It’s Halloween, and Margaret Atwood is sitting down with me to discuss the Important Topic of debt as a human construct, how it shapes our society, and how our present value system skews the way we view our debt to the planet. This timely topic of the 2008 CBC Massey Lectures is titled Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Her final lecture will be delivered at Convocation Hall the following day.
And yet what I can’t help but notice is that Margaret Atwood, a formidable force in the social fabric of this country, who recently returned from a quick jaunt to Spain to receive that country’s highest distinction (added to a pile of awards that includes pretty much everything but the Nobel Prize), is wearing a black sweater with an orange shirt, carrying a pair of monarch butterfly costume wings.
Who cares? As John Fraser, the Master of Massey College, remarked while introducing her to the packed hall on Saturday night, there are two Margaret Atwoods: a woman who chooses to dress like a butterfly for Halloween, and the Great Writer, the Margaret Atwood, the brilliant mind daunting to interviewers (though very kind to student journalists). The two are mutually reinforcing.
Presently, the question “Why write about debt?” isn’t one that people are asking—it’s hard to think about anything else. As work on the lectures began in earnest in late January, Atwood’s decision to choose this topic and not, say, bananas, looks pretty prophetic. Sources of inspiration, she says, included “the ads on buses—people making a living off debt—19th-century literature, and social animals that exist in hierarchies where there is exchange.”
Given her prescience, it might be tempting to call Atwood the Lady Oracle. More likely, being attuned to society is just part and parcel of being a novelist.
Other source material included her mother’s household ledgers from the 1930s and ‘40s. “What debt you had you paid off the next week. Your biggest debt was the mortgage on your home,” she says when we have our sit-down interview in the common room at Massey. Though debt has always been the subject of morality, our position has been inconsistent.
But as much as Payback is about debt, it also concerns the innate human qualities that make the concept possible—debt is just part of how we think. Only a species with a sense of balance and fairness could create a debt crisis. Atwood notes an experiment in which capuchin monkeys were taught to exchange pebbles with their keeper for slices of cucumber. One day, one of the monkeys got a grape, valued as being worth more than the measly cucumbers the rest received for their pebbles. The other monkeys were furious and refused to continue playing.
“When one monkey got a grape for doing nothing, it didn’t work into the system. It’s just not fair,” she intones. It seems awfully deterministic.
“It’s not genetic, not determinist. It’s epigenetic,” she retorts, referring to the study of how certain genetic traits may be switched on or off, depending on the environment. As she writes in Payback, “I’m not proposing a stamped-in-tin immutable ‘human nature’ here. […] I’m merely saying that without gene-linked configurations—certain building blocks or foundation stones, if you like—the many variations of basic human behaviours that we see around us would never occur at all.”
“We’re disposed to this way of thinking,” she tells me, “but the light needs to go off for it to happen.” There are few instances where humans don’t think by way of fairness, balance, or debt. “Not when the other person’s got an axe or a nuclear arsenal.”
But this disposition to value things improperly has disastrous results.
In its 47 years, the Massey Lecture series has covered everything from Ursula Franklin’s Real World of Technology to Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress. In the college’s partnership with CBC Radio 1’s Ideas and the House of Anansi Press, there are three discernable principles:
One. Ideas—those airy, unsubstantial, in-theory, thought-bubble things—matter. They have always mattered, whether or not you are aware of their structuring your life and the decisions that affect you.
Two. The world—the very concrete, lived in, consequential, hard-realities world—is at stake. You may not comprehend it in the pressing, underlying way that the Massey Lectures address. The basic job for the lecturer is to identify that sense of malaise we all feel but can’t figure out until, handily, the lecturer gives it a name.
Three. If we are to wrestle the world from the brink, the ideas we need must belong to us all.
If with Payback Atwood seems an oracular figure, the mantle of Massey Lecturer fits her well. There’s a sense in which fulfilling the proper role of an academic is enough. “What would Margaret Atwood do in the face of the environmental crisis?” someone asked. “She would give this lecture,” the Great Writer replied.
The final question was from a woman named Ruth, an ecologist who worries that she could give people all the information in the world about how their actions harm the environment, but it doesn’t change people’s behaviour. She believes “people are inherently wanting to do the right thing.”
“I enjoy your writing,” Ruth said, “because as a scientist, I don’t get people. I don’t understand—I want to understand people better. If I can give people information, and it doesn’t change their behaviour, then it becomes about the brain. The brain seems to protect you. You can’t accept things that are threatening.”
“I spend a lot of time thinking about this because it relates to my job,” Ruth admitted, her voice breaking. “What do you think needs to be done to help people when information isn’t enough?”
Atwood responds: “The sad truth is, it’s usually necessity that drives behaviour, rather than being told, ‘You’d be good if you did this,’ which works for about two weeks. It’s just like dieting: great resolutions, but they don’t hold up in the face of donuts. You have to give them something else to do. So I would say, redirecting energy in a positive direction, so that people can see that treating things differently is actually good for them.”
“So it’s not futile?” Ruth asked. It was most poignant question of the evening, and a test of whether the Massey Lectures can really answer the questions they pose. But if the Massey Lectures can’t, who will? Where else does the public witness a scientist asking a novelist about how to make people really understand?
“No, it’s not futile. And when people realize that they need that information, there you will be. You’re providing the data upon which action will be taken. When somebody needs that data, the knowledge will be there. You may feel it isn’t necessary right now, or that people don’t recognize it, but it will be necessary, and that’s what you’re doing.”
