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.