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Margaret Atwood: your feelings are no excuse

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Emotions may explain why people overreact, but they don’t justify it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...ch/629443/

EXCERPTS (Margaret Atwood): ... The other person who would doubtless be amazed on this occasion would be Christopher Hitchens himself, not only by the fact that there is a prize in his name (he would be the first to make some bad-taste quip about that; “Hitch kitsch” springs to mind) but also that I, in particular, have been awarded it.

“What, her?” he might well have exclaimed. I suspect him of having taken a dim view of me, mouthy colonial female from the uncool sticks that I was, or am.

[...] At least he didn’t accuse me of hurting his feelings, nor did I accuse him of hurting mine. Having feelings was not a thing back then. We would not have admitted to owning such marshmallow-like appendages, and if we did have any feelings, we’d have considered them irrelevant as arguments. Feelings are real—people do have them, I have observed—and they can certainly be plausible explanations for all kinds of behavior. But they are not excuses or justifications. If they were, men who murder their wives because they’re feeling cranky that day would never get convicted.

You can’t exist as a writer for very long without learning that something you write is going to upset someone, sometime, somewhere. Whether you end up with a bullet in your neck will depend on many factors—there are lots of bullets, and some necks are thicker than others—but let us pause to remember that the most important meaning of freedom of expression is not that you can say anything you like without any consequences whatsoever but that the bullet should not be your government’s, and it should not be fired into your neck for an expression of political views that don’t coincide with theirs.

Hitch and I were both of an archaic generation that endorsed the basic principles of logic. We knew an ad hominem when we fell over one. We didn’t consider the factual truth of any given matter to be dispensable—or worse, to be some scoundrelly piece of propaganda cooked up by the opposing party. We both believed in a healthy society’s need for public debate, with testable evidence presented. So maybe Hitch would not have said, “What, her?” about me. Instead, he might have said, “It could be worse.” Which is what I would have said about him. We may have disagreed about content, but we were in accord about process.

[...] We urgently need to figure out why the present time we are in fact living through has become so grim, and what can be done about it. It does seem to get more extreme by the minute. COVID lockdowns, riots against COVID lockdowns, a war in Ukraine that’s being fought to defend the principles of an open democracy as against those of a closed autocratic regime. And an ongoing examination of last year’s violent coup attempt in that erstwhile beacon of democracy, the United States—a country in which various parties are now proposing to drag people in front of firing squads, without even a trial, it seems. Who needs a trial when it is known with absolute certainty who ought to be gunned down? How is it known? A finger has pointed. There is no need for evidence or truth.

If you’d like a few examples from history of this process in full spate, they are readily available, and they come from both the so-called right and the so-called left. The Terror, during the French Revolution. Hitler’s elimination of any political opposition, beginning in 1933. Stalin’s purges, sometimes with show trials, often not. The Red Guard period in China. Pol Pot. The Argentinian generals who dropped opponents into the ocean out of airplanes. That’s the beginning of a long, long list.

I expect Hitch would join me in a distinction I have been making lately: that between belief and truth. [...] In recent years, people have confused beliefs with truths. From this confusion have come ideologies and dogmas—the characteristic of a dogma being that it’s proposed as an absolute truth and cannot be disputed, and if you try disputing it, you’ll be burned as a heretic.

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 [...] 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... (MORE - missing details)
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