Review of Graeber: Part I (Greiner 2015)

‘Debt’ as Social Value and Moral Force: An Analysis of Graeber

The social arrangements by which humans organize their lives require common codes—such as language and law—and mechanisms for the preservation of culture and the maintenance of order.  According to David Graeber, the concept of debt as a matter of social morality, by no means limited to the sphere of economics, has for the past 5,000 years served such an organizing function for most societies.  In Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011; 2014), Graeber presents a sweeping ethno-historical account of the ways in which ‘debt’ has been culturally encoded and socially constructed, that is to say, normalized, as one of the primary means of ordering social relations and the very meaning of morality.  Debt becomes, to borrow a term from Althusser, a kind of ideological state apparatus.  Debt sets the terms and conditions for not only economics but ‘exchange’ at every level of human interaction and sociality.  Debt is, in Graeber’s account, a kind of zero-sum barometer by which all of human social life and cultural existence is measured, counted, and conducted in every sense of the terms.  The language and logic of debt set the standards for the ordering and enforcement of social, political, economic, and cultural organization.  Debt is seen as the logic of social life—period.

Far from a product of amicable cultural consensus, this logic of debt as the main ordering apparatus for the whole of socioeconomic and political life is in Graeber’s book a matter of systematic, achieved social violence.  That is to say, it is by violence and the ongoing and pervasive threat of violence that the apparatus of debt as an ordering force maintains a stranglehold on the rights and dignity of all of humankind.  This is not for Graeber hyperbole: The logic of debt maintains absolute rule by violence and force at every level of social organization—through various forms and formations of slavery, conquest, and war.

This essay examines some of Graeber’s key claims in detail and it especially explores the ways in which a cultural logic of debt maintained by structures of language and morality are in Graeber’s account rendered at once problematic and in fact the source of much social unrest and disorder.  Graeber’s intellectual project depends on a certain conception of violence and power in sustaining systems of subjugation in terms of debt.  Language, morality, and questions of sociality and social contract figure heavily in this account.

The Language of Debt

Language, literally and in almost every other sense, sets the terms and conditions for social interaction and cultural exchange.  Human society is unimaginable without a clear and mutually intelligible means for exchanging ideas and maintaining relationships whether economic or interpersonal.  From this fact it follows that much of the value that a society places on certain activities and the meaning it ascribes to various types and forms of exchange can be seen to be reflected in language use, even if not especially at the basic level of everyday, ‘ordinary’, communication.  Graeber’s book is very much informed by this phenomenological and materialist understanding of language.  Because language is the means of the transmission of cultural values, Graeber argues that it is essential to look at debt primarily as a matter of language, and moreover in terms of its historical use and encoding over time.  Most people, Graeber argues, have a rather ill-defined sense of what debt in fact actually is, what debt is, and what is means to exist in a state and condition of ‘debt’:

The very fact that we don’t know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power.  If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong. (5)

And the victim, as Graeber’s account makes clear, is more often than not a person who is in some way economically disempowered (e.g., racial or ethnic minorities, women, slaves, etc.) and thus placed on unequal footing in terms of any business arrangement.  For this reason, a considerable portion of Graeber’s analysis deals directly with matters of language—the social construction of debt as a legitimating moral force, a force that lends credence to the notion that all of human economy is a matter of calculation and monetary exchange.  Graeber’s book is in many fundamental ways an elucidation of the concept of debt as a cultural imaginary, a sociohistorical analysis of the construction of the term in the ordering of human affairs.  A debt according to such logic is a matter for marketplace values and precisely quantified accounts.  Human economies become transformed into an economy of the market.  Under social conditions structured and informed by marketplace logic, the primary language becomes not so much the language of human relations but the “language of the business deal” Graeber 2014:13).  Such language leads to all manner of problems in the moral arena.

This, for Graeber, is the central question in the book: “What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal?  What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts?” (13)  Morality is for Graeber the central matter in understanding human constructions of debt as the force of economic and social organization.  It is not so much the matter of economics as such that Graeber finds problematic.  Economics is a necessary and vital part of any ordered (as opposed to chaotic) human society.  Even capitalism has its redeeming qualities in the critique advanced in the book.  What Graeber is taking issue with is the reduction of all of human social life to a matter of money, “money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene” (14).  It is not so much money as such that is in Graeber’s view the source of all evil, but rather the reduction of all basic human affairs and social relations to a question of currency values and quantifiable exchange, established by rules and enforced by violence.  Graeber sees a direct link between violence and quantification and he advances this link as the “source of the moral confusion that seems to float around everything surrounding the topic of debt” (14).  Graeber’s analysis of debt is concerned at every level with the matter of morality and why our understanding, or misunderstanding, of the nature of debt and its place in human relations is responsible for so much if not all of the disarray and upheaval that characterizes the state of life now and over the course of the past 5,000 years.  

Marketplace Morality

Graeber’s project, then, is really at root an ethical project.  Graeber writes as an anthropologist and as an historian.  It is not difficult to understand that Graeber’s frame of analysis is concerned with the structures of human economies and the conditions for moral relations, what Graeber and other anthropologists figure in terms of mutuality and sociality.  Chapter five is a core chapter that sets forth Graeber’s moral argument and ties it back to the questions of language and the cultural encoding of debt as an absolute value and ordering mechanism in human relations.  “To tell the history of debt, then,” Graeber explains, “is also necessarily to reconstruct how the language of the marketplace has come to pervade every aspect of human life—even to provide the terminology for the moral and religious voices raised against it” (Graeber 2014:89).  After delineating three systems or modalities of “moral accounting” (communism, exchange, and hierarchy), and the ways in which people order their economic relations differently according to the logic inherent to each modality, Graeber arrives at the core of his analysis which is a definition of debt.  Debt, Graeber writes:

is a very specific thing and it arises from very specific situations.  It first requires a relationship between two people who do not consider each other fundamentally different sorts of being, who are at least potential equals, who are equals in those ways that are really important, and who are not currently in a state of equality—but for whom there is some way to set matters straight. (120)

Key to this description of debt is its conditional nature and the possibility of settling an account, of balancing an otherwise unequal relationship between two or more people.  It is not so much in Graeber’s account that a debt is something that can or should be simply quantified and precisely calculated and that one a debtor should repay a creditor exactly a sum that is owed.  Such logic, again, is the language of the “business deal.”  What makes a debt a divisive and potentially destructive and morally corrosive arrangement is the way in which a debt can be not just maintained but enforced, especially through slavery, conquest, and war.  Debt and obligation are for Graeber two different matters, the first a matter of social violence and the other a potentially productive force in the advancement of sociality and good moral relations.  A society based on debt, as Graeber’s book argues, is a society predicated on the logic of calculation, an all but exclusively impersonal exchange of credits and debits in the interest of honoring that which one owes to another, not so much as a matter of morality and maintaining good relations as a matter of paying that which is due, or paying with one’s life (social violence and social death in one form or another).

So intrinsically interwoven is the language of debt with the logic of our lives that, in Graeber’s view, it has become almost impossible for people to imagine a society based on any other terms.  Graeber argues that the only way to regain a sense of social control and indeed sanity in terms of human relations is to begin to think of other ways of living and connecting to structures and networks of exchange that can foster more balanced and equal partnerships in the interest of individual satisfaction and the integrity of the greater good.  Is his vision for a more human economy perhaps a touch idealistic, even utopian?  Perhaps.  Leaving aside the question of whether idealism or utopian visions are by nature thoughts best forgotten or disregarded as ridiculous, or at best just not worth thinking too seriously about, I would like to observe that Graeber’s book does add value to the matter of advancing serious critical thought about the nature of economics and the cultural force that mediates this reality.  There is certainly nothing absolute about economic orders and it is always possible for humans to decide to arrange their lives and societies differently as interests change and environmental circumstances necessitate intelligent adaptations.

I do not think it is at all reasonable to suppose that any society now or possible world in the future can ever hope to do without debt—or without economics, for that matter.  Who can say what the future might hold for money?  Perhaps one day, on this world or another, humans will manage to do without it.  At this point, it is well to consider seriously what the matter of debt means for humans as a society and as a species that depends on mutual exchange in the interest of personal satisfaction and the maintenance of a greater good—in other words, a commons, however one wishes to conceive the term.  If a debt is truly the “perversion of a promise,” then perhaps the more healthy world of the future that any reasonable human could hope to achieve is one where every person does the best that he or she can, and systematic slavery on the basis of unequal exchange becomes a matter for the history books.  Who knows what kind of world might be written about by historians and anthropologists in the next 5,000 years?  With any luck, it will be a world a little less obsessed with accounts and a little more focused on doing one’s best for the greater good.

Academic politics and savage minds

Have learned of recent scandals that have called attention to the corruption and petty politics that have infected academic anthropology (and further undermined its already faltering credibility). Apparently, self-proclaimed anarchist and activist David Graeber (author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years among other books) has pushed a bit too hard to have colleagues removed with whom he disagrees politically. See the accounting of this in:

How David Graeber Cancelled a Colleague
by Claire Lehmann

https://quillette.com/2019/09/09/the-anarchist-and-the-anthropology-journal/

The scandal centers on the open-access journal HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau

Apparently, the journal has been undergoing some editorial and structural changes, changes which have upset David Graeber and respecting which Graeber has made cause to fabricate all kinds of allegations to destroy the journal's founder's reputation and professional standing. (Graeber, let it be said, knows quite a bit about the old "tit-for-tat" in economic and social relations: i.e., the art, let's say, of paying "debts." He, quite literally, wrote a book on the topic.)

This is all very unfortunate, not least because David Graeber has actually proven himself quite capable of producing meaningful and provocative historical and anthropological analysis. Perhaps he might think about redirecting his energies toward the more profitable ends of legitimate scholarship. Just a thought.

Will return to this matter soon with more detailed commentary. This kind of character assassination is the new norm and its effects on scholarship and scientific credibility have been quite deleterious. It really is a very serious problem.

Has been so for much longer than I had been aware. Its effects are chilling and very reminiscent of Soviet purges in the 1930s and 40s. One does begin to wonder just how bad things might get. Answer: very bad, almost always worse.

To be continued...

Stephen Jay Gould on Humility in Scientific Discovery

Thought for Today (Via Wordsmith):

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. -Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, biologist, author (10 Sep 1941-2002)

A very fine thought for today from Stephen Jay Gould.

Carl Sagan often said very much the same thing.

Any true scientist admits as much eventually.

The Religious Impulse and the Origins of Language

The religious impulse has been with man since at least the beginnings of language. Monotheistic conceptions of the sacred and divine have come to dominate humanity's consciousness and practices at large. Prior to monotheistic and particularly Judeo-Christian hegemony, the diverse cultures and peoples of the human race acknowledged many gods and goddesses and other beings of supernatural power. This is not a revelation, of course, but I think it is not as commonly known or understood as many imagine.

For the overwhelming majority of the history of religion, human conceptions of the sacred have been by all accounts shamanistic, animistic, nature-centered, polytheistic, pantheistic, and quite frankly, in a word, magical. One might look to the ancient Celts, the Germanic and Norse pagans, the Sumerians, the Slavs, or any number of indigenous peoples from the Amazonian rainforest to the wide Siberian tundra--all such peoples venerated nature as a living creative force and all measured their being in relation to the cosmos. The monotheistic notion that sets a single and all-powerful (almost invariably male) God at the crown and source of creation--this was alien to the understanding of most of the peoples on the planet for literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years. To believe their worldview and cosmology to be the naive and misguided product of savage ignorance or pagan superstition was as inconceivable to their minds as the sense and reality of their views have come to be seen by the majority of humans who walk in the world today.

To see this proven relativity of religious conceptions among the diverse peoples of the world both in the current and ancient worlds is the privilege of an anthropologically and historically trained mind. There is in fact nothing at first glance obvious about this relativity of religious perspective. For the mind and view of the monotheistic believer, any alternative religion must seem not only strange and other but wrong and in need of rectification and conversion. Indeed, it is due to the fervent missionary activities of the past two thousand years that such pre-Christian pagan and magical worldviews have been suppressed and silenced when not outright destroyed. Much of what has survived of the worldview and cosmology of the ancient, pre-Christian world has come to us through oral tradition and what scholars have come to call "folklore." In addition, it should be noted that a significant part of this cultural recovery process has the painstaking work of scholars and particularly philologists and literary historians to thank for it.[1] Much as is the case in the matter of anthropologists who have worked to "salvage" what they could of the dying languages and folkways of the Native Americans (and other aboriginal and First-Nations peoples), so too in the realm of folkloric research has much of what otherwise would surely have disappeared forever been preserved and passed on in some (albeit less than culturally pure) capacity. Storytelling traditions, too, have played their part in keeping some meaningful sense of the ancient worldviews, religions, and cosmological conceptions alive.

The origin of language is thus intimately and inextricably tied to the origin of religion, and to any and all conceptions of the sacred and divine. This, in short, is very largely why storytelling is of such ancient and vital and perennial importance, particularly at the level of myth and ritual, which are the most ancient and universal origins for any storytelling tradition proper. Storytelling and religious ritual are and have always been part and parcel of the human experience, and arguably the most sacred and vital of human symbolic expression.

Notes

[1] It is also very much the case that so much of the knowledge that has been preserved over the past two thousand years, both literate and oral traditions, has the painstaking work of scribes and monks, a great many Catholic, to thank for it. The history of religion, and all history, is by no means a simple or uncomplicated, one-dimensional matter. Politics is one thing, scholarship is always tuned to other purposes, particularly when the prime motivation is the search for understanding and the preservation of knowledge, wheresoever discovered.

The Writer's Call and Covenant

A writer, if he has anything of true value to communicate, will write not so much from an act of personal choice (though it is, certainly, a choice). He will write because he must, because he observes and honors a calling.

The writer's calling is nothing less than a covenant of the soul. This is not hyperbole or self-aggrandizement; it is a vital existential and cosmic truth. To ignore the calling or to refuse the charge that is placed upon the writer is simply at the point of true recognition an impossibility. The writer must write. He must find a way to communicate the vision and understanding of the life he has known, the insight earned and entrusted to him. For writing, as any vocation, is indeed a truth and a trust. Perhaps he will speak to the whole of humanity. Perhaps he will speak to an audience of few or of one. But if he is true to his vision and vocation, he will take up the mantle and write.

To write is not simply to exercise the crafting of words (however rhetorically or artistically practiced). Less so is it pure "self-expression." To write, as a writer, is to give truth to the voice and the vision of the soul. So it is with painting. So it is with music. So it is with dance. Writing is a matter of necessity. It is a creative act of acceptance and surrender. It is not conceived in the womb of contingency, governed by the tides of chance.

The recognition of the writer's call and covenant--this, and this alone, is the moment of the birth of the word. The rest is revision, a fine-tuning of the music first heard in the depths of the stillness of the soul.

The Unbearable Lightness of Awkward Analogies

I don't know if I'm to make this a regular thing, but there is another thought posted at Wordsmith.org to which I thought I might attempt a sensible contribution. Today there is a thought from Roger Ebert, who, though presumably valiant in intention, draws an at least inaccurate moral equivalence between a justification for capital punishment and acceptance of the Holocaust. I think he goes a step too far. I explain why below.

Re: A Thought for Today, 6/18/19 (Wordsmith.org)

"The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?" -Roger Ebert, film-critic (18 Jun 1942-2013)

Regardless of the degree to which "so many Europeans" were or were not okay with the Holocaust (a debatable point), an absolutely critical distinction to be drawn between capital punishment (as a matter of law and principle) and the state-sanctioned, systematic extermination of the Jewish people (as a total act of genocide) is that in the former case there is the understanding of a crime committed by an individual (presuming of course actual guilt), the retribution for which is execution. In the case of the Holocaust, the "crime" so regarded was an "infection" of the gene pool and body politic by those of Hebrew extraction and Judaic faith. Humanity at large has rightly come to see the Holocaust for the inhuman and insane horror that it was. A crime against humanity, and of the highest and sickest order, to be sure; but it was an organized genocide born in hate and fear and advanced by a propagandistically conditioned and socially anchored ethos (not simply by the authoritarian order of a thoroughly depraved man, i.e. Hitler).

Capital punishment, whatever one's position on this very complex moral issue, would not in any responsible evaluation be so analogously (and causally) linked to the genocide of the Holocaust. To justify capital punishment, whether as a general principle or restricted to a specific case, is by no means to breach the slippery slope toward Auschwitz and Dachau. "Halfway there," the film critic says. I think we are rather in a different moral universe--at least a different country of concern. (This itself being an unsettling analogy or awkward link in the larger semantic chain.)

Human Cultural Diversity and the Vision of the "World Community"

Re: A Thought for Today, 6/17/19 (wordsmith.org):

The ultimate sense of security will be when we come to recognize that we are all part of one human race. Our primary allegiance is to the human race and not to one particular color or border. I think the sooner we renounce the sanctity of these many identities and try to identify ourselves with the human race the sooner we will get a better world and a safer world. -Mohamed ElBaradei, diplomat, Nobel laureate (b. 17 Jun 1942)

A noble thought. The thing is, humans are cultural beings. Tribal identity is woven into the core of the DNA. Tribal bonds as such are not destructive nor should they be entirely discouraged in the name of some transnational, supra-human identity. The notion that, deep down, "we are all one" may sound nice and foster warm and fuzzy feelings, but in point of fact we are not all one: there is much diversity in terms of culture and language and worldview, and despite many of the popular ideas about human origins, the fact is that there is much diversity at the genetic level as well.

"Ethnic diversity" is not an empty phrase, and "culture" is infinitely more than a convenient social construct. Any real and meaningful effort to promote a unifying vision around which to structure human action will need to take much more seriously into account the anthropological questions, which have everything to do with cultural identity, language, tradition, and worldview. It will do no humanist vision any favors to advocate that "we renounce the sanctity of these many identities." These many identities have been forged and fostered over thousands if not millions of years. All people who identify with a certain cultural or tribal identity are not simply prepared to "renounce" that identity in favor of some abstract affiliation that we call "the human race." What, really, is all that to be taken to mean, anyway? I am not so sure that many who advocate this have any clear or definite idea in mind. It is all well to seek to find commonalities and points of connection, and I am all for cross-cultural human cooperation in the interest of productive and peaceful outcomes. I am less than confident that such purposes can be realized by minimizing cultural differences or renouncing identities that have been in gestation since humans first learned to come together in the first place (which, again, had everything to do with cultural bonds, language, religion, and all the rest of it).

What's the solution, then? I think the start of a solution is to understand the problem of human conflict as a fundamentally anthropological problem, at the core of which remains the matter of culture. Margaret Mead has addressed this matter to some productive purpose throughout her writings and in clear, digestible summary in her essay on 'World Culture' (1947). [The essay is included in Anthropology: A Human Science. Selected Papers 1939-1960, pp. 134-45.] Mead in her summary observes the following:

"In summary it may be said that world community seems more likely to be attained by working toward certain over-all abstract and inclusive values, within which the different people of the world, who now see one another as separate, competitive, or unrelated, will be able to feel themselves a part, the cultures of each regularly related to the whole to which all give allegiance in different ways congruent with their own cultural values. Thus we would be working toward the type of multi-dimensional world culture, within which there would be interdependence of diverse values rather than a world in which any one interest or function so dominated the others that single value scales, competition, and destruction were the concomitants." (Mead 1964: 144.)

Key to Mead's analysis here is the notion of a "multi-dimensional world culture," that is, one in which the diversity and plurality of cultures is preserved though participatorily structured toward a common culture and a common goal. Such a common culture we can call "the human race," or something more semantically refined, but the common goal has got to be something higher and more inspiring than the zero-sum game of material acquisition and the maximization of all possible sources of wealth. Yes, economic vitality is and always has been crucial to survival. It is also the case that sustainability and ecological integrity are vital, for the survival of all life on any planet. The humans on planet Earth, by any reasonably honest assessment, face many points of needed improvements in all these areas of interest. An ecological ethic will of necessity guide future human actions and all cultural configurations. Failing this, all notions of "humanity" will be rendered null and void and tragically absurd.

Humans need now more than ever new visions for their humanity and place on the planet, not vague notions about how they are all "connected" or "related." What kinds of models can inspire the forces of action and the change of vision that will be needed? The kinds of models that place "culture" in the foreground, not those that try to minimize its importance or relegate its value to the dustbin of history. Culture has always united human action (for better or worse). At this most critical evolutionary juncture, culture and culture reenvisioned alone will prove the species' salvation. Or its doom.

Part of the reason for recognizing the importance of cultural diversity (rather than renouncing all traditional tribal allegiances and identities) is that there is much that many cultures, and many all but unknown, or little known, can potentially contribute toward the fostering of the environmental ethic and the expansion of vision that alone will ensure our survival as a species and connect us all to a higher and more inclusive picture of humanity. Without their critical cultural knowledge, to say nothing of their natural ability to make others reflect relatively on the merits of their own, we are left with singleminded conceptions for the structuring of human interests and for moving the species forward (and not always in the most profitable, or sanest, of directions). This 'totalizing' impulse, to consume and subsume, has resulted in no shortage of human conflict and suffering. One is right to be wary of all calls, however grand, for a 'unification' of all cultures and ways of living. Few proposals have promised so much good yet yielded so much destruction to cultures in the name of "a common humanity."

It is a very good and even necessary thing that other cultures exist, that other thought patterns and concepts of living obtain, and remain. And every one of them has much indeed to teach and learn from one another about the ways to live and think and see, to express and experience their humanity. To get us all to "a better world and a safer world," we might start by learning a bit more about that larger world, the world that exists quite independently from our own limited view of it.