Debt: The First 5000 Years Part 2

The answer provided by primordial-debt theorists is, again, ingenious. If taxes represent our absolute debt to the society that created us, then the first step toward creating real money comes when we start calculating much more specific debts to society, systems of fines, fees, and penalties, or even debts we owe to specific individuals who we have wronged in some way, and thus to whom we stand in a relation of "sin" or "guilt."

This is actually much less implausible than it might sound. One of the puzzling things about all the theories about the origins of money that we've been looking at so far is that they almost completely ignore the evidence of anthropology. Anthropologists do have a great deal of knowledge of how economies within stateless societies actually worked-how they still work in places where states and markets have been unable to completely break up existing ways of doing things. There are innumerable studies of, say, the use of cattle as money in eastern or southern Africa, of sh.e.l.l money in the Americas (wampum being the most famous example) or Papua New Guinea, bead money, feather money, the use of iron rings, cowries, spondylus sh.e.l.ls, bra.s.s rods, or woodp.e.c.k.e.r scalps.42 The reason that this literature tends to be ignored by economists is simple: "primitive currencies" of this sort is only rarely used to buy and sell things, and even when they are, never primarily to buy and sell everyday items such as chickens or eggs or shoes or potatoes. Rather than being employed to acquire things, they are mainly used to rearrange relations between people. Above all, to arrange marriages and to settle disputes, particularly those arising from murders or personal injury.

There is every reason to believe that our own money started the same way-even the English word "to pay" is originally derived from a word for "to pacify, appease"-as in, to give someone something precious, for instance, to express just how badly you feel about having just killed his brother in a drunken brawl, and how much you would really like to avoid this becoming the basis for an ongoing blood-feud.43 Debt theorists are especially concerned with this latter possibility. This is partly because they tend to skip past the anthropological literature and look at early law codes-taking inspiration here, from the groundbreaking work of one of the twentieth century's greatest numismatists, Philip Grierson, who in the '70s, first suggested that money might first have emerged from early legal practice. Grierson was an expert in the European Dark Ages, and he became fascinated by what have come to be known as the "Barbarian Law Codes," established by many Germanic peoples after the destruction of the Roman Empire in the 600s and 700s-Goths, Frisians, Franks, and so on-soon followed by similar codes published everywhere from Russia to Ireland. Certainly they are fascinating doc.u.ments. On the one hand, they make it abundantly clear just how wrong are conventional accounts of Europe around this time "reverting to barter." Almost all of the Germanic law codes use Roman money to make a.s.sessments; penalties for theft, for instance, are almost always followed by demands that the thief not only return the stolen property but pay any outstanding rent (or in the event of stolen money, interest) owing for the amount of time it has been in his possession. On the other hand, these were soon followed by law codes by people living in territories that had never been under Roman rule-in Ireland, Wales, Nordic countries, Russia-and these are if anything even more revealing. They could be remarkably creative, both in what could be used as a means of payment and on the precise breakdown of injuries and insults that required compensation: Compensation in the Welsh laws is reckoned primarily in cattle and in the Irish ones in cattle or bondmaids (c.u.mal), with considerable use of precious metals in both. In the Germanic codes it is mainly in precious metal ... In the Russian codes it was silver and furs, graduated from marten down to squirrel. Their detail is remarkable, not only in the personal injuries envisioned-specific compensations for the loss of an arm, a hand, a forefinger, a nail, for a blow on the head so that the brain is visible or bone projects-but in the coverage some of them gave to the possessions of the individual household. t.i.tle II of the Salic Law deals with the theft of pigs, t.i.tle III with cattle, t.i.tle IV with sheep, t.i.tle V with goats, t.i.tle VI with dogs, each time with an elaborate breakdown differentiating between animals of different age and s.e.x.44 This does make a great deal of psychological sense. I've already remarked how difficult it is to imagine how a system of precise equivalences-one young healthy milk cow is equivalent to exactly thirty-six chickens-could arise from most forms of gift exchange. If Henry gives Joshua a pig and feels he has received an inadequate counter-gift, he might mock Joshua as a cheapskate, but he would have little occasion to come up with a mathematical formula for precisely how cheap he feels Joshua has been. On the other hand, if Joshua's pig just destroyed Henry's garden, and especially, if that led to a fight in which Henry lost a toe, and Henry's family is now hauling Joshua up in front of the village a.s.sembly-this is precisely the context where people are most likely to become petty and legalistic and express outrage if they feel they have received one groat less than was their rightful due. That means exact mathematical specificity: for instance, the capacity to measure the exact value of a two-year-old pregnant sow. What's more, the levying of penalties must have constantly required the calculation of equivalences. Say the fine is in marten pelts but the culprit's clan doesn't have any martens. How many squirrel skins will do? Or pieces of silver jewelry? Such problems must have come up all the time and led to at least a rough-and-ready set of rules of thumb over what sorts of valuable were equivalent to others. This would help explain why, for instance, medieval Welsh law codes can contain detailed breakdowns not only of the value of different ages and conditions of milk cow, but of the monetary value of every object likely to be found in an ordinary homestead, down to the cost of each piece of timber-despite the fact that there seems no reason to believe that most such items could even be purchased on the open market at the time.45 There is something very compelling in all this. For one thing, the premise makes a great deal of intuitive sense. After all, we do owe everything we are to others. This is simply true. The language we speak and even think in, our habits and opinions, the kind of food we like to eat, the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flush, even the style in which we carry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion against social conventions-all of this, we learned from other people, most of them long dead. If we were to imagine what we owe them as a debt, it could only be infinite. The question is: Does it really make sense to think of this as a debt? After all, a debt is by definition something that we could at least imagine paying back. It is strange enough to wish to be square with one's parents-it rather implies that one does not wish to think of them as parents any more. Would we really want to be square with all humanity? What would that even mean? And is this desire really a fundamental feature of all human thought?

Another way to put this would be: Are primordial-debt theorists describing a myth, have they discovered a profound truth of the human condition that has always existed in all societies, and is it simply spelled out particularly clearly in certain ancient texts from India-or are they inventing a myth of their own?

Clearly it must be the latter. They are inventing a myth.

The choice of the Vedic material is significant. The fact is, we know almost nothing about the people who composed these texts and little about the society that created them.46 We don't even know if interest-bearing loans existed in Vedic India-which obviously has a bearing on whether priests really saw sacrifice as the payment of interest on a loan we owe to Death.47 As a result, the material can serve as a kind of empty canvas, or a canvas covered with hieroglyphics in an unknown language, on which we can project almost anything we want to. If we look at other ancient civilizations in which we do know something about the larger context, we find that no such notion of sacrifice as payment is in evidence.48 If we look through the work of ancient theologians, we find that most were familiar with the idea that sacrifice was a way by which human beings could enter into commercial relations with the G.o.ds, but that they felt it was patently ridiculous: If the G.o.ds already have everything they want, what exactly do humans have to bargain with?49 We've seen in the last chapter how difficult it is to give gifts to kings. With G.o.ds (let alone G.o.d) the problem is magnified infinitely. Exchange implies equality. In dealing with cosmic forces, this was simply a.s.sumed to be impossible from the start.

The notion that debts to G.o.ds were appropriated by the state, and thus became the bases for taxation systems, can't really stand up either. The problem here is that in the ancient world, free citizens didn't usually pay taxes. Generally speaking, tribute was levied only on conquered populations. This was already true in ancient Mesopotamia, where the inhabitants of independent cities did not usually have to pay direct taxes at all. Similarly, as Moses Finley put it, "Cla.s.sical Greeks looked upon direct taxes as tyrannical and avoided them whenever possible.50 Athenian citizens did not pay direct taxes of any sort; though the city did sometimes distribute money to its citizens, a kind of reverse taxation-sometimes directly, as with the proceeds of the Laurium silver mines, and sometimes indirectly, as through generous fees for jury duty or attending the a.s.sembly. Subject cities, however, did have to pay tribute. Even within the Persian Empire, Persians did not have to pay tribute to the Great King, but the inhabitants of conquered provinces did.51 The same was true in Rome, where for a very long time, Roman citizens not only paid no taxes but had a right to a share of the tribute levied on others, in the form of the dole-the "bread" part of the famous "bread and circuses."52 In other words, Benjamin Franklin was wrong when he said that in this world nothing is certain except death and taxes. This obviously makes the idea that the debt to one is just a variation on the other much harder to maintain.

None of this, however, deals a mortal blow to the state theory of money. Even those states that did not demand taxes did levy fees, penalties, tariffs, and fines of one sort or another. But it is very hard to reconcile with any theory that claims states were first conceived as guardians of some sort of cosmic, primordial debt.

It's curious that primordial-debt theorists never have much to say about Sumer or Babylonia, despite the fact that Mesopotamia is where the practice of loaning money at interest was first invented, probably two thousand years before the Vedas were composed-and that it was also the home of the world's first states. But if we look into Mesopotamian history, it becomes a little less surprising. Again, what we find there is in many ways the exact opposite of what such theorists would have predicted.

The reader will recall here that Mesopotamian city-states were dominated by vast Temples: gigantic, complex industrial inst.i.tutions often staffed by thousands-including everyone from shepherds and barge-pullers to spinners and weavers to dancing girls and clerical administrators. By at least 2700 bc, ambitious rulers had begun to imitate them by creating palace complexes organized on similar terms-with the exception that where the Temples centered on the sacred chambers of a G.o.d or G.o.ddess, represented by a sacred image who was fed and clothed and entertained by priestly servants as if he or she were a living person. Palaces centered on the chambers of an actual live king. Sumerian rulers rarely went so far as to declare themselves G.o.ds, but they often came very close. However, when they did interfere in the lives of their subjects in their capacity as cosmic rulers, they did not do it by imposing public debts, but rather by canceling private ones.53 We don't know precisely when and how interest-bearing loans originated, since they appear to predate writing. Most likely, Temple administrators invented the idea as a way of financing the caravan trade. This trade was crucial because while the river valley of ancient Mesopotamia was extraordinarily fertile and produced huge surpluses of grain and other foodstuffs, and supported enormous numbers of livestock, which in turn supported a vast wool and leather industry, it was almost completely lacking in anything else. Stone, wood, metal, even the silver used as money, all had to be imported. From quite early times, then, Temple administrators developed the habit of advancing goods to local merchants-some of them private, others themselves Temple functionaries-who would then go off and sell it overseas. Interest was just a way for the Temples to take their share of the resulting profits.54 However, once established, the principle seems to have quickly spread. Before long, we find not only commercial loans, but also consumer loans-usury in the cla.s.sical sense of the term. By c2400 bc it already appears to have been common practice on the part of local officials, or wealthy merchants, to advance loans to peasants who were in financial trouble on collateral and begin to appropriate their possessions if they were unable to pay. It usually started with grain, sheep, goats, and furniture, then moved on to fields and houses, or, alternately or ultimately, family members. Servants, if any, went quickly, followed by children, wives, and in some extreme occasions, even the borrower himself. These would be reduced to debt-peons: not quite slaves, but very close to that, forced into perpetual service in the lender's household-or, sometimes, in the Temples or Palaces themselves. In theory, of course, any of them could be redeemed whenever the borrower repaid the money, but for obvious reasons, the more a peasant's resources were stripped away from him, the harder that became.

The effects were such that they often threatened to rip society apart. If for any reason there was a bad harvest, large proportions of the peasantry would fall into debt peonage; families would be broken up. Before long, lands lay abandoned as indebted farmers fled their homes for fear of repossession and joined semi-nomadic bands on the desert fringes of urban civilization. Faced with the potential for complete social breakdown, Sumerian and later Babylonian kings periodically announced general amnesties: "clean slates," as economic historian Michael Hudson refers to them. Such decrees would typically declare all outstanding consumer debt null and void (commercial debts were not affected), return all land to its original owners, and allow all debt-peons to return to their families. Before long, it became more or less a regular habit for kings to make such a declaration on first a.s.suming power, and many were forced to repeat it periodically over the course of their reigns.

In Sumeria, these were called "declarations of freedom"-and it is significant that the Sumerian word amargi, the first recorded word for "freedom" in any known human language, literally means "return to mother"-since this is what freed debt-peons were finally allowed to do.55 Michael Hudson argues that Mesopotamian kings were only in a position to do this because of their cosmic pretensions: in taking power, they saw themselves as literally recreating human society, and so were in a position to wipe the slate clean of all previous moral obligations. Still, this is about as far from what primordial-debt theorists had in mind as one could possibly imagine.56 Probably the biggest problem in this whole body of literature is the initial a.s.sumption: that we begin with an infinite debt to something called "society." It's this debt to society that we project onto the G.o.ds. It's this same debt that then gets taken up by kings and national governments.

What makes the concept of society so deceptive is that we a.s.sume the world is organized into a series of compact, modular units called "societies," and that all people know which one they're in. Historically, this is very rarely the case. Imagine I am a Christian Armenian merchant living under the reign of Genghis Khan. What is "society" for me? Is it the city where I grew up, the society of international merchants (with its own elaborate codes of conduct) within which I conduct my daily affairs, other speakers of Armenian, Christendom (or maybe just Orthodox Christendom), or the inhabitants of the Mongol empire itself, which stretched from the Mediterranean to Korea? Historically, kingdoms and empires have rarely been the most important reference points in peoples' lives. Kingdoms rise and fall; they also strengthen and weaken; governments may make their presence known in people's lives quite sporadically, and many people in history were never entirely clear whose government they were actually in. Even until quite recently, many of the world's inhabitants were never even quite sure what country they were supposed to be in, or why it should matter. My mother, who was born a Jew in Poland, once told me a joke from her childhood: There was a small town located along the frontier between Russia and Poland; no one was ever quite sure to which it belonged. One day an official treaty was signed and not long after, surveyors arrived to draw a border. Some villagers approached them where they had set up their equipment on a nearby hill.

"So where are we, Russia or Poland?"

"According to our calculations, your village now begins exactly thirty-seven meters into Poland."

The villagers immediately began dancing for joy.

"Why?" the surveyors asked. "What difference does it make?"

"Don't you know what this means?" they replied. "It means we'll never have to endure another one of those terrible Russian winters!"

However, if we are born with an infinite debt to all those people who made our existence possible, but there is no natural unit called "society"-then who or what exactly do we really owe it to? Everyone? Everything? Some people or things more than others? And how do we pay a debt to something so diffuse? Or, perhaps more to the point, who exactly can claim the authority to tell us how we can repay it, and on what grounds?

If we frame the problem that way, the authors of the Brahmanas are offering a quite sophisticated reflection on a moral question that no one has really ever been able to answer any better before or since. As I say, we can't know much about the conditions under which those texts were composed, but such evidence as we do have suggests that the crucial doc.u.ments date from sometime between 500 and 400 bc-that is, roughly the time of Socrates-which in India appears to have been just around the time that a commercial economy, and inst.i.tutions like coined money and interest-bearing loans were beginning to become features of everyday life. The intellectual cla.s.ses of the time were, much as they were in Greece and China, grappling with the implications. In their case, this meant asking: What does it mean to imagine our responsibilities as debts? To whom do we owe our existence?

It's significant that their answer did not make any mention either of "society" or states (though certainly kings and governments certainly existed in early India). Instead, they fixed on debts to G.o.ds, to sages, to fathers, and to "men." It wouldn't be at all difficult to translate their formulation into more contemporary language. We could put it this way. We owe our existence above all: * To the universe, cosmic forces, as we would put it now, to Nature. The ground of our existence. To be repaid through ritual: ritual being an act of respect and recognition to all that beside which we are small.57 * To those who have created the knowledge and cultural accomplishments that we value most; that give our existence its form, its meaning, but also its shape. Here we would include not only the philosophers and scientists who created our intellectual tradition but everyone from William Shakespeare to that long-since-forgotten woman, somewhere in the Middle East, who created leavened bread. We repay them by becoming learned ourselves and contributing to human knowledge and human culture.

* To our parents, and their parents-our ancestors. We repay them by becoming ancestors.

* To humanity as a whole. We repay them by generosity to strangers, by maintaining that basic communistic ground of sociality that makes human relations, and hence life, possible.

Set out this way, though, the argument begins to undermine its very premise. These are nothing like commercial debts. After all, one might repay one's parents by having children, but one is not generally thought to have repaid one's creditors if one lends the cash to someone else.58 Myself, I wonder: Couldn't that really be the point? Perhaps what the authors of the Brahmanas were really demonstrating was that, in the final a.n.a.lysis, our relation with the cosmos is ultimately nothing like a commercial transaction, nor could it be. That is because commercial transactions imply both equality and separation. These examples are all about overcoming separation: you are free from your debt to your ancestors when you become an ancestor; you are free from your debt to the sages when you become a sage, you are free from your debt to humanity when you act with humanity. All the more so if one is speaking of the universe. If you cannot bargain with the G.o.ds because they already have everything, then you certainly cannot bargain with the universe, because the universe is everything-and that everything necessarily includes yourself. One could in fact interpret this list as a subtle way of saying that the only way of "freeing oneself" from the debt was not literally repaying debts, but rather showing that these debts do not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with, and hence that the very notion of canceling the debt, and achieving a separate, autonomous existence, was ridiculous from the start. Or even that the very presumption of positing oneself as separate from humanity or the cosmos, so much so that one can enter into one-to-one dealings with it, is itself the crime that can be answered only by death. Our guilt is not due to the fact that we cannot repay our debt to the universe. Our guilt is our presumption in thinking of ourselves as being in any sense an equivalent to Everything Else that Exists or Has Ever Existed, so as to be able to conceive of such a debt in the first place.59 Or let us look at the other side of the equation. Even if it is possible to imagine ourselves as standing in a position of absolute debt to the cosmos, or to humanity, the next question becomes: Who exactly has a right to speak for the cosmos, or humanity, to tell us how that debt must be repaid? If there's anything more preposterous than claiming to stand apart from the entire universe so as to enter into negotiations with it, it is claiming to speak for the other side.

If one were looking for the ethos for an individualistic society such as our own, one way to do it might well be to say: we all owe an infinite debt to humanity, society, nature, or the cosmos (however one prefers to frame it), but no one else could possibly tell us how we are to pay it. This at least would be intellectually consistent. If so, it would actually be possible to see almost all systems of established authority-religion, morality, politics, economics, and the criminal-justice system-as so many different fraudulent ways to presume to calculate what cannot be calculated, to claim the authority to tell us how some aspect of that unlimited debt ought to be repaid. Human freedom would then be our ability to decide for ourselves how we want to do so.

No one, to my knowledge, has ever taken this approach. Instead, theories of existential debt always end up becoming ways of justifying-or laying claim to-structures of authority. The case of the Hindu intellectual tradition is telling here. The debt to humanity appears only in a few early texts, and is quickly forgotten. Almost all later Hindu commentators ignore it and instead put their emphasis on a man's debt to his father.60 Primordial-debt theorists have other fish to fry. They are not really interested in the cosmos, but actually, in "society."

Let me return again to that word, "society." The reason that it seems like such a simple, self-evident concept is because we mostly use it as a synonym for "nation." After all, when Americans speak of paying their debt to society, they are not thinking of their responsibilities to people who live in Sweden. It's only the modern state, with its elaborate border controls and social policies, that enables us to imagine "society" in this way, as a single bounded ent.i.ty. This is why projecting that notion backwards into Vedic or Medieval times will always be deceptive, even though we don't really have another word.

It seems to me that this is exactly what the primordial-debt theorists are doing: projecting such a notion backwards.

Really, the whole complex of ideas they are talking about-the notion that there is this thing called society, that we have a debt to it, that governments can speak for it, that it can be imagined as a sort of secular G.o.d-all of these ideas emerged together around the time of the French Revolution, or in its immediate wake. In other words, it was born alongside the idea of the modern nation-state.

We can already see them coming together clearly in the work of Auguste Comte, in early nineteenth-century France. Comte, a philosopher and political pamphleteer now most famous for having first coined the term "sociology," went so far, by the end of his life, as actually proposing a Religion of Society, which he called Positivism, broadly modeled on Medieval Catholicism, replete with vestments where all the b.u.t.tons were on the back (so they couldn't be put on without the help of others). In his last work, which he called a "Positivist Catechism," he also laid down the first explicit theory of social debt. At one point someone asks an imaginary Priest of Positivism what he thinks of the notion of human rights. The priest scoffs at the very idea. This is nonsense, he says, an error born of individualism. Positivism understands only duties. After all: We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. After our birth these obligations increase or acc.u.mulate before the point where we are capable of rendering anyone any service. On what human foundation, then, could one seat the idea of "rights"?61 While Comte doesn't use the word "debt," the sense is clear enough. We have already acc.u.mulated endless debts before we get to the age at which we can even think of paying them. By that time, there's no way to calculate to whom we even owe them. The only way to redeem ourselves is to dedicate ourselves to the service of Humanity as a whole.

In his lifetime, Comte was considered something of a crackpot, but his ideas proved influential. His notion of unlimited obligations to society ultimately crystallized in the notion of the "social debt," a notion taken up among social reformers and, eventually, socialist politicians in many parts of Europe and abroad.62 "We are all born as debtors to society": in France the notion of a social debt soon became something of a catchphrase, a slogan, and eventually a cliche.63 The state, according to this view, was merely the administrator of an existential debt that all of us have to the society that created us, embodied not least in the fact that we all continue to be completely dependent on one another for our existence, even if we are not completely aware of how.

These are also the intellectual and political circles that shaped the thought of Emile Durkheim, the founder of the discipline of sociology that we know today, who in a way did Comte one better by arguing that all G.o.ds in all religions are always already projections of society-so an explicit religion of society would not even be necessary. All religions, for Durkheim, are simply ways of recognizing our mutual dependence on one another, a dependence that affects us in a million ways that we are never entirely aware of. "G.o.d" and "society" are ultimately the same.

The problem is that for several hundred years now, it has simply been a.s.sumed that the guardian of that debt we owe for all of this, the legitimate representatives of that amorphous social totality that has allowed us to become individuals, must necessarily be the state. Almost all socialist or socialistic regimes end up appealing to some version of this argument. To take one notorious example, this was how the Soviet Union used to justify forbidding their citizens from emigrating to other countries. The argument was always: The USSR created these people, the USSR raised and educated them, made them who they are. What right do they have to take the product of our investment and transfer it to another country, as if they didn't owe us anything? Neither is this rhetoric restricted to socialist regimes. Nationalists appeal to exactly the same kind of arguments-especially in times of war. And all modern governments are nationalist to some degree.

One might even say that what we really have, in the idea of primordial debt, is the ultimate nationalist myth. Once we owed our lives to the G.o.ds that created us, paid interest in the form of animal sacrifice, and ultimately paid back the princ.i.p.al with our lives. Now we owe it to the Nation that formed us, pay interest in the form of taxes, and when it comes time to defend the nation against its enemies, to offer to pay it with our lives.

This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don't owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it's a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.

Chapter Four.

CRUELTY AND REDEMPTION.

We will buy the poor for silver, the needy for a pair of sandals.

-Amos 2:6.

THE READER MAY have noticed that there is an unresolved debate between those who see money as a commodity and those who see it as an IOU. Which one is it? By now, the answer should be obvious: it's both. Keith Hart, probably the best-known current anthropological authority on the subject, pointed this out many years ago. There are, he famously observed, two sides to any coin: Look at a coin from your pocket. On one side is "heads"-the symbol of the political authority which minted the coin; on the other side is "tails"-the precise specification of the amount the coin is worth as payment in exchange. One side reminds us that states underwrite currencies and the money is originally a relation between persons in society, a token perhaps. The other reveals the coin as a thing, capable of entering into definite relations with other things.1 Clearly, money was not invented to overcome the inconveniences of barter between neighbors-since neighbors would have no reason to engage in barter in the first place. Still, a system of pure credit money would have serious inconveniences as well. Credit money is based on trust, and in compet.i.tive markets, trust itself becomes a scarce commodity. This is particularly true of dealings between strangers. Within the Roman empire, a silver coin stamped with the image of Tiberius might have circulated at a value considerably higher than the value of the silver it contained. Ancient coins invariably circulated at a value higher than their metal content.2 This was largely because Tiberius's government was willing to accept them at face value. However, the Persian government probably wasn't, and the Mauryan and Chinese governments certainly weren't. Very large numbers of Roman gold and silver coins did end up in India and even China; this is presumably the main reason that they were made of gold and silver to begin with.

What's true for a vast empire like Rome or China is obviously all the more true for a Sumerian or Greek city-state, let alone anyone operating within the kind of broken checkerboard of kingdoms, towns, and tiny princ.i.p.alities that prevailed in most of Medieval Europe or India. As I've pointed out, often what was inside and what was outside were not especially clear. Within a community-a town, a city, a guild or religious society-pretty much anything could function as money, provided everyone knew there was someone willing to accept it to cancel out a debt. To offer one particularly striking example, in certain cities in nineteenth-century Siam, small change consisted entirely of porcelain Chinese gaming counters-basically, the equivalent of poker chips-issued by local casinos. If one of these casinos went out of business or lost its license, its owners would have to send a crier through the streets banging a gong and announcing that anyone holding such chits had three days to redeem them.3 For major transactions, of course, currency that was also acceptable outside the community (usually silver or gold again) was ordinarily employed.

In a similar way, English shops, for many centuries, would issue their own wood or lead or leather token money. The practice was often technically illegal, but it continued until relatively recent times. Here is an example from the seventeenth century, by a certain Henry, who had a store at Stony Stratford, Buckinghams.h.i.+re: This is clearly a case of the same principle: Henry would provide small change in the form of IOUs redeemable at his own store. As such, they might circulate broadly, at least among anyone who did regular business at that shop. But they were unlikely to travel very far from Stony Stratford-most tokens, in fact, never circulated more than a few blocks in any direction. For larger transactions, everyone, including Henry, expected money in a form that would be acceptable anywhere, including in Italy or France.4 Throughout most of history, even where we do find elaborate markets, we also find a complex jumble of different sorts of currency. Some of these may have originally emerged from barter between foreigners: the cacao money of Mesoamerica or salt money of Ethiopia are frequently cited examples.5 Others arose from credit systems, or from arguments over what sort of goods should be acceptable to pay taxes or other debts. Such questions were often matters of endless contestation. One could often learn a lot about the balance of political forces in a given time and place by what sorts of things were acceptable as currency. For instance: in much the same way that colonial Virginia planters managed to pa.s.s a law obliging shopkeepers to accept their tobacco as currency, medieval Pomeranian peasants appear to have at certain points convinced their rulers to make taxes, fees, and customs duties, which were registered in Roman currency, actually payable in wine, cheese, peppers, chickens, eggs, and even herring-much to the annoyance of traveling merchants, who therefore had to either carry such things around in order to pay the tolls or buy them locally at prices that would have been more advantageous to their suppliers for that very reason.6 This was in an area with a free peasantry, rather than serfs. They were in a relatively strong political position. In other times and places, the interests of lords and merchants prevailed instead.

Thus money is almost always something hovering between a commodity and a debt-token. This is probably why coins-pieces of silver or gold that are already valuable commodities in themselves, but that, being stamped with the emblem of a local political authority, became even more valuable-still sit in our heads as the quintessential form of money. They most perfectly straddle the divide that defines what money is in the first place. What's more, the relation between the two was a matter of constant political contestation.

In other words, the battle between state and market, between governments and merchants is not inherent to the human condition.

Our two origin stories-the myth of barter and the myth of primordial debt-may appear to be about as far apart as they could be, but in their own way, they are also two sides of the same coin. One a.s.sumes the other. It's only once we can imagine human life as a series of commercial transactions that we're capable of seeing our relation to the universe in terms of debt.

To ill.u.s.trate, let me call a perhaps surprising witness, Friedrich Nietzsche, a man able to see with uncommon clarity what happens when you try to imagine the world in commercial terms.

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals appeared in 1887. In it, he begins with an argument that might well have been taken directly from Adam Smith-but he takes it a step further than Smith ever dared to, insisting that not just barter, but buying and selling itself, precede any other form of human relations.h.i.+p. The feeling of personal obligation, he observes, has its origin in the oldest and most primitive personal relations.h.i.+p there is, in the relations.h.i.+p between seller and buyer, creditor and debtor. Here for the first time one person moved up against another person, here an individual measured himself against another individual. We have found no civilization still at such a low level that something of this relations.h.i.+p is not already perceptible. To set prices, to measure values, to think up equivalencies, to exchange things-that preoccupied man's very first thinking to such a degree that in a certain sense it's what thinking itself is. Here the oldest form of astuteness was bred; here, too, we can a.s.sume are the first beginnings of man's pride, his feeling of pre-eminence in relation to other animals. Perhaps our word "man" (manas) continues to express directly something of this feeling of the self: the human being describes himself as a being which a.s.sesses values, which values and measures, as the "inherently calculating animal." Selling and buying, together with their psychological attributes, are even older than the beginnings of any form of social organizations and groupings; out of the most rudimentary form of personal legal rights the budding feeling of exchange, contract, guilt, law, duty, and compensation was instead first transferred to the crudest and earliest social structures (in their relations.h.i.+ps with similar social structures), along with the habit of comparing power with power, of measuring, of calculating.7 Smith, too, we will remember, saw the origins of language-and hence of human thought-as lying in our propensity to "exchange one thing for another," in which he also saw the origins of the market.8 The urge to trade, to compare values, is the very thing that makes us intelligent beings, and different from other animals. Society comes later-which means our ideas about responsibilities to other people first take shape in strictly commercial terms.

Unlike with Smith, however, it never occurred to Nietzsche that you could have a world where all such transactions immediately cancel out. Any system of commercial accounting, he a.s.sumed, will produce creditors and debtors. In fact, he believed that it was from this very fact that human morality emerged. Note, he says, how the German word schuld means both "debt" and "guilt." At first, to be in debt was simply to be guilty, and creditors delighted in punis.h.i.+ng debtors unable to repay their loans by inflicting "all sorts of humiliation and torture on the body of the debtor, for instance, cutting as much flesh off as seemed appropriate for the debt."9 In fact, Nietzsche went so far as to insist that those original barbarian law codes that tabulated so much for a ruined eye, so much for a severed finger, were not originally meant to fix rates of monetary compensation for the loss of eyes and fingers, but to establish how much of the debtor's body creditors were allowed to take! Needless to say, he doesn't provide a scintilla of evidence for this (none exists).10 But to ask for evidence would be to miss the point. We are dealing here not with a real historical argument but with a purely imaginative exercise.

When humans did begin to form communities, Nietzsche continues, they necessarily began to imagine their relations.h.i.+p to the community in these terms. The tribe provides them with peace and security. They are therefore in its debt. Obeying its laws is a way of paying it back ("paying your debt to society" again). But this debt, he says, is also paid-here too-in sacrifice: Within the original tribal cooperatives-we're talking about primeval times-the living generation always acknowledged a legal obligation to the previous generations, and especially to the earliest one which had founded the tribe [...] Here the reigning conviction is that the tribe only exists at all only because of the sacrifices and achievements of its ancestors-and that people have to pay them back with sacrifices and achievements. In this people recognize a debt which keeps steadily growing because these ancestors in their continuing existence as powerful spirits do not stop giving the tribe new advantages and lending them their power. Do they do this for free? But there is no "for free" for those raw and "spiritually dest.i.tute" ages. What can people give back to them? Sacrifices (at first as nourishment understood very crudely), festivals, chapels, signs of honor, above all, obedience-for all customs, as work of one's ancestors, are also their statutes and commands. Do people ever give them enough? This suspicion remains and grows.11 In other words, for Nietzsche, starting from Adam Smith's a.s.sumptions about human nature means we must necessarily end up with something very much along the lines of primordial-debt theory. On the one hand, it is because of our feeling of debt to the ancestors that we obey the ancestral laws: this is why we feel that the community has the right to react "like an angry creditor" and punish us for our transgressions if we break them. In a larger sense, we develop a creeping feeling that we could never really pay back the ancestors, that no sacrifice (not even the sacrifice of our first-born) will ever truly redeem us. We are terrified of the ancestors, and the stronger and more powerful a community becomes, the more powerful they seem to be, until finally, "the ancestor is necessarily transfigured into a G.o.d." As communities grow into kingdoms and kingdoms into universal empires, the G.o.ds themselves come to seem more universal, they take on grander, more cosmic pretentions, ruling the heavens, casting thunderbolts-culminating in the Christian G.o.d, who, as the maximal deity, necessarily "brought about the maximum feeling of indebtedness on earth." Even our ancestor Adam is no longer figured as a creditor, but as a transgressor, and therefore a debtor, who pa.s.ses on to us his burden of Original Sin: Finally, with the impossibility of discharging the debt, people also come up with the notion that it is impossible to remove the penance, the idea that it cannot be paid off ("eternal punishment") ... until all of a sudden we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity: G.o.d sacrificing himself for the guilt of human beings, G.o.d paying himself back with himself, G.o.d as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem-the creditor sacrificing himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor!12 It all makes perfect sense if you start from Nietzsche's initial premise. The problem is that the premise is insane.

There is also every reason to believe that Nietzsche knew the premise was insane; in fact, that this was the entire point. What Nietzsche is doing here is starting out from the standard, common-sense a.s.sumptions about the nature of human beings prevalent in his day (and to a large extent, still prevalent)-that we are rational calculating machines, that commercial self-interest comes before society, that "society" itself is just a way of putting a kind of temporary lid on the resulting conflict. That is, he is starting out from ordinary bourgeois a.s.sumptions and driving them to a place where they can only shock a bourgeois audience.

It's a worthy game and no one has ever played it better; but it's a game played entirely within the boundaries of bourgeois thought. It has nothing to say to anything that lies beyond that. The best response to anyone who wants to take seriously Nietzsche's fantasies about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other's bodies for failure to remit are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer-an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly: "Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs."13 The last line is something of an anthropological cla.s.sic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.

It's not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization. If Nietzsche's a.n.a.lysis of debt is helpful to us, then, it is because it reveals that when we start from the a.s.sumption that human thought is essentially a matter of commercial calculation, that buying and selling are the basis of human society-then, yes, once we begin to think about our relations.h.i.+p with the cosmos, we will necessarily conceive of it in terms of debt.

I do think Nietzsche helps us in another way as well: to understand the concept of redemption. Niezsche's account of "primeval times" might be absurd, but his description of Christianity-of how a sense of debt is transformed into an abiding sense of guilt, and guilt to self-loathing, and self-loathing to self-torture-all of this does ring very true.

Why, for instance, do we refer to Christ as the "redeemer"? The primary meaning of "redemption" is to buy something back, or to recover something that had been given up in security for a loan; to acquire something by paying off a debt. It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of G.o.d's own son to rescue humanity from eternal d.a.m.nation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction.

Nietzsche might have been starting from the same a.s.sumptions as Adam Smith, but clearly the early Christians weren't. The roots of this thinking lie deeper than Smith's with his nation of shopkeepers. The authors of the Brahmanas were not alone in borrowing the language of the marketplace as a way of thinking about the human condition. Indeed, to one degree or another, all the major world religions do this.

The reason is that all of them-from Zoroastrianism to Islam-arose amidst intense arguments about the role of money and the market in human life, and particularly about what these inst.i.tutions meant for fundamental questions of what human beings owed to one another. The question of debt, and arguments about debt, ran through every aspect of the political life of the time. These arguments were set amidst revolts, pet.i.tions, reformist movements. Some such movements gained allies in the temples and palaces. Others were brutally suppressed. Most of the terms, slogans, and specific issues being debated, though, have been lost to history. We just don't know what a political debate in a Syrian tavern in 750 bc was likely to be about. As a result, we have spent thousands of years contemplating sacred texts full of political allusions that would have been instantly recognizable to any reader at the time when they were written, but whose meaning we now can only guess at.14 One of the unusual things about the Bible is that it preserves some bits of this larger context. To return to the notion of redemption: the Hebrew words padah and goal, both translated as "redemption," could be used for buying back anything one had sold to someone else, particularly the recovery of ancestral land, or to recovering some object held by creditors in way of a pledge.15 The example foremost in the minds of prophets and theologians seems to have been the last: the redemption of pledges, and especially, of family members held as debt-p.a.w.ns. It would seem that the economy of the Hebrew kingdoms, by the time of the prophets, was already beginning to develop the same kind of debt crises that had long been common in Mesopotamia: especially in years of bad harvests, the poor became indebted to rich neighbors or to wealthy moneylenders in the towns, they would begin to lose t.i.tle to their fields and to become tenants on what had been their own land, and their sons and daughters would be removed to serve as servants in their creditors' households, or even sold abroad as slaves.16 The earlier prophets contain allusions to such crises, but the book of Nehemiah, written in Persian times, is the most explicit:17 Some also there were that said, "We have mortgaged our lands, vineyards, and houses, that we might buy corn, because of the dearth."

There were also those that said, "We have borrowed money for the king's tribute, and that upon our lands and vineyards.

"Yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children as their children: and, lo, we bring into bondage our sons and our daughters to be servants, and some of our daughters are brought unto bondage already: neither is it in our power to redeem them; for other men have our lands and vineyards."

And I was very angry when I heard their cry and these words.

Then I consulted with myself, and I rebuked the n.o.bles, and the rulers, and said unto them, "Ye exact usury, every one of his brother." And I set a great a.s.sembly against them.18 Nehemiah was a Jew born in Babylon, a former cup-bearer to the Persian emperor. In 444 bc, he managed to talk the Great King into appointing him governor of his native Judaea. He also received permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar more than two centuries earlier. In the course of rebuilding, sacred texts were recovered and restored; in a sense, this was the moment of the creation of what we now consider Judaism.

The problem was that Nehemiah quickly found himself confronted with a social crisis. All around him, impoverished peasants were unable to pay their taxes; creditors were carrying off the children of the poor. His first response was to issue a cla.s.sic Babylonian-style "clean slate" edict-having himself been born in Babylon, he was clearly familiar with the general principle. All non-commercial debts were to be forgiven. Maximum interest rates were set. At the same time, though, Nehemiah managed to locate, revise, and reissue much older Jewish laws, now preserved in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus, which in certain ways went even further, by inst.i.tutionalizing the principle.19 The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically cancelled "in the Sabbath year" (that is, after seven years had pa.s.sed), and that all who languished in bondage owing to such debts would be released.20 "Freedom," in the Bible, as in Mesopotamia, came to refer above all to release from the effects of debt. Over time, the history of the Jewish people itself came to be interpreted in this light: the liberation from bondage in Egypt was G.o.d's first, paradigmatic act of redemption; the historical tribulations of the Jews (defeat, conquest, exile) were seen as misfortunes that would eventually lead to a final redemption with the coming of the Messiah-though this could only be accomplished, prophets such as Jeremiah warned them, after the Jewish people truly repented of their sins (carrying each other off into bondage, whoring after false G.o.ds, the violation of commandments).21 In this light, the adoption of the term by Christians is hardly surprising. Redemption was a release from one's burden of sin and guilt, and the end of history would be that moment when all slates are wiped clean and all debts finally lifted when a great blast from angelic trumpets will announce the final Jubilee.

If so, "redemption" is no longer about buying something back. It's really more a matter of destroying the entire system of accounting. In many Middle Eastern cities, this was literally true: one of the common acts during debt cancelation was the ceremonial destruction of the tablets on which financial records had been kept, an act to be repeated, much less officially, in just about every major peasant revolt in history.22 This leads to another problem: What is possible in the meantime, before that final redemption comes? In one of his more disturbing parables, the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, Jesus seemed to be explicitly playing with the problem: Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.

The servant fell on his knees before him. "Be patient with me," he begged, "and I will pay back everything." The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt, and let him go.

But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. "Pay back what you owe me!" he demanded.

His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, "Be patient with me, and I will pay you back."

But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.

Then the master called the servant in. "You wicked servant," he said, "I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?" In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.23 This is quite an extraordinary text. On one level it's a joke; in others, it could hardly be more serious.

We begin with the king wis.h.i.+ng to "settle accounts" with his servants. The premise is absurd. Kings, like G.o.ds, can't really enter into relations of exchange with their subjects, since no parity is possible. And this is a king who clearly is G.o.d. Certainly there can be no final settling of accounts.

So at best we are dealing with an act of whimsy on the king's part. The absurdity of the premise is hammered home by the sum the first man brought before him is said to owe. In ancient Judaea, to say someone owes a creditor "ten thousand talents" would be like now saying someone owes "a hundred billion dollars." The number is a joke, too; it simply stands in for "a sum no human being could ever, conceivably, repay."24 Faced with infinite, existential debt, the servant can only tell obvious lies: "a hundred billion? Sure, I'm good for it! Just give me a little more time." Then, suddenly, apparently just as arbitrarily, the Lord forgives him.

Yet, it turns out, the amnesty has a condition he is not aware of. It is inc.u.mbent on his being willing to act in an a.n.a.logous way to other humans-in this particular case, another servant who owes him (to translate again into contemporary terms), maybe a thousand bucks. Failing the test, the human is cast into h.e.l.l for all eternity, or "until he should pay back all he owed," which in this case comes down to the same thing.

The parable has long been a challenge to theologians. It's normally interpreted as a comment on the endless bounty of G.o.d's grace and how little He demands of us in comparison-and thus, by implication, as a way of suggesting that torturing us in h.e.l.l for all eternity is not as unreasonable as it might seem. Certainly, the unforgiving servant is a genuinely odious character. Still, what is even more striking to me is the tacit suggestion that forgiveness, in this world, is ultimately impossible. Christians practically say as much every time they recite the Lord's Prayer, and ask G.o.d to "forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors."25 It repeats the story of the parable almost exactly, and the implications are similarly dire. After all, most Christians reciting the prayer are aware that they do not generally forgive their debtors. Why then should G.o.d forgive them their sins?26 What's more, there is the lingering suggestion that we really couldn't live up to those standards, even if we tried. One of the things that makes the Jesus of the New Testament such a tantalizing character is that it's never clear what he's telling us. Everything can be read two ways. When he calls on his followers to forgive all debts, refuse to cast the first stone, turn the other cheek, love their enemies, to hand over their possessions to the poor-is he really expecting them to do this? Or are such demands just a way of throwing in their faces that, since we are clearly not prepared to act this way, we are all sinners whose salvation can only come in another world-a position that can be (and has been) used to justify almost anything? This is a vision of human life as inherently corrupt, but it also frames even spiritual affairs in commercial terms: with calculations of sin, penance, and absolution, the Devil and St. Peter with their rival ledger books, usually accompanied by the creeping feeling that it's all a charade because the very fact that we are reduced to playing such a game of tabulating sins reveals us to be fundamentally unworthy of forgiveness.

World religions, as we shall see, are full of this kind of ambivalence. On the one hand they are outcries against the market; on the other, they tend to frame their objections in commercial terms-as if to argue that turning human life into a series of transactions is not a very good deal. What I think even these few examples reveal, though, is how much is being papered over in the conventional accounts of the origins and history of money. There is something almost touchingly naive in the stories about neighbors swapping potatoes for an extra pair of shoes. When the ancients thought about money, friendly swaps were hardly the first thing that came to mind.

True, some might have thought about their tab at the local ale-house, or, if they were a merchant or administrator, of storehouses, account books, exotic imported delights. For most, though, what was likely to come to mind was the selling of slaves and ransoming of prisoners, corrupt tax-farmers and the depredations of conquering armies, mortgages and interest, theft and extortion, revenge and punishment, and, above all, the tension between the need for money to create families, to acquire a bride so as to have children, and use of that same money to destroy families-to create debts that lead to the same wife and children being taken away. "Some of our daughters are brought unto bondage already: neither is it in our power to redeem them." One can only imagine what those words meant, emotionally, to a father in a patriarchal society in which a man's ability to protect the honor of his family was everything. Yet this is what money meant to the majority of people for most of human history: the terrifying prospect of one's sons and daughters being carried off to the homes of repulsive strangers to clean their pots and provide the occasional s.e.xual services, to be subject to every conceivable form of violence and abuse, possibly for years, conceivably forever, as their parents waited, helpless, avoiding eye contact with their neighbors, who knew exactly what was happening to those they were supposed to have been able to protect.27 Clearly this was the worst thing that could happen to anyone-which is why, in the parable, it could be treated as interchangeable with being "turned over to the jailors to be tortured" for life. And that's just from the perspective of the father. One can only imagine how it might have felt to be the daughter. Yet, over the course of human history, untold millions of daughters have known (and in fact many still know) exactly what it's like.

One might object that this was just a.s.sumed to be in the nature of things: like the imposition of tribute on conquered populations, it might have been resented, but it wasn't considered a moral issue, a matter of right and wrong. Some things just happen. This has been the most common att.i.tude of peasants to such phenomena throughout human history. What's striking about the historical record is that in the case of debt crises, this was not how many reacted. Many actually did become indignant. So many, in fact, that most of our contemporary language of social justice, our way of speaking of human bondage and emanc.i.p.ation, continues to echo ancient arguments about debt.

It's particularly striking because so many other things do seem to have been accepted as simply in the nature of things. One does not see a similar outcry against caste systems, for example, or for that matter, the inst.i.tution of slavery.28 Surely slaves and untouchables often experienced at least equal horrors. No doubt many protested their condition. Why was it that the debtors' protests seemed to carry such greater moral weight? Why were debtors so much more effective in winning the ear of priests, prophets, officials, and social reformers? Why was it that officials like Nehemiah were willing to give such sympathetic consideration to their complaints, to inveigh, to summon great a.s.semblies?

Some have suggested practical reasons: debt crises destroyed the free peasantry, and it was free peasants who were drafted into ancient armies to fight in wars.29 No doubt this was a factor; clearly it wasn't the only one. There is no reason to believe that Nehemiah, for instance, in his anger at the usurers, was primarily concerned with his ability to levy troops for the Persian king. It is something more fundamental.

What makes debt different is that it is premised on an a.s.sumption of equality.

To be a slave, or lower-caste, is to be intrinsically inferior. We are dealing with relations of unadulterated hierarchy. In the case of debt, we are dealing with two individuals who begin as equal parties to a contract. Legally, at least as far as the contract is concerned, they are the same.

We can add that, in the ancient world, when people who actually were more or less social equals loaned money to one another, the terms appear to have normally been quite generous. Often no interest was charged, or if it was, it was very low. "And don't charge me interest," wrote one wealthy Canaanite to another, in a tablet da