Whose Moral Debt To Who?

In Debt, D. Graeber explores the moral context and history from which the more exclusively financial thing we recognize as Debt emerges. Using mainly Anthropological ethnography as his evidence, he rebuts many of the universalistic and modernistic claims of economics and seeks to complicate their findings with he argues is or was ‘actually done’ in the world, based on his knowledge of the literature.

In one section, he discusses a theory that explores the kinds of obligation people may feel with respect to the communities that birthed and produced them, a religious, nearly sacred fealty to some kind of imagined or real entity that transcends the self but wields great power in motivating people.

This sense of obligation remains. But our loyalties have shifted. In our case to an amorphous, tenuous notion of the nation-state, or its reverberating jingoistic fervor that affiliates people in sporting events, spirited school celebrations or even a sole commitment to the persistence of a single regional entity over others.

But I challenge this intuitive (but deeply and regularly and propagandistically outwardly cultivated and inwardly internalized sense of what is due), and we can all choose to challenge it.

Another way to think of this obligation is to all of those who have been marginalized and excluded for us to exist today, in this society, with the kinds of privilege on which or with which we were raised. Churches, nation-states, schools, towns and etc. are incomplete vehicles for this kind of obligation, and may give us heuristics for dealing with it to some degree but not enough to eradicate the kind of persistent conditions of poverty and discrimination that plague our world.

In my case, I feel that so many have perished, encountered bankruptcy, experienced oppression, stigmatization, forced migration, so that I, a son of the bourgeoisie, may be able to live contentedly, happily, in this day and age. Through various channels and processes this has became the case.

With and in the service of these communities must we endeavor and strive to work and struggle, laboring to disjoin whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, and rurality from privilege.