# Atwood wins Hitchens Prize, Gives Good Speech **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 3, 2022, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/atwood-wins-hitchens-prize-gives-good-speech/962210 "2022-04-03T22:30:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2022, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/atwood-wins-hitchens-prize-gives-good-speech/962210/1 "2022-04-03T22:30:44Z")
I’m a fan of Margaret Atwood. She gives a great speech here, reported in The Atlantic. > **[Your Feelings Are No Excuse](https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/04/margaret-atwood-hitchens-prize-speech/629443/)** > > Emotions may explain why people overreact, but they don’t justify it. ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2022, 2:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/atwood-wins-hitchens-prize-gives-good-speech/962210/2 "2022-04-04T02:13:33Z")
TL, DR, For Bog’s Sake Stop Linking Paywalled Sites… **An excerpt from the above article.** “During the past 15 years or so, the Western world has been under intense attack. By _Western world,_ I mean the world of open, representative democracies, in which the governed have a say in who is to do the governing, in which the judicial arm is separate from the executive arm, in which the laws at least attempt to reform themselves in the direction of fairness and a balance between the rights of the individual and the interests of society at large—or so goes the theory. Some of the attacks have come from without: foreign troll bots have been busily undermining trust and spreading falsehoods. But some have come from within, from both the so-called right and the so-called left. Democracy doesn’t work, we’ve been told. It’s corrupt. It’s all controlled by money—there’s something to that point of view, you must admit. Strongmen are .more efficient. Decadence must be stamped out. For the good of the universe, certain people must be silenced or eliminated. If you’re my age, you’ve heard this before. In fact it is—quite literally—where I came in I’ve taken to drawing a simple diagram to illustrate the problem. Inscribe a circle. At the top, write _Tyranny_ . At the bottom, write _Chaos_ . Across the middle, there’s a band we might call “Open democracy.” There’s an arrow going up to _Tyranny_ on the left, and one on the right. There’s an arrow going down toward _Chaos_ on the right, and one on the left. There’s a big arrow on either side going directly from _Chaos_ to _Tyranny_ : Get yourself a dictator, and he’ll clear up the chaos; so goes the thinking when things become chaotic enough. The moderate center is a preferable place to live. There’s more respect for the individual, or that is the idea. There’s at least some desire for human rights for everyone, or that, too, is the idea. There’s less fear, and that is the idea as well. But the moderate center is also the hardest position to defend. It lacks a Big Slogan. It lacks hordes of robotic followers. It’s untidy. It resists the homogeneous. And it’s under constant attack from both extremes, those on the so-called right and the so-called left. It is this dream of a moderate democratic center that Ukraine has been defending, and that defense has had a broad effect. Suddenly, the recent detractors of democracy are concluding—or some of them are—that maybe democracy is a system worth fighting for, because the alternatives are so much worse. Could it be that open debate, the importance of truth, the necessity of human rights for all, and the desirability of evidence are making a comeback? Is mere yelling about to go out of fashion? Let us devoutly hope so.”