Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online Page B

original Aramaic.
    Modern-day preachers stop well short of saying that the truly virtuous thing would be for creditors to simply burn their record books, but there’s good reason for believing Jesus meant that we should forgive financial debts as well as sins of other kinds. Not only did he use a word that to him meant both, but he was well aware of Mosaic law, by which a sabbatical year had to be proclaimed every seven years in which all debts should be cancelled. “At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release,” says Deuteronomy 15:1 and 2. “Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbour, or of his brother, because it is the Lord’s release.”
    Why, you might ask, would anyone ever lend anything to anyone else under these circumstances? Probably because the lendings and borrowings took place within small communities. You didn’t have to wipe out the debts owed to you by foreigners — only those within the group, where relations with the next-door neighbours were cradle-to-grave and tightly knit, and he who was the lender one year might find himself the borrower the next. My mother, who grew up in a small community in Nova Scotia, used to say, “In a village everyone knows your business.” A good reputation was very important in such places, and nobody wanted to be known as a person who did not repay, or they might not get a cup of flour or an egg the next time they needed one. So you’d ultimately be repaid somehow for a forgiven debt, even if it wasn’t with money. During the Great Depression, for instance, few in rural Nova Scotia had cash to spare, but my grandfather — the local doctor — got paid anyway, in chickens and wood. They certainly did get sick of chicken, said my mother, but at least they were never cold.
    IN HER 1994 BOOK , Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs proposes the theory that there are only two ways in which human beings acquire objects: taking and trading. Everything we do in the way of accumulation falls under one of these two heads, says Jacobs, and we should never confuse the two. We should be especially careful to prevent experts in one area from being put in charge of the other. For instance, police officers — who belong to the guardianship of the “taking” end and have the weaponry we allow to such guardians — should not also be the merchants, or bribery and protection rackets and other forms of corruption will be the result.
    Using Jacobs’s two headings, under “taking” would come hunting and fishing and gathering, and looting during a war, and acquisition of territory by force, and robbery, and rape, and forcing people into slavery, and finding pennies on the sidewalk or — as I prefer to do — paper clips. Under “trading” would come barter, and buying and selling, and arranged marriages, and treaties governing market rules, though these latter are sometimes “taking”— gunboat diplomacy, it used to be called. When I first read this book, I became obsessed with identifying transactions that would not fit into this double-headed scheme. At first I thought of gifts: surely a gift is neither taken nor traded. But no: gifts fit under “trading,” because although no set price is attached to a gift and it is bad form as well as bad luck to sell one, a rule of exchange is still at work: for a gift you owe, at the very least, a payment of gratitude; and in addition to that, you owe a gift of your own, if not to the person who gave you the first gift, at least to someone else. Artistic gifts work like this. An artistic talent is bestowed or given — it cannot be bought — and further inspiration comes from other artists through their work to you and is then passed on to someone else through your own work, should you be so lucky.
    But what about borrowing and lending? Borrowing and lending would seem to exist in a shadowland — neither “taking” nor “trading”— changing their