Maeve Higgins: We are more than money and can’t be reduced to transactions

Millions of young people in the US have been saddled with massive debt before even starting out

Millions of young people in the US have been saddled with massive debt before even starting out.

A lot happened in March of 2020: the pandemic, the panic, the stopgap measures to relieve people of old burdens as we were saddled with new ones.

One such measure the US government took was to pause student loan payments. Student debt is gigantic here, with 45m people owing $1.6 trillion in federal loans taken out for college. This debt is second only to mortgages, and it’s more than the debt Americans owe on car loans or credit cards.

Allowing people a breather from these repayments over the past two years also gave people time to think about this predicament. How did it end up this way, with millions of young people saddled with massive debt before even starting out? And if it was possible to pause it, wasn’t it possible to end it completely?

Activists and progressives pushed for debt relief, and this month, they got it. Well, they got some of it.

President Biden announced a plan to forgive some student loan debt, cancelling $10,000 in debt for those earning less than $125,000 per year and $20,000 for those who had received Pell grants for low-income families. The reaction to this announcement has been fascinating to witness, and indicates what solidarity looks like in the US today.

Solidarity, I suppose, means that you won’t step on someone’s neck to get to where you want to be. Instead, you will feel some impulse to see another individual’s life as having roughly the same value as yours and treat them as such.

Student debt is massive in the US, with 45m people owing $1.6 trillion in federal loans taken out for college.

Solidarity is typically a relational concept; it is all about how we connect to others and not about our individual self-interest. Solidarity that can seem altruistic often benefits the helper too. That’s partially how the Democrats framed this latest move on student debt relief.

“All of this means people can start, finally, to climb out from under that mountain of debt,” President Biden said as he announced the debt forgiveness from the White House. “To finally think about buying a home or starting a family or starting a business. And by the way, when this happens, the whole economy is better off.”

Joe ‘by the way’ Biden, I’m so glad you brought that up! I don’t have student debt, and I can assume the taxes I pay here could go towards the student debt relief, and I think we will all be better off, too, not just economically.

The moral load attached to debt is something to behold. The firestorm of fury from Republicans hints that they see something fundamentally bad about the person in debt. 

Democrats quickly highlighted the hypocrisy of many Republicans who benefitted from other financial pandemic relief measures, particularly those who took hundreds of thousands of dollars of now-forgiven loans from the Paycheck Protection Program.

But what struck me, again and again, was the insistence from those on the political right that any kind of debt was not just money owed; rather, it was some vital moral imperative, a sacred contract that holds society together. Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee tweeted: “If you take out a loan, you pay it back. Period.”

Firstly and obviously, this is not true. A cursory glance at the vast list of banks, insurance companies, and corporations bailed out by the US government provides ample evidence that not everyone pays back their debts. Secondly, and more to my point, our moral duty is not to take care of our debts but to take care of each other. This is so far from how things are today that even writing such a thing could attract ridicule.

That’s fine, because the way things operate today are broken, and we don’t need to keep doing it that way. 

So I repeat this practical and urgent distinction: people are more important than money. It is barbaric to organise our world and laws as if the opposite is true, but that is what we do.

In his epic book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, the anthropologist David Graeber tells a story about the Inuit people of the Arctic, as shared by the Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen who lived in Greenland for many years in the early 1900s. Freuchen recalled that another hunter dropped off meat for him and his family when he came home empty-handed after a walrus hunt. He thanked the man profusely, only to be met with a barrage of indignation. “Up in our country, we are human!” said the hunter. “And since we are human, we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.”

Graeber notes that this refusal to calculate credits and debits is found “throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies”. These sophisticated civilisations very deliberately did not reduce each other to transactions.

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They could have, of course, just as we have done today. But they did not, and we don’t have to either.

Graeber concludes the Inuit story with these lines, pointing out that the hunter’s choice not to indebt Freuchen was intentional and consequential: “Of course, we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilisation.”

Our choice today is just as intentional and just as consequential. Forgiving debt shows that a person’s life is worth more than a number in the cloud; it shows that, in the words of that grumpy and generous walrus hunter: “Since we are human, we help each other”.