Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (19 page)

Scrooge feels a little sick. He’s never pictured his own body as being borrowed, and he certainly doesn’t like to think of it as having to be paid back in such a distressing way. It’s his to hold in perpetuity, and to improve, like a piece of real estate. He’s made quite a big investment in it! He understands there are some bioengineers working on the Immortality Project right now, and as soon as they’ve got real results, he’ll buy in. Why shouldn’t his body keep on working for him forever? “Can we talk about something else?” he says.

“Certainly,” says the Spirit. “Our first stop is Athens. It’s the sixth century
B.C.E
.”

Scrooge finds himself in a plain but clean room, open to the sea and sky beyond. Some old geezer in a bedsheet is pondering.

“This man is Solon,” says the Spirit, “the saviour of Athens. The aristocracy have controlled the government for a long time, and have made laws that benefit themselves. This has allowed them to corner a disproportionate amount of the state’s wealth. During years of bad harvests, they’ve driven the poorer farmers deeper and deeper into debt, and then into serfdom and slavery. The result has been economic stagnation.”

“I thought you were an Earth Day spirit,” says Scrooge. “Why are you lecturing me on economics?”

“As Charles Darwin said, ‘The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,’” says the Spirit. “All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn’t be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me.”

This is a novel way of thinking, for Scrooge. He’s always assumed that food came from restaurants, or else from upmarket delicatessen grocers.

“Solon was long held to be the greatest lawmaker of the Athenians,” says the Spirit. “Right now, he’s thinking about how to solve the nation’s problems by cancelling the massive debt structure that has enriched some, but impoverished everyone else. And that’s what he finally did. In essence, he wiped the debt-slate clean.”

“You mean, he defaulted?” says Scrooge. He shudders, envisioning what would happen to his own investment portfolio under these circumstances.

“Absolutely,” says the Spirit. “The alternative would have been a blood-soaked and costly revolution, because the Athenian peasants had been ground down too far. When debt becomes too highly concentrated in the hands of a few, the accounts must be balanced peacefully, or chaos and destruction will be the result. In this case, the rich and powerful who’d taken so much over so many years were forced to pay back by having their claims destroyed, and the result was renewed prosperity for the community. That’s one form of account balancing. Now let me show you another.”

Time flickers again, and they’re looking down at a medieval port city.

“Caffa,” says the Spirit, “on the coast of the Black Sea — a colony founded by the Genoese to exploit the overland trade from the Far East. The year is 1347. A great many people down there are already paying their debts to Nature.”

Scrooge and the Spirit swoop low over Caffa. The city is in turmoil: it has barely survived a Mongol siege, but not before being infected with the Black Death from the virus-ridden besiegers. Now people are dropping like flies in the narrow, overcrowded, filthy streets, while, in the harbour, crowds of panic-stricken citizens are pushing their way onto the ships, hoping they can escape.

“Why have you brought me here?” says Scrooge. “When can we leave?” The stench arising from Caffa is ten times as awful as the stench of Jake Marley’s Ghost.

“The Black Death is about to invade Europe,” says the Spirit of Earth Day Past. “No country will be spared. The plague will come by sea — these Genoese galleys from Caffa will spread it — and then it will run like wildfire over the whole continent. The cities there are overcrowded and unsanitary, and the countries are overpopulated and malnourished, having exhausted the food resources available to them. Also, the immune systems of many of those now living were weakened in their childhoods, during the Great Famine of 1315–16, when torrential rains ruined the harvests and hundreds of thousands died. Pandemic plagues love overcrowding, ecological disasters, and victims weakened by malnutrition. In two years, by the time the first wave of the Great Mortality is over, half of the people now living will be dead. Cities will be emptied. A great many animals and birds will also die. Farms will fall into ruin; forests will grow over them. The entire landscape of Europe will be transformed.”

This thing is turning into a television documentary of the kind Scrooge always switches off — poor people, famines, diseases and disasters, all of that — because why dwell on such negative details? He would really, really like to be back in his own bed, or one of his beds. But instead they’re fast-forwarding through the Black Death, which is very gruesome. Some people are coughing blood, others are turning black, still others are sprouting huge boils.

“When any bad situation is getting worse,” says the Spirit — a sententious girl, as such Spirits tend to be — “people react in a few predictable ways. During the Black Death, many took self-protective actions, such as smelling floral bouquets, sitting beside hot fires, abandoning sick family members, or running away, thereby spreading the virus. If they were rich, they locked themselves up in their castles, hoping to shut the plague out. Others, feeling that long-term financial planning was a waste of time, lived for the moment and enjoyed themselves as much as possible. This enjoyment took several forms, from feasting and consensual sex to looting, raping, and pillaging.”

“Could I see some of that?” says Scrooge, who likes to cut to the chase; but the Spirit continues:

“Others tried to help in various ways, giving food and rendering what medical assistance they could to the dying, and most likely perishing themselves in the process. Some villages that were already infected, recognizing that the plague might be caught through personal contact, sealed themselves off — and in this way tried to stop the spread of the disease. Another group blamed either themselves or others for causing the plague — through sinfulness or malice, or by poisoning the wells — thus giving rise to groups of flagellants who whipped themselves and prayed, and — because they roamed from town to town — also spread the plague. There were many attacks on out-groups suspected of being plague agents — for instance, lepers, gypsies, beggars, and Jews — this last group suffering an estimated three hundred and fifty massacres. Others observed, and bore witness: much that we know about these times comes from contemporaries who wrote down what was happening. Finally, some attempted to carry on with their daily lives and businesses as well as they could. Scrooge, have you been listening to anything I’ve been saying?”

“Of course,” says Scrooge, who has in fact been riveted by a vignette unfolding below, in which a band of drunken fourteenth-century gravediggers — the biker gangs of their times — is invading a luxurious villa not unlike his own.

“To sum up the reactions,” says the Spirit, “Protect Yourself, Give Up and Party, Help Others, Blame, Bear Witness, and Go About Your Life. These are the only six reactions possible in a crisis, if the crisis isn’t a war. If it is a war, you could add two more — Fight, and Surrender — though these might be dark subsets of Helping Others and Give Up and Party. Already you may have noticed that some of your contemporaries are adopting one or another of these same six courses of action. Could it be that they sense an impending global crisis?”

“Naysayer,” Scrooge mutters to himself. But even if something like that does happen, he knows which of the reactions will be his. He’ll do the running away thing — using his private jet — followed by the partying, in a remote Caribbean island hideaway of his where no peasants can get in. “I will thumb my nose at Fate,” he tells himself; though a small voice whispers, “If you still have a thumb. If you still have a nose.” He shivers. It can’t be all bad, he thinks.

“It
wasn’t
all bad,” says the Spirit, reading his thoughts. “Death pays all debts, and cancels a lot of them, so a great deal of working capital was eventually freed up. For the survivors, wages rose, due to a shortage of labour, and the cumbersome and demeaning feudal system came to an end. The position of women improved — jobs were opened to them, as they were during the First and Second World Wars. A period of technical innovation was inaugurated, for good or ill. And just think of the artistic masterpieces inspired by the Great Mortality: Boccaccio’s
Decameron Nights
, Albert Camus’s novel
The Plague
, the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece
The Seventh Seal
. . . . It’s an ill plague that blows no good.”

“I’d rather skip the masterpieces and do without the plague,” says Scrooge.

“Maybe a pandemic plague is part of Nature’s cost-benefit analysis,” says the Spirit. “A way of wiping the slate clean and balancing the accounts. When Mankind becomes too irritating — too numerous, too filthy, too destructive to the Earth — a plague results. Farm animals crowded together are equally prone to disease. Think of a cat coughing up a hairball and you get the picture.”

This cat’s-hairball metaphor is not flattering to humanity, of which Scrooge suddenly feels a part for the first time in his life. But now the Spirit has hauled him up into the clouds again, and they’ve left the plague-ridden cities of the fourteenth century behind them.

THE SPIRIT OF
Earth Day Past takes Scrooge on a rapid journey through time and space. First they visit North America in 1793 to watch an episode in the destruction of the passenger pigeon — enormous flocks of birds are shot down and left to lie, many more than can ever be gathered up and eaten. “The Lord won’t see the waste of His creatures for nothing, and right will be done to the pigeons, as well as others, by and by,” says a tall, rustic-looking old man who’s standing by. “I call it sinful and wasty, to catch more than can be eat.”

“Leatherstocking,” says the Spirit, “from
The Pioneers
, an 1832 novel by James Fenimore Cooper.”

“But he’s just a character in a book!” says Scrooge.

“So are you,” says the Spirit reprovingly. She’s got a point, thinks Scrooge. “I wished to show you that even in abundant North America — abundant at that time — people were already thinking about the right and wrong uses of what is now called ‘natural capital.’ ”

Next they witness the arrival in Europe of the cheap and nutritious potato from the New World. It spreads rapidly, fuelling a population explosion that more than refills the countries and cities, despite new waves of plague and other high-mortality diseases — tuberculosis, diphtheria, smallpox, typhoid, cholera, syphilis, and more. Scrooge decides that the Spirit of Earth Day Past is a sicko. He has to watch as the 1840s potato blight arrives, ravaging Ireland and signalling — says the Spirit — the hazards of mono-cropping, which Nature has always disliked. It’s folly, says the Spirit, to become dependent on just a few crops — wheat, rice, corn, and soy, for instance, as in the twenty-first century — because a blight can cause instant famines.

Leaving the howling and dying Irish behind, Scrooge and the Spirit fly over London, where, as in time-lapse photography, Scrooge witnesses the rise of the factories with their smoking chimneys, and the subsequent overcrowding, and the misery caused by the boom-and-bust cycling of early capitalism. Deformed, greenish children teem in smog-choked slums; families sleep fifteen to an airless, fetid room. Sewage runs in the open gutters.

“How can people live like that?” says Scrooge. This is repulsive.

“What choice did they have?” says the Spirit. “There was no social safety net.”

“Well, private philanthropy could step in . . .” says Scrooge, who’s a great believer in removing the responsibility for social inequities — not to mention tax burdens — from people such as himself.

“‘Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody Poor; / And Mercy no more could be / If all were as happy as we,’” murmurs the Spirit.

“What?” says Scrooge.

“A little light verse,” says the Spirit. “William Blake. Now my travels with you are almost over. I can show you only one more scene. The year is 1972. The place is Toronto, Canada.”

Time flickers, and Scrooge finds himself in a modern-looking room. No more withered-up children, no plague victims, no rotting potatoes, which is a relief. Only a sixty-three-year-old woman reading a newspaper. She cuts out an article, which she folds and tucks into an envelope. She seals the envelope, writes the date on it, then goes downstairs to her cellar and puts it into a steamer trunk.

“What did it say?” asks Scrooge. “That thing she cut out of the paper?”

BUT THE CLOCK
strikes one, again, and the Spirit of Earth Day Past wavers and dissolves, and then re-forms — except that now she’s a man. Scrooge hates these sex-change things: they give him the willies.

“Yo, Scrooge baby,” says the man, West Coastishly. “I am the Spirit of Earth Day Present. Just call me the S of EDP.” He’s wearing a bicycle helmet and a hemp T-shirt that says
Hug My Tree
. In one hand he’s carrying a use-again shopping bag made from recycled plastic pop bottles, and in the other he holds a coffee cup that says
Songbird-friendly Shade-grown Fair-trade Pesticide-free Organic
. He looks a little like David Suzuki, and a little like Al Gore, and also a little like Prince Charles, in his organic farmer guise. “So,” he continues, “which piece of disaster-in-the-making do you want to visit first?”

Scrooge wishes to say “None of them,” but he realizes by now that this is not an option. “You choose,” he says gruffly. This guy seems mild enough, but there’s something deeply weird about him — like a hippie who’s gone through a teleportation device and come out with a few parts scrambled.

“Okay,” says the Spirit, and the next moment Scrooge finds himself at the bottom of the ocean. A huge net is being dragged across the sea floor, destroying everything in its path. Ahead of it bloom undersea forests and their hundreds and thousands of living creatures, both plant and animal; behind it is a desert. The net is pulled to the surface and most of the dead and dying life forms in it are thrown out. A few marketable species are retained.