I was sitting with my first cousin and her Arab husband, smoking his hand rolled cigarettes and drinking his Turkish coffee while watching two of his grandchildren running around having raucous fun.
He lamented life in the US. without a big family and the wonderful feeling of being surrounded by family members all the time. When he visits his Arab family back home he always stays for a month and enjoys giant family meals with dozens of cousins and dancing and singing nearly every night.
Family life and tribal membership is something that we Westerners don’t understand.
I’ve traveled the world and found that a big family and being part of a tribe is the greatest feeling of comfort that can be found among several billions of people. I’ve heard this from an Oxford educated Indian in New Delhi, from a Harvard educated woman in Mali, in Guatemala and dozens of other times.
I tried to start a global organization in 1992 to help Western people understand that our efforts to modernize most of the world is not appreciated or welcomed. I failed miserably. Couldn’t find even a few Western people who agreed with me.
I had an Egyptian immigrant explain to me the day after the 9/11 twin towers slaughter that it was done to tell Americans to stop destroying traditional societies.
Almost no one understands the following fortuitous sources of the Modern World that non-moderns find so distressing.
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Humans are not as smart as many animals. But humans can communicate by voice over a large range of subjects. This facility may only have existed for a few tens of thousands of years but it allowed for extensive social organizing. Humans learned to write and read only a few millennia ago and only in places like China, Babylon, Greece, Japan, Egypt, Persia, India, Israel and a few other places. Many of these places developed schools to transmit the written material.
All the societies that had writing and reading also had hereditary elites that suppressed innovation. The exception was the Jews.
In 100 BCE the Roman Army attacked and dispersed the Jews, who had writing and reading. The dispersed Jews then developed small surviving clusters of Jews centered around a rabbi who created schools to debate their inherited writing. The debate focused on the writing in order for it to conform to reality. (The records of the debates are called Talmud.) These hundreds of clusters of Jews had teachers as leaders not an hereditary elite.
This dispersed but connected society was the first worldwide network of readers and debaters. They stayed in touch with each other.
By 1500 the Spanish and Portuguese dispersed the Jews again. Many went to Holland, the first neo-democracy in the modern world with a very egalitarian population; at the same time that book printing expanded in Europe and the Catholic Church order of Jesuits started studying Hebrew and the Talmud.
This European locale was the source of science and empirical study. It was the core of modernity. It challenged mysticism, tribalism, miracles and alchemy.
The final touchstone of the Modern World was the creation of the United States of America, with its vast open West, diverse immigrant population and a weak hereditary elite. All the ingredients that created the modern world after the Civil War.
People who hate their lives and the modern world, often blame the Jews. Which is historically accurate. The Roman Army and the Spanish Inquisition deserve some credit too.