Why is it that, having spent several days somewhat mystified by certain elements of the public debate around recent events in Paris, it was Will Self’s piece on Vice.com – and his subsequent appearance on that bastion of moral confusion, Channel 4 News – that tipped me over into a state of profound irritation?

The main answer is tediously simple: I am something of a fan of Mr. Self. I regard him as a consistently interesting, challenging and imaginative public intellectual, and as such someone to dearly cherish. I recently tweeted my opinion that, with his last two novels Umbrella and Shark, he had gone from being a very good novelist to a genuinely great one, and I meant it.

Fast forward to a few days ago, and the cold sound of gunshots echoing off the stone streets of Paris. Then this: Will Self entering the debate with a piece reflecting on, and questioning, ‘our fetish for free speech’.

I understand his argument. On Channel 4 news Will explained that all rights, including the right to freedom of speech, come with responsibilities, and claimed that in the wake of the Paris attacks, secular democrats are asserting ‘Freedom of Speech’ as an absolute value in a way that has, rather ironically, religious overtones.

I get the argument, but I disagree with him on both counts and here’s why. Yes, all rights do indeed come with responsibilities. But oddly, Will doesn’t go any further towards describing what exactly, in his opinion, the responsibilities might be that are relevant to recent events in Paris. Are we to infer that Will believes that we have the right to freedom of speech, but that this right comes tethered by the responsibility to avoid offending the metaphysical (and therefore unproven and unprovable) beliefs of religious people? Or are we merely constrained by the ‘responsibility’ to not offend pious Muslims, regardless of context?

Let us not forget that part of what drove the specific attack on Charlie Hebdo – as well as the multiple murderous responses to a set of Danish cartoons published several years ago – is a piece of doctrine which states that it is forbidden to publish pictures of – to visually represent in any manner at all – the prophet Mohammed. This prohibition, in and of itself, is antithetical to any notion of free speech that has any meaning at all. If you believe in free speech in any meaningful sense, then you believe in the right, of anyone who wants to, to break that nonsensical prohibition and draw a picture of Mohammed.

Is Will saying that a drawing of the Prophet is wrong, rather than the prohibition itself? I would suggest that making our world a slightly safer and more harmonious place would involve a number of desirable developments, but surely one of those would be a process of moderate reform within Islamic culture itself that would have many results – one of which would be everyone involved ceasing to care in the slightest about someone, anyone, creating a drawing of Mohammed. Another would be, let me think, a complete u-turn on the subject of apostasy, say.

You see, these were cartoons. While no one of any faith should ever be persecuted for their religious beliefs, we also cannot grant a priori respect for a piece of doctrine simply because it is part of a religious faith. And we cannot respect the prohibition against images of the Prophet if we consider ourselves committed to liberalism, pluralism and freedom.

They were cartoons. Drawings. People were murdered for drawing them. So come on Will, tell us: what are the ‘responsibilities’ that constrain the right to draw a picture without threat of violence? I’m struggling to think of them.

Incidentally, I’ve only looked at a small amount of Charlie Hebdo’s output, and in my opinion it’s mostly puerile rubbish. But I’m shocked at the number of people who seem, at the moment, unable to distinguish between not liking a piece of cultural production, and questioning the right of its producers to have made it in the first place. This is a very important – and thankfully very simple – distinction that we should all be able to make without fail. It is in that sense that the #jesuischarlie meme should not be as easily dismissed as Will implies.

I also disagree that people are treating ‘Freedom of Speech’ as an absolute value in a way that, Will argues, echoes the bland certainties of religious belief itself. Fair enough, in the simple and grandiose language of some European politicians, I see the source of his accusation and understand his complaint.

But I don’t think it’s true. Rather, people are rightly intuiting and asserting that freedom of speech, though very messy, and certainly not perfect or utopian in any sense of the word, nonetheless happens to be the foundation, the necessary condition, of the only kind of decent society that we know of – flawed though it is.

Moreover, freedom of speech is the foundation of the only kind of society that has the ability to change itself over time, through debate and argument, through evolutionary, peacefully dialectical processes rather than via the blood-splattered streets and trampled corpses of revolution.

So, no Will, I don’t think our love of freedom of speech can be dismissed as a ‘fetish’, and I don’t think it is, as you’ve argued, being treated as an ‘absolute’ in the religious sense. Rather, we would do well to remember that freedom of speech is, in its very nature, opposed to absolutism. The latter is established though authoritarian control, totalitarian means, and a culture (be it Communist, Christian, Fascist, Islamist or otherwise) that conditions a population to believe, on pain of torture or death, in one set of ideas, one set of books, one point of view, one interpretation of morality, one ideal. One God.

Freedom of speech, flawed and messy though it is, is the thing that defeats – sometimes slowly and sometimes more rapidly – such monomaniacal evils as these. Because when you introduce freedom of speech, what happens? Points of view proliferate; ideas divide and blend and reproduce exponentially; stories multiply; more different kinds of books are written and published; arguments are had and extended and commented upon; and more different types of individuals and identities escape from underneath the yoke of conservative, traditional or normative oppression to claim their agency and rights.

No, freedom of speech is not an absolute. But it is the best thing we have. That’s why we’re right to defend it with passion.

I’m going to level with you from the start. I’m a fan. A supporter. I won’t say a ‘believer’– for obvious reasons – but my point is that, long before Christopher Hitchens was declared to have the oesophageal cancer that eventually killed him on 15th December 2011, I was firmly of the opinion that he was an extremely fine writer, one of a tiny handful of our very finest thinkers, and without exception the singularly finest public speaker in the whole of western intellectual culture.

‘The Hitch’ meant a lot to quite a lot of people and I was (I am) one of them. His talent as a speaker was such that for many years, pretty much every time he opened his mouth someone turned on a video camera. Hence, searching for his name on YouTube yields a treasure chest of wonderful stuff…* hours upon hours of videos of him lecturing, discussing, debating, improvising, thinking on his feet and, frequently, taking on an intellectual adversary and absolutely destroying them with the utmost grace, wry wit, fearsome intelligence, superior historical knowledge and, that most underrated of virtues, simply being right.

This little book, then, is his final volume, his last hurrah, one might say. It is not the place to start if you’ve never read Hitch before – he has, understandably, written better books – but it is exactly what it purports to be. It is the last words of a man whose staunch intellectual honesty and integrity over the course of his life had rather earned him the right to deliver one last gift, a book written by a dying man on the subject of dying. Without self-pity, without euphemism or fantasy or neurosis. Just this: a book about dying, by a man who is doing precisely that.

The late years of Hitch’s life featured, above all, the continued provocation and reiteration of two main arguments: one saw him being viscerally attacked by the political left for the perceived ‘betrayal’ or ‘shift to the right’ contained in his open and enthusiastic support for the U.S and its allies’ invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq. The second was his own attack on religion, most notably expressed in his best-selling book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

The first of these is barely touched on in Mortality. Which is a shame, because it’s still an important debate: it is at least reasonable to claim, as Hitch’s good friend the novelist Ian McEwan has done, that it was, rather, the political left that changed its position over time, away from its emancipatory, anti-totalitarian core, ditching its hatred of tyrants and oppressive regimes in order to cultivate an even more violent hatred of the United States of America. And that while the left slowly changed, it was in fact Hitchens – lifelong despiser of despots and tyrants – who stayed broadly consistent. (Hitch’s support for the UK’s war in the Falkland Islands is evidence for this view. Acknowledged to be fiercely left-wing at the time, Hitch nonetheless correctly foresaw that if Britain could defeat Argentina in war the brutal, racist and oppressive military regime of Galtieri would fall. And fall it did. Within a year of the end of the conflict.)

The second of the two arguments that dominated Hitch’s late career – religion – seeps into this book in a number of places, and in fact feels never far from the words on any of its pages. It is a presence throughout. Because it was, I suppose, inevitable for Hitch’s detractors to wonder if, faced with the spectre of non-existence, his ‘anti-theism’ would waver. (Hitch was determined to make the distinction between ‘atheism’ and ‘anti-theism’: you can be the former, he said, and still wish there was a God. To be the latter, as he was, is to be relieved that there is absolutely no evidence for such a thing.)

In any case, waver he did not. He discusses ‘Pascal’s Wager’, which describes a kind of ‘bet’ a dying man might place with himself, and which states that you might as well put your faith in God, as you stand to gain everything if proved right, and to lose nothing if proved wrong. Hitch, though, is having none of it:

“Pascal assumes both a  cynical god and an abjectly opportunist human being. Suppose I ditch the principles I have held for a lifetime, in the hope of gaining favour at the last minute? I hope and trust that no serious person would be at all impressed by such a hucksterish choice. Meanwhile, the god who would reward cowardice and dishonesty and punish irreconcilable doubt is one of the many gods in which (whom?) I don’t believe.”

Being what it is, this book, stoic and intelligent and utterly devoid of self-pity, nonetheless becomes more heartbreaking to read as it reaches towards its close. He describes the tortuous effect on him of the slow disappearance of his voice, one of his most unique and treasured assets as a public figure:

“We may not be, as we used to boast, the only animals capable of speech. But we are the only ones who can deploy vocal communication for sheer pleasure and recreation, combining it with our two other boasts of reason and humour to produce higher syntheses. To lose this ability is to be deprived of an entire range of faculty: it is assuredly to die more than a little.”

At the end of this chapter, he sadly and resignedly describes himself as having been consigned, by his disease, in conversation (that most favoured of Hitch’s pastimes,) to the role of listener. And he ultimately connects the awfulness of that fate with his lifelong study of what really matters; of what gives meaning and integrity to human beings: our freedom to express ourselves, to think, and to debate, and to discuss, and to work things out not according to some utopian totalitarian certainty, but by trial and error, using humility, experiment and intelligence:

“What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.”

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens is published by Atlantic Books and can be bought from Amazon by clicking this link.

* If you haven’t done it before, just search for ‘Christopher Hitchens’ on YouTube and browse. Or if you want somewhere to start, this is a wonderfully thoughtful interview that says a lot about his politics and his historical knowledge; or click here to see him debate (and defeat) Tony Blair, himself no slouch as a public speaker; or click here for a fascinating bookstore reading in which Hitch discusses his book about Thomas Jefferson.