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Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

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Ben said: " Definitely , the best thing I read this year.

Here is a passage about Moctezuma and Cortes gambling with dice, and reflection on the our general perception of Aztec culture as being apocalyptic.

During the time when Moctezuma was being held captive in Definitely , the best thing I read this year.

Here is a passage about Moctezuma and Cortes gambling with dice, and reflection on the our general perception of Aztec culture as being apocalyptic.

During the time when Moctezuma was being held captive in his own palace, he and Cortes passed a good deal of their time playing an Aztec game called totoloque. They played for gold, and Cortes, of course, cheated. At one point, Moctezuma's men brought the matter to the king's attention, but the king just laughed and made a joke of it-neither was he concerned later when Pedro de Alvarado, Cortes's chief lieutenant, began cheating even more flagrantly, demanding gold for each point lost and when he lost, paying only in worthless pebbles. Why Moctezuma behaved so has remained something of an historical mystery. Diaz took it as a gesture of lordly magnanimity, perhaps even a way of putting the petty-minded Spaniards in their place.
One historian, Inga Clenninden, suggests an alternate interpreta tion. Aztec games, she notes, tended to have a peculiar feature: there was always a way that, by a freak stroke of luck, one could achieve to tal victory. This seems to have been true, for instance, of their famous ball games. Observers always wonder, viewing the tiny stone hoops set high above the court, how anyone could ever possibly have managed to score. The answer seems to be: they didn't, at least not that way. Normally the game had nothing to do with the hoop. The game was played between two opposing squads, attired as for battle, knocking the ball back and forth:
The normal method of scoring was through the slow accumu lation of points. But that process could be dramatically pre empted. To send the ball through one of the rings-a feat, given the size of the ball and the ring, presumably rarer than a hole in one in golf-gave instant victory, ownership of all the goods wagered, and the right to pillage the cloaks of the onlookers.108
Whoever scored the point won everything, down to the audience's clothing.
There were similar rules in board games, such as Cortes and Moct ezuma were playing: if, by some freak stroke of luck, one of the dice landed on its edge, the game was over, and the winner took everything. This, Clenninden suggests, must have been what Moctezuma was re ally waiting for. After all, he was clearly in the middle of extraordinary events. Strange creatures had appeared, apparently from nowhere, with unheard-of powers. Rumors of epidemics, of the destruction of nearby nations, had presumably already reached him. If ever there was a time
that some grandiose revelation was due from the gods, then surely this was it.
Such an attitude does seem to fit perfectly with the spirit of Az tec culture gleaned from its literature, which exuded a sense of im pending catastrophe, perhaps astrologically determined, just possibly avoidable-but probably not. Some have suggested that Aztecs must have somehow been aware that they were a civilization skating on the brink of ecological catastrophe; others, that the apocalyptic tone is retrospective-since, after all, what we know of Aztec literature is almost entirely gleaned from men and women who actually did expe rience its complete destruction. Still, there does seem to be a certain frantic quality in certain Aztec practices-the sacrifice of as many as tens of tho'usands of war prisoners, most notably in the apparent belief that, were the Sun not continually fed with human hearts, it would die and world with it-that it's hard to explain in any other way.
If Clenninden is right, for Moctezuma, he and Cortes were not simply gambling for gold. Gold was trivial. The stakes were the entire umverse.
Moctezuma was above all a warrior, and all warriors are gam blers; but unlike Cortes, he was clearly in every way a man of honor. As we've also seen, the quintessence of a warrior's honor, which is a greatness that can only come from the destruction and degradation of others, is his willingness to throw himself into a game where he risks that same destruction and degradation himself-and, unlike Cortes, to play graciously, and by the rules.109 When the time came, it meant be ing willing to stake everything.
He did. And as it turns out, nothing happened. No die landed on its edge. Cortes continued to cheat, the gods sent no revelation, and the universe was eventually destroyed.
If there's something to be learned here-and as I say, I think there is-it is that there may be a deeper, more profound relation between gambling and apocalypse. Capitalism is a system that enshrines the gambler as an essential part of its operation, in a way that no other ever has; yet at the same time, capitalism seems to be uniquely incapa ble of conceiving of its own eternity. Could these two facts be linked?
I should be more precise here. It's not entirely true that capitalism is incapable of conceiving of its own eternity. On the one hand, its exponents do often feel obliged to present it as eternal, because they insist that is it is the only possible viable economic system: one that, as they still sometimes like to say, "has existed for five thousand years and will exist for five thousand more." On the other hand, it does seem that the moment a significant portion of the population begins to actually believe this, and particularly, starts treating credit institutions as if they really will be around forever, everything goes haywire. Note here how it was the most sober, cautious, responsible capitalist regimes the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, the eighteenth-century British Commonwealth-the ones most careful about managing their public debt-that saw the most bizarre explosions of speculative frenzy, the tulip manias and South Sea bubbles.
Much of this seems to turn on the nature of national deficits and credit money. The national debt is, as politicians have complained practically since these things first appeared, money borrowed from future generations. Still, the effects have always been strangely double edged. On the one hand, deficit financing is a way of putting even more military power in the hands of princes, generals, and politicians; on the other, it suggests that government owes something to those it governs. Insofar as our money is ultimately an extension of the public debt, then whenever we buy a newspaper or a cup of coffee, or even place a bet on a horse, we are trading in promises, representations of something that the government will give us at some time in the future, even if we don't know exactly what it is. ...more "

Dec 21, 2012 03:43PM · see review