Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

302 DEBT
the left and right (sometimes, too, called "male" and "female") halves
of a tally.
I I I I I
A tally does away with the need for witnesses; if the two surfaces agree,
then everyone knows that the agreement between the contracting parties
exists as well. This is why Aristotle saw it as a fit metaphor for
words: word A corresponds to concept B because there is a tacit agreement
that we shall act as if it does. The striking thing about tallies is
that even though they might begin as simple tokens of friendship and
solidarity, in almost all the later examples, what the two parties actually
agree to create is a relation of inequality: of debt, obligation, subordination
to another's orders. This is in turn what makes it possible
to use the metaphor for the relation between the material world and
that more powerful world that ultimately gives it meaning. The two
sides are the same. Yet what they create is absolute difference. Hence
for a Medieval Christian mystic, as for Medieval Chinese magicians,
symbols could be literal fragments of heaven-even if for the first, they
provided a language whereby one could have some understanding of
beings one could not possibly interact with; while for the second, they
provided a way of interacting, even making practical arrangements,
with beings whose language one could not possibly understand.
On one level, this is just another version of the dilemmas that
always arise when we try to reimagine the world through debt-that
peculiar agreement between two equals that they shall no longer be
equals, until such time as they become equals once again. Still, the
problem took on a peculiar piquancy in the Middle Ages, when the
economy became, as it were, spiritualized. As gold and silver migrated
to holy places, ordinary transactions everywhere came to be carried out
primarily through credit. Inevitably, arguments about wealth and markets
became arguments about debt and morality, and arguments about
debt and morality became arguments about the nature of our place in
the universe. As we've seen, the solutions varied considerably. Europe
and India saw a return to hierarchy: society became a ranked order
of Priests, Warriors, Merchants, and Farmers (or in Christendom, just
Priests, Warriors, and Farmers). Debts between the orders were considered
threatening because they implied the potential of equality, and
they often led to outright violence. In China, in contrast, the principle
of debt often became the governing principle of the cosmos: karmic
debts, milk-debts, debt contracts between human beings and celestial
powers. From the point of view of the authorities, all these led to