Dennis Ross: Remarks on the Awarding of the 2022 Hitchens Prize to Margaret Atwood
On behalf of DVRF, the Ross family foundation, and Jeff Goldberg and the rest of our colleagues at The Atlantic, welcome to the 6th Hitchens Prize dinner.
It is so good to see you all and to be back in the warm light of the Waverly Inn. As I’m sure you appreciate, the pandemic interrupted our plans for last year, but, hopefully, tonight marks a return to an annual practice of honoring those who speak and write with honesty, courage and intelligence.
We are returning with a bang, privileged to add Margaret Atwood, certainly in the small handful of greatest living writers, to our roster of Hitchens Prize winners. More about Ms. Atwood in a moment, but first it’s worth noting that just a few months ago we passed the 10 year anniversary of Christopher Hitchens’ death. This sad occasion drew a wide range of wistful comment, with much curiosity about what Hitchens would have to say if alive today.
If we pursue that same curiosity for a minute, and speculate what a 2022 Hitchens would be thinking or saying, an initial observation is that a lot has happened in the last ten years, and today some of Hitchens’ views seem almost quaint. Consider an early 2008 Hitchens’ article titled “The Peril of Identity Politics,” written when Hillary and Obama were fighting for the Democratic nomination, each wearing the mantle of the first of their ‘category’ that could be President. Hitchens was sharply critical of such appeals to race or gender, arguing that the true measure of our progress from a hideous legacy of discrimination was our ability to disregard race or gender as relevant categories and to move past by forgetting historical prejudice, something he pointed out we’d been able to do with regard to largely forgotten but once potent bigotries around national origin. Well, a lot has happened since that article was written, but hard to think of much that has responded to Hitchens’ call for a race/gender blind politics.
Social and political winds have also shifted around free expression, another issue where Hitchens’ views were traditionally minded. The last decade has seen a broadened assault by those who would apply legal or social sanction to speech and, if they could figure out how to do it, probably to thought as well. Can we doubt that Hitchens would have been stunned by current talk, quite fashionable on campus, of rewriting the First Amendment, or that he would have abhorred speech codes, cancel culture and the lot. His greatest ire might actually have been reserved for the attempted cancellation in some quarters of Thomas Jefferson, the Author of America as Hitchens put it in his Jefferson biography. Hitchens admiration for Jefferson did not avoid his troubled legacy on race and slavery. Would he not have thought it preposterous, however, that this failing, grievous but common for the period, should erase the man so central to the development and articulation of our founding and still core political values.
One could continue this exercise, imagining how a 2022 Hitchens would react to trends in our cultural and political wars, but the exercise at the end of the day simply underscores that his voice, once so prominent in the public square, is now sadly missing. What still survives, and what the Hitchens Prize is intended to strengthen, is the memory not only of what he said but also of how he thought and, indeed, how he worked at thinking. In that, he reminds us of the power that resides in human reason, and of the courage required to follow its path however far it leads from the opinion of others. We recall as well his brilliance in debate, but should not forget that, for all his rhetorical flair, he sought public argument as much to test his own views as those of his opponents. Taken altogether, he was the model of an intellect openly and honestly at work, restlessly pressing to expand or refine his knowledge. As for the lessons he leaves us, his own words serve as well as any, his oft-cited aphorism “it’s not what you think, but how you think,” and the bit of his advice inscribed on the medal we award Prize winners, “take the risk of thinking for yourself.”
This all brings us back to Margaret Atwood, the last person anyone would accuse of not thinking for herself. What is remarkable about her career is in part its length, she began to write plays and poetry at the age of 6, but much more the depth of her talent and breadth of her interests.
One might believe from its publicity that The Handmaid’s Tale was the pinnacle of her career, but it was written over 30 years ago and since then she has been a Booker Prize finalist 5 times and won the award twice. The Booker recognition was for her work as a novelist, but she’s been equally prolific and honored as a poet and writer of nonfiction.
It’s a staggering record of literary accomplishment, and certainly a large reason we are so pleased to award her the Hitchens Prize, but what also strongly spoke to us are the courage and integrity she has shown in defending free expression and resisting those who would wrap an ideological straightjacket around public discourse. The manic rigidity of some of her critics is captured by their challenge to her feminist credentials for having the temerity to suggest that an accused male academic was entitled to a degree of due process. She’s been resolute through a series of such flare-ups, never failing to calmly and publicly make the case for deliberation and reason over hysteria and dogma. For that we are all in her debt.