Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

Our image of the Middle Ages as an “age of faith”—and hence, of blind obedience to authority—is a legacy of the French Enlightenment. Again, it makes sense only if you think of the “Middle Ages” as something that happened primarily in Europe. Not only was the Far West an unusually violent place by world standards, the Catholic Church was extraordinarily intolerant. It’s hard to find many medieval Chinese, Indian, or Islamic parallels, for example, to the burning of “witches” or the massacre of heretics. More typical was the pattern that prevailed in certain periods of Chinese history, when it was perfectly acceptable for a scholar to dabble in Taoism in his youth, become a Confucian in middle age, then turn to Buddhism on retirement. If there is an essence to medieval thought, it lies not in blind obedience to authority, but rather in a dogged insistence that the values that govern our ordinary daily affairs—particularly those of the court and marketplace—are confused, mistaken, illusory, or perverse.