Payback

The things that puzzle us as adults begin by puzzling us as children, or this has certainly been the case for me. In the late 1940s society in which I grew up, there were three things you were never supposed to ask questions about. One of them was money, especially how much of it anyone made. The second was religion: to begin a conversation on that subject would lead directly to the Spanish Inquisition, or worse. The third was sex. I grew up among the biologists, and sex – at least as practised by insects – was something I could look up in the textbooks that were lying around the house: the ovipositor was no stranger to me. So the burning curiosity children experience vis-à-vis the forbidden was focused, for me, on the two other taboo areas: the financial and the devotional.

We kids of the 1940s did usually have some pocket money and, although we weren’t supposed to talk about it or have an undue love of it, we were expected to learn to manage it at an early age. When I was eight years old, I had my first paying job. I was already acquainted with money in a more limited way – I got five cents a week as an allowance, which bought a lot more tooth decay then than it does now. The pennies not spent on candy I kept in a tin box that had once held Lipton tea. I understood that these pennies could be traded for goods such as ice-cream cones but I did not think them superior to the other units of currency used by my fellow children: cigarette-package airplane cards, milk-bottle tops, comic books and glass marbles of many kinds. Within each of these categories, the principle was the same: rarity and beauty increased value. The rate of exchange was set by the children themselves, though a good deal of haggling took place.

All of that changed when I got a job. The job paid 25 cents an hour – a fortune! – and consisted of wheeling a baby around in the snow. As long as I brought the baby back, alive and not too frozen, I got the 25 cents. It was at this time in my life that each penny came to be worth the same as every other penny, despite whose head was on it, thus teaching me an important lesson: in high finance, aesthetic considerations soon drop by the wayside, worse luck.

Since I was making so much money, I was told I needed a bank account, so I graduated from the Lipton tea tin and acquired a red bank book. Now the difference between the pennies with heads on them and the marbles, milk-bottle tops, comic books and airplane cards became clear, because you could not put the marbles into the bank. But you were urged to put your money in there, in order to keep it safe. When I’d accumulated a dangerous amount of the stuff – say, a dollar – I would deposit it at the bank, where the sum was recorded in pen and ink by an intimidating bank teller.

Every once in a while an extra sum would appear in my red bank book – one I hadn’t deposited. This, I was told, was called “interest”, and I had “earned” it by having kept my money in the bank. I didn’t understand this either. It was certainly interesting to me that I had some extra money – that must be why it was called “interest” – but I knew I hadn’t actually earned it: no babies from the bank had been wheeled around in the snow by me. Where then had these mysterious sums come from? Surely from the same imaginary place that spawned the nickels left by the tooth fairy in exchange for your shucked-off teeth: some realm of pious invention that couldn’t be located anywhere exactly, but that we all had to pretend to believe in or the tooth-for-a-nickel gambit would no longer work.

However, the nickels under the pillow were real enough. So was the bank interest, because you could cash it in and turn it back into pennies, and thence into candy and ice-cream cones. But how could a fiction generate real objects? I knew from Peter Pan that if you ceased to believe in fairies they would drop dead: if I stopped believing in banks, would they too expire? The adult view was that fairies were unreal and banks were real. But was that true?

Thus began my financial puzzlements. Nor are they over yet.

. . .

The moment when I first connected debt and sin happened in a church – specifically the United Church Sunday-school, to which I insisted on going despite the trepidations of my parents, who were worried that I might get religiously addled too early in life.

Since we had religion in the classroom, my Sunday-school caper was an add-on. As usual, I was propelled by curiosity: wouldn’t I find out more about religious knowledge in a Sunday school than I could in an ordinary school? Not likely, as it turned out – the most interesting parts of the Bible, those dealing with sex, rape, child sacrifice, mutilations, massacres ... were studiously avoided, though I did spend a lot of time colouring in angels and sheep and robes, and singing hymns about letting my little candle shine in my own small, dark corner ... [And] among the things we memorised was the Lord’s Prayer, which contained the line, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” However, my brother sang in an Anglican boys’ choir, and the Anglicans had a different way of saying the same line: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.” The word “debt” – blunt and to the point – was well fitted to the plain, grape-juice-drinking United Church, and “trespasses” was an Anglican word, rustling and frilly, that would go well with wine-sipping for Communion and a more ornate theology. But did these two words mean the same thing really?

Between the 1940s and now, the search engine has providentially come into being, and I’ve recently been trolling around on the web. If you do this yourself, you’ll find that “debts” was used by John Wycliffe in his 1395 translation and “trespasses” in Tyndale’s 1526 version. “Trespasses” reappears in the 1549 English Book of Common Prayer, though the King James 1611 translation of the Bible reverts to “debts”. The Latin Vulgate uses the word for “debts”. But it’s interesting to note that in Aramaic, the Semitic language that was spoken by Jesus, the word for “debt” and the word for “sin” are the same. So you could translate this word as “Forgive us our debts/sins” or even “our sinful debts”; though no translator has chosen to do this yet.

. . .

It’s usual to say that every actor aspires to play Hamlet but playing Shylock is arguably a greater challenge, for Shylock’s complexities are many, and they’ve become more complex over time. How to play Shylock after the Nazis? Indeed, how to play Shylock, now that the interest-charging for which he’s despised and reviled has become standard business practice?

Neither a borrower nor a lender be guilt-free
What happens if you owe a legitimate money debt and you don’t pay it? In the past there have been many severe penalties for non-payment, from debt slavery to seizure of assets. In England, from the 17th century until the early 19th, your creditor could have you arrested and accused of concealing your assets, and then have you thrown into a dank and filthy debtors’ prison, where you had to languish either until you paid up or until someone bailed you out by paying up for you. While in there, you had to cover the costs of your own food and lodging – a cruel twist, considering that you’d been incarcerated for not having any money in the first place. So unless someone came to your rescue, you were likely to starve and freeze to death. The redoubtable 18th-century writer Doctor Johnson had this to say about debtors’ prisons:

“It is vain to continue an institution which experience shows to be ineffectual. We have now imprisoned one generation of debtors after another, but we do not find that their numbers lessen. We have now learned that rashness and imprudence will not be deterred from taking credit: let us try whether fraud and avarice may be more easily restrained from giving it. ... Those who made the laws have apparently supposed that every deficiency of payment is a crime of the debtor. But the truth is that the creditor always shares the act, and often more than shares the guilt, of improper trust. It seldom happens that any man imprisons another but for debts which he suffered to be contracted in hope of advantage to himself, and for bargains in which proportioned his own profit to his own opinion of the hazard: and there is no reason, why one should punish the other for a contract in which both concurred.”

In other words, both the borrower and the lender were to blame if their arrangement didn’t work out: the former for endangering his security by borrowing, the latter for seeking to make a profit – assumed to be an excessive profit – from the desperation or the excessive risk-taking of the borrower. Their contract had been entered into out of self-interest on both sides, and the bad judgment and greediness of both was therefore to blame for its failure. It is more than possible that Dr Johnson took such a lenient view of imprisoned debtors because he’d come so very close to being one himself.
The plot of The Merchant of Venice, insofar as it concerns a debt and the three main characters involved in this debt, is fairly simple. Antonio wishes to lend money to his friend Bassanio, but doesn’t have ready cash, so he stands security for a loan from a third party: the moneylender Shylock, a Jew and his longtime enemy. But instead of a money guarantee, Shylock requires a pound of Antonio’s flesh, to be cut off next to his heart and weighed out in a scale if the loan isn’t repaid by the due date. The merchant ships Antonio was counting on for cash flow go astray, the due date arrives, and Shylock demands his pound of flesh. Even when offered three times the money instead, Shylock still demands what’s written in the contract. Money is not the point here. Only revenge will do.

Portia – the wife Bassanio has won with the aid of Shylock’s money and his own wits – dresses up as a lawyer and pleads the case. First she urges mercy: the Jew must be merciful, she says. Shylock quite reasonably says, “Why must I?” Portia makes a lovely speech about mercy, which is, however, unconvincing, as such speeches usually are. Then she puts on her fine-print nitpicking lawyer boots: Shylock can have what’s been agreed to, she says, but not a little more: he must weigh out the flesh but he can’t spill any blood, because it’s not in the contract.

Shylock thus gets neither the pound of flesh nor the sum of the original debt. Not only that, as an “alien” designing against the life of a Venetian, his own life is forfeit by law. Portia and the judge let him off that one, as long as he turns Christian. But he has to give half of his wealth to the state – so often the beneficiary in such judgments – and will the other half of his worldly goods to his disobedient and thieving runaway daughter Jessica and the Christian she’s married.

Portia’s speech urging the claims of mercy over justice sounds very sweet; but what it’s saying is, in effect, that Shylock has to be more merciful than everyone else has been to him. When Shylock can’t manage this, Portia reverts to eye-for-an-eye tit-for-tattery justice, and more. True, some mercy does come out of the affair: Antonio seems to have had his vindictiveness blunted a bit by his near-death experience, and Shylock remains alive; though how he will manage to make a living in future is an interesting question. He must, however, be absolved of the charge of covetousness. He’s offered three times the sum of the debt to buy off the pound of flesh, and he refuses. He thus violates the code of business practice – make a profit, whatever else – as well as the Mosaic code of the redemption of pawned objects, and opts for vengeance instead.

There are two antidotes to the endless chain reaction of revenge and counter-revenge. One is through the courts of law, which are supposed to settle questions of the weighing and measuring and resolving of debtor/creditor issues in a fair and equitable way. Whether they always do so is, of course, open to a lot of questions but, in theory, that is their function.

The other antidote is more radical. It is told of Nelson Mandela that, after much persecution, and when he was finally freed from the prison where he’d been put by the apartheid government in South Africa, he said to himself that he had to forgive all those who had wronged him by the time he reached the prison gates or he would never be free of them. In other words, the antidote to revenge is not justice but forgiveness.

Muslim religious law allows the family of a murdered person to participate in the sentencing of the murderer: they can choose clemency if they wish, and it is recognised that this choice is a noble one, and will free them from their anger and sense of victimisation. There are many other cultural examples in which a life is not taken in exchange for a life. I need hardly mention the astonishing truth and reconciliation process that has gone on in South Africa since the end of apartheid. You may think all this forgiveness stuff is watery-eyed idealism of the clap-if-you-believe-in-fairies variety, but if the forgiveness is sincerely given and sincerely received – both parts are admittedly difficult – it does appear to have a liberating effect. As we’ve noted, the desire for revenge is a heavy chain, and revenge itself leads to a chain reaction. Forgiveness cuts the chain.

Now take a deep breath, close your eyes and try the following exercise in historical revisionism. It’s September 11 2001. After two planes have flown into them, the Twin Towers have just collapsed in billows of smoke and fire. Vengeful messages have been disseminated by al-Qaeda. The president of the United States goes on international television and says:

“We have suffered a grievous loss – a blow has been struck at us that was motivated by an obsessive desire to harm us. We realise that this was the work of a small group of fanatics. Other nations might bomb the stuffing out of the civilian population where those fanatics are at present located, but we recognise the futility of such an action. Nor will we accuse any bystander nation of having been involved. We realise that acts of vengeance recoil upon the heads of the inventors, and we do not wish to perpetuate a chain reaction of revenge. Therefore we will forgive.”

Just imagine the impact of taking such a position, not that there was a snowball’s chance in hell of this ever happening. Now, imagine how much different the world would have been today if that position had, in fact, been taken. No ongoing Iraq war. No impasse in Afghanistan. And, above all, no ballooning and ruinous and nation-weakening and out-of-control big fat American debt.

Extracted from ‘Payback’ by Margaret Atwood, published next week by Bloomsbury (£9.99). FT Bookshop price: £7.99 plus p&p; call 0870 429 5884 or visitwww.ft.com/bookshop