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.