Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

PRIMORDIAL DEBTS 67
pay a debt to something so diffuse Or, perhaps more to the point, who
exactly can claim the authority to tell us how we can repay it, and on
what grounds
If we frame the problem that way, the authors of the Brahmanas
are offering a quite sophisticated reflection on a moral question that no
one has really ever been able to answer any better before or since. As I
say, we can't know much about the conditions under which those texts
were composed, but such evidence as we do have suggests that the
crucial documents date from sometime between soo and 400 Be-that
is, roughly the time of Socrates-which in India appears to have been
just around the time that a commercial economy, and institutions like
coined money and interest-bearing loans were beginning to become
features of everyday life. The intellectual classes of the time were,
much as they were in Greece and China, grappling with the implications.
In their case, this meant asking: What does it mean to imagine
our responsibilities as debts To whom do we owe our existence
It's significant that their answer did not make any mention either
of "society" or states (though certainly kings and governments certainly
existed in early India). Instead, they fixed on debts to gods, to sages, to
fathers, and to "men." It wouldn't be at all difficult to translate their
formulation into more contemporary language. We could put it this
way. We owe our existence above all:
•
To the universe, cosmic forces, as we would put it now, to Nature.
The ground of our existence. To be repaid through ritual: ritual being
an act of respect and recognition to all that beside which we are
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•
To those who have created the knowledge and cultural accomplishments
that we value most; that give our existence its form, its
meaning, but also its shape. Here we would include not only the
philosophers and scientists who created our intellectual tradition
but everyone from William Shakespeare to that long-since-forgotten
woman, somewhere in the Middle East, who created leavened bread.
We repay them by becoming learned ourselves and contributing to
human knowledge and human culture.
•
To our parents, and their parents-our ancestors. We repay them by
becoming ancest.ors.
•
To humanity as a whole. We repay them by generosity to strangers,
by maintaining that basic communistic ground of sociality that
makes human relations, and hence life, possible.