Hiding in plain sight
While listening to David Forster Wallace’s commencement speech on This is water, I was trying to identify the water that I swim in- the fundamental realities of the world that we take for granted. It is so pervasive that it is no longer visible. It is hidden in plain sight. It could also be an illusion that you have bought into so profoundly that you have long forgotten that it is an illusion in the first place. Identifying our water is in its essence akin to taking the red pill in The Matrix. It will not be pleasant, but you were rooting for Neo and Trinity to take the red pill, weren’t you?
One such abstraction is the animating force of the human realm. When it disappears- machines stand idle, factories grind to a halt, construction equipment sits derelict in the yard, parks and libraries close down, and millions go homeless and hungry. No, I am not talking about demonetization; I am talking about something more fundamental- Money itself. There is tremendous power in money- be it providing the means for food, water, and medicine at a familial level, the means to sway elections at a national level, and the means to steer foreign policy(by leveraging debt) at the international level. While at the same time, money seems to be the enemy of beauty, as the disparaging term “a sellout” demonstrates. Why does money play such a central role in our day-to-day life?
Was there ever a time when money wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now. The conventional explanation of how money developed that one finds in economics texts assumes barter as a starting point. From the very beginning, competing individuals seek to maximize their rational self-interest(more analysis of this in my previous blog post) was the go-to explaining. This idealized description is not supported by anthropology. Adam Smith said that quid-pro-quo exchange systems preceded economies based on currency, but there’s no evidence that he was right. According to Marcel Mauss, Barter was rare in Polynesia, rare in Melanesia, and unheard of in the Pacific Northwest. Economic anthropologist George Daltonemphatically concurs: “Barter, in the strict sense of moneyless exchange, has never been a quantitatively important or dominant model or transaction in any past or present economic system about which we have hard information.”
Anthropologist David Graeber describes a dual origin of money. The first was “social currencies”: precious and ceremonial items used to rearrange relationships among human beings (marriages, funerals, blood money, and other social functions). This sort of money was not used to buy and sell things and preceded the division of labor that necessitates money as we know it today.
The second root of money, and the first money used for commerce, took the form of credit: tallies of transactions and loans denominated in a common unit of account and periodically settled by delivery of various commodities. The conflation of these two kinds of money led to debt peonage, slavery, the demotion of women’s status, and other iniquities that one might expect to happen when the same currency mediates human relationships as commercial transactions. Graeber observes that behind the man with the ledger is always a man with a gun. Debt relations have always been power relations, and money has always been and remains today, entwined with debt and, therefore, with violence. Yet, when we see the origins of money that are far from violence.
The origins are more akin to the following scenario: I have something you need, and I wish to give it to you. So I do, and you feel grateful and desire to give something to me in return. But you don’t have anything I need right now. So instead, you give me a token of your gratitude — a useless, pretty thing like a necklace or a piece of silver. That token says, “I have met the needs of other people and earned their gratitude.” Later, when I receive a gift from someone else, I give them that token. Gifts can thereby circulate across vast social distances, and I can receive from people I have nothing to offer while still fulfilling my desire to act from the gratitude those gifts inspire within me.
Money is not necessary to operate a gift economy on the level of a family, clan, or hunter-gatherer band. Nor is it essential in the next larger unit of social organization: the village or tribe of a few hundred people. There, if I don’t need anything from you now, either you will (acting from gratitude) give me something that I will need in the future, or you will give to someone else, who gives to someone else, who gives to me. This is the “circle of the gift,” the basis of community.
In a tribe or village, the scale of society is small enough that those who give to me recognize my gifts to others. Such is not the case in a mass society like ours. If I give generously to you, the farmer in Hawaii who grew my ginger or the engineer in Japan who designed my cellphone display won’t know about it. So instead of personal recognition of gifts, we use money: the representation of gratitude. The social witnessing of gifts becomes anonymous. Money becomes necessary when the range of our gifts must extend beyond the people we know personally.
Indeed, the first money appeared in the first agricultural civilizations that developed beyond the Neolithic village: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and India. Traditional, decentralized gift networks gave way to centralized redistribution systems, with the temple and later the royal palace as the hub.
Starting as centralized nodes for a large-scale flow of gifts, they soon diverged from the gift mindset as contributions became forced and quantified, and outward disbursement became unequal. Ancient Sumerian documents already speak of economic polarization, haves and have-nots, and wages that were barely at subsistence.
Suppose we are to have a world with technology, with cinema, internet, and symphony orchestras, with telecommunications and elaborate architecture, with cosmopolitan cities and world literature. In that case, we need money, or something like it, as a way to coordinate human labor on the vast scale necessary to create such things.
Initially, it was the temples where agricultural surpluses were stored and redistributed: the center of religious life was also the center of economic life. Temples were deeply involved in issuing early coins, many of which bore the images of sacred animals and deities. This practice continues today with bills and coins bearing the likenesses of deified presidents. To dive into the same, I’d recommend reading Sacred Economics.
Gift-based economies are very much prevalent in nature as well. Each organism and species makes a vital contribution to the totality of life on earth. This contribution, contrary to the expectations of standard evolutionary biology, need not have any direct benefit for the organism itself. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria don’t directly benefit from doing so, except that the nitrogen they give to the soil grows plants that grow roots that grow fungi, which ultimately provide nutrients to the bacteria. Pioneer species pave the way for keystone species, which offer microniches to other species, which feed yet other species in a web of gifts that, eventually, circle back to benefit the pioneer species. Trees bring up water to water other plants, and algae make oxygen so that animals can breathe. Remove any being, and the health of all becomes more precarious. There are different ways of understanding nature that, while not ignoring its apparent competition, prioritize cooperation, symbiosis, and the merging of organisms into larger wholes. This new understanding is quite ancient, echoing the indigenous understanding of nature as a web of gifts.
It is ironic indeed that money, originally a means of connecting gifts with needs, originally an outgrowth of a sacred gift economy, is now precisely what blocks the blossoming of our desire to give, keeping us in unfulfilling jobs out of economic necessity, and forestalling our generous impulses with the words “I can’t afford to do that.” Neither is it pragmatic to think about returning to the hunter-gatherer way of living.
As humanity faces the coming-of-age ordeal of the present crises and transitions into adulthood, a new economic system is needed that embodies the new human identity of the connected self living in co-creative partnership with the earth. Our economic and money systems should no longer be agents of taking, exploitation, the aggrandizement of the separate self. They should be sacred or dharmic in nature. This is not a revolution in the classic sense, a purge, a sweeping away of the old; it is instead a metamorphosis. After all, our ancestors very much understood this. There are two kinds of verbs in Sanskrit- actions are done for ourselves and the other done for others. Looking after others in the community is fundamental. The reason we love sad movies is that we want to be moved. We like to feel connected to what it means to be human, to be reminded of our inextricable connection to one another. Sadness moves the individual ‘me’ to the collective ‘us.’
Now, if we only can design an economic system to restore to money the sacredness of gifts, would you participate in it? That is if you have not taken the blue pill already.
