Forgive their debts
I listened to a very interesting podcast yesterday with anthropologist David Graebar the author of the Debt the First 5,000 years. His thesis is that our common understanding that credit and money was invented to replace the barter system is backwards. Rather elaborate credit systems were used long before there was money.
While this is interesting what really grabbed my attention is his belief that we have forgotten one of the key features of those early credit systems – that, as the Lord’s prayer notes, debts should be “forgiven.”
He describes the common practice of debt forgiveness and that these early system were designed to protect the debtor from ruin (getting to the point were you needed to sell your family or yourself into slavery). Today’s systems have forgotten those lessons and instead focus on protecting the creditor. This leads, for example, to the growing disparity between the rich and the rest of us. One only needs to look at the AIG bailout to see the extreme shift in that direction.
As to the title of this post – Graebar talks about the language in the Lord’s prayer arguing that the lines referring to debt do address financial debt and not some more abstract conception.
However you feel about these ideas, this is an interesting listen. Give it a try. (link to the podcast)