Letters to a Young Contrarian (Art of Mentoring (Paperback))

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Letters to a Young Contrarian (Art of Mentoring (Paperback))

Letters to a Young Contrarian (Art of Mentoring (Paperback))

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This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people. Secondly, one could read this as a treatise on several of Christopher Hitchens' favorite topics, ranging from misspent socialist youth to his journalism days to the preview of coming anti-religious attractions phase. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility.

I made a mental note to give the Hitch a third or fourth chance, knowing how often I get things wrong, or make snap judgements which reduce complexities and ignore subtleties--along the lines of, um, God Is Not Great, actually. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or half-truth that serves some short-term purpose.

Some of the advice that Hitchens gives his mock student may seem a little cliche in parts, but even there he presents it in such a witty and honest way as to still make it insightful. Nobody in the supposedly affluent and disillusioned 50s had seen any of this coming; I am quite certain that there will be future opportunities for people of high ideals, or of any ideals at all. Such cultural debasement would have appalled the man, as we can tell from his book of letters which contains the following advice to young people: "Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.

While he was once identified with the Anglo-American radical political left, near the end of his life he embraced some arguably right-wing causes, most notably the Iraq War. People who speak their views clearly, intelligently, and elegantly are severely lacking in the fetid mainstream of United States’ (and beyond’s? There even exist official phrases of approbation for this tendency, of which the latest is the supposedly praiseworthy ability to "think outside the box". In an age of overly polite debate bending over backward to reach a happy consensus within an increasingly centrist political dialogue, Hitchens pointedly pitches himself in contrast.there is something idiotic about those who believe that consensus (to give the hydra-headed beast just one of its names) is the highest good. It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only believe nonsense, they can be saved.

There are fringe views that deserve to be marginalized, and then there are dissenting views which need to be heeded, or at least considered. It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year.In the late Victorian period, Oscar Wilde - master of the pose but not a mere poseur - decided to live and act "as if" moral hypocrisy were not regnant.



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