Last week's Intelligence Squared Debate has attracted plenty of triumphantalist crowing from among the pagan, heathen and apostate comunities as well as an almost deafening online silence from representatives of the One True Faith and, moreover, precious little in the way of scholarly critique on the whole dog & pony show masquerading as an early 21st-century equivalent of the Wilberforce-Huxley Debate and the Skopes Monkey Tial rolled into one. In an effort to help rectify this lamentable state of affairs, Hitchens Watch is delighted to be able to be the first online outlet to publish an exclusive review of the event coupled with some insightful and possibly inciteful analysis by TOMAHAWK, a Catholic intellectual who attended the debate and bore witness to the entire sorry spectacle. — Greywolf
OUR PASSIONS FORGE OUR FETTERS A Hasty Commentary Re. a Debate on the Catholic Church (Part 1) by TOMAHAWK
On October 19, I attended, along with a couple of thousand others, the Intelligence Squared Debate: "The Catholic church is a force for good in the world". The event was held in central London at the Methodist Central Hall. Speaking for the proposition were Archbishop John Onaiyekan (from Nigeria) and Ann Widdecombe MP; for the opposition Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry. Predictably the latter two, who remarkably seem to qualify as 'public intellectuals', attracted a large crowd of admirers to the event.
The African Archbishop opened the debate with a leisurely and relatively contentless speech (which he ended well short of his allotted time). In doing so he failed to set the terms of the debate and offered a great opportunity for the opposition to dictate those terms. The Archbishop spoke of his upbringing in a non-Christian belief system (Animism I suspect) and the conversion of his family; how the Church must be understood as a community of believers and we should look to these believers and their actions in the world to see that the Church is a force for good. The list of goods tended, sadly, to neglect the spiritual goods —surprising from a cleric.
Up came CH, rather fawned on by the partial moderator. Even more aggressive than usual CH barked out a list of crimes the Church. The usual stuff: Crusades; Slavery; Torture; Child Abuse; collaboration with Nazis; Child Abuse; AIDS and condoms; exploitation of the poor; Child Abuse; and so on and on. He delivered his piece charmlessly but with passion, such that many in the audience, groupies and some non-groupies, seemed to think he had made a gripping and authoritative intervention that a) annihilated any claims that the Church was a force for good and b) showed CH to a brilliant summariser of history, theology and philosophy. He was, of course, helped in this by the rather weak opening speech. That said, by presenting a mere shopping list and not ever addressing the nature of the Church and what he himself meant by "good" as in "good life" "virtue" etc. (metaphysical and moral notions of good), CH showed no interest in any substantive debate—not something his fans would mind I suppose.
Hitchens, who claims to be a great fan of the Enlightenment (does anyone seriously believe he has ever read a volume Kant, Spinoza or Hume all the way through, far less understood it?), certainly gave first person evidence of Hume's dictum that reason is the slave of the passions. For, both he and Fry, while praising "reason", were by far the more emotional debaters. Nothing necessarily wrong in that, except that when passion distorts truth, men become dishonest and corrupt themselves. And this CH did in spades. Various historical misrepresentations (lies?) were repeated—many of which have already been refuted, e.g here and here. When he did make genuine points about shameful episodes in the Church's past he downplayed what the teaching of the Church was and focused on the vices of certain Catholics in history. This, of course, meant that the implicit moral baseline from which he affected to judge the Church—broadly based on some secular idea of human rights (many of which seem to be ungrounded other than in the desires of people like CH)—went entirely unexamined. And of course a great deal might be said about where such a profound and by no means obvious moral framework is derived from: see here—an article one should read in order to find out what should have been, but wasn't, under discussion. Anyone listening to the speech who knew anything about the Catholic Church (whether pro or anti) would be frankly embarrassed by the range of CH's ignorance (he knows nothing of the different levels of Church teaching, thinks limbo was a dogma, knows nothing of the development of doctrine, thinks that the Church's Declaration Nostra Aetate (which he dated wrongly) overturned a charge of Deicide against the Jews—thus misrepresenting both the Declaration and the Church's teaching before it).
Hitchens closed, sounding like a secular Ian Paisley, and the audience, presumably believing his numerous misrepresentations (misrepresentations that have been repeatedly brought to his attention) rapturously welcomed him in the manner of a crowd of sinners welcoming a fellow into their ranks who shamelessly tells them that they and he and they have no sin.
Next up was Ms Widdecombe, a Catholic convert from Anglicanism, rather cattily introduced as "staunch" and "conservative" together with the untrue implication that her conversion was chiefly over women's ordination. Unlike the Archbishop she was much more adversarial and set about trying to refute Hitchens's claims. In this she did rather well, but it must be questioned whether this was the best use of her time. After all, all Hitchens and Fry had to do was fling enough mud and, as long the proposers sank to the occasion, they could spend the entire evening trying to clean off the mud and not get around to talking about the Church as a force for good. This they largely did, and at the cost of neglecting the deepest truths about the Church they were defending (see the Feser article above) not to mention the sacramental life of the Church, the lives of the saints, the glories of Christian inspired art, music, architecture and the way in which the Church answers the deepest needs of man by seeing man as more than material. In neglecting all these areas the proposers failed badly in their task and, instead of even looking at the moral life and its relation to charity, they appeared to talk only of a merely material version of ‘charidee’—of the kind that Mr Fry so assiduously promotes so long as it is not in any way proselytising (unless it’s promoting condoms, sexual liberation and abortion—in which case Fry will readily lend it his support and assistance).
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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