One of the strangest sights in contemporary intellectual life has been the apotheosis of the secular saint. Like the holy men and women of the past, they gather disciples around them, whose interviews devoutly record their words and deeds; like the martyrs, they suffer for their unbelief, but their last utterances, transfigured by suffering, are all the more treasured. Their lives and deaths are reported in hushed tones, for these magi of the social media are trumpeted by their hagiographers as the true prophets of our time, baptised in wine and purified by sin. In the secular pantheon, cleanliness is next to ungodliness. As a preacher, a Terry Pratchett promoting euthanasia outranks any pope, pastor or rabbi. When Christopher Hitchens died last year, a Diana-like shrine was erected outside his apartment. Not piety but celebrity is the highest virtue.
Among those venerated by the intelligentsia, a prominent place is held by the late Tony Judt. For two years before he died in 2010, Judt was paralysed with motor neurone disease and his ordeal added to the mystique that surrounded him. Ever since his notorious call for Israel to commit national suicide by renouncing its role as the homeland of the Jewish people and embrace a post-Zionist identity as part of a mainly Palestinian state, Judt has been revered as a hero by the academic Left. In his latest posthumous work, written with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (Heinemann, £25), Judt admits that he felt "genuine discomfort" at such idolisation, because "the fact is that it took very little courage to publish a controversial piece about Israel in the New York Review of Books while holding a tenured chair at a major university."
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