July 29, 2011

Money and Morality

In the history of states and empires (beginning around 3,500 B.C.E.),

the overwhelming majority of human beings have been in debt.

Most frequently, this indebtedness has been due to having to pay taxes.

Fear of punishment has been pervasive, but the greatest has been the fear

of losing everything – honor, dignity, house, family, friends, community –

the fear of becoming a slave, ripped from one’s context, and thus from all the

social relationships that make one a human being. A slave is, in this sense, dead.

He is has become a thing, a commodity which now can be bought and sold.

Adding to the violence needed to convert debtors into debt peons or slaves,

has been the routine admonition that whatever punishment befalls them,

it is just, because it is the debtors who have brought it on themselves. In all

Indo-European languages, the words for “debt” are synonymous with those for

“sin” or “guilt.” Indeed, indebtedness is how we now express our moral code.

In Mesopotamian civilization (3,500-539 B.C.E.), the word “freedom”

referred above all to being released from debt. The same is true of the Bible.

The Lord’s Prayer, popularized at the end of the Middle Ages (1,500 C.E.),

speaks of sins as debts to God: “Forgive us our debts.” Our word “free,” is

derived from the German “friend” – being free meant being able to make friends.

Throughout history, the struggle between rich and poor has largely

taken the form of conflicts between debtors and creditors. To redeem

means to re-buy (from a pawn-broker). “To pay” originally meant “to pacify,

to appease.” The German word schuld means both “debt” and “guilt.”

The German word Geld (money) and our word “guilt” have the same root.

In the early Greek city-states and in early Rome, the political struggle between

debtors and creditors was constant. Our word “domestic,” meaning both

“pertaining to private life” and “a servant who cleans the house,” is derived

from the Latin dominus, meaning both “household,” and “master” or

“slave-owner.” Our word “family” derives from famulus, meaning “slave.”

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If we “have” (own) liberty, and even “have” (own) the right to liberty,

then, presumably, we are free to give these away, or even sell them.

Wage labor is, effectively, the renting of our freedom, in the same

way that slavery can be conceived of as the sale of one’s freedom.

When we say we “have” a body, do we mean that we own it like a slave?

In Roman law, “interesse” meant “penalty for the late payment on a loan.”

Around 400 C.E., St. Augustine developed the concept of “self-love” to

denote insatiable desires for self-gratification. Around 1510 C.E., Italian

historian Francesco Guicciadini (a friend of Niccolo Machiavelli), kept intact

St. Augustine’s concept of insatiable self-gratification, but re-named it

“self-interest.” English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) concurred

with the idea. By 1750, most in English educated society accepted as

common sense that “self-interest” explains all human motivation.

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The Axial Age, from 800 B.C.E. to 632 C.E., saw the birth of not only all the

world’s present major philosophical tendencies, but also all of today’s major

world religions – Zoroastrianism, Prophetic Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism,

Hinduism (as a self-conscious religion), Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity,

and Islam. The core of the Axial Age (as defined, in 1949, by German existentialist

philosopher Karl Jaspers), was that period encompassing the lives of Pythagoras

(570-495 B.C.E.), the Buddha (563-483 B.C.E.) and Confucius (551-479 B.C.E.). This period

corresponds exactly with that when coinage was invented. The world’s first coins were

created in the Kingdom of Lydia, in western Anatolia (now Turkey), around 600 B.C.E.

Lydian coins were invented explicitly to pay mercenaries. Were some philosophies

and all religions, in fact, attempts to provide a mirror image to the market logic?

Our endless maze of paired opposites appeared soon thereafter – egoism vs. altruism,

profit vs. charity, materialism vs. idealism, calculation vs. spontaneity.

Is it possible that only people immersed in the pure, calculating, self-interested

logic of market transactions could ever have imagined such dualities?

Indeed, the spirituality of the Axial Age was built on its bedrock of materialism.

We continue the conflict today: “Flesh” vs. “Spirit,” “Reality” vs. “Idea,” and

“corporeal drives and desires” vs. “the intellect.” From this very conflict has arisen

even the idea that peace and community are not trends which, in a group of

people, emerge spontaneously, but rather have to be stamped onto people’s baser

material nature, much like a divine insignia is stamped onto the base metal of a coin.

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Our notion of the corporation is very much a product of the European High

Middle Ages (1,000-1,300 C.E.). The legal idea of a corporation as a “fictive person”

(persona ficta) was first established in canon law by Pope Innocent IV, in 1250 C.E.

Legal historian Frederic Maitland (1850-1906) described such a corporation as

a person who “is immortal, who sues and is sued, who holds lands, has a seal

of his own, and makes regulations for those natural persons of whom he is composed.”

One of the first kinds of entities to which the fiction applied were monasteries.

We have accepted this quaint legal fiction, and treat our corporations

as persons – just like human beings, except immortal, never having

to go through all the human untidiness of marriage, reproduction, infirmity,

and death. In properly Medieval parlance, our corporations are our angels.

The “tulip mania” of 1637, in the Dutch Republic, was the first of a series

of speculative “bubbles,” when future prices bid by investors skyrocketed

and then collapsed. In the 1690’s, the London markets suffered a series of

such bubbles, culminating in the famous South Sea Bubble of 1720.

Two hundred and eighty-eight years later, in 2008, we had our own bubble.

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Historically, the impersonal, commercial markets we now have, must have

originated in theft. Who else but a thief could have been the first person to

look at a house full of objects, and assess them only in term of what he could

trade them in for on the market? Burglars, marauding soldiers, then perhaps

debt collectors must surely have been the first to see the world this way.

We are the sum of the relations we have with others.

Any system which reduces the world to numbers can only

be held in place by weapons – whether these be swords

and clubs, or “smart bombs” from unmanned drones.

Reference

Graeber, David. 2011. Debt – the first 5,000 years. New York, N.Y.: Melvillehouse.

Debtors, redemption, guilt, freedom, sin – pp. 8 and 393.

Mesopotamian civilization – p. 39.

Debt, sin, Geld, guilt – p. 59.

Pay, pacify, appease – p. 60

Schuld, guilt – p. 77.

Axial Age – pp. 80, 84, 224, 237-238, 244, 297 and 426.

Freedom, Bible, Mesopotamia – p. 82.

Slave – pp. 168-171.

Dominus, famulus – pp. 200-201.

Friend – p. 203.

Body – pp. 206-207.

Hobbes – pp. 206, 210, 325 and 344.

Lydia – pp. 224 and 227.

Opposites – pp. 242 and 247.

Interesse – pp. 290 and 331.

Maitland – p. 304.

Self-interest – pp. 331-332 and 446.

Bubbles – pp. 341-342, 347 and 358.

Weapons – p. 386.

We are the sum – p. 387.

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