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.
"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 supposing detecting the fractures is likely to result inn being blamed for them, which means there are decisions to be made here--martyrdom is not to be courted. Jews should never have become revolutionaries, even in situations, like Czarism, where there seemed to be few options. But I'd like know a bit more about Jewish politics in early modernity, where various Scylla and Charybdis's needed to be navigated. There's some good scholarship on this, regarding Poland and the Netherlands that I'm aware of, but it's a bit low on my reading list right now. I believe that "protect the peace of the Kingdom" was the Jewish policy until emancipation.
Yes, it may not be a very important point, but, e.g., France, Spain, Germany, etc., are definitely empires, in the sense of having replaced tribal and familial forms of order with a centralized state. I don't think more splintering would produce something different. But we might be seeing different political forms before too long, and this all may have to. be rethought.
I think the "greater traditions of secular Jewish intellectual life" need to be placed in these larger contexts. That in itself is a mode of power (Yuri Slezkine has some interesting things to say about this) and has always had its interactions with financial, political and media power. But it's true that approximation to higher power leads to a vitiation of Jewishness (ethnicity) and Judaism. That's at least the dominant tendency. But the more Israel becomes the center of Jewish life, and itself becomes more Judaic, the more other possibilities might emerge. It's hard to imagine a kippa-wearing Jew as Secretary of State or chair of the Federal Reserve, but perhap in new forms of think tanks and security firms. Once the kippa-wearers get a bit more cultivated, at least.
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?
I supposing detecting the fractures is likely to result inn being blamed for them, which means there are decisions to be made here--martyrdom is not to be courted. Jews should never have become revolutionaries, even in situations, like Czarism, where there seemed to be few options. But I'd like know a bit more about Jewish politics in early modernity, where various Scylla and Charybdis's needed to be navigated. There's some good scholarship on this, regarding Poland and the Netherlands that I'm aware of, but it's a bit low on my reading list right now. I believe that "protect the peace of the Kingdom" was the Jewish policy until emancipation.
Yes, it may not be a very important point, but, e.g., France, Spain, Germany, etc., are definitely empires, in the sense of having replaced tribal and familial forms of order with a centralized state. I don't think more splintering would produce something different. But we might be seeing different political forms before too long, and this all may have to. be rethought.
I think the "greater traditions of secular Jewish intellectual life" need to be placed in these larger contexts. That in itself is a mode of power (Yuri Slezkine has some interesting things to say about this) and has always had its interactions with financial, political and media power. But it's true that approximation to higher power leads to a vitiation of Jewishness (ethnicity) and Judaism. That's at least the dominant tendency. But the more Israel becomes the center of Jewish life, and itself becomes more Judaic, the more other possibilities might emerge. It's hard to imagine a kippa-wearing Jew as Secretary of State or chair of the Federal Reserve, but perhap in new forms of think tanks and security firms. Once the kippa-wearers get a bit more cultivated, at least.
These are all good questions.