A word on the title—“cybernetics” is essentially the same word as “governance,” and since I want to reject philosophically implicated terms like “theology” and “anthropology” and foreground the centrality of governance in constituting the human, I thought to take advantage of the centrality of “cybernetics” to technological displacements of philosophy. Judaism is intrinsically and ambivalently tied to governance, and since there are already countless books on the Jewish relation to God, to man, to law, to morality, etc., I will offer a rethinking of Judaism along governance and cybernetic lines—which is already implicit in the centrality of law and covenant to Judaism. I’m following up on my argument for understanding Judaism as a
"If we sin, it is in obscuring succession relations, in touting outside options, in intensifying the hold of the outside spread chains of command"
[...]
"It requires a cadre of elites continuous across several empires...posing the possibility of a conflict between the ruler and that elite which is in turn singularized in the persecution of an exemplary member of the elite... This entire configuration is to be rendered cybernetic, with Jews specializing in the detection of fractures across rulers, auxiliary elites and larger population groupings"
I don't know why I fear impossible conflicts between these two imperatives. It's inevitable that they will have to be worked out, no? Someone engaged in such elite mediation of conflicts in an international network is going to be, a lot of the time, working up outside options, perhaps without even realizing it much of the time. How will Jews own their sins without owning too much of them?
"Nations are in the first instance little empires, composed of a centralized government - first of all a monarch"
-I might quibble with this, though I'm not sure it would make any difference to your larger point about the interaction of nations and empires. In the Christian west, the modern age saw the question of which nations housed within the empires would get their "liberation" into statehood and which would remain like the Catalans or Basques. Now, you might think that every nation without a modern state nonetheless has had some "Thesean" journey from an ancient or medieval past when they did have a king and some little "empire". But also I think this is a question of how Christian empires ruled by encouraging or allowing for priests to proselytize in the the local vernaculars of the empire, thus allowing for national identities rooted in a slowly evolving, eventually literary, culture that then went in search of a state. We might see similar phenomena in the European empires in Africa (or bringing the true faith of democracy to Iraq). But this is just a way of saying that for everyone the national problem is like that of the Thesean Jews so Jewish exemplarity, yes, but for how long into the future will that clerical leadership outlast its students?
At the end of this I am still wondering about the power of Jews. Sure, no point in denying it to the extent it exists. But I think of the greater traditions of secular Jewish intellectual life, of which you are a part, that in their attempt at general or synthetic understandings of "the human" or science (I think Feynman said that Science begins with the apprehension that the experts don't know what they're talking about) seem to be a product of either relative powerlessness or a refusal to just play a narrowly-delineated role in an academic/professional setting where, as Gans once put it, everyone gets to be an "aristocrat", expert in their little field, though a (good) Jew knows that the true aristocratic spirit is in the desire to grasp the problem as a whole. I'm wondering if Jewish bureaucrats can do the work you'd like them to do without becoming too bureaucratic... why wouldn't being frank about power mean becoming less Jewish? Again, the need for a very strong discipline is obvious... Do you think the Jews currently wielding power in the offices of American finance and intelligence agencies are well-attuned to their Jewishness? Victoria?
I enjoyed this post.
"If we sin, it is in obscuring succession relations, in touting outside options, in intensifying the hold of the outside spread chains of command"
[...]
"It requires a cadre of elites continuous across several empires...posing the possibility of a conflict between the ruler and that elite which is in turn singularized in the persecution of an exemplary member of the elite... This entire configuration is to be rendered cybernetic, with Jews specializing in the detection of fractures across rulers, auxiliary elites and larger population groupings"
I don't know why I fear impossible conflicts between these two imperatives. It's inevitable that they will have to be worked out, no? Someone engaged in such elite mediation of conflicts in an international network is going to be, a lot of the time, working up outside options, perhaps without even realizing it much of the time. How will Jews own their sins without owning too much of them?
"Nations are in the first instance little empires, composed of a centralized government - first of all a monarch"
-I might quibble with this, though I'm not sure it would make any difference to your larger point about the interaction of nations and empires. In the Christian west, the modern age saw the question of which nations housed within the empires would get their "liberation" into statehood and which would remain like the Catalans or Basques. Now, you might think that every nation without a modern state nonetheless has had some "Thesean" journey from an ancient or medieval past when they did have a king and some little "empire". But also I think this is a question of how Christian empires ruled by encouraging or allowing for priests to proselytize in the the local vernaculars of the empire, thus allowing for national identities rooted in a slowly evolving, eventually literary, culture that then went in search of a state. We might see similar phenomena in the European empires in Africa (or bringing the true faith of democracy to Iraq). But this is just a way of saying that for everyone the national problem is like that of the Thesean Jews so Jewish exemplarity, yes, but for how long into the future will that clerical leadership outlast its students?
At the end of this I am still wondering about the power of Jews. Sure, no point in denying it to the extent it exists. But I think of the greater traditions of secular Jewish intellectual life, of which you are a part, that in their attempt at general or synthetic understandings of "the human" or science (I think Feynman said that Science begins with the apprehension that the experts don't know what they're talking about) seem to be a product of either relative powerlessness or a refusal to just play a narrowly-delineated role in an academic/professional setting where, as Gans once put it, everyone gets to be an "aristocrat", expert in their little field, though a (good) Jew knows that the true aristocratic spirit is in the desire to grasp the problem as a whole. I'm wondering if Jewish bureaucrats can do the work you'd like them to do without becoming too bureaucratic... why wouldn't being frank about power mean becoming less Jewish? Again, the need for a very strong discipline is obvious... Do you think the Jews currently wielding power in the offices of American finance and intelligence agencies are well-attuned to their Jewishness? Victoria?