Customer Reviews

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (CBC Massey Lectures)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What could be more timely, in these economically unstable days, than a discussion about debt?

The essays in Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth were presented as a series of radio lectures in Canada in November 2008. While I often enjoy the non-fiction writings of writers who are more famous for their novels (Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, Stephen King, among others), such collections are usually on a variety of topics or on a fiction-related topic such as writing. In Margaret Atwood's case though, she has taken on the subject of debt, although not exclusively financial debt.

Starting with a history of debt that is sprinkled with childhood memories of Scrooge McDuck and her first bank account, she examines the morality of owing other people. Using examples from literature and from nature, Atwood explores the universality of the concept of fairness. When capuchin monkeys realize that when one of their group is being rewarded with juicy grapes while the rest of them are being rewarded for the same work with lesser treats, they know it's a rotten deal and they rebel.

Atwood looks at how changing attitudes toward debt have affected the way we look at debt in literature. In Shakespeare's A Merchant of Venice, for example, Shylock is a moneylender, which is a necessary, but not very respectable profession. Now one of the most respected professions is banking, which of course, is mainly moneylending.

Debt isn't just about money. Atwood explores the concept of forgiveness, such as when Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison and knew he had to forgive those who'd persecuted him over the years and he had to do it before he walked out of the prison grounds. Otherwise he would carry those resentments with him forever. We know, as he did, that failing to forgive does more harm to ourselves than it does to those who wrong us, but we want payback. Payback for those psychic debts. It's only right, isn't it?

Atwood concludes with a modern-day Christmas Carol that puts all of these debt-related conundrums into perspective. Just in time for Christmas and just in time for the collapse of the world economy. How's that for serendipity?

Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth arrives at an amazingly opportune time, when families are watching jobs and mortgages implode, corporations and communities are running out of credit, and the global economic system is undergoing a meltdown--all because of debt. It is, truly, payback time. And while Atwood's book was completed before the Credit Crash of August, 2008, readers will have that ongoing dramatic scenario fresh in their minds as they follow her investigations into the meaning of debt. "Like air," she says, "it's all around us, but we never think about it unless something goes wrong with the supply." Something has gone wrong, and it's time--past time--to give it some very serious thought. This is just what Atwood does, in a wry, witty, wonderful dance of ideas about debt and its importance in human cultures.

A word of caution for starters, though: if you're looking for suggestions for getting out of the debt mess you're in, you've come to the wrong book. Payback is not a how-to, or even a how-not-to. It is a how-we-got-here, a how-this-is, a how-to-think-about-it, an intellectual (sometimes maddeningly so) journey into the meaning of debt. Atwood examines debt as a metaphor for all our obligations to one another; debt and sin; debt as a literary subtext in everything from Mephistopheles and Vanity Fair to A Christmas Carol; unpaid and unpayable debt; and the "debtor/creditor twinship." When you stop to think about it (and you do stop, and you do think, under Atwood's spell), debt and credit underlie everything under our sun and beyond, even our redemptive and retributive notions of Heaven and Hell. "In Heaven," Atwood writes, "there are no debts--all have been paid, one way or another." Hell is a different story. It's an "infernal maxed-out credit card that multiples the charges endlessly."

You can read Atwood's book in many ways. As an illuminating companion to Jacob Needleman's Money and the Meaning of Life, for instance. Or as a cautionary tale about what happens when we borrow more--money, time, natural resources--than it is possible to repay. Or as a literary tour de force that celebrates the audacity of a gifted and agile wordsmith. Read it to be challenged, to be frustrated, perhaps even to be angered by some of the writer's glib simplifications, and to raise compelling questions. Don't read it for answers, because Atwood, like most poets, doesn't have them and doesn't really want them. In the end, in her reworking of the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, all she has--all we have--are questions:

I don't really own anything, Scrooge thinks. Not even my body. Everything I have is only borrowed. I'm not really rich at all, I'm heavily in debt. How do I even begin to pay back what I owe? Where should I start?

It is a question that many of us, these days, are hard-pressed to answer.

by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

The last chapter of this book should be required reading in the upcoming holiday weeks. Atwood does a marvelous job of distilling the human predicament into something that even the most systems-challenged among us can understand -- and hopefully act upon.

It was with some amusement that I read the review of this book by The Economist magazine. The first sentence of the review: "Without debt there would be no capitalism; mankind would be living in caves and eating whatever it killed." Somehow I missed the part in the book where it said that primitivism was the route that society should have followed. It is ironic that if we continue to follow the current system's -- and The Economist's -- ideology of unlimited growth, we will end up living in caves and eating whatever we kill. It is hard to make the case that the dominant economic system has given us -- and I mean all of us -- much freedom. (See Mindful Economics: How the US Economy Works, Why it Matters, and How it Could be Different for an excellent treatise on the "system.") As Atwood illustrates with her Scrooge Nouveau tale in the last chapter, any freedom we had is rapidly being sucked from us as a result of the way we have conducted ourselves the last few hundred years.

Comments by other readers that this book did not provide answers reminded me that Atwood tells the story of Solon (p. 182 & 183). Solon solves "the nation's problems by cancelling the massive debt structure that has enriched some, but impoverished everyone else." Unless a "jubilee" of this nature takes place in short order, most countries will be struck in the doldrums for generations to come. Individual restraint is commendable, but the hole is simply too deep for society to climb out of at this point. For more information on Solon see Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West by John Ralston Saul.

Despite many laurels for many titles, Atwood hasn't attempted anything quite like the essays of this bonbon. If there is a writer's conceit in the enterprise, there is also a writer's insight.

She is motivated by curiosity about the "human construct" of debt rather than its technicalities. Her subject is "one of the most worrisome and puzzling things I know: that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect".

Her childhood bafflement over debt was also a writer's bafflement - the kind that looks twice as hard at the grown-ups' weird words and customs to get at the mysteries behind. If the three taboos of her childhood were money, religion and sex, the third was no big deal because her parents were biologists. Hence her obsession with the first two, including the magical "interest" payments that used to accrue in her junior bankbook.

Payback locates the debt concept very deep in the human or even the anthropoid psyche. It lies in our sense of fairness, as when young children will instinctively say "That's not fair." It is seen in the "almost universal" cultural concept of an "underlying balancing principle in the universe".

The author first connected debt with sin when fed the "forgive us our debts" version of the Lord's Prayer, rather than what she calls the "rustling and frilly" Anglican version - "forgive us our trespasses". She wonders if financial debt is now reverting to being somewhat sinful, but admits this speculation is not yet supported by the personal indebtedness statistics. In her parents' day, her mother kept an account book that continued for 50 years. Her father once pawned a fountain pen to repay a kindness. "I used to think," she interjects, "that pawnshops had something to do with chess."

But the debts of the Lord's Prayer are spiritual rather than financial. "The whole theology of Christianity," Atwood contends, "rests on the notion of spiritual debts and what must be done to repay them." In which she says Jesus assumes the role of a "cosmic Sin Eater" for the rest of us. I liked her "condensed" two-page explanation of sin and debt in Christianity, although I cannot vouch that it will satisfy the devout.

Halfway through, the financial side of debt begins to dominate the discussion. Without the faculty of memory, Atwood reminds us, there are no debts. Debts could be kept handily in memory once we had invented written records. So could taxes, which "in theory are different from robbery".

Now Atwood is playing to her strong suit, often illustrating her points by reference to fiction and plot rather than history and economics. "Without story," she claims, "there is no debt. Debts have been present in stories for a very long time." Atwood's literary tour of debt includes giants like Marlowe, Goethe, Shakespeare, Dickens, Cervantes and Flaubert. It seems that Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge made a big impact on the young Atwood.

After the Protestant reformation and the 19th century rise of capitalism, Atwood sees the churches obsessing about sexual sins rather than money sins. Not so the novelists! "The best 19th century [fictional] revenge is not seeing your enemy's red blood all over the floor but seeing the red ink all over his balance sheet." Flaubert's doomed adulteress Emma Bovary, she claims, is punished not "for sex but for shopaholicism".

The darkest side of debt arises when the borrower is not a person but a king or a government. Atwood's age-old refrain is the peasants' constant wish for more services and fewer taxes, and the recurrent tendency of their overlords to want the reverse. She points out that heavy taxes have given rise to many rebellions and wars.

In Payback, the astute warring nation is urged to "do the math first" or strike a balance between internal taxes and external borrowings. In which regard George W. Bush's debt-laden financing of the Iraq war is rated as singularly deficient. I would have extended this point, to say that some governments seem to find profligate war-debt acceptable, but ordinary debt for community services unacceptable.

In history, Atwood notes, the masses sometimes bite back, burning the debt records or killing the creditors. That leads her to the pros and cons of revenge as a form of debt-settlement - as debated in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. That in turn leads to a wistful "if only" America had reacted non-vengefully to 9/11.

At the end, Atwood shifts to fictional mode and quite a different agenda. She invents earth "spirits" who take a postmodern "Scrooge Nouveau" on a rollicking tour of the actual past and imagined futures. The spirits teach Scrooge Nouveau that nature is "an expert in cost-benefit analysis" forever "wiping the slate clean and balancing the accounts". It's just possible the earth's future will be good. But it's unlikely, because so many "are actively opposed to any attempts to help clean up the global mess". The subtext is that we should worry less about the economist's financial debt or the religionist's spiritual debt, and worry more about our make-or-break earth-debts.

(from Canberra Times, January 2009)

Given the current worldwide economic malaise, it appears rather prescient that the 2008 Massey Lectures address the subject of debt. In these lectures, Margaret Atwood examines of the concept of debt as a motif in human society, particularly through an examination of metaphors of debt in western literature. As such, this book only obliquely deals with personal monetary debts. Rather, the focus is on the more general idea of debt in relation to justice, sin, redemption, balance, and revenge, among other topics.

Atwood begins with the idea of debt and its relationship to fairness, which is ingrained in the psyche of the human race (and other intelligent creatures). In early societies, notions of debt are aligned with justice, which is typically represented by a supernatural female figure. It is the emergence of Greece, and the induction of the court system described in Aeschylus' Oresteia, that the idea of a female arbiter of fairness/justice (and thus of debt) is replaced, although the image remains.

Next, Atwood describes the links between debt and sin. In heaven, debts are forgiven; in hell, debts are eternally paid back. The character of Satan is often portrayed as a collector of debts, and often described as wielding a ledger. With these notions of debt and sin, the creditor is often seen to be as sinful as the debtor, particularly in pre-industrial literature. Moreover, motifs of debt are always twinned with motifs of credit, one symbiotic with the other.

In the lecture on "Debt as plot", Atwood examines the characters of Faust (as particularly exemplified by Marlowe's Doctor Faustus) and Scrooge (of Dickens's A Christmas Carol). In a fascinating passage, she wonders if Dickens wrote Scrooge as a reverse characterization of Faust:

"Was Dickens consciously writing Scrooge as a reverse Faustus? ... There are so many correspondences it is hard to avoid the thought: Faustus longs to fly through the air and visit distant times and places, Scrooge dreads it, both do it. Both have clerks - Wagner and Bob Cratchit - the one treated well by Faustus, the other treated badly by Scrooge. Marley is Scrooge's Mephistopheles figure who carries his own Hell around with him... Everything Faustus does, Scrooge does backwards."

As someone who has been studying variations of the Faust legend for over a decade, I found this digression fascinating. The characters of Scrooge and Faust will loom large over the subsequent lectures in this book.

An examination of the shadow side of debt described in the title focuses on the ideas of punishment, resentment, and revenge, among others. The endless cycles of revenge and counter-revenge exemplified in the myth of the house of Atreus are shown as analogous to cycles of debt and credit: one is a moral debt, the other a financial one. The solutions to both are laws (as exemplified in the Oresteia) or forgiveness (as exemplified by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission). The shadow side of the debtor is the creditor: hence we have Faust/Mephistopheles, Scrooge/Cratchit, and Antonio/Shylock. It was inevitable that a treatment of the motif of debt would include mention of The Merchant of Venice, and Atwood succeeds with a detailed and trenchant analysis of the relationship between Antonio and Shylock with regards to the debtor/creditor roles.

Payback is associated with redemption, and requires recognition on the debtor's part of the debt incurred. In the concluding lecture, Atwood returns to Scrooge. Recognizing two archetypes in the Dickens tale (Scrooge Original, before his redemption, and Scrooge Lite, after his redemption), she introduces a third archetype for a new variation: Scrooge Nouveaux. This twenty-first century Scrooge is an annoyingly narcissistic modern businessperson, both astoundingly rich and astoundingly ignorant. This Scrooge is visited not by the spirits of Christmas past, present, and future, but the spirits of Earth Day past, present, and future. At this point, the narrative moves into a strong focus ecological ethics and the role of debt. The debtor, Scrooge Nouveaux, is a stand-in for all of us and our negligent razing of the planet, racking up an enormous amount of ecological debt from our creditor. We can either start to pay back through sustainable and ethical practices and receive the forgiveness of Gaia, or proceed with business as usual and face her revenge. As Scrooge Nouveaux begins the new day after the nocturnal visit of the three spirits, he thinks:

"I don't really own anything... Not even my body. Everything I have is only borrowed. I'm not really rich at all, I'm heavily in debt. How do I even begin to pay back what I owe? Where should I start?"

Scrooge Nouveaux's thoughts apply to all of us. Where shall we begin?

I expected, according to the laudatory reviews, that Margaret Atwood would explain the causes of and and mete out blame for the American economic debacle. Nothing of the
sort! Instead, she examines the origins of human behavior and belief about debt and justice, starting with the primates and working her way masterfully through myth, religion, the law, and yes, economics. The surprise: she ends with a beautifully plead case for our responsibility to care for our planet. She does all this with lively trenchant humor. For such a serious subject this is an entertaining, delightful read.
I wish I could see this book put into film by Woody Allen? The Coen Brothers?
But first, she deserves every humanitarian Megaprize.

As others have noted, this is not a book on how to get out of debt, but a book reflecting on the nature of debt: its history, how we've thought of it throughout the years, how a sense of fairness is possibly hard-wired in us (even in other species), and how it's been portrayed in religion and literature. Ms Atwood has done a lot of thinking and research on the subject. She leads us from the anthropological to the legal and theological and then ends up with a peek into the future of how we will think of what we owe and what is owed us. She is a breathtakingly talented writer whose versatility I am only beginning to discover. For a reflection on a subject that will make you think differently about just about every aspect of your life, read this little book!

I've never read Atwood before but now want to read her earlier works. Excellent writer with a probing intellect. Highly recommend this book.

Great book... I love the way she takes her story to unexpected places from the recession, to the development of property ownership and fiefdoms and sharecropping, grimm's fairytales etc. When I got through it I really felt like the whole concept of money and interest especially have slavery underlying. Despite its heavy subject matter, it felt like a great light and breezy beach read. Atwood is a genius.

Margaret Atwood's book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, is fascinating. Her list of glittering prizes is long. The reader is treated to a mature voice; a voice of wisdom and playfulness. In other words, she knows how to tell a good story.

Debt and credit are two weights on opposite sides of a scale. They're always in balance. The debtor and creditor are joined at the hip. One gains and another loses.

Our sense of fairness is ingrained in our cells. The attribute is shared by primates. Their communities, like ours, are hierarchical and cooperative. Atwood cites a study where when one monkey gets a prized grape: the others don't. Pandemonium ensues. The monkeys throw stones at the grape getter. Atwood imagines them as trades' union workers carrying a sign: Management Grape Dispensing Unfair.

Her wit and wisdom illuminate this delightfully meandering story. For story it is. We visit ancient Egyptian culture. These people were early spiritual accountants. After death the soul is weighed against the feather. Debt and credit must balance the scales. Debts must be paid. And for those that have transgressed, rather nasty things happen to them.

Christianity, she says, rests upon spiritual debts and what must be done to repay them. Human sacrifice figures largely throughout human existence. In biblical times, the first-born was seen as belonging to God, and that is why Abraham shows no surprise on being asked to kill his only son.

Debt is sin. Sin Eaters, the poor and desperate, eat food passed to them over the coffin of an unrepentant sinner. This practice has gone on in living memory. Sins can be traded. The Sin Eater trades food for a debt.

This is a scrupulously researched book. The Antinomian Heresy is where some people identify themselves as "elect." Normal moral conduct does not apply. According to Atwood, George Bush and Tony Blair saw themselves as outside normal moral behavior.

And then there is the Devil in his kaleidoscopic incarnations. He is in charge of the ultimate debt collections agency. Just last Sunday I saw a production of Goethe's Faust in Berkeley. The Devil delivers benefits today, just as the deity in many religious is a consolation for suffering in this life with the promise of later reward.

The bargain with the Devil has been a recurring theme throughout history. It may not be surprising that the Devil is a lawyer. Atwood considers the uneducated being afraid of learning and contracts which rob them of their land. Grimm's fairy tales show the cultural disapprobation of the miller: He who produces neither grain nor bread but takes his profit as a middleman.

Genghis Khan wasn't the kindest of men. When he invaded, he killed the rich, but saved the scribes needed to run the bureaucracy of his empire. The accounts must be kept in balance.

We visit plague-ridden Europe and learn how this disease was instrumental in destroying the feudal system. Populations have been kept in balance by war, famine, and disease. When the population dwindles, labor becomes more valued: wages rise. People eat better and have more surviving children. The survivors multiply and drive down the price of labor beyond the level of sustainability. Famine again culls the population and the cycle starts over again. Life comes into balance.

You would think the prognostications of the Club of Rome and scientists from MIT, on the coming collapse of the world economy is too gloomy to read about, but Margaret Atwood tells her story with wit and imagination.

This book is a glowing example of how to write with humor about a serious subject.