I recently read a fascinating and disturbing article in The New Yorker, by Jon Lee Anderson, on the rise and defeat of Islamists in Mali. I was struck by two particular descriptions of the Islamists’ behavior:

“In the central square, Idrissa had witnessed the beating of one of the jihadis’ own men, who had been accused by his comrades of raping a young girl. The spectators loudly criticized the jihadis for a double standard. “Everyone was angry because they didn’t kill him,” Idrissa said. Afterward, the jihadis had gone on the local radio station and warned that anyone who spoke badly about their men would be killed.”

The other:

“Then, on day two, the Islamists came,” he recalled. He had asked the leader what he wanted. Naming the northern towns of Mali, he had said, “Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal are Muslim towns, and we want to make Sharia in them. We are not asking. We are saying what we are doing, and we’re here to make Sharia.”

What I found so troubling was not only “the usual” Al Qaeda-related atrocities, but even more so the Islamist’s clearly voiced goal of destroying an existing social system through violence, devastation of cultural heritage (vandalizing local temples and libraries). This was tied together with the idea of creating a different social order based on sexual control, and the replacement of any traces of modern knowledge by radical interpretations of old religious texts. The irony is that these readings are just as contemporary as the lifestyle the Islamists try to erase.

In my opinion, these two quotes illustrate the power of violence combined with unquestionable certainty, able to undermine an entire civilization—its customs, morals, social order, and authorities. They fall apart in the presence of arrogant brutality. The people are too “civilized,” too cultured to defend themselves. The Islamists reject a civilization they claim is morally corrupt, and instead attempt to replace it with a modern essentialist take on an imagined Golden Age of religious purity.

The case of Islamists in Mali is an extremely vivid example of a contemporary violent essentialism we can witness in many different places and with changing force. There are the extreme right-wing nationalists and Christian religious fundamentalists in Europe and the US, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn activists in Greece, the Le Pen nationalists in France, the Tea Party in the US, as well as the Polish nationalist youth, with neo-Nazi and pagan ties, who recently tried to interrupt Zygmunt Bauman’s lecture at the University of Wrocław.

All these groups seem to play on a fantasy of a bygone era of a harmonious society formed solely by “us,” without outsiders or deviations from the unanimously accepted norms, “inventing” their traditions, as Eric Hobsbawm would have named it. The past is idealized into the present in a form deeply conservative but also modernly total, one in which men rule and women obey; the “we” are the masters, the “others” are the slaves. There is no space for sexual freedom or mental sickness. Foucault’s descriptions of these freedoms in the Middle Ages seem, on the contrary, extremely modern.

In this sense, the current fundamentalist movements are essentialized ideas of a glorious past, devoid of any ambiguity. They are definite, brutal and all-encompassing in a way only an extreme mixture of Enlightenment and Totalitarianism could lead to. They are belief systems based on a logic of the elimination of “otherness.”

The past to which they refer, never was. The refusal to acknowledge the ambiguous, heterogeneous, histories of cultures, religions, ethnicities, and civilizations, makes these movements arrogantly, violently contemporary.

I’ve been trying to figure out Christopher Hitchens for some ten years now. My first encounter with “Hitch” was in the fall of 2000 when he gave an impromptu talk on the writer’s life in the Mechanics Conference Room at the New School for Social Research in New York City. I had recently quit my longtime corporate-suit job in the Midwest and moved to Manhattan to go to grad school, and he was just coming onto the faculty as a visiting professor in my MA program in liberal studies. Hitchens spoke extemporaneously on a dizzying array of topics, from the evils of religion to the necessity of reading George Orwell to the benefits of grain spirits, punctuating important points with blasts of exhaled cigarette smoke. I was often reminded of that experience, minus the noxious tobacco fumes, while reading his memoir, Hitch-22, now out in paperback.

Indeed, Hitchens’ style in person and in print is tailor-made for the memoir form. Anyone familiar with his much-published writing, his frequent media appearances, and lectures will recognize the facility, abundant throughout the book, with which Hitchens moves from personal experience to grandiloquent pronouncement, tying things together with erudite disquisitions on literature, history, and the darker art of muckraking. A familiar tic is the construction “my dear friend [INSERT FAMOUS PERSON’S NAME]….” In that regard, most of the dramatis personae are familiar to regular Hitchens readers so there isn’t a whole lot that’s revelatory in these particular pages, except for the details, which admittedly tend to be more than interesting enough.

A couple of times in the book, Hitchens remarks on his being a late bloomer. And so it is that some have seen the core of Hitch-22 as the story of the author’s inner journey in adulthood from firebrand 1960s campus radical to geezery Tory. It’s a familiar Baby Boomer trope, of course (The Big Chill, anyone?), but one whose narrative trajectory has a longer history within modern liberal thought. (As nineteenth-century historian and statesman Francois Guizot said: “Not to be a republican [in the 1789 French Revolutionary sense] at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head.”)

Anyone who has even passing familiarity with Hitchens’s writing and reputation knows the role he played in vociferously supporting the war in Iraq from what was then his position on the left. His chapter on Iraq is the book’s longest, and it traces his evolution on the subject. It begins with an explanation of his 1976 article published in the New Statesman opining on Saddam Hussein, then Iraqi vice president, as a potential progressive leader. To be sure, from the perspective of a Western post-colonialist writer, a theoretically modernizing secularist would have seemed on the face of it to be an improvement over exploitation under British Imperial rule on the one hand and repression by fundamentalist Arab monarchy on the other.

It took a bit for Hitchens to recognize that Hussein was an evil psycho, but in his telling he was already there on that point well before the saber rattling began on the part of George W. Bush & Co. For Hitchens, a self-professed intellectual in the Enlightenment tradition, Hussein’s irrational absolutism and, maybe even more troubling, his alleged unholy alliance-of-convenience with Islamic religious fundamentalism, sealed his condemnation. Citing Orwell, Hitchens observed in the wake of September 11 (and I can’t remember if it was the next week during the New School graduate class meeting he mentions in the book or later at the Cedar Tavern in the Village before heading out on assignment to Afghanistan) that every issue has those who are on the side of progress and those who are against it. Though Hitchens doesn’t specifically say so, throwing his lot in with the neocons and other war hawks appears to be a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” While he does have harsh words for the malfeasance of the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the war, he maintains his satisfaction with the outcome. (As he glibly put it on Bill Maher’s program a while back, “right idea, wrong execution.”)

Many liberal readers likely won’t find Hitchens’s explication persuasive. For one thing there’s his defense of Paul Wolfowitz and also of Ahmad Chalaby. (There’s the old saying, “Lie down with dogs and get up with fleas.”) More disconcerting is the however begrudging acceptance of the mess created in Iraq by the minions of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism” (which anyone with the intellect of a Christopher Hitchens must recognize as Empire in its postmodern guise) as a regrettable but on balance tolerable consequence in liberating the people of Iraq from Hussein’s despotic rule. A possible defense in this regard is the extremely long-term perspective articulated in Immanuel Kant‘s 1784 essay, required reading in the New School liberal studies program “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View”: that humankind’s “unsociable sociability” (Kant’s term for the brute survival instinct with which nature has endowed the species) will dialectically lead to a rational civil order in the end. That seems like small consolation to the millions whose lives and/or livelihoods are sacrificed in the meantime.

A thread that runs throughout Hitch-22 is the author’s lifelong attempt to intellectually keep “two sets of books,” or as he alternatively puts it, “have it both ways.” Early on this took the form of seeking out alternative positions even within oppositional points of view (i.e., the revolution within the revolution). This earned him the title “contrarian,” a label he rejects. A less judgmental, though albeit more pedantic, assessment would again come from Kant, in this case his essay also from 1784 and also required reading at the New School, “What is Enlightenment?” In particular, it has to do with Kant’s idea of enlightenment as one’s emergence from “self-imposed immaturity,” (in German selbstverschuldeten sometimes translated “self-imposed tutelage”), or put more simply daring to think for oneself. What some will interpret as an opportunistic move from left to right, Hitchens simply sees as coming into his own.

In the book’s conclusion, Hitchens notes his desire to always repudiate “the totalitarian principle, in the mind as well as in politics.” The embrace of continual doubt and self-criticism is what constitutes the eponymous “Hitch-22.” This struck a chord in that I’d been reading twentieth-century German political philosopher Carl Schmidt right before taking up Hitchens’s memoir.

Schmidt is famous (or should I say infamous) for his concept of the “total” state from which the term totalitarianism derives. Schmidt is also known for his analysis in the 1922 book Political Theology of the state of exception, the unforeseen calamitous circumstance, provided for in Article 48 of the Weimer Constitution, allowing the executive branch to assume sovereign power in order to ensure political and social stability. Adolf Hitler invoked Article 48 in suspending democratic authority to establish the Nationalist Socialist government. It’s a principle also arguably explored by Bush Administration advisors (including Wolfowitz) as evidenced by rumors floated regarding the use of the wartime emergency as a rationale for possibly cancelling national elections in the US and the more palpable efforts at expanding presidential power and curtailing individual civil liberties under the theory of the “unitary executive.”

But more relevant is the argument made in another of Schmidt’s books from the 1920s, Political Romanticism, which did more to explain the vagaries of Christopher Hitchens for me than this memoir. According to Schmidt, the most important ideal of romanticism is preservation of the autonomous self. Among the hallmarks of the romantic are irony and aesthetics as defense mechanisms against any and all external forces impinging upon the individual. It consists among other things in the “poeticizing of politics,” treating political events as occasions for “romantic productivity,” that is, expressions of individual creativity of which punditry is an example par excellence. It also manifests itself in a refusal to ultimately commit, keeping oneself safe from the damaging emotional effects of uncomfortable realities.

Political romanticism also explains the one thing Hitchens has never suspended, his militant atheism, perhaps most notably documented in the bestseller god Is Not Great, which was nominated for the National Book Award. (Although I’m not sure why, it’s neither particularly well written nor well argued. For some finer Hitchens writing, pick up Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere.) As Schmidt notes, secularism underlies romanticism in that it removes God as the transcendent principal of the universe and replaces him/her/it/whatever with the individual transcendental ego. (There’s that damned Kant again!)

None of this is to say that Hitch-22 isn’t good reading. There are withering criticisms, amusing quips, and trenchant observations galore. Just think twice about taking it too much to heart.

Note: An earlier version of this essay appeared on the webzine PopMatters.