Payback

"Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth" by Margaret Atwood was a timely book. Originally given as the 2008 CBC Massey Lectures, Atwood began to write them in the Spring but delivered her talks just as the global economy began to crash during the Great Recession. The book examines the concept of debt as a cultural construct. She explores it through religion, economics, ecology, and literature to show its hidden force in our lives. The last chapter consists of Atwood's modern retelling of "A Christmas Carol" staring Scrooge Nouveau, which is hilarious (I recommend seeing if you can find her giving this lecture live - it's a riot). What make the book so interesting is that, as far as I am aware, this is one of the few purely non-fiction works that Atwood has written beyond an exploration of Canadian literature from the 1970s. Her fiction is brilliant and here you get to see her analytical powers that help inform that talent.

Payback is not about a particular debt (e.g. credit card debt, U.S. national debt, mortgage debt and the housing/financial crisis, etc.) -- it's not a "story" with beginning, end, causes, effects, key players, etc. Rather, it is about debt as a concept, which necessarily raises some Big Questions: what is debt, exactly? Are there different kinds? How did different societies throughout history think about debt? What does it mean to "repay a debt"? What is the relationship between debtor and creditor? between debt and culture?

Pros worth mentioning
1. The discussion about the language of debt and repayment. Examples: debt is a (figurative) place that we get "into" and "out of". When we err, we can "redeem" ourselves by changing our behavior. The sinning/spiritual meaning of "redeem/redemption" in this context is so strong that to my surprise I found it incredibly challenging to try to think about "human redemption" as a typical debit/credit transaction, which is of course exactly what it is. (John's body pawned the essence of John so he could err, and then John's body did some stuff to get the essence of John out of hock.)

2. The final chapter. It's a modern Scrooge tale that depicts the horrors of contemporary humans' debt to the earth (overfishing, strip mining, deforestation, large-scale conversion of limited productive farmland to housing tracts, etc.). A unifying theme of debts is that they must be repaid in some manner. What does that mean for humans as we get ourselves further and further into debt?

Con worth mentioning
Payback is incredibly Western-focused. The chapter on cultural origins of debt and its transformation over time begins with the Egyptians and moves on through ancient Greece and Rome, and then medieval, Renaissance, and modern Europe. Where Payback focuses on literature, it focuses on the Western canon: different incarnations of Faust, Shakespeare, Dickens. Where it focuses on religion, it focuses primarily on Christianity and sin as a Christian concept. There is a short section on the roots of the "Jewish moneylender" stereotype (filtered primarily through The Merchant of Venice, which -- notably -- is not about Judaism or Jews, but rather about Jews in relation to Christians) and there are a couple brief mentions of non-Western cultures. Atwood spends more time talking about fairness and justice in monkeys than she spends talking about non-Western cultures. As a short lecture series (which is where this book got its start) Payback is fascinating, but it really shouldn't be considered a description of the universality of debt as a concept.