Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (8 page)

If, on the other hand, you are one of the Elect, whoop de doo: Jesus wants you for a sunbeam and no amount of bad behaviour is going to prevent him seeing you right. This is a pretty crazy view to take, most of us would agree, and historically it has tended to be discouraged by both civic and religious authorities for rather obvious reasons. But there it is.

Since politicians, at least in the English-speaking West, are showing an increasing tendency to drag religion into politics, it would seem fair for the electorate to be able to question them on their own theological views. “Do you believe that you personally are irrevocably saved, that any graft, fraud, lying, torturing, or other criminal activities you may engage in are fully justified because you’re one of the Elect and can do no wrong, that to the pure such as yourself all things are pure, and that the vast majority of those you say you wish to represent as their political leader are vile and worthless and predestined to fry in hell, so why should you give a damn about them?” would seem to be an appropriate lead-off at question time.

THERE’S A NOVEL
that explores the Antinomian Heresy very thoroughly: James Hogg’s 1824
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
. It’s no coincidence that in this day of holier-than-thou politicians it’s attracting increased critical attention. Here’s the situation: religiously warped by a fanatical mother, sure that he’s predestined to be redeemed, and filled with envy and hatred, specifically for his more attractive brother and his jolly old tippler of a dad, the narrator commits one foul crime after another, led on by a mysterious stranger whom he encounters just when he becomes fully convinced of his own irrevocable membership in the Elect.

A prop considered necessary in any respectable literary early-modern pact with the Devil is the Infernal Book, for reasons we’ll come to later; and in Hogg’s novel it duly makes its appearance. One of his first encounters with the mysterious stranger is in a church, where the enigmatic one is found reading something that at first glance looks like a Bible:

I came up to him and addressed him, but he was so intent on his book that, though I spoke, he lifted not his eyes. I looked on the book also, and still it seemed a Bible, having columns, chapters, and verses; but it was in a language of which I was wholly ignorant, and all intersected with red lines and verses. A sensation resembling a stroke of electricity came over me, on first casting my eyes on that mysterious book, and I stood motionless. He looked up, smiled, closed his book, and put it in his bosom. “You seem strangely affected, dear sir, by looking at my book,” said he mildly. “In the name of God, what book is that?” said I. “Is it a Bible?”

“It is my Bible, sir,” said he.

Quite soon the mysterious stranger starts talking of blood bonds, and we readers know who he is: for the blood bond and the shockingly bad book are two unmistakable attributes of the fifteenth-to-nineteenth-century Devil — the literary one, at least — who tempts you into making a contract with him that you have to sign with your own sanguinary fluid. Hogg’s evil book seems to be a satanic version of Scripture, though more usually the Devil’s tome is an account book, in which the souls of the already-purchased are noted down, ready to be collected when the fatal moment comes. Céline has a novel called
Death on the Installment Plan,
and that is in effect what the Devil is selling: you buy now, you enjoy the benefits of whatever goodies the Devil provides, and then you pay later, forever.

Patrick Tierney, in his fascinating book
The Highest Altar: The Story of Human Sacrifice
, comments on the different — and older — traditions that prevail among the shamans — or
yataris
— of the Lake Titicaca region in South America.

Here the very masochistic, and Christian, notion of selling your own soul to the devil in exchange for a treasure never caught on — or made much sense. The Aymara yatari’s more practical approach was to sell someone else to the devil, “body and soul” . . . the way to avoid harm in making a pact with the devil was simply to give the devil a human victim. . . . Obviously, someone is physically killed in this diabolical exchange. Not so obvious, however, is the sinister underlying deal whereby the soul of that person is permanently enslaved. . . .

In former times, before the coming of Europeans to this region, the sacrificial victim — usually a young, innocent person or child — was mentally and emotionally prepared in advance, feasted and flattered and convinced to take on the role willingly, thus becoming a volunteer guardian spirit for all — a powerful conduit for spiritual forces that served the entire community. In this way the victim was akin to the Sin Eater, and thus to the scapegoat: a taboo figure, “accurst,” as the Sin Eater in
Precious Bane
is called, but also blessed; a figure who after his sacrificial death was revered, approached with fear and trembling, and given sacrifices in his or her turn.

Among present-day Lake Titicaca
yataris
and their customers, however — says Tierney — individual pacts with the local deities are undertaken for selfish ends involving worldly wealth and power, and the victim is far from willing. In fact, he or she is lured to the sacrificial spot and murdered, and the soul is enslaved and made to do whatever the entrapper wants. Those performing the sacrifices are said to live in fear of the souls escaping and then wreaking vengeance, like Spartacus or the wives and daughters in
Germinal
— resentment at unfair treatment being a universal unpaid debt that cries out for a balancing of the scales.

Early in human history, lists of such offerings to the supernatural forces, and pacts with them, and debts owing to them, wouldn’t have been set down in permanent form. But with writing came records, and books, and contracts. The envisioning of the unseen world tends to mirror what’s available on Earth: the gatherings of witches pictured by seventeenth-century New Englanders, for instance, bore an eerie resemblance to the Puritan church meetings of the same period. So the Devil got hold of his writing implements as soon as human beings got hold of theirs; in fact, he may even have inherited them from earlier post-mortem scorekeepers, such as the Egyptian scribe god Thoth.

The Devil’s chosen medium has changed over the years. Sometimes it’s not an actual book that requires signing with your blood; sometimes it’s a scroll, or a deed of gift, as in Christopher Marlowe’s late-sixteenth-century play
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
. But whatever its physical form, it’s a contract, and signing it causes your name to be written down in the bad book, just as the names of the righteous are written down in the good one. Since the Devil is among other things a lawyer — the lawyer for the prosecution, you might say — he’s very fond of contracts, and also of records and account books.

WHY THE NEED
for so much documentation? Let’s consider the link between debts and written records.

Without memory, there are no debts: a debt is something owing for a transaction that’s taken place in the past, and if neither debtor nor creditor can remember it, the debt is effectively extinguished. “Forgive and forget,” we say; and, in fact, we may not be able to forgive totally
unless
we forget. Hell, in Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, is the place where absolutely everything is remembered by those in torment, whereas in Heaven you forget your personal self and who still owes you five bucks and instead turn to the contemplation of selfless Being. Or that’s the theory.

Without memory there’s no debt, granted; but we can remember stories — and thus grudges and debts of honour, and who needs to be revenged on whom — anything about people and their doings — much more easily than we can remember long strings of numbers, unless we are mathematical geniuses. Our advanced mathematical ability is very recent, and far from instinctual: the times tables are hammered into our heads through memorizing alone, and even when you’ve learned them you sometimes resort to counting on your fingers — in the days before calculators, that is. The Barbie doll that got into trouble for saying “Math is hard” was just telling the truth. So most of us require a technical assist to perform our calculations, even if it’s only a piece of paper and a pencil.

But how did we conduct our business affairs before we had that piece of paper? How, for instance, did we trade? We’ve been trading physical items for at least forty thousand years, the archaeologists tell us, but without some sort of recordkeeping, trading over long distances must have been risky. To be sure you were getting the value you wanted, trades had to be done face to face — your obsidian for my ochre. Middlemen were undependable: what was sent might not always be what was received, and there would be no sure method of proving it either way. But once devices for recording the transactions were in place, a go-between merchant could do your trading for you and bring back the proceeds, and you could check up on the numbers.

All human technologies are extensions of the human body and the human mind. Thus eyeglasses and telescopes and the images of television and film and painting are extensions of the eye, the radio and telephone of the voice, the cane and crutch of the leg, and so on. Writing and written numbers are — among other things — extensions of the memory. These
aides-mémoire
appeared independently in many human societies, and methods for transmitting numbers, and thus debts, seem always to have appeared before written-down poetic and religious materials: such emotion-and-narrative-driven works could more easily exist in oral form.

Among the Inca of South America, bunches of knotted coloured strings — called
khipu
— were used for this purpose. In early Mesopotamia, small clay cones, balls, cylinders, and other geometrical forms were sealed into clay envelopes. These shapes have now been identified as symbols representing herd animals — cows, calves, sheep, lambs, goats, kids, donkeys, and horses. The envelope could be sent with the herdsman, and could not be opened without being broken. Thus, whoever had already bought the animals had a certified account or waybill.

Cuneiform tablets came later; the vast majority of them are accounting records and inventories, since by this time the priest-kings of Mesopotamia were in the grain-surplus business and had set up the first banks, which were food banks. With the food surpluses came large-scale warfare: you can’t feed armies without them. And with the wars came more inventories, much needed when it came to dividing up the loot. The first thing Genghis Khan’s armies did after a city surrendered was to take inventory, not only of all the valuables, but of all the people. Genghis Khan typically massacred the rich and the aristocracies, but he saved the scribes: he needed a huge bureaucracy in order to run his empire, and literacy came in handy.

Recordkeeping, and thus the ability to track debits and credits, allowed sophisticated taxation systems to proliferate. Initially, taxation was a sort of protection racket: if the taxes were paid to the religious establishment, you were supposed to get the protection of the gods; if they were paid to a king or emperor, you were supposed to get the protection of his armies. Taxes fell most heavily on the peasants — those who produced the actual food that kept the superstructure going — and so it remains today. In theory, taxes are different from someone merely walking into your house and taking your stuff. That’s called “robbery,” whereas with taxes you’re supposed to be getting something in return. What exactly you do get in return provides the chattering points for many a modern election.

When they first appeared, written records must have seemed like black magic to the illiterate: strange markings they couldn’t read could be produced against them by lawyers and landlords, and thus such objects acquired an evil reputation. This is where the Devil’s infernal account book most likely comes from. Indeed, the Devil of the early modern period bears more than a passing resemblance to a tax collector or punitive landlord, waving around infernal soul-for-money contracts like the stage villain of melodrama come to extract the overdue rent and molest the teenage daughter. Although the Bible says, “The wicked borroweth and payeth not again,” it must have seemed to the wretched of the Earth that it was the creditor rather than the debtor who was truly wicked.

All of which goes to answer the question, What is it that Ebenezer Scrooge’s underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchit, is scratching away at all day in his dismal little tank of an office? It’s the accounts — the accounts of the debts owed to Scrooge, the mortgager and merciless moneylender. As the Archangel Gabriel is to God, Bob Cratchit is to Scrooge: for where there are debts, there must be memory, and the memories of Scrooge that are initially important to him are of the debts owed to him, and it’s Bob’s quill pen that’s turning these into records.

Traditionally, it was in poor areas where the financial laws weighed heavily that destroying such records was a longed-for dream, and where cheating the landlord and the taxman and the moneylender was considered not only a right but a virtue. Robin Hood the outlaw and thief is a hero, the money-gathering Sheriff of Nottingham and King John the rapacious creditor and tax extortionist are villains. Robert Burns wrote a short poem called “The Deil’s Awa’ wi’ the Exciseman,” in which the Devil dances away with the man sent to collect taxes on the villagers’ home-brewed malt whisky. Old Nick is given a hearty thanks for this act of snatch-and-grab, since it’s a case of the worst creditor in the world making off with a miniature version of himself, and good riddance to both of them.

WHICH IS MORE
blameworthy — to be a debtor or to be a creditor? “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” says the tendentious Polonius of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
to his impatient son, Laertes, “for loan oft loses both itself and friend / And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.” In other words, if you lend a friend some money and he doesn’t pay you back, you’ll end up being angry with him, and he with you. And if you borrow, you’ll be spending money that isn’t yours and that you haven’t earned, rather than managing within your income. Good advice, Polonius! Strange that so few people follow it. Or possibly strange that anyone at all still follows it, since we are constantly told that borrowing is actually laudable because it turns the wheels of “the system,” and that spending lots of consumer money keeps some large, abstract, blimpish thing called “the economy” afloat.