Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (17 page)

Just imagine the impact of taking such a position, not that there was a snowball’s chance in Hell of this ever happening. Now imagine how much different the world would have been today if that position had in fact been taken. No ongoing Iraq war. No impasse in Afghanistan. And above all, no ballooning and ruinous and nation-weakening and out-of-control big fat American debt.

Where will it all end?
you are doubtless asking yourself. That depends on what you mean by “all.” As for this book, it will end with the next and last chapter, which will attempt to examine what happens when the debit and credit balances get even further out of control. This last chapter is called “Payback.” I looked this word up on the Web and, in addition to several movies of that name, I found a site called ThePayback.com, which bills itself as “your home for all of your revenge needs.” You can order anything over the Internet now, it seems, including “dead fish,” “prank packages,” and “rude lottery tickets.”

But my final chapter will not be about sending a box of wilted roses to your detested ex-lover. It’s more on the order of the mills of the gods, which grind very slowly, though they grind exceeding small.

( Five )
Payback

THE OVERALL SUBJECT
of this book is what I’ve been thinking of as the debtor/creditor twinship, considered in its broadest aspect; and, as a prelude to this final chapter, I’d like to recap some of the key themes touched on so far.

The first chapter, “Ancient Balances,” dealt with our human sense of fairness, balance, and justice, a sense that is very old. Its origins may well be prehuman — a view that scientific studies of monkey and chimpanzee behaviour would tend to support. These animals have strong opinions about the distribution of goods and the fair rate of exchange — refusing to trade a cucumber slice for a pebble, for instance, when the neighbour is getting a grape, and remembering who owes them favours in return for favours granted. I postulated that none of our many systems of debt and credit could exist without an innate human module that evaluates fairness and unfairness and strives for balance: otherwise nobody would either lend or pay back. Among solitary animals such as porcupines, a brain module like this would serve no purpose, but among social animals such as ourselves, dependent as we are on give and take, it does seem necessary. Also necessary is a sense of payback — what negative action you will take in case of a failure to return what is owed.

On such early foundations, many elaborate systems of debts and repayments have been constructed; for instance, the post-mortem judging of the soul among the Ancient Egyptians, in which the heart was weighed against the goddess of truth, justice, balance, right behaviour, and the order of the cosmos, and, if found wanting, was eaten by a monster crocodile god.

So some debts are not money debts: they are moral debts, or debts having to do with imbalances in the right order of things. Thus, in any consideration of debt, the concept of the balance is pivotal: debtor and creditor are two sides of a single entity, one cannot exist without the other, and exchanges between them — in a healthy economy or society or ecosystem — tend toward equilibrium.

The second chapter, “Debt and Sin,” explored, as you might expect, the connection between debt and sin. Which is morally worse, to be a debtor or to be a creditor? Sinfulness has been attributed to both. This chapter also examined the connection between debt and memory, and thus between debt and written contracts — leading naturally to a long-standing theme in Western culture, the pact with the Devil, which I proposed as the first buy-now, pay-later scheme — a prime example being that of Doctor Faustus. A Faustian bargain is one in which you exchange your soul or something equally vital for a lot of glitzy but ultimately worthless short-term junk. I also explored the notion of redemption — a concept that applies to pawnshop practices as well as to redeemed slaves and redeemed souls.

In the third chapter, “Debt as Plot,” I considered the Faustian bargain in more detail — particularly through the stories of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge, the latter being, I proposed, a reverse image of the former. Debt was traced as a governing leitmotif of Western fiction, especially that of the nineteenth century — a century in which, capitalism having triumphed and money having become the measure of most things, debt played a significant role in the lives of actual people. In the nineteenth century, industrial mills increased and multiplied, and drove the capitalist expansion, so I also discussed the sinister attributes traditionally attached to millers — who were thought of as cheats and probably as Devil’s-pact-makers, since they seemed to be able to spin money out of nothing. Mills and millers were linked to the magical mills of folklore, that spew out anything you order up but are very difficult to stop. I concluded this chapter with a reference to the mills of the gods — those mills that grind slowly but very thoroughly. Most people interpret this ancient Greek saying to mean that the retribution for bad behaviour may be a long time coming, but when it does arrive it will be devastating.

This energizing thought led to the fourth chapter, “The Shadow Side,” in which I touched upon the nastier forms of debt and credit account balancing. These included debtors’ prisons, criminal loan-shark collection tactics, liquidating your creditors, rebelling against your rulers when the taxes they imposed were too heavy or too unfair, and — stepping outside the financial border altogether into an area in which money payment simply doesn’t apply — vindictive, blood-soaked revenge.

And now we come to “Payback,” my fifth and final chapter. I’ll try to make this as painless as possible. No, on second thought, I won’t do that: because if it were painless, it wouldn’t be about payback, would it?

IN MY PART
of the world we have a ritual interchange that goes like this:

First person: “Lovely weather we’re having.”

Second person: “We’ll pay for it later.”

My part of the world being Canada, where there is a great deal of weather, we always do pay for it later. One person has commented, “That’s not Canadian, it’s just Presbyterian.” Nevertheless, it’s a widespread saying among us.

What this ritual interchange reveals is a larger habit of thinking about the more enjoyable things in life: they’re only on loan or acquired on credit, and sooner or later the date when they must be paid for will roll around. And that is what this chapter is about. It’s about pay-up time. Or payback time, supposing that you haven’t paid up. In any case, the time when whatever is on one side of the balance is weighed against whatever is on the other side — whether it’s your heart, your soul, or your debts — and the final reckoning is made.

EVERY DEBT COMES
with a date on which payment is due. Otherwise the creditor would never be able to collect, and would therefore never lend anything, and the whole system of borrowing and repaying would stop cold. In the financial services industries, the due date is written right on the mortgage or the loan papers or the credit card agreement. You must pay by that date, or you’ll have to renew the loan; or, if you go overtime on your credit card charges, the interest shoots up, and then things can quickly get unpleasant.

Other sorts of debt also have due dates. In fact, debts of every kind are always coupled with the symbolisms of time and counting and numbers. In the Biblical Book of Daniel, a disembodied hand appears at Belshazzar’s feast, and it writes on the wall:
Numbered, numbered, weighed, divided
. The prophet Daniel interprets this to mean that Belshazzar’s kingdom has been numbered, and is finished — in other words, his number is up — and he’s been weighed in the balance — the same kind of soul or heart or sin balance that the Ancient Egyptians used, we suppose — and the next day, payback arrives: Belshazzar is killed, and his kingdom is divided.

Calendars, clocks, bells ringing the hour: these mark time, and time runs out, for mortal life as well as for debts. That grandfather clock that was too large for the shelf so it stood ninety years on the floor was brought from the shop on the day that the grandfather was born, and went
tick tock, tick tock
, ninety years without slumbering,
tick tock, tick tock
, his life seconds numbering, just like a heartbeat; but it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died. (I learned some memorable songs in grade three.)

The medieval figure of Death carries an hourglass as well as a scythe, and the hourglass signifies that the sands of time — your time — are finite and are running fast. Time’s winged chariot is constantly hurrying near. In Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which Prince Prospero and his thousand hand-picked revellers hoping to flee the plague move from one brightly coloured room of the Prince’s palace to another, there’s an enormous ebony clock in the seventh and final room. (Why seven? The seven ages of man would be my guess.) This foreboding clock also goes
tick tock
, and then it goes
bong
twelve times, because it’s midnight — that mystic hour — and then everyone in the place sprouts red spots and keels over, because you can run but you can’t hide. Not from Time and his or her Siamese-twin brother or sister, Death. (Poe’s clock, like the ninety-year-old grandfather’s, and the watches and clocks in so many murder mysteries — the ones with the bullet holes in them — stops with the last heartbeat.)

So never ask for whom the bell tolls, as the seventeenth-century poet John Donne said. It tolls for thee. Or it will. And then it will stop tolling, just like all those literary clocks.

Time is a condition of the life of our physical bodies: without it we can’t live — we’d be frozen, like statues, because we wouldn’t be able to change; but at the end of time — our time — we don’t need Time any more. There are no clocks in Heaven. Nor are there any in Hell. In both, everything is always Now. Or so goes the rumour. In Heaven, there are no debts — all have been paid, one way or another — but in Hell there’s nothing but debts, and a great deal of payment is exacted, though you can’t ever get all paid up. You have to pay, and pay, and keep on paying. So Hell is like an infernal maxed-out credit card that multiplies the charges endlessly.

Here is Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, speaking on the due date of his loan contract with Mephistopheles. He’s pondering the relentlessness of time, though he’s also longing eloquently for an extension of it:

I writ them a bill with mine own blood: the date
is expired; the time will come, and he will fetch me. . . .
Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn’d perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d.

The Latin line in this speech is a snippet of sad and yearning irony, coming as it does from a poem of Ovid’s in which he’s asking the horses of the night — those that draw Time’s winged chariot — to run slowly. This way the night will stretch out very long, and he’ll be able to spend more time in bed with his mistress. But the invocation doesn’t work for poor Doctor Faustus: time marches relentlessly on, time flies, and not only the clock but the midnight bell strikes, and the dreaded payment falls due.

As I’ve said earlier, there’s good reason to believe that Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge are mirror images of each other — everything Faustus does, Scrooge does backwards. And so it is with Time. What Faustus longs for — that Time will become rubbery and stretch out, so that the due date on his contract won’t arrive and he won’t have to pay over his body and soul to Mephistopheles — this rubberiness of time is something Scrooge actually gets.

The fateful hour for both men is between twelve midnight and one. Among those who follow the more winding paths of mythological association, twelve midnight signals the beginning of what is known as a hinge moment. This phrase now means a turning point, but I am using it in an older sense, dating from a period when time was thought to open and close at certain moments — Halloween and the solstices, for instance — when the actual doors between our world and other worlds swung open on their hinges; and that’s the hour during which Faust is torn apart by demons.

It’s this same hour that’s so important for Ebenezer Scrooge, who receives his first two Spirits of Christmas at what he thinks is one o’clock in the morning on two successive nights — the first being Christmas Eve — and the third at twelve midnight on the third night; but when he wakes, the three nights have been folded into one, and what should have been two days after Christmas is still only Christmas morning. Time for Scrooge has run more slowly, so that he’s accomplished in one night what should have taken three; and in the course of that one night he has lived over his whole life, and caught a glimpse of his potential future death, and then he’s been snapped back into the present. Thus his payment date has been postponed, and he finds himself entering anew into the world — a world he can finally embrace as his own.

“Yes! and the bedpost was his own,” he thinks. “The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in.” He then announces that he doesn’t know what day of the month it is, and he’s as merry as a schoolboy, and in addition to that, he’s a baby. At which point there’s a confusion of bell-ringing; but these are not the solemn tolling bells that announce a death, nor are they marking the relentless passing of Time. Instead they are bells of celebration. They’re celebrating a birth — two births, in fact: that of Jesus, and that of the reborn baby Scrooge. They’re also celebrating the suspension of the ordinary rules of time and thus the ordinary rules of debt. Scrooge has had a reprieve. He’s been given extra time — an extra life, in fact. And now he will use it to pay back what he’s taken; to make, as he says “amends.”

Let’s pause here to ponder the derivation of the word “amends.” According to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, “amends” comes from a word that originally meant a payment, in money or goods, for something you’d done wrong. By making amends then, Scrooge is paying a moral debt. To whom does he owe this debt, and why? In Dickens’s view, he owes it to his fellow man: he’s been on the take from other people all his life — that’s where his fortune has come from — but he’s never given anything back. By being a creditor of such magnitude in the financial sense, he himself has become a debtor in the moral sense, and it’s this realization that’s at the core of his transformation. Money isn’t the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have value: good turns and gifts must also flow and circulate — just as they do among chimpanzees — for any social system to remain in balance.