(2011-08-12) Rodriguez Civilization Graeber Debt Legibility

Julio Rodriguez spins a Master Narrative of the history of Civilization jumping off from David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years ISBN:1933633867 (Debt Financing) with an emphasis on Legibility. I attempt no less here than to make the case that we are witnessing an epochal change that represents a fundamental shift in the organizing principle of human civilization. Graeber takes us part of the way by building a convincing case that debt is one of the most useful concepts by which we can understand human organization into large scale societies. Or, paraphrasing from his words: Not only is debt important, but society is our debts. I take this a step further by making a case that we are not just experiencing another great cycle of debt, but that the changes wrought in the past 200 years have changed the nature of human social cognition in such a way that a new idea is emerging as the primary building block of civilization.

One of the first things that Graeber does quite well is demolish the pernicious myth of Barter.

These small communities could not scale in large part because the transactions which greased the wheels of everyday life took place in an illegible realm of primordial credit... If our desire for fairness and sense of justice balanced for some time with a will to power, the introduction of predictable surpluses created an opportunity for specialization, city building, and everything else that followed. But this higher form of social organization also disrupted tribal narratives by bringing strangers together into the fold... Debt was the most important of these adhesives. How do you make something which existed only by implication legible enough that it can be used to transact with strangers in a complex new setting? The answer is Money.

Zoroastrianism, Prophetic Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity, and Islam were all born during this time period; it is also the time during which completely impersonal coinage took prominence as the primary form of money. Until this “AxialAge”, precious metals were most often used for ritual and adornment, or alternatively for trade between disconnected groups. All of Eurasia faced an almost simultaneous identity crisis that saw the rise of philosophy and the professional soldier... War was a prominent feature of this age and coinage had everything to do with it.

For all the glory of Rome, the “military-coinage-slavery complex” would not last forever. As money was transformed purely into a commodity rather than a debt-token, entire societies were reshaped. As the inertia from initial conquests died down, those who made it rich turned again toward manipulating government and bringing a large part of the peasantry into debt peonage. Relying on mercenaries and barbarians for protection, the empire was well on the way to collapse.

We are in the final stages of Debt as an organizing principle for civilization. It is being displaced by technology.

Update/comment: I think that "technology" is too broad to be a useful term. I think he mainly means the Net. And I don't think he's saying that Debt goes away, but rather that society has been shaped heavily (primarily) by the design of Debt instruments, and that from now the Net will be more important as an organizing constraint/context/soup. I Commented at the blog post.