Niall Ferguson is still a bigoted, pseudo-intellectual windbag

Those of us who hoped my intense scolding of Niall Ferguson last year had a suitably improving and chastening effect were no doubt disappointed this past weekend by the news that the Not-So-Good Professor has made some homophobic public remarks about John Maynard Keynes. At the annual Altegris Conference, a forum with several hundred financiers and financial counselors – presumably well-to-do, presumably not terribly liberal – Niall-o took Keynes's famous remark “In the long run we are all dead” to mean that the economist was uninterested in the fate of posterity, and made the off-the-cuff remark that of course one would not have expected a gay man without children to be concerned with the long term. In the same talk, Ferguson further intimated that Keynes was a swishy girly-man by remarking that Keynes and his wife preferred discussing poetry to having sex. Several people at the forum apparently took sufficient offense with Ferg's remarks to leak them to the press, and Senor Bonehead, realizing that there might be wealthy and powerful people in the world who were also gay, quickly apologized.

This doesn't sound like the kind of episode on which one ought to dwell, except that the Sexiest Scotsman's remarks are typical of the kind of carelessness and general intellectual slovenliness that characterizes his recent articles and his recent book, Civilization (which, my readers will recall, I reviewed at some length). Ferguson deliberately took Keynes's famous quote out of context to imply that Keynes was uninterested in the long-term impact of his fiscal policies (e.g. running a deficit to fight unemployment). As Paul Krugman, one of the leading neo-Keynesians, recently observed, what Keynes actually said was: “This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.” Keynes's point, or one of his points, was that simply waiting for a depressed economy to regain its pre-depression equilibrium was a rotten policy for the immediate term, and that economists needed also to focus on relief in the short term if they wanted to have any useful impact on government policy. To put it another way: it may be irresponsible for governments to saddle young people with heavy long-term public debts, but it is even more irresponsible to saddle them with years of unemployment – and unpayable student-loan debts – that permanently depress their earnings (and the government's future income-tax revenues) in the same term. In his apology, Ferguson did not suggest that he understood what Keynes was actually trying to say.

 

Niall-o also acknowledged in his apology that Keynes, despite his homosexuality, was also married and may have been trying to have children (his wife had a miscarriage), so his observations about Keynes's childlessness were somewhat inaccurate. I think this is rather beside the point, as sexual orientation, child-rearing, and other aspects of one's personal life have little impact on the quality of one's ideas, unless one's ideas primarily relate to sexual orientation, . Karl Marx had a fairly untidy personal life, but this by itself did not affect his ideas about economics and history. Hannah Arendt's youthful affair de coeur with Martin Heidegger may be interesting of itself, but I haven't seen a convincing explanation of how it shaped her powerful (if rather turgidly expressed) liberal ideology. Ferg, however, finds it difficult to acknowledge this, because like many other modern conservatives he follows Paul Johnson's assumption that an intellectual's personal life necessarily shapes his or her ideas.  (Johnson himself was, as Christopher Hitchens discovered in the 1990s, a philanderer and afficionado of spanking, but this is only relevant when one is considering that he criticized Rousseau for having the same mild fetish, and presented himself to both British and American conservatives as a firm opponent of adultery.)

Probably Ferg would have been better off if he had stuck to the mild defense of Keynes he made in Chapter 5 of Civilization, but I suspect he felt this would not have made him popular with a fiscally conservative audience, and so decided to take a few cheap (and dimwitted) shots in order to earn a few cheap laughs. This is one other besetting sin of the Sexiest Scotsman: a pathological need for public approval, even if one can only extract it from a particular source by lawsuit.  One might almost feel sorry for Ferguson, except that there are other people - several billion of them, in fact - far more worthy of our concern and consideration.

Through the Eighteenth-Century Midwest with This Guy Named Sabrevois, Part Five

(For the previous entry in this series, see here.)

Sabrevois concludes his jaunt around the Great Lakes with a description of the Maumee River, which he follows to its headwaters at Kekionga and then across that portage to the Wabash. The Maumee was quite shallow, which may explain why it was an expensive water transport route in the early modern era, and it presented “continuous marshes” for the first 20 or 30 miles upstream from Lake Erie. It was, however, richly populated with waterfowl, so much so that in the spring “one cannot sleep on account of the noise made by their cries” (p. 375). Halfway up the river, 60 or 70 miles from its mouth, Sabrevois points out The Glaize, “the place of clay,” where bison used the clay banks as a wallow. 75 years later the Northwest Indian confederacy would build its settlements, plant its crops, and hold its meetings at this site; its occupation by Anthony Wayne (1794) dealt the confederation a heavy blow.

At the head of the Maumee River, 60 leagues (approximately 120 miles) from Lake Erie, was the town of the Miamis, the principal members of the Miami confederacy. Sabrevois puts their population at “400 men,” which, assuming he means “fighting men,” translates to a total population (including old men, women, and children) of 1,600 – 2,000. Across a three-league portage from the Maumee flowed the headwaters of the Wabash River, which Sabrevois here confuses with the Ohio. This is understandable if one knows that colonial French cartographers referred to the lower Ohio River as the Wabash. On the actual Wabash River resided the Weas, who by Sabrevois's reckoning were the larger part of the Miami confederacy: 1,000 – 1,200 men, or 4,000 – 6,000 people overall, residing in five towns (Ouiatenon, Peticotia, Les Gros, Peangnichia, and one other). He does not mention that the Weas and Miamis were offshoots of the neighboring Illini, or that by 1718 they outnumbered their “elder” brethren to the west.

Sabrevois was perhaps tiring by this point in his memoir, because his descriptions of the Miamis' and Weas' lifeways are repetitive and reminiscent of his descriptions of other Lakes Indians. Both peoples raised corn and other crops, both adorned themselves with vermillion, both preoccupied themselves with “gaming and dancing” (375). In both nations women wore ample clothing and men very little - presumably Sabrevois refers to summer attire. Regarding the Miamis, Sabrevois adds that the men wore many tattoos, that men's and women's garments were principally of deerskins rather than cloth, and that men punished adultery by cutting off their wives' noses. The author notes that only the Miamis had this punishment for adultery, and only applied it to women, though we may note that the Chickasaws had a similar practice by the 1760s – perhaps Chickasaw men borrowed it from their Miami allies? Sabrevois, who is uninterested in gendered violence, presumably includes this detail to let travelers know when they are in Miami communities rather than Illini or Wea ones. Of the Weas, the lieutenant says that their fields were very extensive and that one of their towns had a fortified enclosure with a very clean interior, covered in a layer of sand “like the Tuileries” (376).

Sabrevois's choice of ethnological details helps explain the purposes this memoir was to serve. The lieutenant was writing not as an ethnographer but as an imperial functionary, and he intended, I think, for his document to be used by other French colonists, especially traders and officials. In discussing various Indian nations he provides details of clothing, tattoos, and games not to provide local color, but to help French travelers distinguish between Indian nations whose people physically resembled one another and often spoke similar languages. Such distinctions were important for Europeans who needed to know whether or not the people they were visiting were French allies. Sabrevois counts the male population of each Indian nation as a kind of military inventory, to let French officials know how many gunmen they could potentially raise if those nations became wartime allies. Sabrevois's interest in Indian subsistence and food supplies, finally, was not intended as a reflection on Native Americans' civility, but rather an indication of how easily various communities could feed French travelers. In sum, his memoir is an instrument of empire: a device allowing officials and traders to operate more freely in territory claimed by the French monarchy, describing waterways and available food supplies (both domesticated and wild), identifying distinctions between different Indian nations with whom one might wish to trade (or whom one should avoid), and counting Native American men who might rally to the French colors in wartime.

Such is the case with nearly all historical documents; the purpose for which they were written is vastly different from the purposes to which the historian wishes to put them. Such is arguably the case with all writing: the author cannot know or control his or her readers' interaction with their finished work. Would Jacques-Charles Sabrevois have been amused, puzzled, or horrified by the uses to which later ethnohistorians have put his memoir? And does it really matter?

Through the 18th-Century Midwest with Mister Sabrevois, Part Four

(For the previous post in this series, see here.)

The Illini are a very large collegiate drinking team that occasionally watches team sports and goes to a few classes.  They derive their name from the Illinois or Illiniwek Indians, who in the 17th century were one of the largest Native confederations in the Great Lakes region.  They were still a powerful nation in 1718 when Sabrevois wrote his survey of midwestern Indians, and thus he devotes several pages of his memoir to them and to their kinsmen, the Miamis (of whom more in the next and last post of this series).  

Sabrevois takes us southward along the west bank of Lake Michigan, passing the Mascouten and Kickapoo towns "on the bank of a river whose name I have forgotten" (I assume it's the Milwaukee), en route to the Saint Joseph River.  The lieutenant mentions in passing that the Mascoutens' and Kickapoos' customs are similar to the Mesquakies - not surprisingly, they were often military allies of the Fox Indians – though he adds that they still use bows and arrows to hunt and that some of their hunters can "run down the stag afoot" (372).  Arriving at the Saint Joseph River, which he claims was abandoned by its Indian inhabitants during the Fox War – only temporarily, if so – he notes the valley's excellent soil, abundant wild birds, and wild grapes.  "It is the best region in all that country." (373)  Sabrevois does not suggest that the French colonize the region, instead advising his superiors to induce the Miamis to return there.


Sabrevois then hops a short distance westward to the towns of the Illiniwek on the Illinois River, near the French post of La Roche.  They have about "400 men," translating to 1600-2000 people overall, in these settlements, and retain many of their old material customs: they use bows and arrows, wear deerskin clothes and bison robes (as well as garments woven from bison hair), and adorn themselves with elaborate tattoos – "all sorts of figures and designs" (374).  The lieutenant does mention that they make excellent "powder horns," indicating they do have gunpowder and, presumably, firearms, obtained in trade with the French.  

Further down the Illinois River are the Illiniwek communities of Pimitoui and Cahokia, 50 leagues from La Roche; 30 leagues further still is Kaskaskia, the "most prosperous nation among all the savages," whose people are numerous and "industrious."  The Illiniwek in these communities, or some of them at least, have adopted French customs: they raise French melons and wheat, as well as cattle, pigs, and chickens; have constructed three mills, one of them horse-driven, to produce flour; and many in Kaskaskia have become Christians. Sabrevois is uninterested in Native American women, so we must rely on Sophie White's Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians (U. of Pennsylvania, 2012) and Susan Sleeper-Smith's "Women, Kin, and Catholicism" (Ethnohistory 47 [Spring 2000]: 423-52) to inform us that most of these cultural converts were women married to French traders.  It was they who became Christian converts, in many cases to join themselves to new religious kinship networks (i.e., godparents), and they who raised the crops and livestock, allowing their French husbands to trade, hunt, smoke, and behave, in short, like Illinois Indian men.  Given that Illinois women also wore French textiles and dressed according to a modified European style, we may conclude that photos of University of Illinois women posing as "Princess Illiniwek" while wearing stereotypical Plains Indian garb are perhaps not 100% historically accurate.

**

The above image, "Princess Illiniwek (Idelle Stith, Oct. 26, 1943)" is courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives and is used with their kind permission.

A Letter to the Class of 1988, from One of Your Future Selves

My high school class is holding its twenty-fifth reunion this summer, and unfortunately, due to a conflict with a professional conference, I will probably not be able to attend.  I thought instead I might reflect on the extent to which the world has changed - and not changed - since 1988, and to put my reflections into the form of a letter, slightly snarky and occasionally vague (though easily deciphered by 2013 observers), from my 43-year-old self to all of the seniors with whom I graduated.  What mostly emerges from these reflections is a reminder that it is very difficult to predict the future, particularly when it comes to politics.  (Technological changes are a little easier to predict.)  As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., asked some years ago, "Who in 1940 would have guessed that the next three presidents after FDR would be an obscure back-bench Missouri senator, a lieutenant colonel in the army, and a Harvard undergraduate?"

Anyway, here's the letter:

**

Dear Students of the Class of 1988:

Hello there.  It's one of your classmates, reporting, in a virtual-time-traveling/wishful-thinking sort of way, on the changes that have occurred in the world since your graduation a quarter-century ago.   While I can't be too precise about the events of the last 25 years (that would spoil all the surprises for you), I can say that most of what happened in the world in the 1990s and 2000s was beyond the power of all but the craziest futurologists to predict.

1) No, we haven't had a nuclear war, nor have we been conquered by the Soviet Union.  Actually, we call it "Russia" now, and it's smaller than it was in your day.

2) As you might have guessed if you have been following Mr. Gorbachev's career for the past few years, the Cold War is over.  The bankers won.

3) Our current Worldwide Existential Threat is global warming, which many of you are going to hear about for the first time this summer (1988).  Some people deny it exists.  Let me note that summer temperatures in Australia now reach the 110s and 120s (Fahrenheit), and the Arctic Ocean is nearly ice-free for part of the year.

4) Japan has not become the world's leading economy.  China is going to be taking that role, unless they poison all of their air and water first.

5) Sub-Saharan Africa was pretty messy in the 1990s, with a frightening genocide in one country and a war in another country that has killed over 3 million people.  Currently, though, the continent is experiencing 5% annual economic growth, and there's a big amateur film industry in Nigeria, of all places.

6) Also, South Africa has changed somewhat since 1988.  Mostly peacefully, mostly for the better.

7) There is still no cure for AIDS, but we have drugs that make the disease manageable, and there are subsidies to provide them to poor people.

8) There is also no cure for cancer, though we have a vaccine against one common form of it.

9) The American manned space program is dormant at the moment.  There is an International Space Station but it receives its supply and crew via Russian space craft.   On the other hand, we have several robot cars on Mars.

10) Speaking of outer space, Pluto isn't a planet anymore (astronomers have relabeled it a "Kuiper object.")  To replace it, we have discovered over 100 planets orbiting other stars.  None are Earth-like, but we'll keep looking.

11) Futurologists predicted that one day every American would have in their home a machine that played TV programs, movies, music, and games, and acted as a videophone.  We now have such machines – we call them "computers."  Perhaps you've heard of them?

12) Okay, maybe you need more explanation. Many if not most Americans use a communications technology called the "Internet" to download entertainment and send messages and video images from their computers.  Also from their "wireless devices."  Also from their "phones."  (There are phones today that have 100 times as much computing power as your home computers.)

13) We don't call them "videophones," by the way; we call them "Skype," after the Estonian technology company that developed the software.  Yes, Estonia is a real country.

14) You can probably guess who the next president after Ronald Reagan is going to be.  After him, the next three presidents will be a) the governor of a Southern state, who will be impeached for having oral sex in the White House, b) a man who will start a war with a Middle Eastern country because of daddy issues, c) a 27-year-old who's going to start law school this fall.

15) Ronald Reagan is no longer alive, which should come as no surprise because he's already 135 years old.  Perhaps his most lasting legacy is economic inequality: in 2010, the top 1% of the U.S. population had six times as much wealth as the bottom 80%.

16) Elvis is still dead.  So is his son-in-law, Michael Jackson.  No, I'm not making that up.

17) The top-grossing movie of the 1990s will be a film about the Titanic by a man who currently directs sci-fi action movies.  The top-grossing movie of the 2000s will be a sci-fi action movie about giant blue people, directed by the same guy.

18) Assuming you're reading this in June 1988, the top-selling music album in the United States today is by a British pop singer who is currently one month old.

19) As for our class, we're all (I think) still alive, out of jail, mostly employed, mostly content.  Life goes on.

**

Debt: The First 5,000 Years: Conclusions

(For my summary of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, see here.)

Perhaps the most important general theme in Graeber's book is the historic interrelationship between debt, religious obligation, and violence. Graeber describes a very old, if complicated, relationship between violence and debt: indebtedness frequently led to enslavement, the breakup of families, and the redefining of people as things, and indebted merchant-adventurers engaged in violent or morally opprobrious pursuits in order to keep ahead of their own interest payments. Public debt, while it is not much older than the modern nation-state, is similarly linked to state violence: the nation-state created public debt to finance its war machine, and the modern state that cannot cheaply borrow money is one which cannot defend itself.  Conversely, however, the modern state with lots of military bases and nuclear weapons can usually “persuade” its creditors to keep the money spigot open.*

The relationship between debt and moral obligation, however, has changed repeatedly in the last 5,000 years; as recently as the Medieval era, several of the world's largest religions (Buddhists, Muslims, Christians) either stigmatized debt or downplayed it as a distraction from one's religious debts. It is only in the more materialistic early modern era that we (by which I mean “Westerners and their 20th-century imitators”) have come to see human beings as mere bundles of rationalized economic capacities and interests, and debt and compound interest as engines of positive progress. The notion that an individual, particularly a wage laborer, can free him/herself of debt, is even more recent: Graeber argues it only became possible for large numbers of workers when the governments of industrializing countries enlarged their money supply in the 1800s.**  Westerners subsequently began to assume that individuals could free themselves of debt through hard work and thrift, and that therefore debtors must be lazy, profligate, and immoral. Since 1970, however, as wages stagnated and as governments around the world dismantled progressive tax codes and social safety nets, this idea has become much harder to sustain. (One of my colleagues continues to defend thriftiness, of a sort, by distinguishing between “bad” debt, like consumer debt, and “good debt,” like student loans and mortgages. The collapse of the Western housing market in 2008 and the explosion of high-interest student loans in the United States makes even this ideological crutch a rickety one.)

It is past time, Graeber concludes, to change the way Westerners and other industrializing societies view private debt. The notion that debtors are immoral rather than unlucky is quite a recent one, and therefore subject to change. State-sponsored debt relief is an old and morally well-grounded institution, practiced by governments both ancient (Sumerian city-states, Egyptian pharaohs) and modern (American state governments in the 1780s), and justified by several world religions' traditions, like the Jewish practice of jubilee. It is also a good economic policy: people crippled by debts they cannot avoid incurring, like medical debt or student loan debt (which American students can only avoid if they accept the likelihood of long-term unemployment), cannot become good customers for American businesses.

Perhaps, though, we need to take an even more radical approach, and question not only the legitimacy of debt, but the legitimacy of capitalist values. Modern capitalism, Graeber observes, mandates continual productive growth in order to allow investors (and workers) to stay ahead of their debts. In practice, this now means that workers need to slave away at multiple jobs just to stay financially afloat, societies need to promote the continual expansion of consumer demand and consumer debt, and businesses need to exploit their workers and destroy the environment. Some of us, I think, assume toil, debt, and consumerism are worthwhile social goods, insofar as they keep the rabble under control. People who are exhausted by mindless work, held down by debt, and drugged by television and junk food are less likely to cause trouble for the ruling class. (George Orwell made these observations, substituting radio for television, in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.) But not all of us agree with this, and even if we did we cannot allow businesses to keep damaging the environment unless we aim at collective suicide.

We must, Graeber argues, no longer promote hard work as our highest socioeconomic good. Graeber says he'd like us to stop criticizing the “undeserving poor,” those who produce little but don't do their neighbors much harm.  He also argues that it is much more humane, and much more typical of human societies until very recently, to value leisure and collective celebration over one's “career.” My own experience is that there are some people in capitalist countries, like teachers and airline pilots, who really do like their jobs, but for the vast majority of workers there is nothing to be gained from extra effort. Since the 1970s gains in worker productivity have all gone to the top decile of salary-earners, and even losing one's job has had much more to do with stupid corporate managerial decisions than with one's own ineptitude. We should be placing more value on our relationships and our hobbies, shifting away from a consumerist lifestyle that turns people into hoarders, and making “I resolve to do less” a more common workplace slogan.  "Better living through laziness" may not have the same ring as "Workers of the world, unite!", but it's likelier to appeal to those of us in the slacker generation, and less likely to kill the planet than 7 billion people living by the code of "Root, hog, or die."

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* I'm not sure how valid this argument is. The Soviet Union had a huge army and thousands of nuclear weapons in the 1980s, and yet this didn't stop European banks from threatening to cut off its credit if Gorbachev tried to suppress the Eastern European revolt in 1989. The United States' ability to borrow money cheaply, which Graeber attributes to our being armed to the teeth, actually has more to do with our large, relatively secure tax base and the federal government's disinclination, until quite recently, to default.

** Graeber is incorrect when he attributes industrial-era inflation to deliberate government policy. Eric Hobsbawm observed (in The Age of Capital, 1848-1875) that this was instead due to the huge 19th-century gold strikes in California, Australia, and South Africa. Otherwise the general tendency in industrializing countries was toward deflation, which would have made life more difficult for debtors and workers.

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(Above image via StrikeDebt Chicago and StrikeDebt Tucson.)

Debt: The First 5,000 Years: A Review, of Sorts

In an earlier post on Hope for the 99 Percent (or words to that effect), I argued that today's workers need to focus on accumulating wealth and improving their educations, and not expect any assistance from the state, except in the form of minimal social-insurance payouts.  What I did not say, because I hadn't thought to say it at the time, is that it is rather difficult for modern workers to accumulate wealth because they are usually heavily in debt, and difficult for them to educate themselves without accumulating additional debt.  Indebtedness, it would seem, is one of the principal factors keeping the 99 Percent down and ensuring that wealth continues to flow upward to our oligarchs.  And that debt would appear to be inescapable, unless we make some effort to restructure it (at much lower interest rates) or abolish it.  To do so, I think we first need to ask how legitimate modern private debt actually is.  Perhaps the best place to start answering this question is David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which I read last year and will now endeavor to review.

The long blog entry that follows is my summary of Graeber's powerful, but rather convoluted, argument. In a future blog post, I will provide some analysis of the book and of Graeber's suggestions for how we can move forward from our current socio-economic mess.

**

Graeber, as an anthropologist, avoids approaching the problem of debt with the assumptions of an economist. In the early chapters of his book, he notes that modern debt involves a double fiction: the idea that people who contract a debt are autonomous equals – hence the modern belief that people who cannot pay their debts brought their problems on themselves – and that a creditor has a feudal right of dominion over a debtor until the debt, plus interest, is paid. Debt also depends on the ability of creditors and debtors to enumerate their obligations precisely, using monetary values; this in turn depends on the invention of money. The double-fiction of equality and absolute dominion, however, could not apply to pre-modern (or “heroic”) societies, like the Celts or the African Lele. These societies were usually hierarchical, and they could readily conceive of social obligations between dependents and lords; indeed, a lord's or patriarch's honor stemmed from his control of the bodies and labor of others. However, they did not accept that lords had absolute control over their dependents: they could not readily alienate or sell their bondsmen, female relatives, or children. Heroic societies understood the concept of a medium of exchange, and of placing a monetary value (measured in oxen or precious metals) on people and their labor, but in practice they only allowed elites to exchange people or their labor for other people, to strengthen existing human relationships or pay blood debts. 

States interfered with these arrangements when they introduced currency and open markets, which, Graeber provocatively argues, were largely a byproduct of the creation of professional armies in the so-called “Axial Age” (800 BCE – 600 CE). A state could most efficiently supply its armies by taxing its subjects, then stipulating that they had to pay the tax with money, which they could obtain by selling goods or services. Money usually took the form of precious metals because they were portable and easy to steal – Alexander's armies, for example, looted the equivalent of $285 billion from the temples and palaces of Persia. Once currency, taxes, and markets came into being, however, it became possible to convert labor and social obligations into goods and money; it thus became possible for even non-elite persons to buy human beings, either as slaves or debt-peons. (Debt peonage, a modern reader might argue, was voluntary, but in fact people were usually driven to it by hunger, misfortune, or taxes.) Elites found this threatening to their honor, one of the reasons, Graeber unhappily observes, that Greek aristocrats began confining women to the home (to demonstrate that their bodies still belonged to their husbands); peasants, of course, found this more personally threatening, and would periodically revolt or flee. Early states proved less interested in preserving the honor of elites than in preventing rebellion or defection by debt-ridden peasants. Some did so through periodic debt amnesties, a practice that preceded the Axial Age: the Sumerians, who invented interest-bearing debts, also invented the concept of debt forgiveness; Egyptian monarchs also used debt amnesties, and in fact a piece of one of their 2nd-century stele announcing a general debt amnesty became the Rosetta Stone. Other states, like the Roman Republic and the ksatriya republics of early India, avoided peasant revolts by recruiting peasants into their armies, paying them sufficient wages to avoid indebtedness, and relying on war captives for labor. The latter solution, we should note, merely externalized the problem, and perpetuated the connection between debt, violence, and enslavement.

The Axial Age also gave rise to several religions which opposed usury or offered indebted peasants an otherworldly escape from debt. These religions became pervasive and influential in the Middle Ages (600-1400). Chinese Buddhists argued that the most important debts were those owed to one's parents and to the universe itself, and that these were only payable through temple donations, but also that such donations would permanently cancel existential debt. Muslims, while they honored trade and enabled it through sophisticated credit arrangements, forbade usury and were skeptical of the value of physical money. Medieval Christians were both anti-debt and anti-trade, but they did develop the idea of the merchant adventurer, who was willing to use bravery and violence to open new markets.

In the early modern era (ca. 1450-1971), Europeans' drive to conquer the world was financed by the aforementioned merchant adventurers, whose primary economic pursuits were bullion (most of which they exported to China and India), weapons, slaves, and drugs (coffee, sugar, tobacco, opium). Theologians, religious reformers, and scholars came to accept usury, with Protestants leading the way and Catholics following a short distance behind; by the 1700s Europeans argued that humans were motivated primarily by interest, which is etymologically related to the concept that “money [must] never cease to grow.” European states had also come to harness this concept of interest by creating national debts, which yielded regular dividends for the state's wealthy creditors, and national banks, whose notes could circulate as money – an important consideration in an era when elites had come to distrust fiat money and private credit certificates, but could not always obtain the gold and silver they did trust.  From these sources. Graeber argues, came modern capitalism, an ideological structure placing morality, money, and state power at the service of the idea that economic output must always grow, no matter the cost. And “it is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor” (Ch. 11). European capitalists' incessant need for labor drove the African slave trade, the enserfment of Eastern European peasants, and colonial regimes' use of taxes to draw commoners into debt peonage. Debt and interest forced capitalists to create an economy that would always grow, and in turn they forced free persons into debt or bondage to provide the labor necessary to realize that vision. Only at the very end of the period, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, did European states and capitalists begin to create a limited wage-labor economy wherein workers could accumulate enough money to imagine themselves free of debt, and therefore respectable.

By the mid-20^th century, though, the only thing that backed state currency was state debt, which in turn was backed by the state's warmaking power. The United States' current economic power is based on its dollar's position as the world's reserve currency; on the inability of countries holding dollars to exchange them for gold; on the ability of the U.S. to project deadly force anywhere in the world; and in the use of dollars to purchase oil. (I highly doubt, incidentally, Graeber's assertion that Saddam Hussein's switch to the Euro to denominate oil sales was a cause of Operation Iraqi Freedom; George W. Bush and his advisers weren't that calculating. Well, maybe Dick Cheney was, and screw him.) Meanwhile, the idea that workers could accumulate enough money and assets to propel themselves into the middle class, never a widespread one beyond a few industrialized countries, was abandoned in the 1980s, as conservative governments smashed labor unions, adopted tight-money monetary policies, and allied themselves with evangelical Christians who endorsed their policies as divinely-inspired. Workers were now offered the opportunity to enrich themselves through speculation (401ks, for instance) and debt (mortgages, credit cards, student loans, microcredit), but that opportunity vanished, probably for good, in 2008, leaving behind only the idea that there were no alternatives to capitalism, that individual debt was a sin, and that a person's worth could be measured in commodities. There is nothing natural, however, about this grim state of affairs; it is instead the product of centuries of violence, which ripped normal human obligations from their social context and transformed them into arithmetical equations of debt and interest.

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Coming soon: Graeber's concluding remarks and my own thoughts.

(Images above are of the cover of Graeber's book, the Rosetta Stone, and an eighteenth-century ceramic painting of European trading factories at Canton, from the collection of San Jose State University.)