I think I am alone in understanding the creation of the modern world.
Many people have done a good job in looking at the elements and the significance of separate historic developments. I include Niall Ferguson, Jonathan Israel and Matt Ridley among those who have done the best job. There are many others who have contributed to our understanding. Many have seen the central importance of empirical thinking, reading, writing and the legal underlay; and many have seen the significance of the sequence of innovation from wind power, water power, steam power to oil power.
But I seem to be unique in seeing the stifling impact of hereditary elites. Only in the right circumstances of a diverse urban population with strong social networks, laws and a culture of tolerating innovation can the absence of an hereditary elite allow modern commerce to thrive.
We didn’t get modern commerce in China which had all the other scientific, intellectual, urban, and diversity ingredients but also had the stifling hereditary ruling elite. Nor did we get it in the culturally homogeneous Arab, Indian or Latin societies with weak elites. Tribes had to be largely dissolved, as well, as in Britain, France and Northern Europe.
Modern commerce grew first in the British Empire where the hereditary elite and primogenitor were disrupted in overseas dominions and most importantly in the United States of America where diverse immigration was extensive, and the wide open ‘West’ made it possible for the younger sons to escape the thwarting influence of the elite East coast families.
Hereditary elites stifle all innovation to preserve their power. Only in Japan was the hereditary elite able to absorb innovative individuals without totally stifling it; but there was a lack of cultural diversity needed to create modern commerce.
Why am I unique in seeing the whole picture? There are definitely many people smarter than I.
For me to understand my own functions I have had to discover several general human attributes.
The three most important attributes we homos have are (1) adulthood, (2) culture and (3) brain limitations.
I stumbled on the first, ‘adulthood’ entirely by accident. My girlfriend had an affair with Lyall Watson a few years after we broke up. She introduced him to me. He told me about the 100th monkey story and I interpreted it to mean that only in the juvenile stage of animal development is learning possible. For humans, I calculated that the juvenile stage ends before age 23. New original learning and genuinely new thinking does not occur in most humans after age 23. From a cursory survey of my friends, I guess that exceptions occur in about 1 out of 300 cases.
In my case I became part of the 1 in 300 because I went to Israel at age 19, lived on a kibbutz and had my entire worldview totally overthrown by that experience. The juvenile door for learning remained open.
(2) Culture is another fortuitous experience. At age 32, I took a trip around the world as my own prerequisite to joining the board of Point Foundation. Dick Baker Roshi, who had spent 3 years living in Japan, did a little to prepare me. When I got there I only saw the Japanese as small Americans who worked harder than Americans and did many things a little differently. But it was different enough for me to begin to see what culture was. (‘Culture’ as anthropologists see it.) I resolved to pick a culture and study it. I picked Japan as a comfortable place to study; I liked Japanese food, cleanliness and its long isolated history. I visited Japan every year for the next 50 years, staying from one month to three months. I traveled the country and became involved in business, politics and the arts.
Lastly, (3) brain limitations. I have long thought about the human brain capacity. Kinsey said that he started teaching knowing the names of 30,000 moth species. Each time he learned a new student's name he forgot one moth species. That started me thinking about the brain. The largest functioning word memory is about 100,000 words. I concluded that the human brain, in computer terms, can only contain a few million bytes of information, much of it compressed for fairly fast retrieval.
I concluded that most of our intelligence resides in the many knowledgeable friends we have. We store knowledge and information with each other. I have had many brilliant and diverse friends which has been my source for a broad worldview.