path: root/ch8.tex

\chapter{}

Let's backtrack to wherever it is that
the Origins of Western Civilization are reinvented and then go forward to try a little
progressive meta-history of this most modern of organisms. Greece, a tiny time-slice
inserted far down, towards the beginning of
the ascent-trajectory of western Man. Our
art, philosophy, logic are said to begin here.
What if all memory of Greece were erased?

All countries, cultures and religions secrete, value and store up selective histories
and mythologies to legitimate themselves.
What do Europe and America consider themselves to be without this passing nod to Greek
origins? Even Hitler's and Mussolini's regimes featured Greek-derived iconography.
To make these histories, an amalgam of
events, myths, legends, folk tales, sagas,
religious deeds, epics (to say nothing of vast
storehouses of paper, as well as appropriate
mnemonic architecture and monuments)
were collated. Thus a quasi-arbitrary sequence is created, one linking events into
causal chains in order to create the feel of
mystical inevitability, celebrating the everconstant triumph of the present. Mistakes or
horrors are leached out or are considered to
be the price one pays for progress. Continuity, progress, history is a smoothing out
of the sudden, the disruptive, the violent, the
random and unaccounted-for. Even the most
rationalistic sequences must include the cultural, for logic too is a \emph{culture}.

The building up of Western Civilization is
a story of grand strides toward unity, yet
requiring breakdowns and fragmentation of
old formations: that is to say, re-feudalization before new reorganization (note the
re-feudalization of AT\&T). This totalizing
sequence constitutes a grand myth --- given
an ascendant trajectory which will avoid
breakdowns --- called progress or sometimes
evolution --- beginning in the past few hundred years when some percieved that the
industrial revolution had to rewrite the old
myths into new ones, forever ending circles
and cycles and introducing exponential
curves reaching into the empyrean (sometimes called space). To question this accretion at any point is to disrupt the spell the Grand Ascent has over us.

It may be argued that certain events were
chosen arbitrarily; an association of ideas
about event sequences, which happen to
have --- we have not accounted for pure invention --- operated in a certain temporal sequence, not nescessarily in a cause-effect
line. A politico-mythico-Lockian mnemonic.
Ultimately G\"{o}del makes the point that the
linking of all logical steps depends on an act
of faith, just as the assignment of meaning to
a pool of securities is an act of faith.

We can follow some of the many arbitrary
feeder streams that empty into this ocean of
Western Culture. Oedipus, for example, is
not merely a Greek play about a hubris-ridden, stubborn figure, one prototypical
individual, blinded and suffering. It is the
story of the restoration of balanced ethical
and divine budgets. The tale is also about a
power struggle, a plot in the face of an
environmental disaster: medical (plague),
economic
(starvation), genetic (dynastic legitimation: though it is not specifically mentioned as such, genetic information as fate --- 
as explained by the retroactive prophecy
delivered by Delphi --- are intertwined), and
demographic catastrophe (sterility in women
and potential population decline). The tale
is also about an information-search (among
other things for genetic origins). Who passed
ownership and title on to whom and how,
based on breeding lines of descent, a story of
false and contaminated claimants. It is about
the relationship of genetic purity to rulership, property, the laws that define those
relationships, the rules of mating. The health
of the nation is at stake.

Usually this play is interpreted for us as a
moral, psychological and sexual tragedy (incest). Freud led us in the wrong direction,
positing the erotic rather than the reproductive consequence, falling into a trap set by
the old Hebrews and Christians. Lust, especially incest, leads to death. But then, we
may ask, what did Freud know about life?
What little he did know, he lied about.

Genes, contaminated by \emph{deeds} (acquired
characteristics, or fate?), the inadvertant sin
of Oedipus and Jocasta have brought together
the wrong genes, illegitimately. The sins of
the rulers, or putative founders of this kingdom of Thebes (the information) contaminates the body politic, its well being, its
health, and affects all nature. Did the Greeks
know about genetics? No, but they were
obsessed with plant and animal breeding
and dynastic breeding strategies. The forced
comparison between human activity and
nature's response is interpreted in a magical
way and skews human behavior. (That the
play is also Athenian propaganda against
Thebes and Delphi is another story in itself.)
If the thought of the pre-Socratics, Socrates,
Plato and Aristotle go into modern rational
thought, why not these tales, which are
\emph{logical} constructs disguised as dreamlike
tales of scandals.

Another take: Helen of Troy gives birth to
the Hellenes. We can now understand one of
the reasons for the furor over Troy. Only
Helen can give birth to the Hellenes and
she---or the symbolic and real reproductive
apparatus inside her beautiful body---has
been stolen. Helen, mythic figure, like a
queen ant or bee, is a collective emanation.
As a carrier of a certain nation or race-spawning mechanism,
she is, from an information-perspective, also collective. \booktitle{The
Iliad} concerns a conflict of ethnicities, a
polarity called Asia vs. Europe, an East-West
struggle for the control of trading routes to
the profitable Scythian hinterland. The war
is used as a means of uniting diverse tribes
into one mega-ethnicity. The first Grand
Alliance, the first NATO-like Allies. These
themes are summoned up again during the
East-West war against the Persians. The Iliad
includes a brilliant, albeit indirect, essay on
set-theory disguised as a list of tribes. The
Hellenes are the set of all Hellenic sets: a
genome of a corporate body called a race.

The Old Testament can be seen as a set of
linked stories and myths about the Hebraic
relationship to God's Design (covenant, contract, law ... rules of the game, more honored in the breach than the observation), a
history of dynastic continuities; rules for the
preservation of the Hebrew genepool and its
royal subsets: the living propagation of
God's word, or perhaps the Word made into
code...God provides the operating system;
the Hebrews write the software). The Design
has rules for mating, accretion of power, and
how to transmit \emph{informational} treasure (\emph{The
Talmud}). The Old Testament is also a meditation on the rules of economic behavior,
negotiation of conflicts, law, contracts, politics, nations.

These notions of a nation encompasses a
genetic mystique. An ethnicity contains the
idea of birth from a set of primal founders, all
of whose descendants have shares in a commonality of genes and are related.

Implicit in the Old Testament and Judaic
law (and fulfilled in Kaballa) is a sort of
evolutionary trajectory along a linear path.
The history of Jews, unlike the history of
\enquote{primitives} is not cyclical except in the
longest sense. Gratification and fulfillment
are deferred. The Hebrews introduce the
notion of the long-range trajectory, completed
by the coming of the Grand Recombinatorial
and debt-redeeming wizard, The Messiah.
This Messiah will reunite the scattered
Hebrews (for how can they mate if they are
far apart?). And \emph{this} Messiah is only for the
Jews, only for \emph{one} genepool, no one else.
Kaballistic lore, a heretical meditation
on the same long-range cycle, is a wave with
only one fall and rise, spread throughout the
universe. The Messiah becomes a way of
reuniting, reconcentrating the power that
the disaspora fragmented, a kind of ultimate
meta-history of mergers.

Still another event: What strategy did
Joseph use to monopolize Egypt's grain production for the Pharoah? Prophecy, dream
interpretation, fear, land-reform, expropriation of commodities, rationalization of production (a kind of early, political, state-run
agribusiness), storage facilities, new gathering techniques. Clearly Joseph must have
used some form of accounting and econometric projection to affect a grand, structural
and political change. His interpretation of
Pharoah's dream is risk-analysis. Not only
did Joseph change the environment around
him, but his thought radiates down through
the ages and affects agribusiness today. The
short-range, forced march collectivization in
the Soviet Union, the long range \enquote{collectivization} and concentration into agribusiness
in the U.S. (using genetic cropping strategies), use the same pattern. Maybe we should
call Jung's idea the collectivized memory.

Up to the New Testament, the Hebrews are
heterosexual. The Jews \enquote{give birth} to the
Christians, or that's the way we tell the story.
God uses Mary as a child-producing\slash nurturing vehicle (expropriating variant tales out
of the past). Here is a departure into androgeny: self-replication, an ancient, sinful
theme, for this is what Lucifer did too. Incest? Autocest? Autogamy? Or is God a
wierd insect? New rules for sexual mating
enter the picture and implicitly alters the relationship of dynasty to property. By proslytyzing \emph{all}, not only Jews, the nation, the
ethnicity dissolves and becomes a sort of
corporation: shares in redemption are open
to all. The Messiah will redeem \emph{all} debt. The
Old Testament is endogamic: the New Testament is exogamic.

Historiography is expressed as reproduction, human continuity with attendant \enquote{qualities}; genetics as myth. But does the myth enter into the genetics of the present,
as many scientists turn back to what was religion and magic in the past? (One may pour
enormous resources into a project and use
scientific techniques in pursuit of magical
aims.) The Christian God's experiment enthralls the moderns and they try to replicate
it, using the Holy Spirit to fertilize a laboratory vagina.

Genetics and the right to rule, to own
property, come for the Romans at a time
when both myth and documentation exist
side by side inside the dynasty-obsessed
empire. The Empire funds the history of its
own origins, a vast, dynastic myth called
\booktitle{The Aeniad}, which traces the ancestry of the
Romans to the Trojans, not the Greeks.

For the Christians and the Romans, these
tales explain discontinuity while maintaining continuity. The new birth stories insure
discontinuity between the Romans and the
Greeks. In the same sense, Jesus is not only
divine, but a Jew and not a Jew. Aeneas is a
Greek, but not a Greek.

At time's end, the Christians promise -- 
theme and variation -- Resurrection and redemption of all believers (investors). They
will bring to material life the dead and
dissolved who remain as memories. But how
is this Ressurection to be accomplished?
Will there be an information-search for the
dissolved and scattered, the transformed,
decayed human material of the world, and
then a sort of reconstruction, a retro-combination? Clearly, the parts, the very atoms,
have memory addresses. Or are the \emph{memory}
elements to be reinfused into dust, and that
dust brought to life, as the Kaballists claimed
to be able to do? Or are the memory elements
inserted in machines? No matter. The point
is that the \emph{thinking} behind these tales descends to us. (Of another transubstantiation
myth which has to do with capital itself, more later.)

These political and social materials, this
kind of thought, woven back into the whole
traditional memory-corpus of dramatic, fictional, religious works, permits us to see that
a trans-disciplinary
whole operated even
in the ancient past, albeit using coded languages. These were preserved, by some, with
consequences for the present. On the other
hand, what was selectively forgotten and
buried? We never get to hear the peasant's
side of the story in the Joseph tale. The
oppressed have no dynastic history. The
concreteness, the mundanity of the past, has
been generalized, its particularity eroded,
just like the start-up equity put into a corpoation. The information of the past shapes
the information processing of the present.

The econometric predictions of this present (think of the Russian-American wheat
deal of 1972-73, the decision to corner the
grain market, extensive planning) uses, with
minor variation, the Josephian scenario. In
fact, to tell the story again, the disaster
Joseph predicted was not a disaster of underproduction, but too many years of overproduction, with attendant deressed prices, requiring either a famine to be manufactured,
or at least an \emph{informational} famine created
by cornering the market, leading to real
hunger. Prices? Is this really in \booktitle{The Bible}?
Joseph, after all, as Pharoah's agent, sold the
surplus grain on the world market during a
world famine. New discourses inserted back
into past events disrupt the holiness of the
memory time-series, and question the legitimacy of modern thought-buildup, indeed,
the legitimacy of all present-based\slash obsessed-with-past, the soft cause-effect linkages built
into history.