Debt (23 page)
Authors: David Graeber
In fact, the English “please” is short for “if you please,” “if it pleases you to do this”—it is the same in most European languages (French
si il vous plait
, Spanish
por favor
). Its literal meaning is “you are under no obligation to do this.” “Hand me the salt. Not that I am saying that you have to!” This is not true; there is a social obligation, and it would be almost impossible not to comply. But etiquette largely consists of the exchange of polite fictions (to use less polite language, lies). When you ask someone to pass the salt, you are also giving them an order; by attaching the word “please,” you are saying that it is not an order. But, in fact, it is.
In English, “thank you” derives from “think,” it originally meant, “I will remember what you did for me”—which is usually not true either—but in other languages (the Portuguese
obrigado
is a good example) the standard term follows the form of the English “much obliged”—it actually does means “I am in your debt.” The French
merci
is even more graphic: it derives from “mercy,” as in begging for mercy; by saying it you are symbolically placing yourself in your benefactor’s power—since a debtor is, after all, a criminal.
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Saying “you’re welcome,” or “it’s nothing” (French
de rien
, Spanish
de nada
)—the latter has at least the advantage of often being literally true—is a way of reassuring the one to whom one has passed the salt that you are not actually inscribing a debit in your imaginary moral account book. So is saying “my pleasure”—you are saying, “No, actually, it’s a credit, not a debit—you did
me
a favor because in asking me to pass the salt, you gave me the opportunity to do something I found rewarding in itself!”
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Decoding the tacit calculus of debt (“I owe you one,” “No, you don’t owe me anything,” “Actually, if anything, it’s me who owes you,” as if inscribing and then scratching off so many infinitesimal entries in an endless ledger) makes it easy to understand why this sort of thing is often viewed not as the quintessence of morality, but as the quintessence of
middle-class
morality. True, by now middle-class sensibilities dominate society. But there are still those who find the practice odd. Those at the very top of society often still feel that deference is owed primarily to hierarchical superiors and find it slightly idiotic to watch postmen and pastry cooks taking turns pretending to treat each other like little feudal lords. At the other extreme, those who grew up in what in Europe are called “popular” environments—small towns, poor neighborhoods, anyplace where there is still an assumption that people who are not enemies will, ordinarily, take care of one another—will
often find it insulting to be constantly told, in effect, that there is some chance they might
not
do their job as a waiter or taxi driver correctly, or provide houseguests with tea. In other words, middle-class etiquette insists that we are all equals, but it does so in a very particular way. On the one hand, it pretends that nobody is giving anybody orders (think here of the burly security guard at the mall who appears before someone walking into a restricted area and says, “Can I help you?”); on the other, it treats every gesture of what I’ve been calling “baseline communism” as if it were really a form of exchange. As a result, like Tiv neighborhoods, middle-class society has to be endlessly recreated, as a kind of constant flickering game of shadows, the criss-crossing of an infinity of momentary debt relations, each one almost instantly cancelled out.
All of this is a relatively recent innovation. The habit of always saying “please” and “thank you” first began to take hold during the commercial revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—among those very middle classes who were largely responsible for it. It is the language of bureaus, shops, and offices, and over the course of the last five hundred years it has spread across the world along with them. It is also merely one token of a much larger philosophy, a set of assumptions of what humans are and what they owe one another, that have by now become so deeply ingrained that we cannot see them.
Sometimes, at the brink of a new historical era, some prescient soul can see the full implications of what is beginning to happen—sometimes in a way that later generations can’t. Let me end with a text by such a person. In Paris, sometime in 1540s, François Rabelais—lapsed monk, doctor, legal scholar—composed what was to become a famous mock eulogy, which he inserted in the third book of his great
Gargantua and Pantagruel
, and which came to be known as “In Praise of Debt.”
Rabelais places the encomium in the mouth of one Panurge, a wandering scholar and man of extreme classical erudition who, he observes, “knew sixty-three ways of making money—the most honorable and most routine of which was stealing.”
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The good-natured giant Pantagruel adopts Panurge and even provides him with a respectable income, but it bothers him that Panurge continues to spend money like water and remains up to his ears in debt. Wouldn’t it be better, Pantagruel suggests, to be able to pay his creditors?
Panurge responds with horror: “God forbid that I should ever be out of debt!” Debt is, in fact, the very basis of his philosophy:
Always owe somebody something, then he will be forever praying God to grant you a good, long and blessed life. Fearing to lose what you owe him, he will always be saying good things about you in every sort of company; he will be constantly acquiring new lenders for you, so that you can borrow to pay him back, filling his ditch with other men’s spoil.
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Above all else, they will always be praying that you come into money. It’s like those ancient slaves destined to be sacrificed at their masters’ funerals. When they wished their master long life and good health, they genuinely meant it! What’s more, debt can make you into a kind of god, who can make something (money, well-wishing creditors) out of absolutely nothing.
Worse still: I give myself to bonnie Saint Bobelin if all my life I have not reckoned debts to be, as it were, a connection and colligation between Heaven and Earth (uniquely preserving the lineage of Man without which, I say, all human beings would soon perish) and perhaps to be that great World Soul which, according to the Academics, gives life to all things.
That it really is so, evoke tranquilly in your mind the Idea and Form of a world—take if you like the thirtieth of the worlds imagined by Metrodorus—in which there were no debtors or lenders at all. A universe sans debts! Amongst the heavenly bodies there would be no regular course whatsoever: all would be in disarray. Jupiter, reckoning that he owed no debt to Saturn, would dispossess him of his sphere, and with his Homeric chain hold in suspension all the Intelligences, gods, heavens, daemons, geniuses, heroes, devils, earth, sea and all the elements … The Moon would remain dark and bloody; why should the Sun share his light with her? He is under no obligation. The Sun would never shine on their Earth; the heavenly bodies would pour no good influences down upon it.
Between the elements there will be no mutual sharing of qualities, no alternation, no transmutation whatsoever, one will not think itself obliged to the other; it has lent it nothing. From earth no longer will water be made, nor water transmuted into air; from air fire will not be made, and fire will not warm the earth. Earth will bring forth nothing but monsters, Titans, giants. The rain will not rain, the light will shed no light, the wind will not blow, and there will be no summer, no autumn, Lucifer will tear off his bonds and, sallying forth from deepest Hell with the Furies, the Vengeances and the horned
devils, will seek to turf the gods of both the greater and lesser nations out from their nests in the heavens.
And what’s more, if human beings owed nothing to one another, life would “be no better than a dog-fight”—a mere unruly brawl.
Amongst human beings none will save another; it will be no good a man shouting Help! Fire! I’m drowning! Murder! Nobody will come and help him. Why? Because he has lent nothing: and no one owes him anything. No one has anything to lose by his fire, his shipwreck, his fall, or his death. He has lent nothing. And: he would lend nothing either hereafter.
In short, Faith, Hope and Charity would be banished from this world.
Panurge—a man without a family, alone, whose entire calling in life was getting large amounts of money and then spending it—serves as a fitting prophet for the world that was just beginning to emerge. His perspective of course is that of a
wealthy
debtor—not one liable to be trundled off to some pestiferous dungeon for failure to pay. Still, what he is describing is the logical conclusion, the
reductio ad absurdum
, which Rabelais as always lays out with cheerful perversity, of the assumptions about the world as exchange slumbering behind all our pleasant bourgeois formalities (which Rabelais himself, incidentally, detested—the book is basically a mixture of classical erudition and dirty jokes).
And what he says is true. If we insist on defining all human interactions as matters of people giving one thing for another, then any ongoing human relations can only take the form of debts. Without them, no one would owe anything to anybody. A world without debt would revert to primordial chaos, a war of all against all; no one would feel the slightest responsibility for one another; the simple fact of being human would have no significance; we would all become isolated planets who couldn’t even be counted on to maintain our proper orbits.
Pantagruel will have none of it. His own feelings on the matter, he says, can be summed up with one line from the Apostle Paul: “Owe no man anything, save mutual love and affection.”
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Then, in an appropriately biblical gesture, he declares, “From your past debts I shall free you.”
“What can I do but thank you?” Panurge replies.
GAMES WITH SEX AND DEATH
WHEN WE RETURN
to an examination of conventional economic history, one thing that jumps out is how much has been made to disappear. Reducing all human life to exchange means not only shunting aside all other forms of economic experience (hierarchy, communism), but also ensuring that the vast majority of the human race who are not adult males, and therefore whose day-to-day existence is relatively difficult to reduce to a matter of swapping things in such a way as to seek mutual advantage, melt away into the background.
As a result, we end up with a sanitized view of the way actual business is conducted. The tidy world of shops and malls is the quintessential middle-class environment, but at either the top or the bottom of the system, the world of financiers or of gangsters, deals are often made in ways not so completely different from ways that the Gunwinggu or Nambikwara make them—at least in that sex, drugs, music, extravagant displays of food, and the potential for violence do often play parts.
Consider the case of Neil Bush (George W.’s brother) who, during divorce proceedings with his wife, admitted to multiple infidelities with women who, he claimed, would mysteriously appear at his hotel-room door after important business meetings in Thailand and Hong Kong.
“You have to admit it’s pretty remarkable,” remarked one of his wife’s attorneys, “for a man to go to a hotel-room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her.”
“It was very unusual,” Bush replied, admitting however that this had happened to him on numerous occasions.
“Were they prostitutes?”
“I don’t know.”
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In fact, such things seem almost par for the course when really big money comes into play.
In this light, the economists’ insistence that economic life begins with barter, the innocent exchange of arrows for teepee frames, with no one in a position to rape, humiliate, or torture anyone else, and that it continues in this way, is touchingly utopian.
As a result, though, the histories we tell are full of blank spaces, and the women in them seem to appear out of nowhere, without explanation, much like the Thai women who appeared at Bush’s door. Recall the passage cited in Chapter Three, from numismatist Philip Grierson, about money in the barbarian law codes:
Compensation in the Welsh laws is reckoned primarily in cattle and in the Irish ones in cattle or bondmaids
(cumal)
, with considerable use of precious metals in both. In the Germanic codes it is mainly in precious metal …
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How is it possible to read this passage without immediately stopping at the end of the first line? “Bondmaids”? Doesn’t that mean “slaves?” (It does.) In ancient Ireland, female slaves were so plentiful and important that they came to function as currency. How did that happen? And if we are trying to understand the origins of money, here, isn’t the fact that people are using
one another
as currency at all interesting or significant?
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Yet none of the sources on money remark much on it. It would seem that by the time of the law codes, slave girls were not actually traded, but just used as units of account. Still, they must have been traded at some point. Who were they? How were they enslaved? Were they captured in war, sold by their parents, or reduced to slavery through debt? Were they a major trade item? The answer to all these questions would seem to be yes, but it’s hard to say more because the history remains largely unwritten.
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