Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (21 page)

What Scrooge sees as they fly above the city is a lot like what he saw in Europe during the Black Death: chaos, mass death, the breakdown of civic order. All five of the erstwhile Mrs. Scrooges are peddling their bodies on the street in exchange for tinned sardines, with varying success. They don’t look very good, having achieved the thin-as-a-model figure through no efforts of their own. The Spirit points to three people fighting over a dead cat, which they intend to eat: Scrooge’s future self is one of the three. Nor does he manage to obtain any of the cat for himself: he’s too weak. The other two kick him, and leave him on the sidewalk, and make off with their meal.

“This is terrible!” Scrooge whimpers. “Spirit — show me no more!”

“The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small,” says the Spirit. “Mankind made a Faustian bargain as soon as he invented his first technologies, including the bow and arrow. It was then that human beings, instead of limiting their birth rate to keep their population in step with natural resources, decided instead to multiply unchecked. Then they increased the food supply to support this growth by manipulating those resources, inventing ever newer and more complex technologies to do so. Now we have the most intricate system of gizmos the world has ever known. Our technological system is the mill that grinds out anything you wish to order up, but no one knows how to turn it off. The end result of a totally efficient technological exploitation of Nature would be a lifeless desert: all natural capital would be exhausted, having been devoured by the mills of production, and the resulting debt to Nature would be infinite. But long before then, payback time will come for Mankind.”

Scrooge is terrified, but at the same time he’s been making some rapid calculations. If the good future is the real one, he should invest in alternative energies and desalination plants, and he’ll make a killing. If the bad future is the real one, he needs to corner the dog food market and build himself a fortified underground bunker, with piped-in oxygen, and he’ll end up controlling the world, or what’s left of it.

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” says Scrooge, quoting his famous forebear. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”

“I deal in futures,” says the Spirit of Earth Day Future. “My best offer is Maybe.”

Scrooge clutches the Spirit’s arm, which shrinks, collapses, and dwindles down into a bedpost. His own bedpost! “What a horrible dream,” he thinks. “But so far, only a dream. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future — the Spirits of all three Earth Days shall strive within me! I have time to make amends!”

IN THE NON-FICTIONAL
world, in which you and I do something called “existing” and Scrooge does not, we’ve been discussing various ways of looking at debt. Like all our financial arrangements, and like all our rules of moral conduct — in fact, like language itself — notions about debt form part of the elaborate imaginative construct that is human society. What is true of each part of that mental construct is also true of debt, in all its many variations: because it is a mental construct, how we think about it changes how it works.

Maybe it’s time for us to think about it differently. Maybe we need to count things, and add things up, and measure things, in a different way. In fact, maybe we need to count and weigh and measure different things altogether. Maybe we need to calculate the real costs of how we’ve been living, and of the natural resources we’ve been taking out of the biosphere. Is this likely to happen? Like the Spirit of Earth Day Future’s, my best offer is Maybe.

SCROOGE CLIMBS OUT
of his bed and goes to the window. There’s the world. It’s very beautiful, what with the trees and the sky and so forth. It used to look solid, but now it appears fragile, like a reflection on water: a breath of wind would ripple it, and it would vanish.

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?

( Notes )

As befits the lecture form, this book was written with a listener in mind.

ONE: ANCIENT BALANCES

This chapter is dedicated to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where my interest in Egyptian coffins was awakened when I was nine; to my father, Dr. C. E. Atwood, through whom I read
The Water Babies
; and to all the children I babysat and watched over at summer camps and in the home — stern teachers in the ways of tit-for-tat.

For the Setons, father and son, see Redekop, Magdalene.
Ernest Thompson Seton.
Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1979.

Tooth fairies and banks: It is in fact true that if you stop believing in banks they will expire.

The statistics on debt are from
CBC MARKETPLACE
: “Debt Nation.”

The friend who wrote me the letter about the mortgages was Valerie Martin; I thank her for her permission to use it.

The United Church is the United Church of Canada, formed by a union between the Methodists and some of the Presbyterians.

I came across Frans de Waal’s comment on the nature of culture in
Harper’s
magazine, June 2008, in an article by Frank Bures called “A Mind Dismembered: In Search of the Magical Penis Thieves.”

I thank my brother, neurophysiologist Dr. Harold L. Atwood, for sending me various articles on epigenetics.

There are many variants to the “Punch-buggy, no punch-backs” game. In one, the colour of the Beetle must be specified. I leave it to the experts to dispute the many rules.

For primate trading, see De Waal, Frans, and S. F. Brosnan. “Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay.”
Nature
(2003): 425.

Fisher, Daniel. “Selling the Blue Sky.”
Forbes.com
. 2008.
Forbes
. 20 February 2008. <
http://www.forbes.com/business/global/2008/0310/070.html
>.

————. “Primate Economics.”
Forbes.com
. 2008. Forbes. 22 February 2008. <
http://www.forbes.com/2006/02/11/monkey-economics-money_cz_df_money06_0214monkeys.html
>.

Surowiecki, James. “The Coup de Grasso.”
The New Yorker.
10 October 2005. Condenet. 28 February 2008. <
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/10/06/
031006ta_talk_surowiecki
>.

Also Wright, Robert.
The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
. New York: Vintage, 1994. The 1995 reprint is subtitled “Why We Are the Way We Are.” Pages 196, 197, 198, 204.

There are probably some other reasons for the femaleness of Charles Kingsley’s Bedoneby twins; for these, see my introductions to Rider Haggard’s
She
, New American Library, and H. G. Wells’s

The Island of Doctor Moreau
, Penguin, as well as my unfinished thesis on supernatural Victorian female characters, which is somewhere in the Fisher Library of the University of Toronto.

There is much work on the relationship between Kingsley and Darwin. But see primarily the reverse-evolution fable within the novel, in which human beings revert to a primitive state by lying under the flapdoodle trees and effortlessly eating flapdoodle.

The story of Dives and Lazarus is in Luke 16:19–31.

For gelada monkeys, see Morell, Virginia. “Kings of the Hill.”
National Geographic.com
. 2002. National Geographic Society. 20 February 2008. <
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0211/feature4/
>.

Quotes from
The Eumenides
are from Grene, David, and Richmond Lattimore, eds.
The Complete Greek Tragedies
. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

For ancient gods and goddesses, see, among others, “Thoth, the Great God of Science and Writing.”
Mystae.com
. 24 February 2008. <
http://www.mystae.com/restricted/streams/scripts/thoth.html
>.

Hooker, Richard. “Ma’at: Goddess of Truth; Truth and Order.”
World Civilizations.
1996. Washington State University. 24 February 2008. <
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/egypt/maat.htm
>.

Roe, Anthony. “Maintaining the Balance: Concepts of Cosmic Law, Order, and Justice.”
White Dragon.
1998. 22 February 2008. <
http://www.whitedragon.org.uk/articles/cosmic.htm
>.

Swatt, Barbara. “Themis, God of Justice.”
Marian Gould Gallagher Law Library
. 2007. University of Washington School of Law. 19 February 2008. <
http://lib.law.washington.edu/ref/themis.html
>.

TWO: DEBT AND SIN

This chapter is dedicated to Aileen Christianson of Scotland, to Valerie Martin of the United States, and to Alice Munro of Canada — experts on sin and debt, all. Also to my mother, Margaret K. Atwood, and to my aunt, Joyce Barkhouse, for the insights they have provided on living within your means.

The person who said, “Debt is the new fat,” was Judith Timson, in a conversation with me.

The Anglican Church of Canada is quite a lot like the Anglican Church of England, and somewhat like the Episcopalian Church in the United States.

Joyce Barkhouse thinks my father got his pawnable pen from his mother as a graduation gift. Which raises another question: How could she have afforded it, since she didn’t have a bean either? She must have saved up for a long time.

The word “redeem” is also repeatedly used in the Jewish seder ceremony to describe what God did in reference to the Israelites when he freed them from slavery in Egypt. I thank Rosalie and Irving Abella for this knowledge, and for a seder experience that will never be forgotten.

Redeeming a donkey with a lamb may be found in Exodus 34:20. The story of Jephthah’s daughter is in Kings 1. The first-born belonging to God is in Exodus 22:29. The wicked borrowing and paying not again is in Psalms 37:21. Elijah and the priests of Baal are in Kings 1.

The sermon on debt is to be found at Olbrych, Jennie C. “Outrageous Forgiveness.”
St. James Santee Episcopal Church Blog.
2004. Blogspot. 12 March 2008. <
http://stjamessantee.blogspot.com/2004_09_01_archive.html
>.

Other works cited include

Hogg, James.
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
. Ed. Adrian Hunter. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001.

Hyde, Lewis.
The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World
. 1983. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007. Page 41.

Jacobs, Jane.
Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.
New York: Vintage, 1992.

Leith, Sam. “Blair Believes He Can Do No Wrong: Ask the Antinomians.”
Telegraph.co.uk.
2006. Telegraph Media Group. 2 March 2008. <
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/03/25/do2504.xml
>.

Lerner, Gerda.
The Creation of Patriarchy
. Uncorrected proof. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pages 77, 84.

Milton, John. “Samson Agonistes.”
John Milton: Selections
. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

————. “Paradise Lost.”
John Milton: Selections
. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Orwell, George.
1984
. New York: Harcourt, 1983. Page 256.

Tierney, Patrick.
The Highest Altar: The Story of Human Sacrifice
. New York: Viking, 1989. Page 277.

Webb, Mary.
Precious Bane
. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Page 43.

Zola, Émile.
Germinal
. Trans. Peter Collier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

THREE: DEBT AS PLOT

This chapter is dedicated to Miss Bessie B. Billings and Miss Florence Smedley, my English teachers at Leaside High School in Toronto, where I first read
The Mill on the Floss
; to Dr. Jay Macpherson of Victoria College, who made the Victorian novel a thing of splendour and intrigue; and to Dr. Jerome H. Buckley of the Harvard English Department, who did some very dramatic readings of Dickens. Also to the Deer Park Library in Toronto, from which, in the late 1940s, I borrowed every Andrew Lang fairy book I could get my hands on.

The books used or cited in this chapter are

Berne, Eric.
Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships.
New York: Ballantine, 1964. Page 81.

Blake, William. “Jerusalem.”
Selected Poetry and Prose
. Ed. Northrop Frye. New York: Random House, 1953.

Bunyan, John.
The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Ed. Roger Sharrock. New York: Penguin, 1987. Page 79.

Dickens, Charles.
A Christmas Carol
. New York: Weathervane, 2007.

Eliot, George.
The Mill on the Floss
. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Page 252, 356, 359.

Hardy, Thomas. “The Ruined Maid.”
Complete Poems
. Ed. James Gibson. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Irving, Washington. “The Devil and Tom Walker.” Internet text version.

Lang, Andrew.
The Blue Fairy Book
. New York: Dover, 1965.

Marlowe, Christopher.
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.
Ed. David Scott Kastan. New York: Norton, 2005.

Thackeray, W. M.
Vanity Fair.
1908. Ed. Whitelaw Reid. London: Aldine Press, 1957.

The texts of quotations from Chaucer are standard.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales
were read by me at an early age, and remembered well.

Valerie Martin drew my attention to the game of Forfeits.

A note on “redeem”: “To redeem” is thus also to rename — or redefine — yourself, which can lead to reversing the doom.

“The Miller of Dee” came from memory, but I also checked it against available texts.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE SHADOW SIDE

This chapter is dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe, whose story “The Cask of Amontillado” terrified me as a child reader, and set me to thinking about the ever-present question: how much revenge is enough? Also to Alberto Manguel, who once said to me, “Canadians don’t have any revenge stories,” thus prompting me to write one: “Hairball,” it is called. And to Elmore Leonard, charming explicator of the ways of the underside. And to Larry Gaynor, who knows what shadows lurk in the hearts of men, and also what hearts lurk in the shadows of women.

Another real-life revenge is the frozen shrimp in the curtain rods. So easy to smell, so hard to find.

Works cited include

Buchan, James.
Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money
. New York: Welcome Rain, 2001.

Dickens, Charles.
A Tale of Two Cities.
Ed. Andrew Sanders. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

————.
David Copperfield
. Ed. Nina Burgis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Johnson, Samuel.
Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler.
Ed. W. J. Bate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.