Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

HONOR AND DEGRADAT ION 17 7
The word "crisis" literally refers to a crossroads: it is the point
where things could go either of two different ways. The odd thing
about the crisis in the concept of honor is that it never seems to have
been resolved. Is honor the willingness to pay one's monetary debts
Or is it the fact that one does not feel that monetary debts are really
that important It appears to be both at the same time.
There's also the question of what men of honor actually do think is
important. When most of us think of a Mediterranean villager's sense
of honor, we don't think so much of a casual attitude toward money
as of a veritable obsession with premarital virginity. Masculine honor
is caught up not even so much in a man's ability to protect his womenfolk
as in his ability to protect their sexual reputations, to respond
to any suggestion of impropriety on the part of his mother, wife, sister,
or daughter as if it were a direct physical attack on his own person.
This is a stereotype, but it's not entirely unjustified. One historian
who went through fifty years of police reports about knife-fights in
nineteenth-century Ionia discovered that virtually every one of them
began when one party publicly suggested that the other's wife or sister
was a whore.30
So, why the sudden obsession with sexual propriety It doesn't
seem to be there in the Welsh or Irish material. There, the greatest
humiliation was to see your sister or daughter reduced to scrubbing
someone else's laundry. What is it, then, about the rise of money and
markets that cause so many men to become so uneasy about sex31
This is a difficult question, but at the very least, one can imagine
how the transition from a human economy to a commercial one might
cause certain moral dilemmas. What happens, for instance, when the
same money once used to arrange marriages and settle affairs of honor
can also be used to pay for the services of prostitutes
As we'll see, there is reason to believe that it is in such moral
crises that we can find the origin not only of our current conceptions
of honor, but of patriarchy itself. This is true, at least, if we define
"patriarchy" in its more specific Biblical sense: the rule of fathers, with
all the familiar images of stern bearded men in robes, keeping a close
eye over their sequestered wives and daughters, even as their children
kept a close eye over their flocks and herds, familiar from the book
of Genesis.32 Readers of the Bible had always assumed that there was
something primordial in all this; that this was simply the way desert
people, and thus the earliest inhabitants of the Near East, had always
behaved. This was why the translation of Sumerian, in the first half of
the twentieth century, came as something of a shock.