Payback

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.

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. W

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.

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.