Debt (22 page)

Competitive gift exchange, then, does not literally render anyone slaves; it is simply an affair of honor. These are people, however, for whom honor is everything.

The main reason that being unable to pay a debt, especially a debt of honor, was such a crisis was because this
was
how noblemen assembled their entourages. The law of hospitality in the ancient world, for instance, insisted that any traveler must be fed, given shelter, and treated as an honored guest—but only for a certain length of time. If a guest did not go away, he would eventually become a mere subordinate. The role of such hangers-on has been largely neglected by students of human history. In many periods—from imperial Rome to medieval China—probably the most important relationships, at least in towns and cities, were those of patronage. Anyone rich and important would find himself surrounded by flunkies, sycophants, perpetual dinner guests, and other sorts of willing dependents. Drama and poetry of the time are full of such characters.
⁵⁵
Similarly, for much of human history, being respectable and middle-class meant spending one’s mornings going from door to door, paying one’s respects to important local patrons. To this day, informal patronage systems still crop up, whenever relatively rich and powerful people feel the need to assemble
networks of supporters—a practice well documented in many parts of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Latin America. Such relationships seem to consist of a slapdash mix of all three principles that I’ve been mapping out over the course of this chapter; nevertheless, those observing them insist on trying to cast them in the language of exchange and debt.

A final example: in a collection called
Gifts and Spoils
, published in 1971, we find a brief essay by the anthropologist Lorraine Blaxter about a rural department in the French Pyrenees, most of whose inhabitants are farmers. Everyone places a great emphasis on the importance of mutual aid—the local phrase means “giving service”
(rendre service)
. People living in the same community should look out for one another and pitch in when their neighbors are having trouble. This is the essence of communal morality, in fact, it’s how one knows that any sort of community exists. So far so good. However, she notes, when someone does a particularly great favor, mutual aid can turn into something else:

Thus does mutual aid slip into inequality. Thus do patron-client relations come into being. We have already observed this. I chose this particular passage because the author’s phrasing is so weird. It completely contradicts itself. The boss does the man a favor. The man cannot repay the favor. Therefore, the man repays the favor by showing up at the boss’s house with the occasional basket of tomatoes and showing him respect. So which one is it? Can he repay the favor, or not?

Peter Freuchen’s walrus hunter would, no doubt, think he knew exactly what was going on here. Bringing the basket of tomatoes was simply the equivalent of saying “Thank you.” It was a way of acknowledging that one owes a debt of gratitude, that gifts had in fact made slaves just as whips make dogs. The boss and the employee are now fundamentally different sorts of people. The problem is that in all other respects, they are not fundamentally different sorts of people. Most likely they are both middle-aged Frenchmen, fathers of families,
citizens of the Republic with similar tastes in music, sports, and food. They
ought
to be equals. As a result, even the tomatoes, which are really a token of recognition of the existence of a debt that can never be repaid, has to be represented as if it was itself a kind of repayment—an interest payment on a loan that could, everyone agrees to pretend, someday be paid back, thus returning the two members to their proper equal status once again.
⁵⁷

(It’s telling that the favor is finding the client a job in a factory, because what happens is not very different from what happens when you get a job in a factory to begin with. A wage-labor contract is, ostensibly, a free contract between equals—but an agreement between equals in which both agree that once one of them punches the time clock, they won’t be equals any more.
⁵⁸
The law does recognize a bit of a problem here; that’s why it insists that you cannot sell off your equality permanently [you are not free to sell yourself into slavery]. Such arrangements are only acceptable if the boss’s power is not absolute, if it is limited to work time, and if you have the legal right to break off the contract and thereby to restore yourself to full equality, at any time.)

It seems to me that this agreement between equals to no longer be equal (at least for a time) is critically important. It is the very essence of what we call “debt.”

What, then, is debt?

Debt is a very specific thing, and it arises from very specific situations. It first requires a relationship between two people who do not consider each other fundamentally different sorts of being, who are at least potential equals, who
are
equals in those ways that are really important, and who are not currently in a state of equality—but for whom there is some way to set matters straight.

In the case of gift-giving, as we’ve seen, this requires a certain equality of status. That’s why our economics professor didn’t feel any sense of obligation—any debt of honor—if taken out to dinner by someone who ranked either much higher or much lower than himself. With money loans, all that is required is that the two parties be of equal legal standing. (You can’t lend money to a child, or to a lunatic. Well, you can, but the courts won’t help you get it back.) Legal—rather than moral—debts have other unique qualities. For instance, they can be forgiven, which isn’t always possible with a moral debt.

This means that there is no such thing as a genuinely unpayable debt. If there was no conceivable way to salvage the situation, we
wouldn’t be calling it a “debt.” Even the French villager could, conceivably, save his patron’s life, or win the lottery and buy the factory. Even when we speak of a criminal “paying his debt to society,” we are saying that he has done something so terrible that he has now been banished from that equal status under the law that belongs by natural right to any citizen of his country; however, we call it a “debt” because it
can
be paid, equality
can
be restored, even if the cost may be death by lethal injection.

During the time that the debt remains unpaid, the logic of hierarchy takes hold. There is no reciprocity. As anyone who has ever been in jail knows, the first thing the jailors communicate is that nothing that happens in jail has anything to do with justice. Similarly, debtor and creditor confront each other like a peasant before a feudal lord. The law of precedent takes hold. If you bring your creditor tomatoes from the garden, it never occurs to you that he would give something back. He might expect you to do it again, though. But always there is the assumption that the situation is somewhat unnatural, because the debt really ought to be paid.

This is what makes situations of effectively unpayable debt so difficult and so painful. Since creditor and debtor are ultimately equals, if the debtor cannot do what it takes to restore herself to equality, there is obviously something wrong with her; it must be her fault.

This connection becomes clear if we look at the etymology of common words for “debt” in European languages. Many are synonyms for “fault,” “sin,” or “guilt;” just as a criminal owes a debt to society, a debtor is always a sort of criminal.
⁵⁹
In ancient Crete, according to Plutarch, it was the custom for those taking loans to pretend to snatch the money from the lender’s purse. Why, he wondered? Probably “so that, if they default, they could be charged with violence and punished all the more.”
⁶⁰
This is why in so many periods of history insolvent debtors could be jailed, or even—as in early Republican Rome—executed.

A debt, then, is just an exchange that has not been brought to completion.

It follows that debt is strictly a creature of reciprocity and has little to do with other sorts of morality (communism, with its needs and abilities; hierarchy, with its customs and qualities). True, if we were really determined, we could argue (as some do) that communism is a condition of permanent mutual indebtedness, or that hierarchy is constructed out of unpayable debts. But isn’t this just the same old story, starting from the assumption that all human interactions must be, by definition, forms of exchange, and then performing whatever mental somersaults are required to prove it?

No. All human interactions are not forms of exchange. Only some are. Exchange encourages a particular way of conceiving human relations. This is because exchange implies equality, but it also implies separation. It’s precisely when the money changes hands, when the debt is cancelled, that equality is restored
and
both parties can walk away and have nothing further to do with each other.

Debt is what happens in between: when the two parties cannot yet walk away from each other, because they are not yet equal. But it is carried out in the shadow of eventual equality. Because achieving that equality, however, destroys the very reason for having a relationship, just about everything interesting happens in between.
⁶¹
In fact, just about everything human happens in between—even if this means that all such human relations bear with them at least a tiny element of criminality, guilt, or shame.

For the Tiv women whom I mentioned earlier in the chapter, this wasn’t much of a problem. By ensuring that everyone was always slightly in debt to one another, they actually created human society, if a very fragile sort of society—a delicate web made up of obligations to return three eggs or a bag of okra, ties renewed and recreated, as any one of them could be cancelled out at any time.

Our own habits of civility are not so very different. Consider the custom, in American society, of constantly saying “please” and “thank you.” To do so is often treated as basic morality: we are constantly chiding children for forgetting to do it, just as the moral guardians of our society—teachers and ministers, for instance—do to everybody else. We often assume that the habit is universal, but as the Inuit hunter made clear, it is not.
⁶²
Like so many of our everyday courtesies, it is a kind of democratization of what was once a habit of feudal deference: the insistence on treating absolutely everyone the way that one used only to have to treat a lord or similar hierarchical superior.

Perhaps this is not so in every case. Imagine we are on a crowded bus, looking for a seat. A fellow passenger moves her bag aside to clear one; we smile, or nod, or make some other little gesture of acknowledgment. Or perhaps we actually say “Thank you.” Such a gesture is simply a recognition of common humanity: we are acknowledging that the woman who had been blocking the seat is not a mere physical obstacle but a human being, and that we feel genuine gratitude toward someone we will likely never see again. None of this is generally true when one asks someone across the table to “please pass the salt,” or when the postman thanks you for signing for a delivery. We think of these simultaneously as meaningless formalities and as the very moral basis of society. Their apparent unimportance can be measured by the
fact that almost no one would refuse, on principle, to say “please” or “thank you” in just about any situation—even those who might find it almost impossible to say “I’m sorry” or “I apologize.”