Debt

by David Graeber

  On returning home, he said to his father, “What is the profit on investment that one can expect from plowing fields?”

  “Ten times the investment,” replied his father.

  “And the return on investment in pearls and jades is how much?”

  “A hundredfold.”

  “And the return on investment from establishing a ruler and securing the state would be how much?”

  “It would be incalculable.”56

  Lü adopted the prince’s cause and eventually contrived to make him King of Qin. He went on to became first minister for the king’s son, Qin Shi Huang, helping him defeat the other Warring States to became the first Emperor of China. We still have a compendium of political wisdom that Lü commissioned for the new emperor, which contains such military advice as the following:

  As a general principle, when an enemy’s army comes, it seeks some profit. Now if they come and find the prospect of death instead, they will consider running away the most profitable thing to do. When all one’s enemies consider running to be the most profitable thing to do, no blades will cross.

  This is the most essential point in military matters.57

  In such a world, heroic considerations of honor and glory, vows to gods or desire for vengeance, were at best weaknesses to be manipulated. In the numerous manuals on statecraft produced at the time, everything was cast as a matter of recognizing interest and advantage, calculating how to balance that which will profit the ruler against that which will profit the people, determining when the ruler’s interests are the same as the people’s and when they contradict.58 Technical terms drawn from politics, economics, and military strategy (“return on investment,” “strategic advantage”) blended and overlapped.

  The predominant school of political thought under the Warring States was that of the Legalists, who insisted that in matters of statecraft, a ruler’s interests were the only consideration, even if rulers would be unwise to admit this. Still, the people could be easily manipulated, since they had the same motivations: the people’s pursuit of profit, wrote Lord Shang, is utterly predictable, “just like the tendency of water to flow downhill.”59 Shang was harsher than most of his fellow Legalists in that he believed that widespread prosperity would ultimately harm the ruler’s ability to mobilize his people for war, and therefore that terror was the most efficient instrument of governance, but even he insisted that this regime be clothed as a regime of law and justice.

  Wherever the military-coinage-slavery complex began to take hold, we find political theorists propounding similar ideas. Kautilya was no different: the title of his book, the Arthasastra, is usually translated as “manual of statecraft,” since it consists of advice to rulers, but its more literal translation is “the science of material gain.”60 Like the Legalists, Kautilya emphasized the need to create a pretext that governance was a matter of morality and justice, but in addressing the rulers themselves, he insisted that “war and peace are considered solely from the point of view of profit”—of amassing wealth to create a more effective army, of using the army to dominate markets and control resources to amass more wealth, and so on.61 In Greece we’ve already met Thrasymachos. True, Greece was slightly different. Greek city-states did not have kings, and the collapse of private interests and affairs of state was in principle universally denounced as tyranny. Still, in practice, what this meant was that city-states, and even political factions, ended up acting in precisely the same coldly calculating way as Indian or Chinese sovereigns. Anyone who has ever read Thucydides’ Melian dialogue—in which Athenian generals present the population of a previously friendly city with elegantly reasoned arguments for why the Athenians have determined that it is to the advantage of their empire to threaten them with collective massacre if they are not willing to become tribute-paying subjects, and why it is equally in the interests of the Melians to submit—is aware of the results.62

  Another striking feature of this literature is its resolute materialism. Goddesses and gods, magic and oracles, sacrificial ritual, ancestral cults, even caste and ritual status systems all either disappear or are sidelined, no longer treated as ends in themselves but as yet mere tools to be used for the pursuit of material gain.

  That intellectuals willing to produce such theories should win the ears of princes is hardly surprising. Neither is it particularly surprising that other intellectuals should have been so offended by this sort of cynicism that they began to make common cause with the popular movements that inevitably began to form against those princes. But as is so often the case, oppositional intellectuals were faced with two choices: either adopt the reigning terms of debate, or try to come up with a diametrical inversion. Mo Di, the founder of Mohism, took the first approach. He turned the concept of li, profit, into something more like “social utility,” and then he attempted to demonstrate that war itself is, by definition, an unprofitable activity. For example, he wrote, campaigns can only be fought in spring and autumn, and each had equally deleterious effects:

  If in the spring then the people miss their sowing and planting, if in the autumn, they miss their reaping and harvesting. Even if they miss only one season, then the number of people who will die of cold and hunger is incalculable. Now let us calculate the army’s equipment, the arrows, standards, tents, armor, shields, and sword hilts; the number of these which will break and perish and not come back … So also with oxen and horses …63

  His conclusion: if one could add up the total costs of aggression in human lives, animal lives, and material damage, one would be forced to the conclusion that they never outweighed the benefits—even for the victor. In fact, Mo Di took this sort of logic so far that he ended up arguing that the only way to optimize the overall profit of humanity was to abandon the pursuit of private profit entirely and adopt a principle of what he called “universal love”—essentially arguing that if one takes the principle of market exchange to its logical conclusion, it can only lead to a kind of communism.

  The Confucians took the opposite approach, rejecting the initial premise. A good example is most of the opening of Mencius’ much-remembered conversation with King Hui:

  “Venerable Sir,” the King greeted him, “since you have not counted a thousand miles too far to come here, may I suppose that you also have something with which you may profit my kingdom?”

  Mencius replied:

  “Why must Your Majesty necessarily use this word ‘profit’? What I have are only these two topics: benevolence and righteousness, and nothing else.”64

  Still, the end-point was roughly the same. The Confucian ideal of ren, of humane benevolence, was basically just a more complete inversion of profit-seeking calculation than Mo Di’s universal love; the main difference was that the Confucians added a certain aversion to calculation itself, preferring what might almost be called an art of decency. Taoists were later to take this even further with their embrace of intuition and spontaneity. All were so many attempts to provide a mirror image of market logic. Still, a mirror image is, ultimately, just that: the same thing, only backwards. Before long we end up with an endless maze of paired opposites—egoism versus altruism, profit versus charity, materialism versus idealism, calculation versus spontaneity—none of which could ever have been imagined except by someone starting out from pure, calculating, self-interested market transactions.65

  Materialism II:

  Substance

  As in the near presence of death, despise poor flesh, this refuse of blood and bones, this web and tissue of nerves and veins and arteries.

  —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.2

  Taking pity on the hungry wolf, Wenshuang announced, “I do not covet this filthy bag of meat. I give it over to you that I may quickly acquire a body of more enduring strength. This donation will help benefit us both.”

  —Discourse on the Pure Land 21.12

  As I’ve already observed, China was unusual because philosophy there began with debates about ethics and only later turned to speculations a
bout the nature of the cosmos. In both Greece and India, cosmological speculation came first. In each, too, questions about the nature of the physical universe quickly give way to speculation about mind, truth, consciousness, meaning, language, illusion, world-spirits, cosmic intelligence, and the fate of the human soul.

  This particular maze of mirrors is so complex and dazzling that it’s extraordinarily difficult to discern the starting point—that is, what, precisely, is being reflected back and forth. Here anthropology can be helpful, as anthropologists have the unique advantage of being able to observe how human beings who have not previously been part of these conversations react when first exposed to Axial Age concepts. Every now and then too, we are presented with moments of exceptional clarity: ones that reveal the essence of our own thought to be almost exactly the opposite of what we thought it to be.

  Maurice Leenhardt, a Catholic missionary who had spent many long years teaching the Gospel in New Caledonia, experienced such a moment in the 1920s, when he asked one of his students, an aged sculptor named Boesoou, how he felt about having been introduced to spiritual ideas:

  Once, waiting to assess the mental progress of the Canaques I had taught for many years, I risked the following suggestion: “In short, we introduced the notion of the spirit to your way of thinking?”

  He objected, “Spirit? Bah! You didn’t bring us the spirit. We already knew the spirit existed. We have always acted in accord with the spirit. What you’ve brought us is the body.”66

  The notion that humans had souls appeared to Boesoou to be self-evident. The notion that there was such a thing as the body, apart from the soul, a mere material collection of nerves and tissues—let alone that the body is the prison of the soul; that the mortification of the body could be a means to the glorification or liberation of the soul—all this, it turns out, struck him as utterly new and exotic.

  Axial Age spirituality, then, is built on a bedrock of materialism. This is its secret; one might almost say, the thing that has become invisible to us.67 But if one looks at the very beginnings of philosophical inquiry in Greece and India—the point when there was as yet no difference between what we’d now call “philosophy” and what we’d now call “science”—this is exactly what one finds. “Theory,” if we can call it that, begins with the questions: “What substance is the world made of?” “What is the underlying material behind the physical forms of objects in the world?” “Is everything made up of varying combinations of certain basic elements (earth, air, water, fire, stone, motion, mind, number …), or are these basic elements just the forms taken by some even more elementary substance (for instance, as NyĀya and later Democritus proposed, atomic particles …)”68 In just about every case, some notion of God, Mind, Spirit, some active organizing principle that gave form to and was not itself substance, emerged as well. But this was the kind of spirit that, like Leenhardt’s God, only emerges in relation to inert matter.69

  To connect this impulse, too, with the invention of coinage might seem like pushing things a bit far but, at least for the Classical world, there is an emerging scholarly literature—first set off by Harvard literary theorist Marc Shell, and more recently set forth by British classicist Richard Seaford in a book called Money and the Early Greek Mind—that aims to do exactly that.70

  In fact, some of the historical connections are so uncannily close that they are very hard to explain any other way. Let me give an example. After the first coins were minted around 600 bc in the kingdom of Lydia, the practice quickly spread to Ionia, the Greek cities of the adjacent coast. The greatest of these was the great walled metropolis of Miletus, which also appears to have been the first Greek city to strike its own coins. It was Ionia, too, that provided the bulk of the Greek mercenaries active in the Mediterranean at the time, with Miletus their effective headquarters. Miletus was also the commercial center of the region, and, perhaps, the first city in the world where everyday market transactions came to be carried out primarily in coins instead of credit.71 Greek philosophy, in turn, begins with three men: Thales, of Miletus (c. 624 bc–c. 546 bc), Anaximander, of Miletus (c. 610 bc–c. 546 bc), and Anaximenes, of Miletus (c. 585 bc–c. 525 bc)—in other words, men who were living in that city at exactly the time that coinage was first introduced.72 All three are remembered chiefly for their speculations on the nature of the physical substance from which the world ultimately sprang. Thales proposed water, Anaximenes, air. Anaximander made up a new term, apeiron, “the unlimited,” a kind of pure abstract substance that could not itself be perceived but was the material basis of everything that could be. In each case, the assumption was that this primal substance, by being heated, cooled, combined, divided, compressed, extended, or set in motion, gave rise to the endless particular stuffs and substances that humans actually encounter in the world, from which physical objects are composed—and was also that into which all those forms would eventually dissolve.

  It was something that could turn into everything. As Seaford emphasizes, so was money. Gold, shaped into coins, is a material substance that is also an abstraction. It is both a lump of metal and something more than a lump of metal—it’s a drachma or an obol, a unit of currency which (at least if collected in sufficient quantity, taken to the right place at the right time, turned over to the right person) could be exchanged for absolutely any other object whatsoever.73

  For Seaford, what was genuinely new about coins was their double-sidedness: the fact that they were both valuable pieces of metal and, at the same time, something more. At least within the communities that created them, ancient coins were always worth more than the gold, silver, or copper of which they were composed. Seaford refers to this extra value by the inelegant term “fiduciarity,” which comes from the term for public trust, the confidence a community places in its currency.74 True, at the height of Classical Greece, when there were hundreds of city-states producing different currencies according to a number of different systems of weights and denominations, merchants often did carry scales and treat coins—particularly foreign coins—like so many chunks of silver, just as Indian merchants seem to have treated Roman coins; but within a city, that city’s currency had a special status, since it was always acceptable at face value when used to pay taxes, public fees, or legal penalties. This is, incidentally, why ancient governments were so often able to introduce base metal into their coins without leading to immediate inflation; a debased coin might have lost value when traded overseas, but at home, it was still worth just as much when purchasing a license, or entering the public theater.75 This is also why, during publc emergencies, Greek city-states would occasionally strike coins made entirely of bronze or tin, which everyone would agree, while the emergency lasted, to treat as if they were really made of silver.76

  This is the key to Seaford’s argument about materialism and Greek philosophy. A coin was a piece of metal, but by giving it a particular shape, stamped with words and images, the civic community agreed to make it something more. But this power was not unlimited. Bronze coins could not be used forever; if one debased the coinage, inflation would eventually set in. It was as if there was a tension there, between the will of the community and the physical nature of the object itself. Greek thinkers were suddenly confronted with a profoundly new type of object, one of extraordinary importance—as evidenced by the fact that so many men were willing to risk their lives to get their hands on it—but whose nature was a profound enigma.

  Consider this word, “materialism.” What does it mean to adopt a “materialist” philosophy? What is “material,” anyway? Normally, we speak of “materials” when we refer to objects that we wish to make into something else. A tree is a living thing. It only becomes “wood” when we begin to think about all the other things you could carve out of it. And of course you can carve a piece of wood into almost anything. The same is true of clay, or glass, or metal. They’re solid and real and tangible, but also abstractions, because they have the potential to turn into almost anything else—or, not p
recisely that; one can’t turn a piece of wood into a lion or an owl, but one can turn it into an image of a lion or an owl—it can take on almost any conceivable form. So already in any materialist philosophy, we are dealing with an opposition between form and content, substance and shape; a clash between the idea, sign, emblem, or model in the creator’s mind, and the physical qualities of the materials on which it is to be stamped, built, or imposed, from which it will be brought into reality.77 With coins this rises to an even more abstract level because that emblem can no longer be conceived as the model in one person’s head, but is rather the mark of a collective agreement. The images stamped on Greek coins (Miletus’ lion, Athens’ owl) were typically the emblems of the city’s god, but they were also a kind of collective promise, by which citizens assured one another that not only would the coin be acceptable in payment of public debts, but in a larger sense, that everyone would accept them, for any debts, and thus, that they could be use to acquire anything anyone wanted.

  The problem is that this collective power is not unlimited. It only really applies within the city. The farther you go outside, into places dominated by violence, slavery, and war—the sort of place where even philosophers taking a cruise might end up on the auction block—the more it turns into a mere lump of precious metal.78

  The war between Spirit and Flesh, then, between the noble Idea and ugly Reality, the rational intellect versus stubborn corporeal drives and desires that resist it, even the idea that peace and community are not things that emerge spontaneously but that need to be stamped onto our baser material natures like a divine insignia stamped into base metal—all those ideas that came to haunt the religious and philosophical traditions of the Axial Age, and that have continued to surprise people like Boesoou ever since—can already be seen as inscribed in the nature of this new form of money.