Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (3 page)

The winner of the contest was called
TIT FOR TAT
— an expression that descends from “Tip for Tap,” both words having once meant a hit, push, or blow — thus, “You hit me and I’ll hit you back.” The computer program
TIT FOR TAT
played by a very simple set of rules: “On the first encounter with any program, it would co-operate. Thereafter, it would do whatever the other program had done on a previous encounter. One good turn deserves another, as does one bad turn.” This program won out over time because it was never repeatedly victimized — if an opponent cheated on it, it withheld co-operation next time — and, unlike consistent cheaters and exploiters, it didn’t alienate a lot of others and then find itself shut out of play, nor did it get involved in escalating aggression. It played by a recognizable eye-for-an-eye rule: Do unto others as they do unto you. (Which is not the same as the “golden rule”— Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That one is much more difficult to follow.)

In the computer program contest won by tit for tat, it was a given that each player had equal resources at its disposal. Treating a first approach with friendliness and then replying to subsequent ones in kind — returning good for good and evil for evil — can be the winning stratagem only if the playing field is level. None of the competing programs were permitted to have superior weapons systems: had one of the entrants been allowed an advantage such as the chariot, the double-recurved bow of Genghis Khan, or the atomic bomb,
TIT FOR TAT
would have failed, because the player with the technological advantage could have obliterated its opponents, enslaved them, or forced them to trade on disadvantageous terms. This is in fact what has happened over the long course of our history: those that won the wars wrote the laws, and the laws they wrote enshrined inequality by justifying hierarchical social formations with themselves at the top.

I ENCOUNTERED THE
“kind but stern” tit-for-tat pattern as a child, but in a literary guise. In Charles Kingsley’s 1863 children’s book,
The Water Babies
, Tom — a poor, ignorant, exploited, and abused child-labourer chimney sweep — drowns in a river and finds himself swimming around with gills, like a newt. Then, in a series of post-mortem adventures, he learns through trial and error how to become Kingsley’s version of the ideal Victorian Christian male. His main instructors are two powerful supernatural female figures — the beautiful, baby-cuddling Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, who’s the Golden Rule in action, and the ugly, strict, punitive but fair Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, a nannyish embodiment of payback. The Victorian reader might have recognized them as Mercy and Justice, or even as a nurturing Wordsworthian Mother Nature — she “who never did betray the heart that loves her”— and a tough, take-no-prisoners Darwinian Mother Nature with a Lamarckian twist — you become what you do. (Kingsley was a friend of Darwin;
The Water Babies
was published a mere four years after
The Origin of Species
had appeared and is one of the first literary responses to it. It may even be counted as one of the first brave entries in the Intelligent Design category: if the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Flood had to be scratched, at least you might fall back on Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid to make sense of both the natural and the human order.)

In present terms, Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby could be seen as the first, co-operative move of tit for tat, and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid with her birch rod is what happens next if you act badly. For instance, Tom has been naughty — he has put pebbles into the mouths of the sea anemones to fool them — so instead of getting a candy from Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid as the other water babies do, Tom gets a pebble.

At the end of the book, the two women are revealed as one and the same person, a person who is incidentally quite a lot like George MacDonald’s young-old, friendly-scary female allegories of Christian Grace in the
Curdie
books: the Victorians did love their supernatural females. This double-sided lady raises several questions. I did use to wonder why both of her avatars were married — perhaps they were too closely involved with babies to be respectable as single girls? — and where Mr. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mr. Bedonebyasyoudid were to be found. Down at the pub avoiding the swarms of babies, the sickly sweet cooing, and the nasty birch-rod punishments, quite likely. I’m sure their two wives, or wife, had at least one offspring of her or their own, because otherwise there would have been no Mary Poppins of the P. L. Travers books — she is so obviously in the direct line of descent of the Bedoneby twins. But those questions must remain forever unanswered.

Instead I would like to ask, Why is Kingsley’s Mercy-and-Justice figure female?

AS IT TURNS OUT
, Kingsley’s double-visaged female justice-provider has some distant ancestors. I’d like to make one of those
Star Trek
-ish hyperdrive leaps in time and space, and go back, back, back, thousands of years ago, to the Middle East. What I’m tracking is both a painted image and a constellation. The constellation is Libra, the scales or balance, and as a present-day zodiac sign it rules from September 23 to October 22. One explanation of its name is that it rises at the time of the autumnal equinox, when the day and the night are of equal length, a balance being a device for determining equivalents. A more questionable interpretation is that it appeared at harvest time, when farmers were weighing their produce for marketing purposes.

But more likely it had another origin. In Akkadian — an ancient Semitic language spoken by, among others, the Assyrians — this constellation was called
zibanitu
, which means “the claws of the Scorpion,” because it rose before the constellation of the Scorpion and was thought to be the front part of it. But
zibanitu
could also mean a weighing scales — a scorpion held upside down is similar in shape to the ancient form of this device. The constellation is now known only as Libra, a Latin word meaning “scales or balance.” It is usually pictured as — guess what — a scales or balance, consisting of a crossbar suspended from a central arm or chain, with a pan hanging from each end of the crossbar. It’s the only zodiac sign that isn’t an animal or a person, although it’s frequently held by a young woman, often identified as Astraea, the daughter of Zeus and Themis. Both Themis and Astraea were goddesses of justice, and Astraea is also known as the constellation Virgo, the virgin. Thus, in the Virgo-Libra configuration, we see a young woman holding a double-armed scales and identified with Justice.

From Themis and Astraea to Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid may seem like a stretch, but there are some other generations as well. Jumping back in space-time again, we find ourselves in Ancient Egypt, and this time we’re hunting for the scales as weighing device. The scales or balance is one of the very first articulated mechanisms to appear in pictorial art based on mythology. There are many pictures of scales in the “coffin texts” found in tombs —“coffin texts” being charms and spells written on the coffin itself, or on scrolls of papyrus, intended to help the soul make its way through the Egyptian Underworld after death.

First stop on the soul’s trip was the Halls of Ma’ati, where the dead person’s heart would be weighed on a two-armed scale of the kind used in Ancient Egypt for weighing gold and jewels. Ma’ati meant Double Ma’at — double not in the evil-twin sense of “double,” but in the times-two sense — double strength. As for Ma’at, she was a goddess, sometimes pictured as two goddesses, or a pair of twins — teenage twins, with wings on their shoulders and ostrich feathers in their headdresses. She was one of the presiding deities at the weighing of the heart, the others being jackal-headed Anubis, who did the actual weighing, and ibis-headed Thoth, moon god and thus, in a society that used the lunar calendar, the god of time. He was also the god of measurements and numbers and astronomy and engineering skills, and in addition he was a supernatural scribe or clerk. In heart-weighing scenes, he’s often shown with his wax tablet at the ready and his stylus poised, just as a scribe would have been present at a real-life gold-weighing to record the results.

Sometimes a miniature Ma’at was shown sitting on one pan of the scales, but more often it was her feather — the feather of Ma’at — that was used to counterweight the heart. If your heart weighed the same as Ma’at, you could go on to the next stage and meet and merge with Osiris in his guise as god of the Underworld, where a suitable underworldly location would be assigned to you, with possibilities for rebirth. (The Egyptian inner coffin was known, reassuringly, as “that which begets,” and the coffin-board was known as “the egg”— so you might hatch out of death, just like a bird.)

However, if your heart was heavier than the feather, it would be thrown to an unpleasant crocodile-headed deity, which would eat it. As with most mythologies or religions, there was a way around this moment of dreadful judgement: you could fortify your heart ahead of time with special charms obliging it not to snitch on you. Presumably the heart was willing to co-operate, since it would be better for both of you if your heart kept your dirty deeds to itself: being eaten by a crocodile was not in either of your best interests. On the other hand, your cheatin’ heart might tell on you. The uncertainty must have been what made the drama of post-mortem heart-weighing such a riveting subject for speculation among the Ancient Egyptians.

Interesting that it was the heart, even so long ago, that was thought to absorb the effects of your good and bad deeds, like Dorian Gray’s scoundrelly picture. It’s not the heart that remembers your moral pluses and minuses, really — it’s the brain. But we can’t be convinced of that. No one ever sends his valentine a picture of a brain with an arrow through it; nor, in the case of romantic failure, do we say, “He broke my brain.” Maybe that’s because, although the brain’s in the control tower, it’s the heart we can feel responding to our emotions — as in,
Be still my beating heart
. (Not brain.)

Why was it Ma’at who was used as the counterweight to the heart? Ma’at was a goddess, but she wasn’t a goddess with a specific function or area, such as writing or fertility or animal husbandry: she was much more important than that. The term
ma’at
meant truth, justice, balance, the governing principles of nature and the universe, the stately progression of time — days, months, seasons, years. It also meant the proper comportment of individuals toward others, the right social order, the relationship between the living and the dead, the true, just, and moral standards of behaviour, the way things are supposed to be — all of those notions rolled up into one short word. Its opposite was physical chaos, selfishness, falsehood, evil behaviour — any sort of upset in the divinely ordained pattern of things.

This concept — that there is an underlying balancing principle in the universe, according to which we should act — appears to have been almost universal. In Chinese culture, it’s the Tao or Way, in Indian culture it’s the wheel of karmic justice. If not in this world, then in the next, and if not now, then in the future, the
TIT FOR TAT
cosmic law of reciprocity would see to it that you’d be returned good for good and evil for evil.

Even in shamanistic hunter-gatherer societies, there was a right way, and failure to follow it would upset the balance of the natural world and result in famine: if you did not treat the animals you killed with respect, not killing too many of them and thanking them for giving themselves as food, and if you did not share your kill fairly, as custom demanded, the goddess of the animals would withhold those animals from you.

The protector of animals and the hunt was unambiguously female. Ancient Greek-speakers worshipped Artemis of the Silver Bow as Mistress of the Animals; there were many Celtic goddesses associated with wild animals; among the Inuit of northern Canada, Nulialiut was the feared undersea goddess who gave or withheld the seals, whales, and walruses according to the virtuous behaviour of men or the lack of it. In early Neolithic times, babies were thought to be produced by women alone, so it made sense that wild-animal fecundity would be also controlled by a female deity. This person was not a demure girly-girl: she could be ferocious, and was relentless when crossed.

However, by the time they started recording and elaborating their mythologies, the Ancient Egyptians were already agriculturalists: they depended not on wild animals but on managed herds, and on crops. Thus, although they had a number of gods with animal heads, these animals were for the most part not hunted wild prey but domesticated animals such as cows. An exception was the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet — her name means “she who is powerful”— who was in charge of a list that at first seems bewildering: war and destruction, plagues, and violent storms on the one hand, and physicians, healing, and protection from evil on the other. This double-bladed list makes sense once we know that Sekhmet was also the defender of Ma’at, so her acts of destruction were performed to avenge wrongs and to restore the rightful balance of things. She is
TIT FOR TAT
in action — unlike Ma’at, who doesn’t perform deeds but is the standard against which they are to be measured.

Sekhmet, like Ma’at, was a daughter of the sun god Ra, the lifegiver who created the world by naming it. Sekhmet was also known as “the blazing eye of Ra,” a goddess who could see injustice and then fry it. (This notion exists in the Old Testament as well — the all-seeing eye of God is usually focused on bad deeds rather than good ones.) But Sekhmet appears to have confined her activities to this life, whereas Ma’at is present everywhere. She was the
sine qua non
, that without which nothing else could exist. So, during your post-mortem trial, your heart was being weighed against nothing less than the sum total of order in the universe.

We are usually given to understand that we are the philosophical heirs of the Greek-speakers and Romans and Israelites, not of the Ancient Egyptians, but in fact the Greek tradition of divine justice is somewhat more confusing and foreign to us than the Egyptian one. The Greek-speakers had several goddesses of justice, the first being Themis, meaning “order,” who represents some of the same ideas as Ma’at does. She was a Titaness — a member of that older group of ruling supernaturals who were close to the Earth itself. The Titans were overthrown by Zeus and the Olympians, but Themis weathered the transition and was given a seat on Olympus. She was an infallible prophetess, and these powers came from her ability to look into the patterns of the universe. In some accounts she has a daughter by Zeus, called Diké, or “Justice”— justice not so much of the Egyptian right-balance kind as of the punishment kind. Diké was quite aggressive, and can be seen on vase paintings hitting people with a mallet.