The Three Greatest of All Time: The most important challenges to crack facing a spiritually impoverished era. Is it possible to recreate the historical conditions essential for past masterpieces, or is this a dangerous game? Market infrastructure led to economic progress and the scientific world's infrastructure led to scientific and technological progress - is there a parallel infrastructure for the spiritual world that can bring about accelerated cultural development and incubation of masterpieces?
The three big and fundamental questions of the humanities, which (of course) the humanities will hardly address, are the three most important questions for the spiritual future of the world. Their current acute importance stems from the fact that technological change creates spiritual change - and therefore allows, for the first time in the history of the spirit, to move from humanities to spiritual engineering. Thus, correct answers to questions can influence the future spiritual world, just as the scientific revolution influenced the material world. And these are the three fundamental questions that anyone engaged in a science dealing with the spirit would be happy if an answer that meets experimental criteria was found for them:
A. The question of place: Why specifically Western culture? What caused this particular culture to bypass all others and dominate the world, with unprecedented spiritual and material achievements? Why did it succeed more than others - and how can one correctly characterize the sources of its success in order to recreate this success? (The "leftist" answer that Western culture was the worst of all and therefore won - does not stand up to any historical test). What is the source of the Western miracle, which did not happen anywhere else?
B. The question of time: Why specifically Jewish culture? What caused one culture, not particularly large and notably lacking in power, to persist through countless periods and host cultures, while repeatedly and astonishingly contributing (without any quantitative proportion to its size) to all of human spiritual history. Is it possible to characterize the factors for this and recreate them? (The right-wing answer, that Jewish culture was "better" than all others - does not stand up to any historical test). What is the source of the Jewish miracle, which did not persist in any other culture?
C. The combined question of place and time: What is the origin of golden ages? The existence of very prominent golden ages in the history of the spirit - and the incorrectness of the naturalistic assumption that talent is evenly distributed across periods and places - is a very surprising fact. Is it possible to characterize the conditions in which golden ages are created - and recreate them? Is it possible to create a golden age (for example, today...)? Is it possible to create a long-lasting golden age (and if not - why not)? What is the source of the miracles of Athens, the Renaissance, or Vienna, which lasted with tremendous power for short periods?
The Netanya School dealt intensively with these three questions - and offered them a variety of original answers in its writings. Each such answer - if it has substance - means a cultural-organizational or social experiment that can be performed to improve the current miserable cultural achievements of culture (today, perhaps the internet can enable such experimental platforms). If such a successful experiment is found, its meaning will be the ability for spiritual engineering: creating conditions for cultural flourishing. But not every such answer harbors an experiment we would want to perform. And so is a very reasonable answer to question A, which we will lay out below.
If we try to trace the roots of Western superiority in the world, we will discover that the Industrial Revolution is already a stage where Europe distinctly surpassed the GDP of the great Eastern cultures - like China and India. But the roots of the Industrial Revolution are much earlier. We would be happy if the world picture was that the scientific revolution is the root of Western superiority, or the republic of letters and the free competitiveness inherent in European fragmentation (as Prof. Joel Mokyr argues). But what can we do when the superiority existed long before them, and a clear and indisputable sign of the superiority of Western culture occurred even in the discovery of America. It was not the Far Eastern cultures that did this - and no other culture was close to it. It is also not a coincidental achievement, as the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope and the maritime arrival in India were close in time - and distant in space.
We also cannot trace specifically the invention of printing as the source of superiority, for it was not what created the maritime capabilities that shortly after led to these discoveries. One might perhaps argue for a general Western technological capability, from which many developments stemmed, such as printing, shipping, and even the Copernican and scientific revolutions. According to this quite recent explanation, in the spirit of our times, technology precedes science and spirit. But if so, there is a need to ask what caused this technological capability. In fact, if we try to find the roots of the West's technical superiority over the East, we will recall the technological military advantages of the Christian world over the Muslim one even in the Crusader period, where sometimes a relatively small Crusader army was able to cope with vastly superior Muslim forces, on their home turf, thanks to technical capabilities (armor, armament, logistics and military construction). The roots of the West's superior military capabilities can perhaps be traced even to antiquity, with the armies of Rome and Macedonia, which only logistical limitations prevented from conquering the entire world. Overall, Western invasions to the East were generally much deeper, in dimensions of space and time and power and influence and penetration into the depth of the rival system - than the opposite ones.
We are well acquainted with the geographical, political, and military fragmentation in the West, which created numerous wars. As well as the phenomenon known to this day that war is the mother of invention - combining the need, funding, and motivation for open-mindedness. War is a distinctly competitive evolutionary field, precisely because no cultural convention or agreement will change the balance of power in practice, and will not prevent progress - every barrier will be breached. The strong will win. The successful will survive. And those who are less - less. The possibility for technical conservatism in the military field is lower than in any other field, and countless important inventions were created during wars (more than any other period) or with security funding. The Israeli high-tech industry is also a clear example of this phenomenon, as are central scientific achievements of the 20th century (for example: the computer). Even inventions created before wars, and blocked for use due to natural human conservatism and fixation, were often tried for the first time in war (for example: the use of antibiotics on a large scale). The Cold War created a scientific arms race that reached space - and achievements some of which have not been recreated to this day (or until the next arms race).
Therefore, it is easy for us to believe that it is precisely the high belligerence of Europe and Western culture (and especially within itself) that led to its technical development, which later led to scientific and ideological development. Shipping also developed out of military competition, and eventually brought and integrated into commercial competition, and with the development of trade, capitalism also developed. But the basis is combat. According to this historical method, if it has generality, the fighting and struggle between the Greek polis cities, and the political fragmentation in Greece (which stemmed from geographical fragmentation) are the roots of the Greek miracle (and not, as suggested in fashionable thinking, the network structure of Greek culture). After all, if we had asked the Greeks themselves - they would have pointed to the myth of the Iliad and the Odyssey, around the Trojan War, and to the archaic heroes as those who shaped their culture and ethos more than anything.
How then do we position Greek philosophy, which is a one-time achievement of Western culture? (We can attribute Rome and its engineering and organizational capabilities without hesitation to the militaristic paradigm above). Perhaps we will also remember the achievement of our sage culture or of the Bible. Sometimes it is precisely a weak group, within a military world, that creates a kind of competition between men that ends in intellectual struggles - and the transfer of the battlefield to the world of spirit. The general who falls in love with Socrates (a rather failed soldier) in the Symposium, and the dominant parallel imagery between military and intellectual disputes in rabbinic literature are perhaps examples of such a direction. Let us also note the exceptional culture of argument and dispute of the sages, and the culture of confrontation of the prophets (who were a kind of counter-culture figures), and the culture of Socratic confrontational dialogue - all of which channel male aggressive belligerence into a refined and refining intellectual channel.
Jews are known for the wars of the Jews to this very day - but these are usually only intellectual wars. When raising a hand is taboo within the collective, muscle displays and competition between roosters move to legitimate channels within the given culture. The raging and noisy political dispute in Israel, more than it is aimed at achieving any achievement or goal externally, is aimed at twisting the arm of the other side in the internal dispute. Because Jews, as is known, have no external wars - only internal wars. It follows from all this that we should try to organize the network as a war of ideas, and thus perhaps cultural redemption will grow for us. And for the fastest possible technological and scientific advancement, alas, commercial competition alone will not suffice, but the optimal scenario is a cold war (between the US and Europe and China). But since a cold war can always turn hot - we will make do with the current peace, even if basic scientific research suffers from it (and it indeed suffers).
Economic competition between commercial companies and nations does not support science and basic research like the military one, and we often suffer, usually without knowing, from the consequences of this neglect. The most famous among these consequences, but not the most severe of them, is of course the Corona pandemic. If the Cold War had continued in the era of genetic engineering this would not have happened - but on the other hand we would be facing a balance of terror of ethnic biological destruction, which is no less dangerous than a nuclear holocaust (but with a developed arsenal of military biological defense tools, which any natural virus would have been defeated by). The main risk in the lack of progress in basic research stems precisely from the narrowing gap between the technological frontier (which the commercial world actually promotes rapidly) and the scientific research frontier, because of which there may be an advantage for non-institutional organizations and perhaps even individuals over state institutions.
If we compare this to an epidemic, we will discover that the greatest threat from it is the inspiration it can give to terrorists in developing a truly contagious and deadly biological weapon, perhaps even ethnic, as well as viral cyber destruction carried out by individuals. In such a situation, the mass-suicidal shooting events in the US will be revealed as a much more dangerous precursor to the rest of the century than the September 11 suicide attackers. The nightmare scenario is the combination of a virus with a huge infection coefficient (like measles), a prolonged incubation period (like AIDS), and exceptional lethality (like Ebola). The technological gap to create such a virus is narrowing, and for individuals it is much smaller than creating a nuclear bomb. Since only states have an interest in developing defense capabilities against such threats - it is possible that only a state scientific establishment will be able to respond to the next Hitler, sitting in a basement and drawing inspiration from Corona for a new type of world holocaust. If so and for another reason threatening humanity (artificial intelligence?), we may need to add to the questions of the humanities another question, fourth, fateful and acute:
D. The question of lack of place and time: How can cultural holocaust and spiritual annihilation be prevented?