There's an ancient Chinese proverb (or at least, a line from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo about an ancient Chinese proverb) saying that, if you save a person's life, you're responsible for it forever. On the face of it, this makes no sense. Having made them a gift of their own life, you should, it seems, be able in good conscience to walk away. What they do with it afterwards is up to them.
But what strikes me about this proverb is rather how intuitively sensible it feels. No one in Vertigo demands to know why this is so, or dismisses it as nonsense, and I've never known anyone in real life to react that way either. Owing someone your life isn't like owing them 50 dollars. It means something.
And the reason why, it seems to me, is that this isn't a debt that's meant to be repaid. You don't ordinarily save a person's life in the expectation that they'll later be in a position to save yours, or to offer anything of comparable value. You expect that they'll be in your debt forever. There will always be this relationship between you-- and not at all a relationship of equality.
I come to be thinking about all this because of a mild surprise I had this morning. About two years ago I did (what I thought of as) a minor favor for a man I didn't really know. A small sum of money changed hands, a couple emails were sent, and after that I didn't think much of it. Just today, I got a message from him saying that he hasn't forgotten me, or what he promised me-- which is a bit embarrassing, seeing as I'd all but forgotten him, and had no recollection of his having promised me anything at all. I feel like I should have remembered. I feel like I owe him that much. But it hardly makes sense that I owe him something; I never even intended for him to owe me anything. Without meaning to, without even realizing it, I became someone he felt accountable to, and by whatever obscure human mechanism is operating in the Chinese proverb, that means I have an obligation to him as well.
It's not a tremendous obligation, I don't think. If anything, it's the same obligation I have to everyone else: the obligation to notice him as a person, and treat him how I'd like to be treated. But it feels much more weighty and serious, I suppose, because I've realized that, in a way, I have power over him. Power is supposed to come with responsibility, and it almost always does.
This made me think that, of all the unequal relationships in the world, debt is maybe the least humane in this respect: all the power is on one side, and all the responsibility on the other.
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Obligation must be as old as people, but debt-- quantified debt, the kind that can be exactly measured and tracked over great distances in time and space, between any two people in the world-- is a modern innovation, something that needs currencies and accounting to work. If I owe you 50 dollars, and I pay you 50 dollars, the debt is annihilated, and indeed there is no longer any necessary connection between us at all. We don't have to care about each other for this to work; we don't even have to be introduced; we just have to agree on the concept of 50 dollars. This has some major upsides: it lets resources flow freely, and it allows people to be (at least nominally) free and equal, even-steven, owing nothing to anybody.
This is in contrast to the kind of obligation that subsists between family, or friends, or doctor and patient, or teacher and student, or maybe between the two people in the Chinese proverb. These obligations aren't precisely measured or ever fully discharged. There is no limit to what they can demand of us. But their big advantage is that they're generally understood to run both ways. When they're unequal, they acknowledge the inequality. They are thou-relationships between whole people.
I worry about the exercise of power without a thou-relationship. I don't say that it's inherently oppressive, but it's certainly risky. And so I worry about debt, and what it means for us that our society relies so much on it.
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