UPDATE: 20 December: It seems this book is the abridged published version of Margaret Atwood’s Massey Lectures, which will be repeated on radio national from 14 January 2010 at 6pm.
Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth is a short book about the social construct of debt: where the concept comes from, the part is plays in our culture, and how it is linked to two of the strongest human emotions: desire and fear. She explores the idea of debt from different angles and traces the concept through human mythology and behaviour.
Atwood first considers fairness, arguing that borrowing and lending could not have developed without fairness. She traces it back to the most ancient myths, such as Ma’at and Iustitia, and forward to literature, using The Water Babies as her primary example. She explores the history of the idea of moral balances and how humans in all cultures weigh up deeds and behaviours against each other. She also observes that a concept of cheating and fairness has also been observed in other animals.
In Debt and Sin, Atwood tries to answer the question ‘is it morally wrong to be a debtor’. She teases out the originals of the word debt (which was once used interchangeably with ‘sin’, for example in the gospel of Matthew 6:12); but also relates ‘sin’ to its origins in ideas of sacrifice, which hark back to fairness and moral balances. Much of this exploration focuses on the Christian tradition. She then brings these ideas together to establish a basis of accounting and balance sheets, pointing out their link to memory – without memory, there is no debt. She notes that the earliest written records appear to be accounting balance sheets, and notes that debt is inconsistent with oral forms of communication.
Atwood notes that, if being a debtor is a sin, then so too must be being a creditor, as one cannot exist without the other. She remarks on several clichés here, such as Polonius’ ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’ and ‘wiping the slate clean’ – noting that both of these encapsulate the idea that a healthy equilibrium is required between debtor and creditor in a functioning society.
Moving on to a chapter called Debt as Plot, Atwood returns to the idea of debt and memory, and that a debt is essentially a narrative, caused by a string of events and actions over time. She traces some classic plots that use debt as a plot device overtly (Scrooge, Vanity Fair) and covertly (Dr Faustus, Madam Bovary. She uses these to talk about non-monetary debt, how it can be conflated with monetary debt (through the idea of sin), and how we choose to ‘pay’ for our sins and bargains; and notes how, especially in 19th Century literature, debt (either money or behaviour) is a governing leitmotif of Western storytelling.
The fourth chapter is called The Shadow Side, and looks at what happens when the power equilibrium between debtor and creditor is upset – loan sharks and criminal syndicates, liquidation, rebellion and revolution, and also revenge. She notes how our cultural understanding of debt and fairness can be used to stir up hatred, using examples like Idi Amin’s expulsion of ethnic Indians from Uganda, and the experience of Chinese immigrants in various Asian countries; but also how it can be used against oppressors, such as the anti-colonial uprising around the world that have centred on tax.
In the last chapter, Atwood moves away from the non-fiction essay style of the previous four, and writes a fictional piece about Scrooge and a Spirit of Earth Day Past who appears to him; and how his ‘payback’ may have been different under the debt constructs of the modern world. I didn’t finish this chapter because I found it annoying.
The last chapter aside, this is an interesting and thought-provoking book. It is always healthy to explore ideas that we tend to take as given, and to understand where in our culture they come from and how we are influenced by deep-seated cultural factors in making decisions.The book was published around the time of the global financial crisis, and while it doesn’t tell you why residential mortgage-backed securities and CDOs are bad or good things, it helps to explain some of our reactions to the events of the past year.
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury, 2008
