The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [87]
In this century the man with the bleeding heart is a sentimental fool because he has a feeling that can no longer find its form. Still, his sentimentality is appealing. Everyone likes Peter Walsh, though no one would give him a good job. In the empires of usury the sentimentality of the man with the soft heart calls to us because it speaks of what has been lost.
* Philip Drucker provides an example from the tribes of the North Pacific coast. Loans were not uncommon there, but most were in the nature of a gift, returned with voluntary increase to indicate gratitude. “However,” Drucker tells us, “loans at interest were strictly commercial transactions, the rate being agreed upon at the time of the loan. The ruinous 10 0 percent rate was usual for a long-term loan, that is, for several years … There are no exact data on the origin of the custom, but there is reason to suspect that it may not be aboriginal in origin… It is probably significant that loans at interest consisted of trade blankets or money, not of aboriginal value items.” Here, as I surmise must be the general case, the appearance of interest on loans coincides with the introduction of market exchange with foreigners.
* I am not fond of arguments that depend upon declaring something “natural” or “unnatural”; they tend not only to cut off debate but to assume a division between man and nature. Usury may be justly hated, but since men invented it, we must either accept it as a part of nature or say that men are not.
To give Aristotle his due, however, we might change the terms to “organic” and “inorganic.” Organic wealth was the original context for most of our economic language. In The Origins of European Thought Richard Onians makes an interesting observation in regard to the word “capital.” For both the Greeks and the Romans, the human head was regarded not as the seat of consciousness but as the container of procreative powers, the seeds of life. A Roman metaphor for kissing was “to diminish the head,” according to Onians; sexual intercourse also “diminished the head,” the point being that erotic or generative activity draws the life-stuff out of its container. In this way it was understood that caput (head, but also capital) produced offspring. Onians tells of a Roman cult, the Templars, who worshiped a divine head “as the source of wealth, as making trees bloom and earth to germinate.” Aboriginally “capital” was a strictly organic wealth that quite literally bore tokos, and in this context Aristotle is right: it is unnatural, it is not true to nature, to speak and act as if inorganic capital could possibly do the same.
* Such a double economy is hardly unique to the Jews; it occurs wherever there is a strong sense of an in-group. In fact, if ancient usury was not the exorbitant rate to which the term now refers but something closer to “rent” or “interest,” then the Jewish law is comparatively mild. An ethnologist writes as follows of a Solomon Island society: “Native moralists assert that neighbors should be friendly and mutually trustful, whereas people from far-off are dangerous and unworthy of morally just consideration. For example, natives lay great stress on honesty involving neighbors while holding that trade with strangers may be guided by caveat emptor.”
* This remarkable piece of scholarship first appeared in 1949 and has now been reprinted, with addenda, by the University of Chicago Press. Nelson was a historian of religion who, touched by Max Weber’s similar work, fixed on the usury debate as a way to trace moral and economic conscience through the history of the Church. I am indebted to his guidance.
* “The law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian.”—Gal. 3:24–25. Luther reinstates the law in civil affairs where faith may not be assumed, but risk may. His is an Old Testament spirit.
* It may be time to add a note on the