Tomas Sedlacek, Economics of Good and Evil
Abridged and edited for readability
Gilgamesh, wherefore do you wander? The eternal life you are seeking you shall not find…. Always be happy, night and day. Night and day play and dance.
The Epic of Gilgamesh dates from over four thousand years ago and is the oldest work of literature available to humankind. The first written records come from Mesopotamia. The epic inspired many stories that followed, which dominate mythology to this day in more or less altered form. Even in this oldest work known to men, economic questions play an important role—and if we want to set out on a trail of economic questioning, we can go no deeper into history than this. This is the bedrock.
Only a fraction of the material relics survive from the period before the epic, and only fragments remain of written records relating mainly to economics, diplomacy, war, magic, and religion. As the economic historian Niall Ferguson cynically notes, these are “reminders that when human beings first began to produce written records of their activities they did so not to write history, poetry, or philosophy, but to do business.” But the Epic of Gilgamesh bears witness to the opposite—despite the fact that the first written clay fragments may have been about business and war, the first written story is about great friendship and adventure. Surprisingly, there is no mention of either money or war; for example, not once does anyone in the whole epic sell or purchase something. No nation conquers another, and we do not encounter a mention even of the threat of violence. It is a story of nature and civilization, of heroism, wisdom, and the battle against the gods.
Despite being a text of such great importance, it seems to have completely escaped the attention of economists. At the same time, this is where we encounter our civilization’s very first economic contemplation; the beginnings of well-known concepts such as the market and its invisible hand, the problem of utilizing natural wealth and efforts at maximizing effectiveness. A dilemma appears on the role of feelings, the term “progress,” and the natural state, or the topic of the comprehensive division of labor connected with the creation of the first cities. This is the first feeble attempt to understand the epic from an economic standpoint.
First, let’s briefly summarize the story line of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh, the ruler of the city of Uruk, is a superhuman semigod: “two thirds of him god and one third human.” The epic begins with a description of a perfect, impressive, and immortal wall around the city that Gilgamesh is building. As punishment for the merciless treatment of his workers and subjects, the gods call on the savage Enkidu to stop Gilgamesh. But the two become friends, an invincible pair, and together they carry out heroic acts. Later, Enkidu dies, and Gilgamesh sets out in search of immortality. He overcomes numerous obstacles and pitfalls, but immortality eludes him, if only by a hair’s breadth. The end of the story returns to where the epic began—to the song in praise of Uruk’s wall.
Gilgamesh’s effort to build a wall like no other is the central plot of the entire story. Gilgamesh tries to increase his subjects’ performance and effectiveness at all costs, even preventing them from having contact with their wives and children. So the people complain to the gods:
The young men of Uruk he harries without warrant, Gilgamesh lets no son go free to his father (…) Gilgamesh lets no girl go free to her bridegroom The warrior’s daughter, the young man’s bride.
This has a direct relation to the emergence of the city as a place that manages the countryside around it. “The village neighbors would now be kept at a distance: no longer familiars and equals, they were reduced to subjects, whose lives were supervised and directed by military and civil officers, governors, and tax-gatherers, directly accountable to the king.”
A principle so distant and yet so close. Even today we live in Gilgamesh’s vision that human relations—and therefore humanity itself—are a disturbance to work and efficiency; that people would perform better if they did not “waste” their time and energy on nonproductive things. Even today, we often consider the domain of humanity (human relations, love, friendship, beauty, art, etc.) to be unproductive.
Governing people reduced to human-robots has been the dream of tyrants from time immemorial. Every despotic ruler sees competition to effectiveness in family relations and friendships. The effort to reduce a person to a unit of production and consumption is also evident in social utopia. In his ideal state, Plato does not allow guardian families to raise their children; instead they hand them over to a specialized institution immediately after birth. This is similar to the dystopias in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. In both novels, human relations and feelings (or any expressions of personality) are forbidden and strictly punished. Love is “unnecessary” and unproductive, as is friendship; both can be destructive to a totalitarian system. As C. S. Lewis puts it, “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”
To a large degree, today’s mainstream economics is somewhat close to such a concept. Models of neoclassical economics perceive labor as an input to a production function. But such an economy does not know how to build humanity (so human!) into its framework—but human-robots would fit it just fine. As Joseph Stiglitz says,
One of the great “tricks” (some say “insights”) of neoclassical economics is to treat labour like any other factor of production. Output is written as a function of inputs—steel, machines, and labour. The mathematics treats labour like any other commodity, lulling one into thinking of labour like an ordinary commodity, such as steel or plastic. But labour is unlike any other commodity. The work environment is of no concern for steel; we do not care about steel’s well-being.
But there exists something that is frequently confused with friendship, something society and the economy greatly need: Even the earliest cultures were aware of the value of cooperation on the working level—today we call this collegiality or fellowship. These “lesser relationships” are necessary for society and for companies because work can be done much faster and more effectively if people get along with each other on a human level and are mutually amenable. Teamwork is a promise of improved performance, and specialized companies are hired to do team-building.
But friendship, one of the central themes of the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from different material than teamwork. Friendship, as C. S. Lewis describes it, is completely uneconomical, unbiological, and unnecessary for civilization. But it is in friendship where—often by-the-way, as a side product, an externality—ideas and deeds are performed that can change the face of society. Friendship can go against an ingrained system in places where an individual does not have the courage to do so himself.
In the beginning, Gilgamesh considers friendship unproductive until he himself experiences it with Enkidu and discovers that it brings unexpected things. Here we have a beautiful example of the power of friendship, one that knows how to transform a system and change a person. Enkidu, sent to Gilgamesh as a punishment from the gods, in the end becomes his faithful friend, and together they set out against the gods. Gilgamesh would never have gathered the courage to do something like that on his own—nor would Enkidu. Their friendship helps them to hold their own in situations where either of them would not have succeeded alone. Mythic drama frequently contains a strong friendship bond—as religious scholars describe it, friends “are afraid and stimulate each other before the battle, seek solace in their dreams and are transfixed before the irreversibility of death.”