Margaret Atwood

speaker

143 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2025 last heard 9 Mar

Margaret Atwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism · 9 May 2025 podcast

So the French monarchy had put a lot of money into the American Revolution because they were pissed at the British for having... taking new France. We want to get back at them. So they overspent on the American Revolution, and then they upped the taxes, never popular, and then the price of bread went up. So perfect storm. People were angry enough to take the risk.

Okay, so we've had a lot of thinking along those lines. People interested in genetics say there's a genetic component. People interested in cultures say there's a cultural component. A very interesting book from years ago that I read was by a man who, as a child, being Jewish, had been rescued and hidden. in the Netherlands.

And when he grew up, he was tortured by the question, what made those people do that? Why did they do that? They're risking their own lives. Why did they? And he went back and he interviewed a number of people who had rescued children. under those circumstances. And he thought, is it religious? No, it was not religious. Some of them were religious, others were not. Was it political?

No, it was not political. Some of them were left, some of them were right, some of them didn't have politics particularly. So what was it? And he said the only thing that he could conclude was that to have done otherwise would have violated their idea of who they were. But where did they get that idea of who they were? That's another question which he didn't pursue.

But where do you get that idea of who you are, that you are not a person who, when presented with a child that needed to be rescued, you are not a person who would say, go away, and I'm telling them, SS on you. So what is the difference there? I don't know the answer to that. It's unknown.

Yeah, I think that's entirely right. And there's something that we always leave out of these kinds of conversations, which is it's fun. It's fun to sit at the guillotine and watch these people that you resent getting their heads chopped off. There were wild street dances over that, dancing the carmineule and singing this song about ha, ha, ha, got them back.

So it is a street party in some way, banding together with like-minded people and feeling you've accomplished something, especially if people tell you that this thing that you're doing is basically good. It's very potent. And if it weren't fun on some level, people wouldn't do it. Isn't that a terrible thing to say that it's fun?

But I don't know whether you read Bill Buford's essay on joining football hooligan gangs.

the adrenaline, you know, the exhilaration, the feeling that I haven't had this much fun since like forever. I'm just having a, I feel so alive, you know, hitting people in the nose, etc. And people describe the sort of battle energy that comes over them. And there is a real adrenaline rush that happens. And we can't leave that out. You cannot leave that out.

Well, now. Now we're getting into it. Now we're getting into the problem, okay? 19th century was a century of utopias. So many of them were written that Gilbert and Sullivan write an opera called Utopia Limited, which has a satire on it. But you only satirize something that's a thing, you know, that's become a vogue. Why did they write so many utopias?

Because they'd already made so many amazing discoveries that had changed things. So germs, who knew about them? We know about them now. And look what we can do now that we know about germs. Maybe now we'll wash our hands before delivering babies and giving everybody puerperal fever the way we had been doing before. Steam engines, wow, this is amazing. Steam machinery in factories, look at that.

Sewing machines, wow. Before that, it was all hand sewing. And what might be coming, Jules Verne writing about submarines on the way, air travel around the world in 80 days. So it was just going to get better. There were some problems like the woman problem, but the utopias usually solved those.

by giving the women a better deal and less clothing, and all different kinds, and they solved overpopulation various ways. One of them was that the future people just wouldn't be interested in sex. So I read a lot of those when I was a Victorianist, and then people stopped writing them in the 20th century. Why? Because too many of them were tried in real life on a grand scale.

So Soviet Union comes in as a utopia. Hitler's Germany comes in as a utopia, though only for certain people. Soviet Union tried to be more inclusive, but first you had to kill those people like the Cossacks and Kulaks and what have you. But then But then you can have the utopia. And Mao's China comes in as a utopia. And lots of others. And then it's not great.

So instead we get We by Evgeny Zemyatin. We get 1984. We get Fahrenheit 451. It's not great. And it becomes very difficult to write a utopia because nobody believes it anymore. They'd seen the results. But I think we're getting back to, if not, let's have utopia, but first we have to kill all those people.

I think we're getting to the point where we're saying, unless we improve the way we're living, unless we change the way we're living, goodbye, Homo sapiens sapiens. You cannot continue on a planet as a mid-sized, land-based, oxygen-breathing mammal if there isn't enough oxygen, which is what will happen if we kill the oceans and cut down all the trees. So we are looking into the...

barrel of a gun as a species. And the big debate now is, okay, how much, how soon can it be done, and will people even go for it? And meanwhile, you've got all of these other problems that the problem you're trying to solve is causing. So cascading series of events, can it be reversed? So some of the thinking is being directed towards yes, it can.

Because unless you do yes, it can, you're going to do no, it can't. And if it's no, it can't, goodbye us. So I am working with a platform called Disco to do an online workshop. Practical Utopias course in which people will, like Lego, like Minecraft basically, they will examine the components of our material way of living, like what house, what food, what clothing, what energy.

Can we turn it around on the material level? And in order to do that, what will our social organization have to be like? So what form of government do you propose for this utopia that you're going to build?

So provide them with the tools that are now already available, different ways of building houses, different ways of making fabrics, different ways of providing clothing, et cetera, different energy forms. Let's see what you can put together out of that and who's going to run this thing. So some very fundamental questions.

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