Letters to a Young Contrarian. (Agreeing To Disagree).(Review)(Excerpt)

Letters to a Young Contrarian By Christopher Hitchens Basic Books, 226 pages, $22

The title of this book refers to Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. But there are two problems with Christopher Hitchens' attempt to parse "contrarian" as if it were a career choice.

For one thing, many writers consider themselves "contrarians." For instance, lots of regulars on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page recall earlier Leftist allegiances. Likewise, Leftist editorialists sometimes "put themselves on the line" by, say, noting a good point or two about school vouchers. Lusty agreement with orthodoxy rarely motivates a person to broadcast his or her opinions. Some make their mark this way, but just as many burn to show the world how to split the difference between opposing camps, or how to blaze a fresh path, even if they mostly lean to one side of the political spectrum or the other.

The other problem concerns the wisdom of fashioning oneself deliberately as a "contrarian" in the literal sense. As Hitchens observes, certain people are innately indisposed to accept orthodoxies. But they do not disagree with all comers just for the sport of it: They sense an alternate truth. Certainly Hitchens himself always has. He repeatedly asserts in this book that we must judge a man not on what he thinks but on how he thinks.

As such, Letters to a Young Contrarian is less a guide to being professionally testy than a goad to intelligent engagement with the issues of the day. Writing to an imaginary acolyte, Hitchens girds him against the usual objections to opinions that stray beyond conventional boilerplate. Given my own experiences taking on the black Left, I particularly valued his presentation of a 1908 treatise by one F. M. Cornford which beautifully demolishes the eternal charge that dissenting views automatically "abet the other side." Hitchens is especially keen in his insistence that dispute is a sign of life, that the universal agreement so many wish for would be evidence of mental debility and ideological tyranny.

Hitchens gets nervier in places. He cherishes imperfect private behavior by famous thinkers, taking Dr. Martin Luther King as an example: "I like the fact that he had feet of clay and a digestive tract and reproductive organs: All human achievement must also be accomplished by mammals." Hitchens is not being merely libertine--he observes that flawed champions "strongly suggest that anyone could do what the heroes have done."

He devotes generous space to his withering condemnation of religious ...