In some roundabout way I came across the debate of Christopher Hitchens vs. Peter Hitchens on youtube. If you search for it on Google you will find it.

These two are fairly quick on their feet, but almost opposite in style. Peter is more fair and circumspect yet outgunned at times, while Christopher is sharper and wittier yet full of bluster.

There were two parts to the youtube debate, first part on a certain war, and the second part on Christopher Hitchens’ book debunking religion. That part of the debate by Peter is nicely summarized in his article here.

By far the weakest argument on the side of Christopher Hitchens is, as rightly pointed out by his brother, the former’s inclination to lump all 20th century “regimes of evil” (itself a rather loaded Western conception) into the camp of religion. There is a kernel of truth to it but the way it is treated by Christopher Hitchens is underhanded. A fairer assessment would be that atheistic regimes used methods along the lines of organized religion for means of control. And so here is the problem. Organized religion, and rather, organized anything, is itself a human instrument. The operative word is organized, not so much religion. I am not sure all that transpired under the name of organized religion can be attributed to religion rather than simply, human organization.

On the flip side, the weakest argument on the side of Peter Hitchens is the notion that morality has no compass without religion. This is again, rightly pointed out by Christopher Hitchens, absurd. Morality developed out of pre-historic human society, and is merely codified, initially, in the form of religious edicts. Here again, codified is the operative word, not religion. In many societies, in fact most parts of the world, that did not (and some that still do not) subscribe to the Abrahamic religions, or any religion, the codification came in the form of semi-secular or fully secular personal and governing philosophies such as in East Asia. These are all perfectly reasonable solutions to the morality problem. Certainly in developed secular societies of the present age, morality has been abstracted away into civil and criminal laws, which are the preferred form of codification. Religion is hardly the only restraint or check on behavior, nor does it need to be.

Peter Hitchens also draws the following distinction

If we are weak and poor, we can all summon up self-interested decency, behaving in a kind way, in public, towards those from whom we hope for decency in return.

But as soon as we have the power to do evil, we generally do. What is to stop us, unobserved, doing and planning acts of selfish unkindness against others, as so many of us do — for example — in office politics?

What is to stop us, in the privacy of the home, taking advantage of the goodness of others more generous than ourselves? Who will ever know?

If we become rich or mighty, how much worse the problem is. We can rob, wound and defraud our fellow creatures without any fear that they will be able to take revenge. A surprising number of us have power to act in this way.

It is a false dichotomy, as indeed, absent any form of restraint, people will behave in self-interested and possibly abusive ways. However, that is why in the ideal secular society, religion is never replaced by void, as warned against by Peter Hitchens, but by procedures that ensure no one is above the law.

Now, an argument could be made that the state has too many things on its hands to practically look after the moral welfare of all of its citizens in all spheres of life, and some internal restraint is needed. This is true. But that problem is by no means new, and has long been anticipated by the Confucianism-Legalism debate of more than two thousand years ago. In short, you need a balance of the two to have a practically workable society. A lawful society with socialization for its citizens in the internal code of ethics for that culture (this is important) is just as functional as one motivated by religion. In fact, religion is but a special case (which should seem obvious now) of the general phenomenon when viewed from a step’s distance away. Rather than attribute edicts to a benign supernatural being, why not attribute them to the benign wish for the continued success of the species? Isn’t that the same thing? There is something quite obviously innate to that, just like your hand shouldn’t want to strangle your neck just because of some simplistic version of self-interest.