Pro Commerce

Eureka! Two of Two

An expansion of my previous blog.

Humans are not much smarter than other animals.  Me included.  Even in several hundred millennia, we have only created the modern world in the last quarter of a millennium.  Humans must cooperate to create anything and must accumulate knowledge.  Many institutions keep that from happening.

The ‘we’ of this modern creation is primarily one nation.   One nation out of nearly 200 in the U.N.  Only 25 of those 200 nations can create a bicycle without importing parts of it. One nation has created 90% of the technology of the modern world.  Israel is the second creator and only recently and Japan is the third.

So how did this happen?  That has been my lifetime quest for an answer.

The cargo cult piece of the puzzle was recent.   Humans seem to want to imitate the abundance of modern commerce.  In the Polynesians and Melanesians which saw the incredible wealth of the Japanese and American militaries that were brought with planes and airdropped came incomparable abundance.   The natives tried to reproduce the airplanes, radios and everything they saw out of bamboo and jungle products, expecting the goods to be delivered to them in abundance again.

Most of the humans on the planet have tried to do what the Polynesians and Melanesians did; they copied the behavior they saw and in most cases they imported the components of the modern world that they wanted.  The Bedouin tribes in Abu Dhabi and Dubai had oil/gas to buy and import a simulacrum of the entire modern world made of steel and concrete instead of jungle materials.

Now, my other question has been ‘What made the modern world possible?’  More accurately, what kept other humans from creating the modern commerce that created the modern world?  The question really is what institutions kept cooperation from happening?

That is what is in my Eureka email.  First empirical knowledge has to be accumulated.  Otherwise each separate human is pretty useless. 

We Jews gave that to the world with writing, debate about the empirical world and multi-generational education.  

Second, cooperation with a very large group of diverse people was needed.  That was what modern commerce allows.  The employees of my morning coffee shop are from every nationality, every religion and every other human distinction.

How did we get modern commerce?  That is what I outlined in my blog.  The tribe had to be destroyed, the hereditary elite had to be destroyed and empiricism had to be elevated to its central role in human knowledge systems.

Eureka! One of Two

I have put the last two pieces together in the puzzle.  

The puzzle is how an animal as limited as humans can build such a beautiful and complex society as we have today. The two pieces I have just found are ‘cargo cult’ and ‘empiricism.’  Other parts of the puzzle I have found during my life and can be found in my eleven books and my blogs.

Let’s begin with the ‘cargo cult.’

I have been baffled by the existence of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. How can a Bedouin tribe build a modern functioning city?  The answer is a cargo cult with oil/gas, steel and concrete instead of bamboo.

‘Empiricism’ comes from Yoram Hazony, who figured out that what created the modern dichotomy between Jefferson and Hamilton was that the former was a platonist and the latter was an empiricist.  That is the missing piece in the evolution of the modern world.

The modern world was created by modern commerce,  I have spent my life trying to understand how this highly improbable system came about.  Now I know.

First came the Jews who focused an entire tribe on the idea of a unitary god.  That created a coherent group who had to debate and understand how the world around us could have been created by a single entity. The Jews mastered writing and debate which elevated empirical wisdom and recording of that wisdom along with education to create an historic chain of learning.  We Jews have been the social lubricant of empiricism throughout history.

Second came the European Catholic Church which slowly, over a millennium, enforced the idea and institution of a marriage that demanded the isolated and efficient nuclear family.  Tribes could not create the global world of colonialism.

Third came Columbus, Kepler and Galileo, who used empiricism to begin the discovery of the world around them.  Immediately following these great technologists was the Dutch Republic, the first home of Protestantism and modern global commerce. 

Fourth were the pioneers of the empirical world, mostly in England after the Dutch invaded it.  Newton, Adam Smith, Priestly and James Watt.

Fifth was the creation of the modern commercial national structure by Hamilton and Franklin.

Sixth were the Colonial world, the Masonic Order and the Great American West that allowed for the destruction of the hereditary elite and the freedom of the other siblings to emerge.

Seventh, the discovery of Bessemer steel and oil, the key physical ingredients of the modern world.

Eighth was World War II, which caused the collapse of the American hereditary elite in 1960 that in turn made the spread of the modern innovative corporation and meritocracy a global reality.

Now I have it.  That is the modern world.  Just add the cargo cult and we see how the world of modern commerce became established.  Totally fortuitous.

The world of Modern Commerce, the world that I discovered, has allowed countless individual small-minded humans to cooperate and share their small units of knowledge to create magnificent technology and complex institutions.

Let us hope, that my greatest fear, that the world of Plato, Descartes, Jefferson, Kant, Marx and the Wokies will not destroy what we have accidentally created.

Victor Davis Hanson

Brilliant paper on America's decline by Victor Davis Hanson.

Great Uncle Abe on Global Warming

My great uncle Abraham Lincoln Phillips was born in Petaluma California in the late 1870s.  Sometime in his 20’s uncle Abe, whom we called A.L, became a Christian Scientist.  As he explained, “Science is very successful.”  

He remained a Christian Scientist faithful until he was 92 when he had prostate surgery. 

I bring this up because I never cease wondering how more than a billion people worldwide can believe in Human Caused Global Warming and the consequent Armeggedon.  After all, the temperature of the surface of the earth is 57.4 F today as it was in 1950.

I think the reason may be the same. ‘Science is very successful,’ and the billions who believe in the Global Warming thesis are terribly impressed with the incredible products of science they see in the world around them.

That is how I explain this mass hypnosis.  

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People who have been reading this blog for years know that I took a class at the U. of Chicago from Niels Bohr, who taught that the history of science was the history of people explaining the physics behind the series of constants being discovered by engineers and technologists.  It is really the engineers and technologists to whom we are indebted for the miracles of the modern world.

Human Caused Global Warming Still Not True

I’ve been saying this since I first looked at the evidence in 1983.  The false nature of this thesis is recently well evidenced in a Congressional hearing. S71022-20132171-302668.pdfs 

Just for my records.

Homeless in Chinatown?

Yesterday, at 10am, I drove up Grant Ave. and down Stockton St. (San Francisco) and didn’t see one homeless person or tent. Those two streets are Chinatown. Stockton St. had more people than any other part of the City.

Why are there no homeless when they cover sidewalks in most of the retail blocks in the rest of the City?

My tool for analysis of this issue is Social Sorting.  I describe Social Sorting as my original idea #8 which you can find here.  

The geography of an individual’s location or job is defined by three elements: the flag, the screen and the overflow.

The flag is what draws a homeless person to any location.  The flag for a homeless person is

•  a place that is safe, 
• where people give money to beggars and 
• where other homeless congregate. 

The screen for a homeless person is a place 

• where food is available, 
• where protection from the elements is available and 
• where hostility is minimal. 

The overflow is where the homeless person will be threatened and/or chased away.

Chinatown is mostly populated by Cantonese Chinese. The area was settled in 1824 by Cantonese and they have owned businesses in that location ever since.  

Most Chinese do not give money or food to beggars or the homeless. Chinatown does not offer a flag to attract homeless unlike the rest of San Francisco which gives them money, food and safety.  

The screen in Chinatown is that Chinese openly dislike and have disdain for people who won’t work.  In China an adult healthy person who won’t work is allowed to starve to death.  In the rest of San Francisco the homeless are treated as decent people who are ‘unfortunate,’ probably mentally ill or addicted to drugs.

The overflow in Chinatown is the broom and a bucket of water.  A homeless person who tries to settle in Chinatown will be driven off with a broom and bucket of water.  In the rest of the City, the police might be called and they will tell the homeless person to ‘move along’ and will be ignored.

That is why there are no homeless people in Chinatown.

(photo of Shanghai.)

Ridiculous, Absurd

What could be more absurd or ridiculous than to give advice on aging?

I have never paid attention to people giving advice on aging.  Why should you?

To get to 100 years old, your heart must beat 3 billion times.  That is a lot, more than any living human can understand or explain.  Thinking someone knows how to get to 3 billion heartbeats is absurd.

My advice is about making old age comfortable.  In my early thirties I learned how to practice zazen, which is sitting meditation with an empty mind.  I have continued to do this practice ever since, daily (weekdays) for a half an hour.  Now in my old age I can sit comfortably doing nothing for hours or days on end, comfortably.  

That is a very helpful practice when your energy is low and nearly all your close friends are dead.  I’m glad I can do it.  I have led a very energetic life; now is the time for serenity.

I am not advocating for any specific form of meditation nor for any of the ideas, like enlightenment, that presumably are attendant.  Most rewards for meditation, such as enlightenment, seem overrated.  But being serene in old age is a great payoff.