A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now, the rest of us will likely be worried about a decade from now. The rise of authoritarianism. A backlash against women’s social progress. Climate change leading to social unrest. Advertising permeating more and more of our lives.We originally released this episode back in March 2022. But just like Atwood’s work, it somehow only got more relevant with time. Atwood is the author of at least 17 novels, including the classic “The Handmaid’s Tale,” as well as 20 books of poetry and nine collections of short fiction. When we spoke, she’d just published an essay collection, “Burning Questions.” And she has a new book coming out this fall, “Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts.”Mentioned:Art & Energy by Barry LordBook recommendations:War by Margaret MacMillanBiased by Jennifer L. EberhardtSecrets of the Sprakkar by Eliza ReidCharlotte’s Web by E. B. WhiteLord of the Rings by J. R. R. TolkienThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.htmlThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Special thanks to Kristina Samulewski, Coral Ann Howells and Brooks Bouson. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick and Aman Sahota. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: Why are stories central to human nature?
Oh. Well, people have had a lot of theories about that. So let's say that once we had a language that included a past and a present and a future, once we could think about what had happened and transfer information to people about what might therefore happen, we were going to be telling stories.
So I think the stories, if you go way back, the stories that start being told are partly about how to do stuff. like how to hunt the gazelle, and precautions that you might take around that. So I think stories were originally, or the reason they persisted, because of course there must have been a positive for stories, was to teach people so they didn't have to do it by trial and error.
So Uncle Alf got eaten by a crocodile right there. Maybe better not go swimming there. So you don't have to try for yourself to see if there might be a crocodile there. I'm telling you this story. And it didn't end well, so don't do that. The other thing we did when we started with the complicated language was we started believing in things that might not necessarily be visible.
And I think we did that partly to... Make us feel we are getting a little help here. So it's raining too much. What can we do about that? Let's talk to the rain god.
What do you think the disadvantage is of being a species that thinks in stories where information is more persuasive and a good story?
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Chapter 2: How can stories be used for manipulation?
oh yeah, you can make up really destructive things and use them in an instigated and malicious way for your own ends. And that's the other thing that we really know about stories and going back as far as we can with the written record, among other things, those are the kinds of stories we find. So why were people so horrified by Odysseus? He made up these lies. He made up stories.
He made up ruses. He made up deceptions. He's tricky. So we are a species that deceives. Other species deceive too, but we do it more elaborately and we do it with stories. Other animals go in for camouflage and deception, but we were able to go in for camouflage and deception using words.
And we can, for instance, make up false stories about our enemies to get other people to dislike them and turn against them. And if you go into the history of propaganda in wartime, you will find a lot of clever inventions about stuff that wasn't true done for the purposes of deceiving. So we are a species that deceives. Other species deceive too.
But we do it more elaborately and we do it with stories.
What makes a story believable?
Oh, well now, let me see what kind of thing you might like. I think you might like a story about what a good person you are. You're a good person, Ezra. Do you want to do the right thing? Sure you do, I can tell. Well, you can really help out humankind. So all you have to do is sacrifice 17 children at the full of the moon. And you're going to do that, aren't you, Ezra?
Because you're a good person and you want to help. I think most people want to be good. And they want to help. I don't take a really cynical view of human nature that way. I think we do want to be good. We do want to help. And so a really conniving person will pitch to that side of us rather than saying just let's rob a bank and make a million dollars.
You know, I think you would say no to the bank robbery, Ezra. Because it's not helpful. You might say yes to it if we said, let's rob a bank and use the million dollars to help humankind and advance equality. You might do that. Yeah?
I mean, I worry my bank high skills are weak, so I might have practical objections to the plan.
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Chapter 3: What makes biblical stories so potent?
I mean, there's a lot of sex, death, blood, and violence in there, which is one of the reasons it's remained such a popular book. These are dramatic stories. When you get into the begets and the begats, maybe not so much, but what we would call these sort of key stories are very dramatic. And they often feature something that we really like, which is underdogs making good.
So a number of the key stories are like that. And some of them are about really cataclysmic events. And some of them that we didn't get in high school are about very bad behavior. So the one that I put into the Testaments, which is the concubine cut into 12 pieces, for some reason they didn't parade that in front of the eight-year-olds. I don't know why. So what's a concubine, Mom?
One kid writing a Sunday school essay said, King Solomon had 12 wives and 82 porcupines. It made me just... No. So yeah, it's very interesting to see what kind of bad behavior is actually condoned and permitted, but there isn't a lot of papering over in the Bible. If people are bad, they're bad, like it's right out there on the page. And even people who are favored quite frequently behave badly.
and get called on it.
I want to talk a bit about the way that stories function in politics. You're Canadian, but you've spent a fair amount of time living in the United States as well. What's your view of the difference between the stories Americans tell about themselves, about their country, and the stories that Canadians tell about their country?
Well, these stories are in flux, as you probably have noticed. There used to be a kind of shared mythology in the United States, and Canadians used to lament that they didn't have such a thing. And it would, in fact, be quite difficult to have a totally shared mythology in Canada because it was already made up of some diverse groups of people.
But Americans had a kind of unifying story and unifying ceremonies that involved a lot of marching around on the 4th of July. The French also have been quite conflicted about their stories, but they managed to make it stick for a while. So it was Bastille Day, good or bad. I think they're still thinking it's good. But there was a lot of adjustment before that became the accepted stories.
They had the revolution, then they had Napoleon, then they had the restoration of the monarchy, and then they had another republic, and then they had another monarchy, and then they had another republic. In order to hold any sort of nation state together, there has to be a story that most of the people agree on. And every once in a while, those stories fall apart.
And if they're not replaced with another one, fragmentation is the result. So one of the things that stories do is they give members of a group a kind of unifying imaginary thing that they can believe in. When I say imaginary, I'm not saying it's necessarily false. I'm saying it is a thing of the imagination, like money. It's also a thing of the imagination.
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Chapter 4: How do national myths shape countries?
Okay, because the Cold War was the Iron Curtain, Land of Darkness. Don't know whether you remember that pop song, They Don't Have a God Behind the Iron Curtain.
I do not.
No?
Before my time.
Oh, they don't have God behind the iron curtain. To Satan they have given something crown.
But this evil nation will never find salvation till the Lord tears the iron curtain down.
It's catchy. Catchy, yeah. So the story about America was that's where you wanted to be. That's where you didn't have all the things that were going on behind the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain then comes down in 1989. That story loses some of its grip. So if you're going to be Land of Virtuous Light, who is the foil to that? You know, who gets to play the Penguin to your Batman?
Or even worse, the Joker to your Batman. And that was a problem. I remember the 90s, which is probably when you were born.
I'm a little older than that.
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Chapter 5: What inspired 'The Handmaid's Tale'?
And knock, knock, knock, there would be the light bulb. But after telling us about that, he then took us into the vestibule and said, want to change some dollars? Anyway, everything was sort of underneath. So we went in search of Kafka at that time in Prague, trying to find Kafka, because I'm a big fan of Kafka, and couldn't find any Kafka things.
Graham actually went to his addresses trying to find Kafka, knock on the door, Kafka, no, no, no, no, no, Kafka, no, goodbye, slam. So very verboten Kafka at that time. We then went back in 89. And already there were Kafka handkerchiefs, Kafka playing cards, Kafka tchutchkas were already beginning to appear. And then I went back a little bit later and it was full-blown Kafka. You couldn't...
You sort of couldn't avoid Kafka. There's a statue, there's an award. I've got the award. I've got the Kafka award. I was thrilled. And in the hotel where I was staying, they had a whole sort of display of sort of Kafka's pencil, Kafka's typewriter, Kafka's chewing gum, you know, just anything that they could collect was in there. So this is a story about two things.
Number one, about how some literary figures get repressed under certain kinds of regimes. Why Kafka? Because he wrote stories about impenetrable bureaucracies, the justice of which could not be figured out. And that was a bit too close to the bone, I suppose. And the other part of the story is how something can disappear, but then reappear.
How you can be a villain for one regime and a hero for the next. And that can work both ways.
Tell me a bit about the regime you construct in The Handmaid's Tale. What does Gilead believe?
Okay, so the answer to that question is, what questions was I attempting to answer? And remember when I start writing it, beginning of the 80s when there's already a backlash against a lot of the stuff that had been happening in the 60s and 70s. And things do tend to go that way.
So you have 10 or 15 years of a certain period, and then you have a pushback against it by people who didn't like it when it was happening. So Joan Didion predicted it. She said, some of these people are not happy. This is not their idea of how things should go. And that also can work both ways, because any group over 200 people is almost bound to have a schism.
It's a good rule.
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Chapter 6: How do totalitarian regimes control narratives?
They have their immediate concerns. They have their own jobs and financial problems. They have stuff they have to deal with. And to try to take any sort of a wide or long view is quite hard for a lot of people because their own lives are so immediate, immersive, and stressed. So that's part of the problem.
And the other part of the problem is we would rather not look, especially if we feel powerless in the face of that which we are being asked to look at. Like, what do you expect me to do? So our really big problem and what is driving a lot of these other problems is what used to be called climate change and is now called the climate crisis.
And that is going to be more weather catastrophes, more fires, more droughts, more famines. And when you have famines, And water shortages, you're going to have social unrest, and you're going to have a great big refugee problem, which we already have now. So what are you going to do? And for most people, what can they do? And therefore, I would rather not look.
So it's like my friend who, when she sees a squirrel run over in the streets, she says, I don't want to look at that. Well, you know, who does? I don't want to look at a squashed squirrel either, but it's there.
I've read enough interviews with you to know you kind of bat away questions of prescience. But it struck me reading that, that it's actually maybe one of the simple answers to why a number of your books have an extraordinary staying power and feel like they were a bit ahead of their time, which is simply that you seem pretty good at not ignoring, at simply asking, well, what if this is true?
What if this continues? What if what I see is real?
Yes, I wouldn't call it a gift.
None of them are, right? Isn't that the thing about the gifts, in stories at least?
Well, gifts from the gods usually have a catch. Somebody asked me the other day, would you like to live forever? And I said, well, I've heard that story. Don't ask for eternal life unless you also ask for eternal youth, because it's not going to work out well. They have to be treated with care, gifts from the gods.
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Chapter 7: What are the dangers of ignoring societal issues?
Being poor is being undervalued and treated as negligible. The more equal people are from the point of view of what they've got, the happier they are likely to be. So it's not a question of what you've got, it's a question of whether what you've got is considered negligible, or whether what you've got is considered exceptional.
We all feel a version of this, and it's very hard to live as if you know it's true, even if you intellectually do, that the problems I have right now are wonderful problems to have. It doesn't mean on some level they're not problems. I mean, my son was up every hour on the hour overnight and whatever.
I have all the little difficulties of a life, but it is hard to imagine how I will look at myself and my own lack of, not spoken, but felt gratitude at times. But it's hard to live as if you know how good your life truly is. It's just a strange thing about being human.
Yeah, well, you can't do it every day, but you might take time off now and again. So back in the days when people did these things, everybody said grace before a meal. Grace is of different kinds, but basically it was an acknowledgement that you were lucky to be eating grace. There was an old Scottish grace that said, let me see, what is it?
Some have meat and cannot eat, some something and lack it, but we have meat and we can eat, and so the Lord be thanked. Like that. And then they got silly about it and said things like, good drink, good meat, good God, let's eat. So that was a normal thing that people did in their life at one time. It used to be a daily but often hypocritical thing that people did.
However, any form of social convention is going to be hypocritical at times. And just so we realize how lucky we are. Wouldn't it be awful if we always had to tell the truth on social occasions?
Yes. It would not be great. I think there's something to be grateful there, too.
Oh, I'm so glad you're here having dinner with us. When are they leaving?
I think it's easily enough to conceive how in 84 you're looking at totalitarianism at East Germany and also thinking about trends in America. But something in the background is that you get Gilead in part because of environmental crisis. So tell me to you how you think about societies changing as their ecosystems degrade, their environmental ecosystems.
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Chapter 8: How does insatiability shape our world?
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.
Have you ever constructed a utopia, even just for yourself, that you find convincing?
Not yet. I know they're pitfalls, having read so many of them. You'll notice that I put one into Oryx and Crake and the Mad Atom trilogy, and that's an engineered species that lacks our drawback, shall we say. But they're also, for a human being like us, very boring.
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