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In her latest book, literary icon Margaret Atwood has taken on the subject of debt. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Anansi, $18.95), the printed version of this year’s Massey Lectures, examines the subject from the perspective of a student of history, literature, humanity and religion. With her unique and often-humorous style, Atwood takes us from Ancient Egypt and Sumer all the way into the potential future.
Atwood spoke with Upfront editor Alex Mlynek about the lessons of the past, why balance will be so important in the rules that arise out of the financial crisis, and why she’s hopeful that when the dust clears, we will ultimately be OK.
What led to you to decide to write a book about debt?
I planned this book three years ago, long before this moment of history we’re witnessing now. It was…a somewhat foreseeable moment. Although you couldn’t tell then when it was going to happen, or that it was going to be this bad, you could certainly tell that, sooner or later, there was going to be a downturn, because the United States was pouring a huge amount of money into the Iraq war, and borrowing a lot to do so. And also because certain things, such as house prices, were just going up and up, and when they go up and up, sooner or later there’s going to be a ceiling. Especially if the country where those houses are situated has destabilized itself by borrowing so much money. And it is a pattern that you can see in history. The history of bubbles, for instance, financial bubbles and also the history of wars. Wars that cost too much.
What is the main message you’re trying to convey with the book?
I’ve arranged the book into five chapters. And the foundation chapter is about fairness, because you cannot have a debtor-creditor system without a notion of fairness. I propose that it’s something built into human beings. Even little kids, before they hit the age of knowing what money is, they know about “that’s not fair.” And, unless there are fair rules, there will be no confidence in the system. So it starts out with the notion of fairness and balance. And then it goes on to the notion of sin, which is an old one, of when is debt sinful. Well, debt is actually sinful when you can’t pay it back, and all of the people you owe money to then don’t get their money, and there is a ripple effect, which you’re seeing happening right now. A lot of innocent bystanders are going to be hurt by this. Building that kind of structure and then basically running out the door is very harmful to a lot of other people. It’s really morally bad. Then it goes on to talk about debt as a plot, how it plays out in fiction, particularly in 19th-century fiction. The fourth chapter is about what happens when you don’t pay, won’t pay or can’t pay, and historically such things as debtors’ prisons, killing the creditors. We haven’t seen that yet. It has happened before in history, and revenge is what happens when you can’t pay in money. Money is not enough. It won’t do. So Hamlet doesn’t say to Claudius, “You killed my dad, that’ll be a thousand ducats.” There isn’t a money price you can put on some things. And in the fifth [chapter] we go on to look at it in a much wider picture, which is you can’t keep on taking from anything without putting back and not have a collapse. And that is actually what we have been doing to the planet. So we owe more debts than financial ones. And unless we start repaying them pretty soon, we’re going to have the same kind of collapse in the planet that you’ve just seen in the financial system. Except in that area, once the thing is gone, it’s gone.
Let’s discuss the character you created in Payback of Scrooge Nouveau.
That was lots of fun.
He comes to the conclusion that we don’t own anything, that we’re heavily in debt. How should we start paying that debt back?
Well, help is on the way. Your Oct. 27 Canadian Business magazine had a big feature on oil, about a guy in the oilpatch, who said it’s not a renewable resource. So sooner or later, and possibly sooner than we think, it’s going to (a) get a lot more expensive and (b) run out. So we should put our thinking caps on right now, and devise new methods of energy generation, unless we want to see a worldwide societal collapse. That’s just for starters. New tech, you can call it green tech if you like, or you can call it new tech, but it’s tech that is not dependent on oil. Canada should start now. We’ve been laying back. We’ve been just coasting along, because we have oil. But don’t think that this will not apply to us. It will apply to everybody. Either we’re going to be left behind, because we haven’t done this, and then we’ll be at the mercy of everybody who has, or we’d better start now.
How do you think the current financial crisis is going to affect the way society looks at debt?
I think they’re going to demand fair regulations. In fact, they’re already demanding them. This happened because there was an invitation. It was an invitation to behave this way, because the rules were relaxed. And, of course, if one guy starts behaving this way, the others think, “Well he’s doing it, why shouldn’t I?” It’s not exactly illegal. It’s unethical. But because the regulations were relaxed, it’s not “illegal.” So they all did it. The public is going to demand fairer regulation. The danger is, of course, always with these things, the pendulum will swing too far the other way, and we’ll lock up the system so that nobody can do anything. And then you’ll have stagnation. But they have to restore faith in the system. Currency is called currency because it flows. If it stops flowing, it’s actually not good for anything. Because money is only a symbol, and it’s a symbol that you can use to translate stuff into other stuff. So the whole system will just stagnate if the rules are too Byzantine. But if there are no rules, you’ll get what you just had—and a complete loss of confidence.
Do you think there’s such a thing as “good” debt?
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