Margaret Atwood on utopias

Ezra Klein, Margaret Atwood on Stories, Deception, and the Bible, The New York Times, March 25, 2022. From the interview:

Atwood: Well, now. Now we’re getting into it. Now we’re getting into the problem, OK. 19th century was a century of utopias. So many of them were written that Gilbert and Sullivan write an opera called “Utopia Limited,” which is 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 and factories, look at that. Sewing machines, wow. Oh, and before that 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 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 start 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 you could 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 Yevgeny Zamyatin. We get “1984.” We get “Fahrenheit 451.” It’s not great, and it becomes very difficult to write a utopia because nobody believes in it anymore. And 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, OK, 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.