Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

62 DEBT
capacity to measure the exact value of a two-year-old pregnant sow.
What's more, the levying of penalties must have constantly required
the calculation of equivalences. Say the fine is in marten pelts but the
culprit's clan doesn't have any martens. How many squirrel skins will
do Or pieces of silver jewelry Such problems must have come up all
the time and led to at least a rough-and-ready set of rules of thumb
over what sorts of valuable were equivalent to others. This would
help explain why, for instance, medieval Welsh law codes can contain
detailed breakdowns not only of the value of different ages and conditions
of milk cow, but of the monetary value of every object likely to
be found in an ordinary homestead, down to the cost of each piece of
timber-despite the fact that there seems no reason to believe that most
such items could even be purchased on the open market at the time.45
I I I I I
There is something very compelling in all this. For one thing, the premise
makes a great deal of intuitive sense. After all, we do owe everything
we are to others. This is simply true. The language we speak and
even think in, our habits and opinions, the kind of food we like to eat,
the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flush, even
the style in which we carry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion
against social conventions-all of this, we learned from other people,
most of them long dead. If we were to imagine what we owe them as
a debt, it could only be infinite. The question is: Does it really make
sense to think of this as a debt After all, a debt is by definition something
that we could at least imagine paying back. It is strange enough
to wish to be square with one's parents-it rather implies that one does
not wish to think of them as parents any more. Would we really want
to be square with all humanity What would that even mean And is
this desire really a fundamental feature of all human thought
Another way to put this would be: Are primordial-debt theorists
describing a myth, have they discovered a profound truth of the human
condition that has always existed in all societies, and is it simply
spelled out particularly clearly in certain ancient texts from India-or
are they inventing a myth of their own
Clearly it must be the latter. They are inventing a myth.
The choice of the Vedic material is · significant. The fact is, we
know almost nothing about the people who composed these texts and
little about the society that created them.46 We don't even know if