Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens

Author:Christopher Hitchens
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

In that period, the manipulation of populism by elitism was rather a hit-or-miss affair. The “Church and King” mobs unleashed by the authorities in Georgian England were—I don’t believe I exaggerate—outlets for energy that might otherwise be directed at Church and King. Instead, those who could not read were given cakes and ale for making a pyre of copies of The Rights of Man. If you read Dickens’s depiction of the Gordon Riots in Barnaby Rudge you will strike much the same idea. For the party of order, disorder has always had its uses. It is not only reformers and revolutionaries who claim to speak in the name of the “general will.”

Much the same can be said about literary and scientific and even medical matters. Books that were once banned or ridiculed or both, from the time of the condemned Socrates to the time of the forbidden Ulysses, have had to be saved not by the crowd, but from the crowd. The evidence of our own evolution had to be broken to people very gently, lest they take up some stupid slogan about the Rock of Ages being preferable to the age of rocks. (Care still has to be taken on this point, when dealing with the tenderheaded.) Many are the works of genius now in public libraries that would have been incinerated if a roll of opinion had been called. And, since I appear to you to be fixated on this point anyway, I trust I will lose none of your respect if I remind you once again that the forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book. Do not think for a moment that I have exhausted this point!

Nowadays, “public opinion” is more smoothly and easily ventriloquised. I am sure you have had the experience of making up your own mind on a question and then discovering, on the evening news of the same day, that only 23.6 percent of people agree with you. Ought you to be depressed or disconcerted by this alarmingly exact dissection of the collective brain? Only if you believe that a squadron of undertalented but overpaid pseudo-scientists have truly and verifiably arrived at this conclusion. And perhaps—indeed I would argue, in any case—not even then.

I am sure that you are partially armored, as most intelligent people are, against this kind of thing. Everybody knows that the question can be “loaded”; everybody knows that the sample can be “weighted”; everbody knows that the intelligibility of the questions depends upon the commonplace and the regnant assumptions. It’s a mark of sophistication to understand these things, and occasionally to announce that one distrusts or suspects them.

However, these reservations don’t amount to a serious critique. The first thing to notice, surely, is that these voyages into the ocean of the public mind are chartered and commissioned by wealthy and powerful organisations, who do not waste their money satisfying mere curiosity. The tactics are the same as those of market research; the point is not to interpret the world but to change it.

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