Debt
It would be foolish to argue that all Axial Age philosophy was simply a meditation on the nature of coinage, but I think Seaford is right to argue that this is a critical starting place: one of the reasons that the pre-Socratic philosophers began to frame their questions in the peculiar way they did, asking (for instance): What are Ideas? Are they merely collective conventions? Do they exist, as Plato insisted, in some divine domain beyond material existence? Or do they exist in our minds? Or do our minds themselves ultimately partake of that divine immaterial domain? And if they do, what does this say about our relation to our bodies?
In India and China, the debate took different forms, but materialism was always the starting point. We only know the ideas of most truly materialist thinkers from the works of their intellectual enemies: as is the case with the Indian king PĀyĀsi, who enjoyed debating Buddhist and Jain philosophers, taking the position that the soul does not exist, that human bodies are nothing but particular configurations of air, water, earth, and fire, their consciousness the result of the elements’ mutual interaction, and that when we die, the elements simply dissolve.79 Clearly, though, such ideas were commonplace. Even the Axial Age religions are often startlingly lacking in the plethora of supernatural forces seen before and after: as witnessed by continued debates over whether Buddhism even is a religion, since it rejects any notion of a supreme being, or whether Confucius’ admonitions that one should continue to venerate one’s ancestors was merely a way of encouraging filial piety, or based on a belief that dead ancestors did, in some sense, continue to exist. The fact that we have to ask says everything. Yet at the same time, what endures, above all, from that age—in institutional terms—are what we call the “world religions.”
What we see then is a strange kind of back-and-forth, attack and riposte, whereby the market, the state, war, and religion all continually separate and merge with one another. Let me summarize it as briefly as I can:
1) Markets appear to have first emerged, in the Near East at least, as a side effect of government administrative systems. Over time, however, the logic of the market became entangled in military affairs, where it became almost indistinguishable from the mercenary logic of Axial Age warfare, and then, finally, that logic came to conquer government itself; to define its very purpose.
2) As a result: everywhere we see the military-coinage-slavery complex emerge, we also see the birth of materialist philosophies. They are materialist, in fact, in both senses of the term: in that they envision a world made up of material forces, rather than divine powers, and in that they imagine the ultimate end of human existence to be the accumulation of material wealth, with ideals like morality and justice being reframed as tools designed to satisfy the masses.
3) Everywhere, too, we find philosophers who react to this by exploring ideas of humanity and the soul, attempting to find a new foundation for ethics and morality.
4) Everywhere some of these philosophers made common cause with social movements that inevitably formed in the face of these new and extraordinarily violent and cynical elites. The result was something new to human history: popular movements that were also intellectual movements, due to the assumption that those opposing existing power arrangements did so in the name of some kind of theory about the nature of reality.
5) Everywhere, these movements were first and foremost peace movements, in that they rejected the new conception of violence, and especially aggressive war, as the foundation of politics.
6) Everywhere too, there seems to have been an initial impulse to use the new intellectual tools provided by impersonal markets to come up with a new basis for morality, and everywhere, it foundered. Mohism, with its notion of social profit, flourished briefly and then collapsed. It was replaced by Confucianism, which rejected such ideas outright. We have already seen that reimagining moral responsibility in terms of debt—an impulse that cropped up in both Greece and India—while almost inevitable given the new economic circumstances, seems to prove uniformly unsatisfying.80 The stronger impulse is to imagine another world where debt—and with it, all other worldly connections—can be entirely annihilated, where social attachments are seen as forms of bondage; just as the body is a prison.
7) Rulers’ attitudes changed over time. At first, most appear to have affected an attitude of bemused tolerance toward the new philosophical and religious movements while privately embracing some version of cynical realpolitik, But as warring cities and principalities were replaced by great empires, and especially, as those empires began to reach the limits of their expansion, sending the military-coinage-slavery complex into crisis, all this suddenly changed. In India, Aśoka tried to re-found his kingdom on Buddhism; in Rome, Constantine turned to the Christians; in China, the Han emperor Wu-Ti (157–87 BC), faced with a similar military and financial crisis, adopted Confucianism as the philosophy of state. Of the three, only Wu Ti was ultimately successful: the Chinese empire endured, in one form or another, for two thousand years, almost always with Confucianism as its official ideology. In Constantine’s case the Western empire fell apart, but the Roman church endured. Aśoka’s project could be said to be the least successful. Not only did his empire fall apart, replaced by an endless series of weaker, usually fragmentary kingdoms, but Buddhism itself was largely driven out of his one-time territories, though it did establish itself much more firmly in China, Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Korea, Japan, and much of Southeast Asia.
8) The ultimate effect was a kind of ideal division of spheres of human activity that endures to this day: on the one hand the market, on the other, religion. To put the matter crudely: if one relegates a certain social space simply to the selfish acquisition of material things, it is almost inevitable that soon someone else will come to set aside another domain in which to preach that, from the perspective of ultimate values, material things are unimportant; that selfishness—or even the self—are illusory, and that to give is better than to receive. If nothing else, it is surely significant that all the Axial Age religions emphasized the importance of charity, a concept that had barely existed before. Pure greed and pure generosity are complementary concepts; neither could really be imagined without the other; both could only arise in institutional contexts that insisted on such pure and single-minded behavior; and both seem to have appeared together wherever impersonal, physical, cash money also appeared on the scene.
As for the religious movements: it would be easy enough to write them off as escapist, as promising the victims of the Axial Age empires liberation in the next world as a way of letting them accept their lot in this one, and convincing the rich that all they really owed the poor were occasional charitable donations. Radical thinkers almost invariably do write them off in this way. Surely, the willingness of the governments themselves to eventually embrace them would seem to support this conclusion. But the issue is more complicated. First of all, there is something to be said for escapism. Popular uprisings in the ancient world usually ended in the massacre of the rebels. As I’ve already observed, physical escape, such as via exodus or defection, has always been the most effective response to oppressive conditions since the earliest times we know about. Where physical escape is not possible, what, exactly, is an oppressed peasant supposed to do? Sit and contemplate her misery? At the very least, otherworldly religions provided glimpses of radical alternatives. Often they allowed people to create other worlds within this one, liberated spaces of one sort or another. It is surely significant that the only people who succeeded in abolishing slavery in the ancient world were religious sects, such as the Essenes—who did so, effectively, by defecting from the larger social order and forming their own utopian communities.81 Or, in a smaller but more enduring example: the democratic city-states of northern India were all eventually stamped out by the great empires (Kautilya provides extensive advice on how to subvert and destroy democratic constitutions), but the Buddha admired the democratic organization of their public assemblies and adopted it as the model for his followers.82 Buddhist mon
asteries are still called sangha, the ancient name for such republics, and continue to operate by the same consensus-finding process to this day, preserving a certain egalitarian democratic ideal that would otherwise have been entirely forgotten.
Finally, the larger historical achievements of these movements are not, in fact, insignificant. As they took hold, things began to change. Wars became less brutal and less frequent. Slavery faded as an institution, to the point at which, by the Middle Ages, it had become insignificant or even nonexistent across most of Eurasia. Everywhere too, the new religious authorities began to seriously address the social dislocations introduced by debt.
Chapter Ten
THE MIDDLE AGES
(600 – 450 AD)
Artificial wealth comprises the things which of themselves satisfy no natural need, for example money, which is a human contrivance.
—St. Thomas Aquinas
IF THE AXIAL AGE saw the emergence of complementary ideals of commodity markets and universal world religions, the Middle Ages were the period in which those two institutions began to merge.
Everywhere, the age began with the collapse of empires. Eventually, new states formed, but in these new states, the nexus between war, bullion, and slavery was broken; conquest and acquisition for their own sake were no longer celebrated as the end of all political life. At the same time, economic life, from the conduct of international trade to the organization of local markets, came to fall increasingly under the regulation of religious authorities. One result was a widespread movement to control, or even forbid, predatory lending. Another was a return, across Eurasia, to various forms of virtual credit money.
Granted, this is not the way we’re used to thinking of the Middle Ages. For most of us, “Medieval” remains a synonym for superstition, intolerance, and oppression. Yet for most of the earth’s inhabitants, it could only be seen as an extraordinary improvement over the terrors of the Axial Age.
One reason for our skewed perception is that we’re used to thinking of the Middle Ages as something that happened primarily in Western Europe, in territories that had been little more than border outposts of the Roman Empire to begin with. According to the conventional wisdom, with the collapse of the empire, the cities were largely abandoned and the economy “reverted to barter,” taking at least five centuries to recover. Even for Europe, though, this is based on a series of unquestioned assumptions that, as I’ve said, crumble the moment one starts seriously poking at them. Chief among them is the idea that the absence of coins means the absence of money. True, the destruction of the Roman war machine also meant that Roman coins went out of circulation; and the few coins produced within the Gothic or Frankish kingdoms that established themselves over the ruins of the old empire were largely fiduciary in nature.1 Still, a glance at the “barbarian law codes” reveals that even at the height of the Dark Ages, people were still carefully keeping accounts in Roman money as they calculated interest rates, contracts, and mortgages. Again, cities shriveled, and many were abandoned, but even this was something of a mixed blessing. Certainly, it had a terrible effect on literacy; but one must also bear in mind that ancient cities could only be maintained by extracting resources from the countryside. Roman Gaul, for instance, had been a network of cities, connected by the famous Roman roads to an endless succession of slave plantations, which were owned by the urban grandees.2 After around 400 ad, the population of the towns declined radically, but the plantations also disappeared. In the following centuries, many came to be replaced by manors, churches, and even later, castles—where new local lords extracted their own dues from the surrounding farmers. But one need only do the math: since Medieval agriculture was no less efficient than ancient agriculture (in fact, it rapidly became a great deal more so), the amount of work required to feed a handful of mounted warriors and clergymen could not possibly have been anything like that required to feed entire cities. However oppressed Medieval serfs might have been, their plight was nothing compared with that of their Axial Age equivalents.
Still, the Middle Ages proper are best seen as having begun not in Europe but in India and China, between 400 and 600 ad, and then sweeping across much of the western half of Eurasia with the advent of Islam. They only really reached Europe four hundred years later. Let us begin our story, then, in India.
Medieval India
(Flight into Hierarchy)
I left off in India with Aśoka’s embrace of Buddhism, but I noted that ultimately, his project foundered. Neither his empire nor his church was to endure. It took a good deal of time, however, for this failure to occur.
The Mauryans represented a high watermark of empire. The next five hundred years saw a succession of kingdoms, most of them strongly supportive of Buddhism. Stupas and monasteries sprang up everywhere, but the states that sponsored them grew weaker and weaker; centralized armies dissolved; soldiers, like officials, increasingly came to be paid by land grants rather than salaries. As a result, the number of coins in circulation steadily declined.3 Here too, the early Middle Ages witnessed a dramatic decline of cities: where the Greek ambassador Megasthenes described Aśoka’s capital of Patna as the largest city in the world of his day, Medieval Arab and Chinese travelers described India as a land of endless tiny villages.
As a result, most historians have come to write, much as they do in Europe, of a collapse of the money economy; of commerce becoming a “reversion to barter.” Here too, this appears to be simply untrue. What vanished were the military means to extract resources from the peasants. In fact, Hindu law-books written at the time show increasing attention to credit arrangements, with a sophisticated language of sureties, collateral, mortgages, promissory notes, and compound interest.4 One need only consider how the Buddhist establishments popping up all over India during these centuries were funded. While the earliest monks were wandering mendicants, owning little more than their begging bowls, early Medieval monasteries were often magnificent establishments with vast treasuries. Still, in principle, their operations were financed almost entirely through credit.
The key innovation was the creation of what were called the “perpetual endowments” or “inexhaustible treasuries.” Say a lay supporter wished to make a contribution to her local monastery. Rather than offering to provide candles for a specific ritual, or servants to attend to the upkeep of the monastic grounds, she would provide a certain sum of money—or something worth a great deal of money—that would then be loaned out in the name of the monastery, at the accepted 15-percent annual rate. The interest on the loan would then be earmarked for that specific purpose.5 An inscription discovered at the Great Monastery of Sanci sometime around 450 ad provides a handy illustration. A woman named Harisvamini donates the relatively modest sum of twelve dinaras to the “Noble Community of Monks.”6 The text carefully inscribes how the income is to be divided up: the interest on five of the dinaras was to provide daily meals for five different monks, the interest from another three would pay to light three lamps for the Buddha, in memory of her parents, and so forth. The inscription ends by saying that this was a permanent endowment, “created with a document in stone to last as long as the moon and the sun”: since the principal would never be touched, the contribution would last forever.7
Some of these loans presumably went to individuals, others were commercial loans to “guilds of bamboo-workers, braziers, and potters,” or to village assemblies.8 We have to assume that in most cases the money is an accounting unit: what were really being transacted were animals, wheat, silk, butter, fruit, and all the other goods whose appropriate rates of interest were so carefully stipulated in the law-codes of the time. Still, large amounts of gold did end up flowing into monastic coffers. When coins go out of circulation, after all, the metal doesn’t simply disappear. In the Middle Ages—and this seems to have been true across Eurasia—the vast majority of it ended up in religious establishments, churches, monasteries, and temples, either stockpiled in hoards and treasuries or gilded onto or cast into altars
, sanctums, and sacred instruments. Above all, it was shaped into images of gods. As a result, those rulers who did try to put an Axial Age–style coinage system back into circulation—invariably, to fund some project of military expansion—often had to pursue self-consciously anti-religious policies in order to do so. Probably the most notorious was one Harsa, who ruled Kashmir from 1089 to 1101 ad, who is said to have appointed an officer called the “Superintendent for the Destruction of the Gods.” According to later histories, Harsa employed leprous monks to systematically desecrate divine images with urine and excrement, thus neutralizing their power, before dragging them off to be melted down.9 He is said to have destroyed more than four thousand Buddhist establishments before being betrayed and killed, the last of his dynasty—and his miserable fate was long held out as an example of where the revival of the old ways was likely to lead one in the end.
For the most part, then, the gold remained sacrosanct, laid up in the sacred places—though in India, over time these were increasingly Hindu ones, not Buddhist. What we now see as traditional Hindu-village India appears to have been largely a creation of the early Middle Ages. We do not know precisely how it happened. As kingdoms continued to rise and fall, the world inhabited by kings and princes became increasingly distant from that of most people’s everyday affairs. During much of the period immediately following the collapse of the Mauryan empire, for instance, much of India was governed by foreigners.10 Apparently, this increasing distance allowed local Brahmins to begin reshaping the new—increasingly rural—society along strictly hierarchical principles.