Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2 page)

But there’s nothing on the table that isn’t based on or linked to our rudimentary human patterns — what we want, what we don’t want, what we admire, what we despise, what we love, and what we hate and fear. Some geneticists even go so far as to speak of our “modules,” as if we were electronic systems with chunks of functional circuitry that can be switched on and off. Whether such discrete modules actually exist as part of our genetically determined neural wiring is at present still a matter for experiment and debate. But in any case, I’m assuming that the older a recognizable pattern of behaviour is — the longer it’s demonstrably been with us — the more integral it must be to our human-ness and the more cultural variations on it will be in evidence.

I’m not proposing a stamped-in-tin immutable “human nature” here — epigeneticists point out that genes can be expressed, or “switched on,” and also suppressed in various ways, depending on the environment in which they find themselves. I’m merely saying that without gene-linked configurations — certain building blocks or foundation stones, if you like — the many variations of basic human behaviours that we see around us would never occur at all. An online video game such as
Everquest
, in which you have to work your way up from rabbit-skinner to castle-owning knight by selling and trading, co-operating with fellow players on group missions, and launching raids on other castles, would be unthinkable if we were not both a social species and one aware of hierarchies.

What corresponding ancient inner foundation stone underlies the elaborate fretwork of debt that surrounds us on every side? Why are we so open to offers of present-time advantage in exchange for future though onerous repayment? Is it simply that we’re programmed to snatch the low-hanging fruit and gobble down as much of it as we can, without thinking ahead to the fruitless days that may then lie ahead of us? Well, partly: seventy-two hours without fluids or two weeks without food and you’re most likely dead, so if you don’t eat some of that low-hanging fruit right now you aren’t going to be around six months later to congratulate yourself on your capacity for self-restraint and delayed gratification. In that respect, credit cards are almost guaranteed to make money for the lender, since “grab it now” may be a variant of a behaviour selected for in hunter-gatherer days, long before anyone ever thought about saving up for their retirement. A bird in the hand really was worth two in the bush then, and a bird crammed into your mouth was worth even more. But is it just a case of short-term gain followed by long-term pain? Is debt created from our own greed or even — more charitably — from our own need?

I postulate that there’s another ancient inner foundation stone without which debt and credit structures could not exist: our sense of fairness. Viewed in the best light, this is an admirable human characteristic. Without our sense of fairness, the bright side of which is “one good turn deserves another,” we wouldn’t recognize the fairness of paying back what we’ve borrowed, and thus no one would ever be stupid enough to lend anything to anyone else with an expectation of return. Spiders don’t share out the bluebottles among other adult spiders: only social animals indulge in sharing out. The dark side of the sense of fairness is the sense of unfairness, which results in gloating when you’ve got away with being unfair, or else guilt; and in rage and vengeance, when the unfairness has been visited upon you.

Children start saying, “That’s not fair!” at the age of four or so, long before they’re interested in sophisticated investment vehicles or have any sense of the value of coins and bills. They are also filled with satisfaction when the villain in a bedtime story gets an unambiguous comeuppance, and made uneasy when such retribution doesn’t happen. Forgiveness and mercy, like olives and anchovies, seem to be acquired later, or — if the culture is unfavourable to them — not. But for young children, putting a bad person into a barrel studded with nails and rolling him or her into the sea restores the cosmic balance and removes the malevolent force from view, and the little ones sleep easier at night.

The interest in fairness elaborates with age. After seven, there’s a legalistic phase in which the fairness — or, usually, the unfairness — of any rule imposed by adults is argued relentlessly. As this age, too, the sense of fairness can take curious forms. For instance, in the 1980s there was a strange ritual among nine-year-old children that went like this: during car rides, you stared out the window until you spotted a Volkswagen Beetle. Then you hit your child companion on the arm, shouting, “Punch-buggy, no punch-backs!” Seeing the Volkswagen Beetle first meant that you had the right to punch the other child, and adding a codicil —“No punch-backs!”— meant that he or she had been done out of the right to punch you in return. If, however, the other child managed to shout “Punch-backs!” before you could yell out your protective charm, then a retaliatory punch was in order. Money was not a factor here: you couldn’t buy your way out of being punched. What was at issue was the principle of reciprocity: one punch deserved another, and would certainly get it unless an Out clause was inserted with the speed of lightning.

Ontogeny repeats phylogeny, we’re told: the growth of the individual mirrors the developmental history of the species. Those who fail to discern in the Punch-buggy ritual the essential lex talionis form of the almost four-thousand-year-old Code of Hammurabi — reformulated as the Biblical eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth law — are blind indeed. Lex talionis means, roughly, “the law of retribution in kind or suitability.” Under the Punch-buggy rules, punches cancel each other out unless you can whip your magical protection into place first. This kind of protection can be found throughout the world of contracts and legal documents, in clauses that begin with phrases such as “Notwithstanding any of the foregoing.”

We’d all like the right to a free punch, or a free lunch, or a free anything. We all suspect that the likeliness of our getting such a right is scant unless we can jump in there with some serious abracadabra. But how do we know that one punch is likely to incur another? Is it early socialization — the kind you get while squabbling over the Play-Doh at preschool and then saying, “Melanie bit me”— or is it a template hot-wired into the human brain?

LET’S EXAMINE THE
case for the latter. In order for a mental construct such as “debt” to exist — you owe me something that will balance the books once it is transferred to me — there are some preconditions. One of them, as I’ve said, is the notion of fairness. Attached to that is the notion of equivalent values: what does it take to make both sides of the mental score sheet or grudge tally or double-entry bookkeeping program we’re all constantly running add up to the same thing? If Johnny has three apples and Suzie has a pencil, is one apple for one pencil an acceptable exchange, or will there be an apple or a pencil remaining to be paid? That all depends on what values Johnny and Suzie place on their respective trading items, which in turn depend on how hungry and/or in need of communication devices they may be. In a trade perceived as fair, each side balances the other, and nothing is thought to be owing.

Even inorganic Nature strives toward balances, otherwise known as static states. As a child, you may have done that elementary experiment in which you put salty water on one side of a permeable membrane and fresh water on the other side and measure how long it takes for the sodium chloride to make its way into the
H
²
O
until both sides are equally salty. Or, as an adult, you may simply have noticed that if you put your cold feet on your partner’s warm leg, your feet will get warmer while your partner’s leg will get colder. (If you try this at home, please don’t say I told you to do it.)

Many animals are able to tell “bigger than” apart from “smaller than.” Hunting animals have to be able to do this, as it could be fatal to them to literally bite off more than they can chew. Eagles on the Pacific coast can be dragged to a watery grave by salmon that are too heavy for them, since, once having pounced, they can’t unhook their claws unless they’re on a firm surface. If you’ve ever taken small children to the big-cat enclosure at the zoo, you may have noticed that a medium-sized feline such as the cheetah won’t pay much attention to you but will eye the kids with avid speculation, because the youngsters are meal-sized for them and you are not.

The ability to size up an enemy or a prey is a common feature of the animal kingdom, but among the primates, the making of fine bigger-than and better-than distinctions when the edible goodies are being divided up verges on the unnerving. In 2003,
Nature
magazine published an account of experiments conducted by Frans de Waal, of Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Center, and anthropologist Sarah F. Brosnan. To begin with, they taught capuchin monkeys to trade pebbles for slices of cucumber. Then they gave one of the monkeys a grape — viewed by the monkeys as more valuable — for the very same pebble. “You can do it twenty-five times in a row, and they are perfectly happy getting cucumber slices,” said de Waal. But if a grape was substituted — thus unfairly giving one monkey a better pay packet for work of equal value — the cucumber-receivers got upset, began throwing pebbles out of the cage, and eventually refused to co-operate. And the majority of the monkeys got so angry if one of them was given a grape for no reason that some of them stopped eating. It was a monkey picket line: they might as well have been carrying signs that read,
Management Grape Dispensing Unfair!
The trading was taught, as was the pebble / cucumber rate of exchange, but the outrage appeared to be spontaneous.

Keith Chen, a researcher at the Yale School of Management, also worked with capuchin monkeys. He found he could train them to use coinlike metal disks as currency, coins being the pebble idea, only shiny. “My underlying goal is to determine what aspects of our economic behaviour are innate, deep in the brain, and conserved over time,” said Chen. But why stop at obviously economic behaviour such as trading? Among social animals that need to co-operate in order to achieve common goals such as — for capuchins — killing and eating squirrels, and — for chimpanzees — killing and eating bush babies, there has to be a sharing-out of the results of group effort that is recognized as fair by the sharers. Fair is not the same as equal: for instance, would it be fair for the plate of a ninety-pound ten-year-old to contain exactly the same amount of food as that of a two-hundred-pound six-foot-sixer? Among the hunting chimpanzees, the one strongest in personality or physique typically gets more, but all who have joined in the hunt receive at least something, which is pretty much the same principle used by Genghis Khan for doling out the results of his conquering, slaughtering, and looting activities among his allies and troops. Those who express surprise at winning political parties for their porkbarrelling and favouritism might keep this in mind: if you don’t share out, those folks won’t be there when you need them. At the very least, you have to give them some cucumber slices, and avoid giving grapes to their rivals.

If fairness is completely lacking, the members of the chimpanzee group will rebel; at the very least, they’re unlikely to join in a group hunt next time. To the extent that they’re social animals interacting in complex communities in which status is important, primates are highly conscious of what’s fitting for each member and what, on the other hand, constitutes uppity counter-jumping. The snobbish top-of-the-pecking-order Lady Catherine de Bourgh of Jane Austen’s novel
Pride and Prejudice
, with her exquisitely calibrated sense of rank, has nothing on capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees don’t limit their trading to food; they regularly engage in mutually beneficial favour-trading, or reciprocal altruism. Chimp A helps Chimp B to gang up on Chimp C and expects to be helped in turn. If Chimp B then doesn’t come through at the time of Chimp A’s need, Chimp A is enraged and throws a screaming temper tantrum. There seems to be a kind of inner ledger involved: Chimp A senses perfectly well what Chimp B owes him, and Chimp B senses it too. Debts of honour exist among chimpanzees, it appears. It’s the same mechanism that’s at work in Francis Ford Coppola’s film
The Godfather
: a man whose daughter has been disfigured comes to the Mafia boss for help and gets it, but it’s understood that this favour will need to be repaid later in some unsavoury way.

As Robert Wright says in his 1995 book,
The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are
, “Reciprocal altruism has presumably shaped the texture not just of human emotion, but of human cognition. Leda Cosmides has shown that people are good at solving otherwise baffling logical puzzles when the puzzles are cast in the form of social exchange — in particular, when the object of the game is to figure out if someone is cheating. This suggests to Cosmides that a ‘cheater-detection’ module is among the mental organs governing reciprocal altruism. No doubt others remain to be discovered.” We do want our trades and exchanges to be fair and above-board, at least on the other person’s side. A “cheater-detection module” assumes a parallel module, one that evaluates non-cheating. Small children used to chant, “Cheaters never prosper!” in the schoolyard. That’s true — we judge cheaters harshly, which affects their future prosperity — but it’s also true, alas, that they receive this judgement from us only when they get caught.

In
The Moral Animal
, Wright gives an account of a computer simulation program that won a 1970s contest proposed by Robert Axelrod, an American political scientist. The contest was designed to test what sort of behaviour patterns would prove to be the fittest by surviving the longest in a series of encounters with other programs. When one program first “met” another, it had to decide whether to co-operate, whether to respond with aggression or cheating, or whether to refuse to play. “The context for the competition,” says Wright, “nicely mirrored the social context of human, and prehuman evolution. There was a fairly small society — several dozen regularly interacting individuals. Each program could ‘remember’ whether each other program had cooperated on previous encounters, and adjust its own behaviour accordingly.”