Comment on Simon Leys’ An Empire of Ugliness

Letters and an unpopular opinion

I so far have enjoying Leys’ The Hall of Uselessness, but his essay An Empire of Ugliness misses the mark in it Leys considered Christopher Hitchens’ book The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa Theory and Practice as an attack on a person of faith and a saintly unassailable person. Leys thought that this was due to Hitchens’ attack on the beautiful and his craving ugliness.

Yet, I think he is trying to tar Hitchens as a lover of the philistine position of understanding the saintly and beautiful but utterly attempting to destroying it. I believe this misses the mark of Hitchens’s book, while flawed in tone and less convincing because of the reputation of its target still a work hard journalism and of significant merit.

Hitchens see a great ugliness in Mother Theresa order proscribing saving souls rather than bodies. Her order sells itself on saving the poor and has had countless donation to her works but her work is built an order that is not giving medicinal aid but built on suffering of the poor. Her order has been documented on not having medicines for pain or illness and does not support doctors with what has been raised Hitchens wanted to see a world class hospital in Calcutta not an hospice based on suffering, he wanted medicine and analgesics and not death beds where pain and penance are the suave for the soul. Hitchens thought help the body and the soul is secondary.

Hitchens, also saw that many who preyed on the poor in their nations dictators, fraudsters etc. used Mother Theresa as cover and cleansing of reputation. Hitchens disliked the huskers who, seemed to fill the Theresa coffer with ill gotten gains. He sees monetary malfeasance on Theresa's fund raising and allocation of charitable funds. Leys does not address this in any form other than saying it is Thresa’s higher purpose and she should not sully herself with where the money came from (or address in any form at all how it is spent. )

Hitchens wanted a world class hospitals and kindness for the poor and saw what Theresa was called Saintly for may have been more sinister, as a house of suffering, pain and death. Thresa was concerned chiefly with conversion and the saintliness of suffering. He documents this well and Leys refutes none of his journalistic claims.

Leys does not delve into these claims but demerits Hitchens’ brutal attack and relies on Theresa saintly reputation to claim what Hitchens has written as Philistine destruction of the beautiful saintly philosophy. The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa Theory and Practice is not my favorite work of Hitchens but I have never been able to dismiss those two claims of she embraced the famous and the fraudsters took money from nefarious sources and that her hospice should have been a hospital with a high standard of care. The poor suffered on both ends from fraud and lack of fine medical and the money sits in the bank.

While it is easy to find positions Christopher Hitchens held that one can disagree with, in this instance Hitchens wrote about something that was truly ugly because Calcutta should have the fine hospital with popper staff, equipment, medicines and analgesics, not a house of the death and suffering. He fought ugliness and he fought the corruption, even if they were committed by would be saints.