Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

PRIMORDIAL DEBTS 57
Sacrifice (and these early commentators were themselves sacrificial
priests) is thus called "tribute paid to Death." Or such was the manner
of speaking. In reality, as the priests knew better than anyone, sacrifice
was directed to all the gods, not just Death-Death was just the intermediary.
Framing things this way, though, did immediately raise the
one problem that always comes up, whenever anyone conceives human
life through such an idiom. If our lives are on loan, who would actually
wish to repay such a debt To live in debt is to be guilty, incomplete.
But completion can only mean annihilation. In this way, the "tribute"
of sacrifice could be seen as a kind of interest payment, with the life
of the animal substituting temporarily for what's really owed, which is
ourselves-a mere postponement of the inevitable.34
Different commentators proposed different ways out of the dilemma.
Some ambitious Brahmins began telling their clients that sacrificial
ritual, if done correctly, promised a way to break out of the human
condition entirely and achieve eternity (since, in the face of eternity, all
debts become meaningless.)35 Another way was to broaden the notion
of debt, so that all social responsibilities become debts of one sort or
another. Thus two famous passages in the Brahmanas insist that we
are born as a debt not just to the gods, to be repaid in sacrifice, but
also to the Sages who created the Vedic learning to begin with, which
we must repay through study; to our ancestors ("the Fathers"), who
we must repay by having children; and finally, "to men"-apparently
meaning humanity as a whole, to be repaid by offering hospitality to
strangers.36 Anyone, then, who lives a proper life is constantly paying
back existential debts of one sort or another; but at the same time, as
the notion of debt slides back into a simple sense of social obligation,
it becomes something far less terrifying than the sense that one's very
existence is a loan taken against Death.37 Not least because social obligations
always cut both ways. Especially since, once one has oneself
fathered children, one is just as much a debtor as a creditor.
What primordial-debt theorists have done is to propose that the
ideas encoded in these Vedic texts are not peculiar to a certain intellectual
tradition of early Iron Age ritual specialists in the Ganges valley,
but that they are essential to the very nature and history of human
thought. Consider for example this statement, from an essay by French
economist Bruno Theret with the uninspiring title "The Socio-Cultural
Dimensions of the Currency: Implications for the Transition to the
Euro," published in the Journal of Consumer Policy in 1999:
At the origin of money we have a "relation of representation"
of death as an invisible world, before and beyond life--a