Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

THE AXIAL AGE 241
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 tributepaying
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