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Tuesday, Jan 07, 2014 - 22:45 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

First Of The Next



(Source: Amazon)


How better to begin the year with a review, and though the main object of my latest visit was Lecturing Birds On Flying*, the incidental Debt - The First 5000 Years turned out to be more compelling. Therefore, I will attempt to condense the essence of the near-400 pages of the latter into this posting, along with commentary, into a mostly-linear telling that may not correspond to the original (which jumps about a bit)

[*One tiny quibble: Triana mentions the odds of finding a ten foot tall man as insignificant even given several lifetimes of the universe - I would say that this is hardly that improbable, given that the current verified record is nearly nine feet, and he hadn't even stopped growing! While there are probably physiological limits in our design, going from an average of near six feet to ten is likely less incredible than getting to our current state from the small mammals we started from]

So, what is debt? Graeber writes as an anthropologist, and not an economist, which offers a whole new perspective; in the most ancient sense, there is primordial debt, emphasized in major religions - it is mentioned that the Vedas see sacrifice as a tribute to Death, the Brahmans, to society, Buddhists, to parents. To this might be added that to the Very Top in the Abrahamic faiths, but frankly the basic premise is similar - you owe whoever happens to be in charge of the place, and you better pipe down and pay up if you know what's good for ya.

That said, at least officially, religions tend to view material wealth negatively. For instance, usury is not looked kindly upon, either being forbidden (Abrahamic) or limited such that the interest paid cannot exceed the principal amount (Dharmic), with further compassion shown by periodic cancellation of all debts (e.g. the Jubilee, though one can make a convincing case for it being inspired by the Sumerians and Babylonians, the latter particularly heavily slandered)

Of course, in the real world, adherents found all sorts of ways to get around pesky holy pronouncements, when they don't suit them - as the Pope discovered recently, not even the Vicar of Christ on Earth can repeat what He unambigiously said without drawing rebuke (one suspects that if Jesus did indeed return in the Bible Belt, he would be thrown in the clapper in short order for being a liberal commie hippie)

Still, merchants, financiers and moneylenders were mostly disparaged (think the archetypical Jewish miser of period literature), and usually low in the social order due to not producing anything of their own; the Muslims appear an exception, with successful merchants presented in high esteem, though they were expected to be men of learning. Incidentally, Graeber mentions a parallel between Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and divine providence in Islam, as well as his pin/needle factory example in division of labour.

Graeber later gives a very instructive definition of markets versus capitalism - in markets, the objective is C-M-C': through the intermediary of money [M], one converts a commodity [C] to another commodity [C'] for one's use. Whereas in capitalism, it is M-C-M': the commodity [C] is merely a means for money [M] to make more money [M']!

Further breaking with the compelling orthodox economic narrative of the development of money:

Barter → Money → Credit


He argues that the true picture is:

(Recognition of) Credit [For In-group]
Barter [For Strangers]		→ Money


Actual evidence, apparently, is that barter was very seldom used in practice - it seems that classical economists extrapolated (badly), from the basis of self-interest, about how exchanges could theoretically have taken place before token money was invented (and got it woefully wrong)

What instead happened was, among family and the wider tribe, most commodities were simply accepted to be communal - if a household needed rice, and their neighbours had an excess, they simply went and took it on the understanding that they would do the same if the situation were reversed. Note that this is not quite "borrowing", with the implication of debt, for in the words of one Eskimo:

"Up in our country we are human! 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. We say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs."


Lines are *supposed* to be blurred


While it may be true that no dog ever exchanged a bone, Smith was by all accounts not the most learned naturalist, for animals do keep accounts in their own way. And, like them, even the most egalitarian human societies punish freeloaders - the story is told of one slacker who without fail asked for the best bits of other hunters' catch, without ever helping out. Since his peers could not refuse his requests, as per custom, they did the only thing left to them, and killed him. It follows that we cannot find a "beginning" of debt (and thus money), for it has always existed in some form.

This brings us to an amusing anecdote about barter - the author recalls visiting a cloth market in Madagascar with a native friend, who spent four hours haggling over pennies in the price of a sweater. This is in itself not too remarkable, save that the next time he went with another friend, the new girl asked for the price, and then for the real final price. Finding it acceptable, she paid. When the incredulous author asked if that was even possible, she shrugged and replied: "Some people enjoy that sort of thing." (N.B. This makes a lot of sense - I really, really, really have no patience for contrived modesty/reluctance plays of this form)

It is noted that at the lowest level, a lot of human interaction is in fact "communism" - when a person asks for directions, one does not generally reply "and how much is that worth to you?" (Once, I got asked for spare change at a vending machine by a stranger, so rare an occurance here that I was momentarily stymied. Perhaps we have indeed moved from the basics)

Much unhappiness, it turns out, stems from there being an "in-group" and "out-group", with different rules for each - e.g. Deuteronomy 23:19-20: one cannot charge a fellow in-grouper interest, but outsiders are fair game. The cynical might hold that there is really nothing too special about the nature of the groups, just who's in and who's out. In addition, there has to be a rough parity in power for such exchange - if one side is too weak, what happens is often "let's beat them up and take their stuff", which as we shall discover, is a recurring theme in history, even for "the good guys".

The existence of groupings does impose a certain expected equality within members, though - primitive tribes were often divided into halves such that one half always had need of the other, a crude method of balancing power that has been refined in present expression, both in (slightly) more and less legitimate organizations. The author posits that it is more difficult to get really rich in a homogeneous society, since the wealthy can be pressured into helping those of the same ethnicity. Large disparities are thus more common where no such relationships applied (e.g. Jews to largely Christian populations in medieval Europe - not that they were left with too much choice - and Chinese in Indonesia and elsewhere)

A further oddity of some primitive cultures is the phenomenon of, after having his life saved, the rescuee demanding a gift on top of that, to the surprise of European missionaries, who were expecting some gratitude; however, this seemingly inverted response can instead be interpreted as a high honour - the saved man is pledging himself to the great man who helped him, and what mighty lord takes from his inferiors? To deny the gift is then to insult the man as not worth taking on as a follower; or as we say, 一日为师，终身为父.

In such early "Big Man" cultures, one's status is determined by overt generosity, and Graeber notes that many American Indian chiefs were actually the poorest in their tribes, due to all the largesse expected of them. A similar practice existed among the Celts, with suicide the only accepted way to "save face" if one was outdone in a gift-giving challenge. While not as exaggerated, the basal etiquette of gifting whatever object admired by a guest to him is pretty commonplace, holding in cultures as disparate as the Maori and Chinese (which is related beautifully in one of Archer's tales)


Mr. Ham supports the Big Ham culture
(Source: brothersoft.com)


The inheritors of this legacy today are then the various entertainers (rappers, boxers, footballers, lottery winners etc) who maintain large entourages (门客?) of loyal hangers-on (who invariably disperse once the Big Man goes broke), though local weddings probably also qualify. Although "act like you're the person you want to be (i.e. rich)" is a self-help staple that sometimes works, it's probably still best not to wear a hat that's too big for one's head.

As it was, most kings got more selfish, and began concentrating on the "protection" rather than the "provision" side of the reciprocity equation. Taxes were, then, literally protection money. This brings us to: why bother with coinage, since the king could (and often did) own all the gold mines?

The simplified answer is that it facilitates administration. Charting the flow of coinage, this is mandated:

Kingy → Soldiers (wages)
Peasants → Kingy (taxes)

Clearly, from the perspective of the peasants, if they didn't want to get beaten up, they had to fulfil the missing link:

Soldiers → Peasants (food, services, stuff they want)

Note that this frees our Kingy from having to bother with the minutae of catering for his troops - the peasantry simply had to provide whatever the soldiers needed, to earn coin to pay Kingy back. A quite ingenious solution that was adoped by empires as diverse as the Indus and the Romans.

Certainly, there were occasional shortages, especially when the face value of the coinage was lower than the metal's actual value, in which case it would be melted down or hoarded - there were cases in Tudor England where the family silver had to be paid as a substitute. However, societies could in fact function quite well without sufficient specie, with local merchants simply operating on a credit system (like our fiat), together with private tokens and tallies (i.e. 符) as a means of record (the concept reflected in public-key cryptography)

If this still proved insufficient, the standard practice for kings was to simply shake down who had the money. In Europe, this was quite often the Jews, who periodically got beaten up for their cash because hey, they're not one of us anyway (Graeber argues that The Merchant Of Venice had it the wrong way round). To be fair, even the prevailing religion sometimes got the short end of the stick, especially as they somehow tended to amass large stores of treasure, regardless of doctrine. Seen in this respect, the occasional raids on temples and churches were necessary as a way to return money into circulation. Note the huge role "beating up" plays - Game of Thrones had it right in that most knights were glorified bandits.

Many jokes have indeed acknowledged this fundamental relationship between power and money, such as the one mentioned about a man who, when robbed when out walking with his friend, attempts to discharge his debt to his pal by counting the fifty bucks he owed in the amount handed over. Unfortunately for him, the high-minded mugger took it badly, and provided the friend with a thousand bucks to lend to the first man, before promptly robbing it back.

Somewhat unexpectedly, it is stated that kings and slaves are more alike each other, than either is to the middle class - which we should recall, was also recognized by Fussell in his study of social strata. Most people are bound by an intricate and dynamic web of interrelations and favours, and are to a large part defined by these links. In particular, among the Tiv of Nigeria, the practice is to never return exactly what one has borrowed, but always either a little more or less, for to insist on clearing the slate would indicate that one no longer wishes to have anything to do with the other party.

This mutual scratching of backs does not, however, apply to kings and slaves, the former because it all is supposed to belong to him anyway, and the latter because he has neither property or identity of his own. In their own ways, both lead isolated existences. It should be remembered that such impartiality is probably a virtue for monarchs, though - one deed for which enlightened legendary rulers are often praised for is that of not passing their position to their progeny - carry that on for too long, and you tend to get winners like Kim The Third, who has apparently had his uncle fed to dogs.

[N.B. On this, given that the sensational story was scooped by the irreproachable paragon of fact-checking known as The State's Times, experts in the field are properly remaining skeptical about its veracity (though Mr. Ham is now reconsidering sponsoring Kim for the position of chair at the next general meeting of the Association of Cult Leaders)]


Li'l Kim should really hold a get-together


This division is also true in transactions, where the shopping mall is held as quintessentially middle-class - prices are listed, and everyone pays the same. At the very top and bottom, in contrast, a lot becomes negotiable. Neil Bush (brother of George W.) conceded that for some reason, ladies of mysterious provenance kept appearing in his hotel room when he was doing business in Thailand and Hong Kong. This is, of course, possibly down to his raw animal magnetism.

Here, we might skip to the Lele, a Congo tribe who dealt in "spheres of exchange", where some goods were explicitly not expressible in terms of others. At the bottom were everyday market goods, which the females traded in. Next came "prestige" goods such as cattle and brass rods (manufactured in Birmingham, of all places), and above that were the females themselves (the young, cute and fertile ones only, it goes without saying, as with the Irish cumal; Chaucer ran with the primal swap: "I am youre wyf; score it upon my taille")

While perhaps abhorrent, the system of spheres did at least acknowledge the value of a human as above all material things - the only acceptable exchange was woman for woman; of course, as direct trades were hard to come by, they were facilitated by intermediate deals. For example, a man desiring a wife, but whose own pawn was not desired by the holder of that woman, could seek a third party with a girl that that man did want. Lest feminists begin frothing at the mouth here, it should be stated that among the Lele, almost everyone, male or female, was someone's pawn, and pawnship was often viewed as an advantage - the pawn had another family to rely on. It was just that male pawns were not in much demand.

Furthermore, Lele girls who felt that they were being pwned - say, by being slated to be an old man's fifth wife - always had an out. She could simply flee to the next village, which would almost always accept her as a "village wife" to all the strapping young males of her age-set. The author takes pains to assure readers that the position is more than respectable, and that the girls in question were treated as princesses (and some of them were actual princesses, i.e. daughters of chiefs) by their grateful husbands, who likely hadn't been getting any before her arrival. This happy and prudent institution has sadly been dismissed out of hand by stuffy modern moralists.

Still, the point is that they agreed that there is no comparism between people and things - human life has absolute value (if at times discounted; a free Irish woman was considered at 50% of her nearest male relative, which however can still be considered more progressive than some Arab states today). A man without a pawn to exchange might acquire a wife through heavy and recurrent gifts of money, but if so it was accepted that she was then never really his; as a Thai champion noted, money is easier to come by than wives.

This is more than can be said for the dreary calculation involved in the contemporary dowry culture, which has been reduced to mere supply and demand, with a brideprice instead the norm in China. That village wife thing must be sounding more and more attractive by the day, to officials who are silently counting the tens of millions of frustrated single males milling about with altogether too much time and energy.

While inter-sphere exchange is not supposed to happen, as mentioned, the rules could often be bent by the charismatic (or, as the Lele put it, strong-hearted). Although the idea is that while status can get money, but not the other way round (from the Algerians, but doubtless many other peoples), tribal ranks were routinely bought and sold for brass rods. Then again, this was the case for British officer commissions and Chinese mandarinates too, so one can hardly judge them.

But if so, and with honour described as "surplus dignity", it is then only expected that it be measured in such terms - Irish petty kings, for instance, had their honour-price (a separate concept from blood price, or wergeld) set at seven cumals, though in practice this was converted into the equivalent of cows or silver, the spheres not in effect with them.

Another consequence of this setup was that honour was then most associated with men of violence, and indeed is associated disproportionately with soldiers and gangsters to this day. This is because one of the most evident ways to attain honour, across cultures, was to take it from others. It wouldn't be valuable if it were too plebian, right?


It's not all *that* different in more lawful pursuits
(Source: moviequotesandmore.com)


Returning to the Irish, they made this explicit by adjusting a lord's honour price upwards whenever he acquired a new serf, as he literally absorbs his vassal's honour into himself. While other peoples have perhaps not been quite so exacting in their definitions, they certainly knew the theory - how else might emperors of various stripes getting thousands to be buried with them be interpreted?

[N.B. It was said that honour comes from others. I disagree.]

While ancient, the institution of slavery likely attained its apex (or nadir) with the likes of brave explorers such as Cortés, who basically butchered an entire civilization for their gold in the name of the Almighty. In his defence, the Aztecs weren't that nice either, and some of the priests with him had the decency to be horrified (though their successors had no qualms about doing some whitewashing for another of their jolly ol' fellows); all this only emphasizes the need to be wary whenever gods are brought in as a justification for an action.

Moving hastily on from those dark times, it is worth noting that while the conquistadors looted the New World, the booty invariably wound up in Asia - gold to India, and silver to China (though jade and pearls were more highly valued; R.I.P, Eusebio) - due to the persistent imbalance in trade between the continents. One can hardly help but hear the echoes of history in America's near-US$1.3 trillion trade deficit with China in the present day, though of course at this level, the actual numbers being tossed around don't mean much, textbook macroeconomic computations be damned.

It is now finally time for the author's thoughts on debt today to come in. In the introduction, he details a conversation in which he supports abolishing the debt that the Third World owns to the IMF, at which he is met by the expected refrain that one should pay one's debts. His response was that, what actually happened was that the tinpot dictators and their cronies simply squirrelled most of the loans away, and stuck citizens with the bill; but why would the lenders care about that detail?

As conspiracy theories go, here's another - what bound the Bush "Axis of Evil" (Iraq, Iran and North Korea) together was their act of switching from the U.S. dollar to the euro. Also, it is little known that perhaps a quarter of the entire world's gold reserves are in the Fed's vaults only a couple of blocks from the Twin Towers; the significance of that, obviously, was not lost on the more imaginative.



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