Het Neoliberale Geloof 436

 Paydirt

Sunday 26 April 2009

by: Leslie Thatcher, Truthout | Book ReviewPayback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth By Margaret Atwood, Anansi, Toronto (2008)

    Amid the plethora of voices analyzing the roots of the financial system's meltdown and the mechanics of various bailout proposals, a few are consistently interesting: Dean Baker, the Nobels: Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, Kevin Phillips, Simon Johnson, Matt Taibbi, William Greidner.... The occasional work will delve more deeply or attack these problems from a different angle: philosopher Andre Gorz's "Theorizing Deliverance from the Labor- and Commodity-Centered Society," demographer Emmanuel Todd's "The Specter of a Soviet-Style Crisis," Hervé Kempf's "How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet," Thomas Geoghegan's indispensable article in Harper's April 2009 issue: "Infinite Debt: How Unlimited Interest Rates destroyed the Economy." For a truly Olympian view, however, I recommend novelist Margaret Atwood's stunning "Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth," the published volume of her 2008 Massey Lectures, which were broadcast over Canadian Broadcast Company Radio last November.

    A keen critical thinker who has already transmuted her finely tuned novelist's perception of the way we are now into such dazzling dystopian futures as "The Handmaid's Tale" (1985) and "Oryx and Crake" (2003), Atwood in "Payback" looks back to genetics, archaeology, history and literature to explore "that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force." [1] And, as she warns, that exploration focuses neither on the practical nor on the lurid, though both are touched on and illuminated, but on the questions, "Are we in debt to anyone or anything for the bare fact of our existence? If so, what do we owe and to whom or to what? And how should we pay?" [2]

    Atwood's method is poetic and allusive: the sum of her citations, examples, expositions, questions, etymologies, anecdotes and references far exceeds the substance of any conclusions. Moreover, the pleasure excited by her virtuoso voice - its perfect pitch and control, its apparently effortless elegance - almost undermines her enounced intention to inflict at least some pain. [3] I suspect the reason even Atwood's most acerbic commentary gave me pleasure does not derive from my taste for the mordant (especially when it happens to dovetail to my own views) but from the underlying and overarching optimism that informs her work [4] - not confidence that humans will work out the best possible future for themselves in time, but what appears a conviction worthy of the Egyptian Goddess Ma'at (who, with her balancing scales, is evoked early and often in "Payback") that justice is the equilibrium point towards which both human and natural systems tend. This, as Atwood suggests, is not necessarily reassuring for humans likely to be alive after the next twenty years. 

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/042609B