Why is a shared metaphysical infrastructure necessary between cultures for war and commerce? Why was the Bible created between Egypt and Mesopotamia? How did world Jewry function as the Internet of the Middle Ages? How is the gradual approach of Judaism to centers of power throughout history related to the gradual distancing of God from man throughout Judaism? And what is the banana waiting for the human monkey at the end of history? On all this and more - in another chapter from the Banana Notebooks
The Culture of War
Once it was thought that trade arose from scarcity and surplus, and therefore the more different countries are, the more trade there would be between them. But it turned out that trade actually occurs between similar countries, and there is hardly any trade between different ones, meaning trade actually arises from shared culture. And so it is with conflicts and wars. Conflicts don't happen between different countries but rather between similar ones. The Cold War happened precisely because of the similarity between the USA and the USSR, as empires based on economic agendas, and therefore it's a mistake to think that because China will be a superpower it will have a conflict with the USA. These countries are too different; conflict stems from spiritual conflict, which requires a shared spiritual infrastructure. That's why with Jordan and Egypt, with whom we have nothing in common, there is peace, and precisely because of the similarity between Israel and Iran there is conflict, despite having no shared border. The same goes for the similarity to Palestinians and Lebanese, and with the Palestinians the conflict is the hardest because they are the most similar to us, and both sides compete for the role of victim, and are not willing for the other to take it from them; there is a spiritual agreement on the victim structure and therefore there is competition over it. And so it was in the ancient world, there was no conflict with the cousins Ammon and Moab like with the brothers Edom and Ishmael. Christianity hated Judaism because of the similarity between them, and so did Muhammad fight the Jewish tribes. The Israelite kingdoms did not have an active conflict with Egypt but with the northern kingdoms of Assyria and Babylon, because the cultural source of the Israelites is there, not in Egypt. The Germans hated the Jews precisely because of the similarity of Judaism to Nazism, as a chosen people. The Crusades were because of the similarity of Christianity to Islam, therefore Islam fought towards Europe and not towards Hinduism, despite them being ostensibly more idolatrous. This is the conclusion of Genesis that the hardest quarrels are between brothers, and precisely because of the increasing similarity between men and women, their relationships are at an all-time low. Apple, Google and Facebook fight because they are similar, and don't fight against food producers, for example. Philosophers fight philosophers, and cats fight cats.
Geophilosophy - Geopolitics of Ideas
What protected the Egyptian kingdom, which was not conquered for thousands of years and maintained cultural continuity, was the desert, which protected it from the changing empires in greater Mesopotamia. Until the conquest route moved to the sea, and then it was conquered by Rome. Israel was not in the area that was conquered the most times (to its north), but rather between the stable area of Egypt and the cultural turmoil of Mesopotamia, and therefore was influenced by both - absorbing both the advanced dynamic and competitive influences and the monopolistic cultural stability. Canaan was not a center of war or empire, but rather a center of trade, a route between the constant empire and the changing empires. The stability of Egypt led to ongoing trade, and the dynamism of Mesopotamia saved from stagnation. It was on the border between stability and instability, which from a physical perspective is the most fertile and fractal place - the edge of chaos. In Mesopotamia there were many empires and therefore a civil society of Hammurabi's laws, because every time the state changed, and this law influenced biblical law. In contrast, in Egypt there was a state religion in its most extreme sense, with Pharaoh as a god, and all religion revolving around his immortality, because stability created the pyramids and resistance to death and mummification and eternity, and this influenced the totality of monotheism - our god is like a Pharaoh of the gods. Thus we received a total and timeless god with human law. And the friction between these two elements, between human temporality and law from a constant source - this is the Torah.
The Holocaust Affected the Arab World More Than Europe
What caused the destruction of the Arab world is Israel, which took the Jewish elite, which connected it to the West, from all over the Arab world, emptying it of Jews. Therefore, it's a world that had its Jews taken from it, even more than Europe after the Holocaust, and a cultural vacuum was created, which led to fundamentalism. Just as Russia today, where the Jews there are no longer what they used to be, is being drawn back to the Tsarist era. It's not that Americans are more creative than Japanese and Chinese, and more entrepreneurial, but that in America there are enough Jews to change the ethos of the country, and the media that comes out of it. Jews, being the human Internet of the world, as a networked people found everywhere, have always attracted societies for the benefit of trade and exchange of ideas, particularly between Muslim and Christian cultures. Because Jews had no connection to Indian and Chinese cultures - these two remained isolated from the rest. If Jews had been exiled to India and China - culture would really look different, and it's possible that the East would have led over the West, and monotheistic religions, capitalism and the idea of messianic progress would have developed there. The reason for the Cold War is that after Europe was emptied of Jews there were two superpowers with millions of Jews - Russia and the USA - who exploited the Jews to obtain nuclear weapons, and adopted opposite Jewish-economic ideologies. But the persecution of Jews in Russia contributed to its collapse, because its Jews could not be part of the global Jewish network behind the Iron Curtain and collapsed under oppression, and only in the capitalist period after its fall did they stand out as oligarchs until its return to Tsarism. After victory in the first Cold War, the USA made the same mistake with Russia as it did with Germany after World War I. And therefore we are under threat of the outbreak of the Second Cold War. But the decline of Russian Jewry is what left the USA as the only leading option in the world. If Hitler had waited too long after expelling Jews from their positions in the university, Germany would have begun to lag significantly technologically behind the countries where Jews remained part of the scientific establishment. If, for example, he had restrained himself for a decade, then other countries would already have computers and atomic bombs and he still wouldn't. Therefore he had a narrow window of opportunity. On the other hand, if the war had lasted another two or three years, and the USA had defeated Germany using atomic bombs which are weapons of mass destruction, then the moral account of the Holocaust would have been different, and would have diminished the crimes of the Germans who would have seen themselves as victims. The Holocaust was a severe blow to European culture, but what contributed to global barbarism and the rise of low culture more than anything is Zionism, which drew Jews from all over the world and greatly weakened networked Judaism. In the end, only the USA, England, France and Russia were left with relatively developed Judaism - and these are exactly the powers that defeated Hitler. In other words, it's possible to deconstruct all of history through Judaism, not because Judaism really drives history, but from its perspective as a global network. Because historical explanations (intelligent ones) don't claim to have found the mechanism that drives history, but that they've found an important perspective through which to look at history, and therefore the driving of history is reflected through it, like an X-ray of a body that can be in all kinds of planes, and the claim is that a certain plane captures something essential and predictive (for example, they can diagnose a disease or the development of a new organ in advance). From this perspective, the Jewish claim is strong: the Jewish plane captures something essential from the heart of history. Therefore it's also important to think how the Jewish perspective predicts the future, and in particular how Judaism integrates with the essential revolution of changing man. And here it can be argued that Judaism is the current edge of human enhancement, whether it's cultural or genetic enhancement - its intellectual excellence is a fact. And this orientation in the history of ideas can provide religious and cultural justification for enhancement. Religious justification: to learn Torah better, to decipher its mysteries that were not revealed to previous generations, to get closer to the supreme intellect according to Maimonides, and maybe even to give birth to the Messiah. Cultural justification: in order to produce geniuses from within it and to be a light unto the nations and to find technologies that will protect Jews from extermination and prevent a Holocaust. Even secular Jews will go further than any other culture to prevent a second Holocaust, and this includes against risk from artificial intelligence or risk from aliens or risk from brain cyber or any other futuristic danger. It has simply become a principle. Jews will do anything to survive, even if there will no longer be any reason for man.
Our Naive Era
The Fermi paradox stems from the fact that even a gap of just a thousand years is enough, between the stage at which different cultures leave their planet and reach the explosion of progress, so that there is no scale for comparison between their development. Even if there are many such species, or even cultures on the same planet, they never emerge in parallel. Because in a thousand years our development will be incomparable to that of today, and therefore if the acceleration is great enough, a small gap in departure times for the race is enough so that any two will never get close and never compete, and therefore every race will be unique in its level of development, as far as can be seen on the horizon. And a race that precedes us by a thousand years, or a hundred thousand years, is perhaps already capable of creating the entire universe, and being our god, and maybe that's what happened, because who said that the amount of matter and energy and distance in the universe are large? Maybe they are tiny in relation to another universe, and we are a mini-universe, a nano-universe. But maybe these gods are still sensitive to suffering, or to ignorance, and therefore play a little with history, or at least create uniqueness and interest in it, like in a game or a book. We need to stop thinking about aliens and start thinking about gods, because the gap between us and them is a gap between man and god, not between man and foreign man or animal. Because even to be a game or scientific experiment requires some ratio between the sophistication of the game and the sophistication of the player, we could be a god of ants but less a god of bacteria and even less a god of atoms or photons. And therefore it may be that each race is the god of the race that emerges shortly after it in the race, and these are spheres of gods within gods, expanding circles, the gap between them only grows and hence the distancing of God from us in history. And there may be races that are a little closer to their god than others, although of course because of the acceleration the gap tends to infinity. Therefore the Fermi paradox is a religious argument, and the prevalence of life in the universe leads to the existence of gods, and science at its peak can still merge back with religion. Maybe God really looked for someone to talk to in humanity, and found that the Jews are the most worthy interlocutors relative to the rest. Or decided to teach it something and create a partnership through Jesus, who was an alien in a human body.