A new book by Michael
Hudson puts an intriguing economic spin on the Lord's Prayer, according
to a review by Jon
Siman:
So let us reconsider Hudson’s fundamental insight in more vivid
terms. In ancient Mesopotamian societies it was understood that freedom was
preserved by protecting debtors. In what we call Western Civilization, that is,
in the plethora of societies that have followed the flowering of the Greek
poleis beginning in the eighth century B.C., just the opposite, with only one major
exception (Hudson describes the tenth-century A.D. Byzantine Empire of Romanos
Lecapenus), has been the case: For us freedom has been understood to sanction
the ability of creditors to demand payment from debtors without restraint or
oversight. This is the freedom to cannibalize society. This is the freedom to
enslave. This is, in the end, the freedom proclaimed by the Chicago School and
the mainstream of American economists. And so Hudson emphasizes that our
Western notion of freedom has been, for some twenty-eight centuries now,
Orwellian in the most literal sense of the word: War is Peace • Freedom is
Slavery • Ignorance is Strength. He writes: “A constant dynamic of history has
been the drive by financial elites to centralize control in their own hands and
manage the economy in predatory, extractive ways. Their ostensible freedom is
at the expense of the governing authority and the economy at large. As such, it
is the opposite of liberty as conceived in Sumerian times” (p. 266).
And our Orwellian, our neoliberal notion of unrestricted freedom for the creditor dooms us at the very outset of any quest we undertake for a just economic order. Any and every revolution that we wage, no matter how righteous in its conception, is destined to fail.
And we are so doomed, Hudson says, because we have been morally blinded by twenty-eight centuries of deracinated, or as he says, decontextualized history. The true roots of Western Civilization lie not in the Greek poleis that lacked royal oversight to cancel debts, but in the Bronze Age Mesopotamian societies that understood how life, liberty and land would be cyclically restored to debtors again and again. But, in the eighth century B.C., along with the alphabet coming from the Near East to the Greeks, so came the concept of calculating interest on loans. This concept of exponentially-increasing interest was adopted by the Greeks — and subsequently by the Romans — without the balancing concept of Clean Slate amnesty....
After all these centuries, we remain ignorant of the fact that deep in the roots of our civilization is contained the corrective model of cyclical return – what Dominique Charpin calls the “restoration of order” (p. xix). We continue to inundate ourselves with a billion variations of the sales pitch to borrow and borrow, the exhortation to put more and more on credit, because, you know, the future’s so bright I gotta wear shades.
Nowhere, Hudson shows, is it more evident that we are blinded by a deracinated, by a decontextualized understanding of our history than in our ignorance of the career of Jesus. Hence the title of the book: And Forgive Them Their Debts and the cover illustration of Jesus flogging the moneylenders — the creditors who do not forgive debts — in the Temple. For centuries English-speakers have recited the Lord’s Prayer with the assumption that they were merely asking for the forgiveness of their trespasses, their theological sins: “… and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us….” is the translation presented in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. What is lost in translation is the fact that Jesus came “to preach the gospel to the poor … to preach the acceptable Year of the Lord”: He came, that is, to proclaim a Jubilee Year, a restoration of deror for debtors: He came to institute a Clean Slate Amnesty (which is what Hebrew דְּרוֹר connotes in this context).
So consider the passage from the Lord’s Prayer literally: … καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν: “… and send away (ἄφες) for us our debts (ὀφειλήματα).” The Latin translation is not only grammatically identical to the Greek, but also shows the Greek word ὀφειλήματα revealingly translated as debita: … et dimitte nobis debita nostra: “… and discharge (dimitte) for us our debts (debita).” There was consequently, on the part of the creditor class, a most pressing and practical reason to have Jesus put to death: He was demanding that they restore the property they had rapaciously taken from their debtors. And after His death there was likewise a most pressing and practical reason to have His Jubilee proclamation of a Clean Slate Amnesty made toothless, that is to say, made merely theological: So the rich could continue to oppress the poor, forever and ever. Amen.
And our Orwellian, our neoliberal notion of unrestricted freedom for the creditor dooms us at the very outset of any quest we undertake for a just economic order. Any and every revolution that we wage, no matter how righteous in its conception, is destined to fail.
And we are so doomed, Hudson says, because we have been morally blinded by twenty-eight centuries of deracinated, or as he says, decontextualized history. The true roots of Western Civilization lie not in the Greek poleis that lacked royal oversight to cancel debts, but in the Bronze Age Mesopotamian societies that understood how life, liberty and land would be cyclically restored to debtors again and again. But, in the eighth century B.C., along with the alphabet coming from the Near East to the Greeks, so came the concept of calculating interest on loans. This concept of exponentially-increasing interest was adopted by the Greeks — and subsequently by the Romans — without the balancing concept of Clean Slate amnesty....
After all these centuries, we remain ignorant of the fact that deep in the roots of our civilization is contained the corrective model of cyclical return – what Dominique Charpin calls the “restoration of order” (p. xix). We continue to inundate ourselves with a billion variations of the sales pitch to borrow and borrow, the exhortation to put more and more on credit, because, you know, the future’s so bright I gotta wear shades.
Nowhere, Hudson shows, is it more evident that we are blinded by a deracinated, by a decontextualized understanding of our history than in our ignorance of the career of Jesus. Hence the title of the book: And Forgive Them Their Debts and the cover illustration of Jesus flogging the moneylenders — the creditors who do not forgive debts — in the Temple. For centuries English-speakers have recited the Lord’s Prayer with the assumption that they were merely asking for the forgiveness of their trespasses, their theological sins: “… and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us….” is the translation presented in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. What is lost in translation is the fact that Jesus came “to preach the gospel to the poor … to preach the acceptable Year of the Lord”: He came, that is, to proclaim a Jubilee Year, a restoration of deror for debtors: He came to institute a Clean Slate Amnesty (which is what Hebrew דְּרוֹר connotes in this context).
So consider the passage from the Lord’s Prayer literally: … καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν: “… and send away (ἄφες) for us our debts (ὀφειλήματα).” The Latin translation is not only grammatically identical to the Greek, but also shows the Greek word ὀφειλήματα revealingly translated as debita: … et dimitte nobis debita nostra: “… and discharge (dimitte) for us our debts (debita).” There was consequently, on the part of the creditor class, a most pressing and practical reason to have Jesus put to death: He was demanding that they restore the property they had rapaciously taken from their debtors. And after His death there was likewise a most pressing and practical reason to have His Jubilee proclamation of a Clean Slate Amnesty made toothless, that is to say, made merely theological: So the rich could continue to oppress the poor, forever and ever. Amen.
I definitely have to read
this book, especially in light of Rothbard's economic history that essentially
reduces the development of modern economics to the gradual relaxations of
Christian society's ban on usury over the centuries. As crazy as it sounds, it
is entirely possible that what we think of as a necessity for economic growth
is, to the contrary, an integral factor in reestablishing large-scale human
slavery.
To paraphrase Philip K. Dick, Jesus Christ's war against the moneylenders never ended.
Just because some people are inclined to binary-thinking, allow me to be very clear and state that I do not think this literal interpretation of the Lord's Prayer negates or adulterates in any way the metaphorical debt of sin to which Jesus Christ was without question referring. But given what we know of these matters after centuries of additional evidence concerning the matter, it is the exact opposite of far-fetched to imagine that the literal context is also relevant.
To paraphrase Philip K. Dick, Jesus Christ's war against the moneylenders never ended.
Just because some people are inclined to binary-thinking, allow me to be very clear and state that I do not think this literal interpretation of the Lord's Prayer negates or adulterates in any way the metaphorical debt of sin to which Jesus Christ was without question referring. But given what we know of these matters after centuries of additional evidence concerning the matter, it is the exact opposite of far-fetched to imagine that the literal context is also relevant.
