there in the early 70s. And it was as if the spaceship had been lowered down from outer space.
Elizabeth
I went there, also. I know it well.
Peter Hitchens
And in ‘73, it was new, and even more, cut off, really, from the surroundings. I’ve been back since and what I tend to find when I go back is that I’m revisiting an earlier version of the modern world. All the sexual rules, the rules about drugs, about behaviour, about dress and everything else, which have now become totally normal and unexceptional, were pioneered there. That’s how people lived. When you then went, as I did, to work on the Swindon Evening Advertiser in a pretty prosaic and restrained industrial town, it became quickly apparent that the ideas which seemed to make sense in those circumstances didn’t make sense.
And also, the other thing which makes sense was, the Marxist makes enemies out of practically everybody. And I found that the people that I had to deal with as a reporter on the Swindon Evening Advertiser, the Tory councillors, the police officers, the vicars, and all the rest of the council. They were not the bourgeois monsters that I’d been taught to believe, and it was just insupportable. Also, as a lot of defectors from Marxism do, I was reading a lot of Arthur Koestler, and particularly a book of his, not widely known, called Arrival and Departure, which explores the problem that an awful lot of world reformers really need to reform themselves. They’re not they’re not quite in touch with reality. And I remember, we used to get people who would write in to The Socialist Worker asking for more information, and as I was the representative of the organisation in Swindon, if anybody from Swindon did this, it was passed on to me, and I would go out on Friday nights on my bicycle and visit them and see if they were good prospects. And one of them lived in a village outside Swindon. I remember it was a very wet, windy night, but I still went out into the wind and the rain to this cottage. This very rangy, gaunt man and his wife, who was obviously terrified of him in this quite squalid cottage. And he talked, actually more or less like a lunatic. And I made some inquiries about him, and he had previously been in touch with the organisation in Bath, and they said he actually had a firearm and they’d had to lock him up in the cellar once. So, it encouraged the idea, in my mind, that actually the far left was not just inapplicable practically, but also tended to attract people who were not really quite right in the mind.
Elizabeth
You’ve written a little bit about a trip to Prague and various meetings
Peter Hitchens
Oh, that’s much later, that.
Elizabeth
Okay, tell me about this theme of freedom, because at points in your writing, I can really hear, when you’re attempting to be very generous to the analysis of the problems that the left come up with, it’s the solutions that you disagree with, and it’s because you feel like those solutions are not applicable without restrictions on freedom, is that a fair summary?
Peter Hitchens
Well almost everything is going to restrict somebody’s freedom, on this as on so many things, Karl Marx was right. No man fights freedom. He fights close to freedom of others. It’s a banality. Anybody who tries to make freedom into a principle, which I think some people do on the supposed right, because they can’t stomach Christianity is embracing a nonsense. You can’t advance the freedom of X without diminishing the freedom of Y. You never will be able to. And a government is about balancing these things, it’s not about tearing along, making X wholly free and Y wholly restraint. Or, if it is, it will lead to disaster.
Elizabeth
And you became a foreign correspondent with a particularly formative time in Moscow. Could you say a little bit more about how you think that time shaped you and shaped your thinking?
Peter Hitchens
Well, it didn’t shape me. I already knew what I needed to know. I long ago abandoned Marxism when I went to Moscow. I really knew how bad it was in theory. You couldn’t, have done without living there, what I hadn’t grasped was how bad it was in practice. There were aspects of it as well, which didn’t fully take shape in my own mind until I’d left. And, when I came back here, I was actually abroad for about 5 years, I was in the Soviet Union for two– and a–bit years, and then there’s brief gap, and I did a lot of travelling, then a couple of years in the United States. In my experience, other people may find different, working as a resident foreign correspondent is a bit like being an astronaut. You’re a weightless, you’re outside all the normal rules of life, the money is different, the language is different, the whole world that you knew, and which gave you your signposts and warnings isn’t there. You have to learn to live a completely different way. And it’s extremely exhilarating, as I said, and also sometimes quite frightening. But it’s coming back to Earth when you come back after five years in these weird circumstances to an ordinary, suburban, commuting life of offices and all the rest of it are one of the most forceful moments of my life. That’s over now, I’m back. I’m not weightless anymore. I’m out of orbit, and I won’t probably be going back into it. And that caused me to think a great deal about my own country, which I’d left in one condition and come back to and found in another. And I would ceaselessly find small things, little inefficiencies, surlinesses, nastinesses, or indeed, bits of legislation which made me think, what does that remind me of? I can’t think. Where have I come across this before? And after a while, it came to me that an awful lot of it reminded me of the Soviet Union.
The most powerful thing was the growing disdain for the married family and for the freedom of women to bring up their own children. Because in the Soviet Union, it had been a state policy that the state was, to some extent, the main parent and the parents of children were compelled by the wage system to go out to work very early on and leave their children in state nurseries for a lot of the time. And the upbringing of the child was taken over by the state, which was the Communist Party. And I also discovered, I mentioned it in the book, and it remains very important to me, a small park in part of Moscow called Krasnopresnenskaya (Red Presnya) and it was unusual. A lot of the statues you found were very monotonous. It was Lenin, Lenin, Lenin everywhere you went. Lenin here, Lenin there, even Lenin in the backyard. But on this occasion, it wasn’t Lenin. It was a child. And I looked at the inscription, I hadn’t really been aware of this before, I should have been, but I was not. It was to a child called Pavlik Morozov, which basically means Paul Frost. And he probably doesn’t exist, there’s now been a lot of research into him. But he was a national martyr of the Soviet Union. I think in some famine, he denounced his own parents to the secret police and then been killed by his grandfather in revenge for this act of treachery. And so, he became the national martyr. There were quite a lot of memorials to him, and his pictures of him were put up in Young Pioneer assembly rooms, and they were taught to revere this ghastly traitor. And one of my translators and fixers, who was supplied to me by the KGB, even she shuddered in horror at that aspect of her childhood when I discussed it with her. It was a hateful thing, but it was true. It had actually happened, and that statue was there. Oddly enough, when they swept away all the Soviet statues, when the thing finally collapsed in August 1991, the statue to Feliks Dzierzynski, was found in the KGB and a lot of the Lenins were put in a special park near the river, some of them would’ve been a bit roughed up, but they were kept. I’ve never been able to find out what happened to the Morozov statue. I think they were so ashamed of it; they just destroyed it. But maybe it’ll turn up. If it turns up anywhere, I should be very worried. But the thing was that it wasn’t just shortages and greyness, and regimentation, and secret police. It wasn’t just a poorer, crummier, less free version of the West. It was actually wholly different. And it was this hatred of the married family and its privacy and freedom which was at the heart of that difference.
Elizabeth
I can really hear that. That really troubling, undermining of these loyalties that come naturally to us in favour of loyalty to the state. Oh, well,
Peter Hitchens
Well George Orwell it’s very good about it in 1984, that the children all belong to this organisation, literally called The Spies. Then they denounce their parents to the secret police, and rejoice as they’re carted off, which is not much further down the road.
Elizabeth
No, how rapid was this sense of actually, I understand this world. I would call myself a socialist but I’m losing faith. Did you very quickly come to the conclusion actually what I am is a conservative? Or was there a long period of not really having a home?
Peter Hitchens
No! I stopped being a Trotskyist. I actually wrote a letter of resignation to the organisation sometime in 1975 which idiotically, I didn’t keep a copy of, and I know the name of the person I sent it to as well, but I can’t find her. I had relied very heavily on MI5 having kept a copy, but they seem to have destroyed my file. I quit there in ‘75 but I didn’t then cease to be a socialist. The Kursk bridge carried huge numbers of people out of Bolshevism into social democracy, which to some extent is where I still am.
Identifying with political labels, forming opinions and the role of columnists
Elizabeth
Yes, you, I’m always fascinated by the way this language is slippery, and when we use phrases like liberal or conservative, we have such different associations with them. So I’d love, if you don’t mind, to just say kind of what are your deep political principles, whatever label they end up, whatever box they end up.
Peter Hitchens
They’re not really principles, they’re just they’re just practical desires. I think that it’s necessary particularly in an advanced and wealthy society, for the state to intervene sometime. The principle is ceded by most, all bar the most completely barking libertarians, whenever people say, ‘What about nationalisation and states running?’ Do you think that Royal Navy should be run as a private concern? And of course, they don’t. There are some who do, there are some who think it should be contracted out to privateers. But I think we can, we can reasonably lay them aside as serious players in the political battle. There are things which the state does better, and that’s one of them. Railways is another, in my view. But, to me, there’s no, there’s no great sort of hierarchy and moral forces. You can’t, don’t dare nationalise anything. Yeah, I’ll nationalise some things and not nationalise others. It’s wholly pragmatic to me because I do think that a lot of people are weak and damaged and afraid and they need some help, and an organised state, under law is quite a good way of providing it.
Elizabeth
But with the language of social conservatism, is there a sense that individual moral choices are not the highest good, that there’s other things at play.
Peter Hitchens
The highest good, I don’t have a highest good in politics, the highest good is in eternity. You mustn’t mix up the two. And Quintin Hogg is very good about this. There is absolutely no reason to believe that somebody, because he is a Christian, must be a conservative, or must be a socialist. It’s perfectly possible to be to be a Christian or to be either of those, it’s a different interpretation. And that’s one of the reasons why civilised discourse between opponents is so important. Nobody is right all the time.
Elizabeth
I often ask guests, because I interview people from radically different principles, perspectives, religious positions, and I often ask them, what is the one thing you wish people understood but they don’t seem to? You said to me on Twitter that you’re constantly trying to explain to people why you hold views they don’t expect you to hold.
Peter Hitchens
I can’t narrow it down to one thing, I’m afraid, there are so many. The main thing people have to understand is that is that almost certainly, the opinions they hold are not their own opinions. The joint the great Jonathan Swift’s law, “You cannot reason a man out of a position he wasn’t reason to do in the first place.” I know this. I’ve tried. You can’t do it, and not many people have.
Elizabeth
How do you think people come to their opinions?
Peter Hitchens
They pick them up. They pick them up less and less from their parents, more and more from certainly in the years when I was growing up, from television. It’s the national sense of humour, which is now almost completely uniform, was provided by television. I don’t find a lot of it particularly funny, but they do, and they are. It’s been a hugely conformist force in all the opinions that people hold about practically anything, and that’s just now moved on to ‘anti–social’ media.
Elizabeth
Yeah, good phrase. One of the places people get their opinion from is columnists. Do you see that?
Peter Hitchens
No, they don’t. They go to columnists to for reassurance about the opinions they already hold. I think there are very few people who go to columnists to try and learn from somebody who disagrees with them. I just don’t think that’s what I do as a columnist. It’s when I’m on Twitter that I tend to be engaging with people who don’t agree with me and generally haven’t read a word that I’ve said or listened to anything that I’ve said either, they just hate me.
Elizabeth
So, what do you think a good columnist is doing? What role do they play in the public conversation?
Peter Hitchens
A lot of it is the reassurance and encouragement of people who hold the same position as you do, and that, ultimately, during the great panic, that was the main thing that I did. And people still come up to me in the street, and it’s quite moving. Because they say I thought I was completely around the bend, and it was really important to me that somebody in national media was saying what he was saying, and the reassurance and the encouragement that you’re not alone.
Elizabeth
Yes. This may be too private; I find the concept of vocation very helpful. The idea that whatever work we’re doing in the world, it’s meaningful. It has impacts on other people. It helps create the moral environments in which we all swim. Do you see what you’re doing as vocational and morally weighty or not?
Peter Hitchens
I think I’d have to ask other people to judge whether it was morally weighty. I would like it to be, but it probably very often isn’t. But I’m not the judge. You should never be the judge of anything you’ve done, because your memory will lie. You’ll exaggerate the wrong things and minimise the others. I don’t read Kierkegaard because it’s too complicated for me, but sometimes I learn things that he said that we are, we are objective about other people and subjective about ourselves. And we should do the opposite, but we don’t. Well, no, you can for brief moments force yourself to be objective, but not for long. It really isn’t much fun.
Elizabeth
No, I mean, confession helps, as you said. I think I’m asking because, whenever I’m approaching a new interviewee, I kind of have the sort of public persona of them, right? And then, you get to know the complexities.
Peter Hitchens
I do hope not.
Elizabeth
Well, the more complexities that you get in books than in columns. And whenever I’m approaching a columnist, because mainly what I know of them is from their columns or their, short debates on the radio, I always assume that they will be very sure of themselves and very confident in their own opinions, and have very little self–doubt. And particularly in this book Rage Against God, there is a very startling humility in your tone and a very harsh sense of your own character and virtue.
Peter Hitchens
Well, I was writing a book about God, I mean, about people’s attitude towards it. It would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it, not to at least make some effort to take a jaundiced look at yourself. But don’t worry, I keep a lot of it secret.
Elizabeth
Good! But I’m trying to tease out how this plays out in your writing a column. Because if you are someone who says every Christian should have a low opinion of their own virtue, and you are someone who has publicly changed their mind in a way that is quite unusual and refreshing.
Peter Hitchens
It is unusual, isn’t it?
Elizabeth
Do you ever agonise over a column? Do you ever write it and think, what if this has a terrible impact in the world? What if I’m wrong?
Peter Hitchens
No, that wouldn’t be what I do. Sometimes I just I write a column and throw the whole thing away because I can’t stand it on rereading and start again. Yeah, I can’t think how I would by anything that I write, risk setting anybody on a wrong path. People don’t come to me for advice about their personal lives.
Elizabeth
Yes, you’re not a priest, after all.
Peter Hitchens
I don’t think that they would be wise to do so.
Elizabeth
So, we’ve kind of traced your loss of faith in socialism and then a period that you talked about as…
Peter Hitchens
I didn’t put faith in socialism. I just found the particular form of Marxist, Leninist, politics, which I had embraced, no longer made sense. It seemed to me to be impractical and narrow.
Elizabeth
Yeah, rejection of it.
Peter Hitchens
It didn’t conform with reality. You could only sustain in the bell jar of the of the university campus. It exists. And I was very lucky to be chucked into place so unlike that immediately after I left.
A return to religion and divine experiences
Elizabeth
And then, this period where you’ve talked about sort of mainly being about pleasure and ambition, a sort of dawning sense of conservatism. And somewhere in there, a return to church, a return to a sense of the sacred.
Peter Hitchens
Yes, but my return to religion is cliché. Again, it’s like being a youthful revolutionary. The young man has children, gets married, earns a living and starts to see the world differently. Tell me something new.
Elizabeth
I don’t think I believe in people’s lives ever being a cliché, Peter
Peter Hitchens
Well, the thing is, that the bits of my life that aren’t as cliché are private. I’m not going to talk about them so.
Elizabeth
There are a few things that you have written about.
Peter Hitchens
Yes, that’s it.
Elizabeth
I’d love to hear about the role of fear, because you spoke about fear and exhilaration early on as about fully aliveness. And part of your slow return, which you’ve rightly said is, and I really respect, it’s more private than asking about someone’s sex life. This deep, intimate encounter with the Divine is not something to be trespassed upon.
Peter Hitchens
Well, I don’t know. I don’t have any visions, or swoons, or things of that kind.
Elizabeth
You saw a painting of the Last Judgement. Would you tell us about?
Peter Hitchens
I did see that painting, yes. What did you then say?
Elizabeth
Could you tell us about that moment?
Peter Hitchens
There wasn’t a moment! I’d had lunch, quite a vinus lunch in Beaune which, if you haven’t been to it, you should go to. It’s lovely French town at the centre of the Burgundy vineyards. And what I like doing most on holiday is having nice lunches and then going on to look at great works of art. And the great work of art in the Hôtel–Dieu Museum in Bern is the Last Judgement painted by Roger Van der Weyden, one of the Flemish masters. And I went along to see it in the spirit of artistic interest, because he was obviously a great painter, thinking, Oh, not another last judgement! Because I have seen, as anybody who’s been in the great galleries of Europe, a lot of last judgments. But this particular one was different, because scampering about at the bottom of the picture, heading towards the pit of the damned were quite a lot of actually naked people. And one of them looked quite like me, and others looked very much like the kind of people I lived and moved and had my being with. They did because they were not clothed or otherwise different as, I think I say in the book, trapped under thick layers of time. They were people as I might have known them. And I thought, what if the idea of the last judgement isn’t a mediaeval fantasy and that it is actually a real thing that applies in the modern world? You don’t see many modern last judgments to you?
Elizabeth
No, you don’t.
Peter Hitchens
In fact, they’re quite unpopular even in the church. Did you know, the York Minster has some of the best glass in England. It’s almost an English Chartres Cathedral. But there’s a whole row of windows, some of the older windows, which are up at about the height of about 30–35, feet. They’re very hard to see. And these are pictures of the last judgement, hell and damnation windows which were moved there, not in the 20th century, but in the Middle Ages, because people didn’t like them much.
Elizabeth
Yes.
Peter Hitchens
Once the idea is taken root, maybe this thing is actually real, then I think it’s worth considering.
Elizabeth
I spent a lot of time on this section when you write about it, because you say something very beautiful. You say, “Maybe I should be ashamed to admit that fear played a role in this return or rediscovery.” But the sense of your own sin, your own desire to avoid judgement, was a was a real thing to you. And you rarely hear people expressing such a raw human thing.
Peter Hitchens
Well, there you are. What can I say? That’s what it was. But it was long, long after that that I, that I returned to the church. It wasn’t some great blinding moment.
Elizabeth
Fall on your knees and accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour moment?
Peter Hitchens
No. I continued my tour of the vineyards of Burgundy. And nice they are too. Another of the works of God in some ways, the making of wine.
Revolutionary worldviews or self–reform?
Elizabeth
I think the dots I’m trying to join is that, you said at the beginning about coming to the conclusion that lots of people who are trying to reform the world should be instead be reforming themselves.
Peter Hitchens
Oh, completely. But that starts with me.
Elizabeth
Yes, and also now when you write, you’re often talking about sort of grand utopian social justice projects as of less importance or less interest or even dangerous, compared to this kind of minute, practical, everyday focus on our own character.
Peter Hitchens
Well they’re different things. The problem with the revolutionary worldview and its allies, and there are many revolutionary worldviews which don’t actually involve anyone climbing onto barricades in one of those French paintings with bayonets and women with their breasts, showing. You don’t need to have all that a revolution. A revolution can be conducted by changing the way that things are taught in schools, or who runs the television studio. Anybody who wants to revolutionise society has almost certainly gone beyond the limits of where they should be going. Because what they’re doing is they’re attempting to alter the lives of other people to conform with what they want because they think that those people would benefit from the disciplines which they want to impose on them. And ultimately, this leads to all kinds of horrible things. Don’t do that, would be my profound lesson. It will never end well.
But it’s separate from the question of whether you can make society better in your own lifetime by practical actions and intelligent policies. Or much more important in the current world, whether you can stop it getting any worse by preventing people from making it worse. Which is my current preoccupation.
Writing ‘Rage Against God’
Elizabeth
Is it fair to say that an awareness of sin or human failings came before wanting to talk about God in the way that you do in this book?
Peter Hitchens
I never wanted to talk about God.
Elizabeth
No, it’s a very hard thing to do well!
Peter Hitchens
I didn’t want to do it. That book was wrung out of me. I didn’t want to write it.
Elizabeth
I’m sorry to be digging it up for you today.
Peter Hitchens
Although I didn’t want to do it, I did do it. It is published under my name. I must take responsibility for it. But it was somebody else’s idea.
Elizabeth
It surprised me in lots of ways, because the two dimension portrait I had was of, you know, Christopher Hitchens, your brother, New Atheist, banging away at that cause. And then you on the other side, going toe to toe on the intellectual arguments for and against God. Your first chapter is, instead, much closer to the chapter I have written on God in the book I have out which, given our different tone and positioning, I wouldn’t necessarily have expected. Which is talking about God is much more fruitful in poetry than prose. This is not something you’re going to argue someone into. And you talked about it being something that we choose to believe, and about the desire for there to be a God. Could you just say a little bit more about that position? Because it was really striking to me.
Peter Hitchens
Oh, well, I don’t see how you can avoid it. The existence of God is unknowable. Therefore, you can’t attain an opinion on it through research or through knowledge. So, there is only one way in which you can reach an opinion on it and that is through choice, and choice is almost always driven by desire. It’s not complicated. I find that atheists object very strongly, with the exception of Thomas Nagel whom I mentioned, to this formula, because they know perfectly well what I’m saying about them. And why would you want the universe to be a vast cosmic car crash with no reason for existing and no purpose for continuing to exist, in which everything you do is judged only by its immediate, observable consequences? Why would you want that? It doesn’t take much intellectual candle power to work out what I’m saying about atheists, does it? So, they object saying, “No, I couldn’t believe. I have no belief.” And they try and attribute their unbelief to some external force. Well, mollusks may have no belief, and bricks may have no belief, but there’s no human being who hasn’t, at some point or other, considered the origins of the cosmos. They’ve considered it. They’ve decided they don’t want it to be designed or created.
Elizabeth
Yes, you quote William Somerset Maughn early on in that season where you were a kind of rebellious teenage atheist, of wanting there not to be a God, because…
Peter Hitchens
It liberated him! He was fantastic. The book Of Human Bondage is extraordinarily frank about that. Yeah. Maughn had many drawbacks, but he also had many strong qualities, and one of them was a severe honesty, I think, about himself. And Of Human Bondage is plainly autobiographical, and that moment which he describes plainly happened to him.
Elizabeth
And I guess I’m wondering then, having had a season of presumably not wanting there to be there to be a God, what changed to make you desire there to be a God?
Peter Hitchens
As I say, you find there are other things in life other than your own immediate pleasure and satisfaction and ambition. I cannot, will not, go into the personal details of that, even if I wanted to, it would also involve talking about other people who I have no business talking about.
Elizabeth
Yes. The thing that comes through a lot, and I think you’ve been saying explicitly, is this longing for the universe to have justice in it.
Peter Hitchens
Yeah. Well, the thing is, anybody who sought justice in any small or large thing in life discovers very rapidly there isn’t much of it about. Generally, you don’t get it. If you do, it takes years, and it’s unsatisfactory when it arrives. But, on the other hand, it’s almost as big a mystery as conscience, we all appear to be equipped with a with a raging desire for it. So, one of the most powerful arguments, particularly for eternal life, is that justice, which we desire is obviously impossible in temporal life, so it can only be attainable in eternity. Therefore, if we desire justice, we must seek the eternal and hope for it and believe in it.
Elizabeth
Yes.
Peter Hitchens
That’s a very simple logical statement to me. I don’t know whether it strikes you as complex, but it seems to me, as I say, the mystery of conscience is, it’s always seemed to me to be a very great challenge to the atheist, but the mystery of the desire for justice is another.
Elizabeth
Yeah, so it’s the C.S. Lewis thing, isn’t it? If you discover in yourself a hunger that cannot be met by worldly things, does it give you a clue that there’s something beyond? Yes, justice and order.
Peter Hitchens
Well, not so much order.
Elizabeth
Well, you say it in here.
Peter Hitchens
Order of the proper sort follows from self–government.
Elizabeth
Say more, if you’re willing.
Peter Hitchens
Well, I think if I had a utopia, which I’m not allowed to have because utopia is a blasphemy, it would be a society governed by conscience. You could certainly have a society more governed by conscience than the one we have now. I know that because I lived in one when I grew up, it was far more governed by conscience than the one we have now,
Elizabeth
Yes, and it’s striking when you talk about what you love about the Church and what you miss about the Church that was, is this focus on confession, and atonement, and the continual taking account of our own soul and our own sins as, presumably a way of staying in touch with our conscience. Is that fair?
Peter Hitchens
Sure, yes. And of making it plain that we are fallen beings and that we cannot attain anything remotely resembling goodness on our own. But the opening of the principal service of the Church of England, until the end of my childhood, was morning prayer. And it opens with a very severe confession, which everybody has to say out loud. You’ll find the way the modern services, where they have confessions at all, they’re so bowdlerized and diluted that they are a wholly different thing.
Elizabeth
Yes, I think it’s one of the things we have in common that, and I think we’d understand it differently, but I am increasingly convinced that this concept of sin, this concept of our tendency to break things in the world, our tendency to disconnect and pull back into ourselves. Luther and Augustine call it homo incurvatus, man turned in on themselves, is heart of the problem, right?
Peter Hitchens
When I returned to the church, and I realised that the 1662, book wasn’t being used. I went round the churches where I lived, trying to find out where it was being used. And I would go to a particularly magnificent church in quite a small town not far from Oxford. And I was looking around, there were absolutely no tables. We. Day, there’s no table of any kind saying what services were. So, I approached him over the clergy – a large, white haired man probably in his 60s. And I said, “Excuse me, I wonder if you can tell me what your Sunday services are.” He said, “Why do you want to know?” And I said, “Well I’m conducting a survey of the use of the Book of Common Prayer in this part of the Oxford Diocese.” And he said, “I know about you!” He said, “I’m not telling you.” And then he said, and there was no reason for him to say other than he really meant it, “I hate Cranmer’s theology of penitence. I hate it!”
Elizabeth
And you thought it’s probably not the church for me.
Peter Hitchens
And it was this great moment of explanation. It happened in the same week, oddly enough, as another great moment of understanding of the railways which I received. I was standing at Oxford station one morning when everything had gone wrong. It was still British Railways then and everything had gone wrong in a really intense way, and, in those days, they had men called rail men, who used to stand in kind of kepis, almost French hats. And there was one he was enormously tall, nearly seven feet tall, and he had a face like Mr Punch with a huge nose and chin which almost met. And he stood, usually impassively, on Oxford station platform all the time. I don’t know what he did, but I was standing next to him at this moment of disaster, and I made some mild remark about how it wasn’t really a very good day for the railways. And he looked down from his immense height, and he said, “The trouble with people like you is that you think the railways have run for your benefit, don’t you?” And it was in that moment that I finally understood that they aren’t. And I’ve known this ever since. Both these two encounters happened in the same week. Very educational. It’s great place to live, Oxford.
The current spiritual landscape
Elizabeth
I want to end by asking. So, the phrase I would naturally use is about the spiritual landscape. I know I thought it might not be to a taste! But when you were writing this book, you are arguing really against the New Atheists, which were very alive at the time. And tracing this kind of 20th century, you talk about the generation that were too clever to believe in God and the role of sewers, and what led to the great decline in church going, that kind of history of ideas. I think we’re in a very different place now. What we’re not seeing is any indication that church going is spiking. I wonder if there is a new interest amongst some groups saying maybe religion has something to offer us. You know, shock, horror! But where do you think we are now, when you try and talk about God or church in public, how much do you think the atmosphere has changed?
Peter Hitchens
Oh, it’s easy for me. But you see, it was always easy for me as a combative person, to be defending a religion against its enemies, than to actually making out the case for religion itself. That was a great boon to me, I’m much more comfortable doing that. I don’t think it’s changed all that much. I think for most people, there’s vast grey indifference and ignorance. Nobody’s taught anything about it. They come out of school knowing more about the Greek or the Norse myths than they do about the Bible now. And the language isn’t known. I said the other day to somebody in Oxford, he was, obviously, an Oxford undergraduate. I said, “Well, I suppose he’s a sort of John the Baptist then.” And he looked at me. He couldn’t quite bring himself to say, Who’s John the Baptist, but that’s what he was thinking. Now, where do you begin? The problem with Christianity is that it really has to be apprehended as a child. It’s very difficult, because it’s quite complicated set of propositions, actually, and also requires fair amount of reading, which people don’t do much of these days. And there’s a lot of I’ll get into trouble here, but who cares? There’s a lot of this happy clappy stuff, which doesn’t seem to me, really, to do the job.
Elizabeth
I hesitate to tell you that that is exactly where I would sit.
Peter Hitchens
Happy clappy?
Elizabeth
All kinds. I am a big fan of morning prayer and sad clappy.
Peter Hitchens
Sad clappy.
Elizabeth
Yeah. I have a good weep quite often lying on the floor.
Peter Hitchens
Rolling about having a nice trance. Speaking in tongues?
Elizabeth
Speaking in tongues.
Peter Hitchens
Okay, well, [Speaks in tongues]
Elizabeth
Please go ahead. We could pray together now, if you’d like,
Peter Hitchens
No. Let’s not.
Elizabeth
Peter, there are many more things I could talk to you about, but I’m very grateful for your time today. Thank you for speaking to me on The Sacred.
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