As we get further away from his much-too-early death, I find myself missing Christopher more and more. Not so much his company, but his presence as a writer. Some spirit went out of the world of letters with him. And because that’s the world in which I’ve made my life, the only one in which I can imagine a life, I take the loss of this spirit personally. Why is a career like that of Christopher Hitchens not only unlikely but almost unimaginable? Put another way: Why is the current atmosphere inhospitable to it?

Would the current environment really have been so hostile to a figure like Hitchens? One of the things that made his infamous quip about Jerry Falwell’s death in 2007 so bold—if Falwell had been given an enema, he told Sean Hannity, he could have been buried in a matchbox—was that it described his late persona almost as well. Before he was diagnosed with cancer in 2010, he was better known as an insult comic than a man of letters—less a sage our political era would have left homeless than a voice who prefigured an age of blowhards and possessed few of the traits his namesake prize has been created to honor. His writing was characterized, above all, by an incredible stubbornness, particularly on Iraq—an issue, Packer says, for which “Christopher made it a point of honor never to call retreat,” even as it became clear that the war was a moral and strategic catastrophe.

Outrage has been redefined as a kind of stupidity.

That obstinacy might have been a trait worth dwelling on given Packer’s critique of the certitude that he believes defines our intellectual moment. “My students have come of age during a decade when public discourse means taking a position and sticking with it,” he says. “The most influential writers are those who create a dazzling moral clarity. Its light is meant to overpower subjects, not illuminate them.” But the same could be said of Hitchens’s preferred rhetorical mode: shock and awe. He began his career as a left-wing polemicist and ended it as a zealot for American empire and the New Atheism, animated by a dogmatism that put most of the religiously faithful he disdained to shame. “[H]e not infrequently simply made arguments based not on reason or evidence but on his own gut feelings,” Alex Pareene wrote in 2015. “Much of his better polemical writing (and all of the worst of it) was clearly motivated by personal, visceral disgust.”

It eventually becomes clear that what Packer wanted to impart to his students wasn’t a wariness of moral clarity or factionalism per se—both were hallmarks of Hitchens’s rhetorical style and persona. What Packer is against is allowing a sense of moral clarity to govern the ways writers engage with each other:

For every time he called me a split-the-difference bien-pensant, and for every time I called him a pseudo–Lord Byron, we seemed to become better friends. We would say rude things about each other in print, and then we’d exchange tentatively regretful emails without yielding an inch, and then we’d meet for a drink and the whole thing would go unmentioned, and somehow there was more warmth between us than before. Exchanging barbs was a way of bonding with Christopher.

This, it’s implied, is how discourse ought to be. Writers should argue fiercely about issues that matter, yes, but not so fiercely that they can’t grab drinks, settle up, and nominate each other for the Hitchens Prize. The world of ideas, as rendered by Packer, is a very different kind of place than the world where most human beings reside. Above them, the wise—people like Packer, people like Hitchens—busy themselves with the ideas that shape, and occasionally end, the lives of the rest. This is a profession made noble by abstraction. When an idea is simply an idea, things can be civil. And when things are civil, things are pure.