Inevitabilism #1 (work in progress)

Inevitabilism is a perspective I use to examine things. It is the reverse of the usual process of isolating the object you wish to study from its normal enviroment, carefully dissecting it, examining each of its properties in turn and then (and only then) trying to deduce out how they all worked to produce the situation occuring in the real world.

All the inevitablist needs is the very broadest of glances at what exists, and more importantly where it exists, and for how long. From this most simple of assessments, and using the minimum assumptions, the inevitablist infers what properties the objects in question must possess, to exist in the places they do, in the states they do, and deduces the relationships and forces at work that produced them.

Sometimes, because it takes in everything that is there, rather than biasing its observations toward a single component, it can produce interesting results.

Let me give you a very simple example of how it works:



Remember when you were a kid, and you used to paint with watercolours..? Maybe you painted a bright yellow sun. Then you washed your brush. The water in the glass turned yellow. Then you painted some waves in blue underneath. You washed your brush. And the water turned green. And then, after a whole bunch of other colours and washings, you just got a murky browny-grey mess.

All the colours had mixed.

But then your mother comes in - waving a plate of chips swimming in cooking oil around - saying: "Hey Picasso, take a break and get these chips down your neck." When suddenly a drop of yellowy oil falls off a chip and lands splat in the middle of a puddle of blue on your painting.

And doesn't mix.

Now here, we could go and reach for a chemistry textbook and get down to atoms. But do we need to..? We could just work it out.

We don't need to know anything about water, or oil. All we need to know is they don't mix, and tend to stay together. From this we infer:

• A cohesive force that tends to stick like to like.
• A repulsive force that tends to push unlike away from unlike.
• (And maybe if we are very clever) we might guess that currently there exists no third-party effector that would allow either of the two elements to overcome the repulsive forces of the other and force a mixing. (Detergent for example).

And we'd be right. At least, right enough to satisfy idle curiousity.

All textbook-and-microscope-free. And if we had got the books out, we might have become so mired in the nitty-gritty of the details, that we perhaps wouldn't have thought about the detergent angle at all, unless it was specifically mentioned. And this is the danger of using other people's brains to do your thinking for you.

It is especially dangerous when the subjects under examination are emotive. History for example. There is almost no such thing as an unbiased history book.

So - Let's try something a bit more complex. Let's take a fresh (and hopefully unbiased) inevitabilist look at some of just about the most emotive events in history: Antisemitism and the totally FUBAR'ed pasts of the Hebrews and the Jews. See what we can work out from scratch.

Basically, the tale starts with a group of people, the Hebrews, linked physically by genetic similarites arising from interbreeding in geographic isolation and linked socially simply from spending a long time in close proximity, and culturally solving the problems of cohesion inherrent to any group of people over the size of a couple of hundred.

Here's a little more detail:

"The Hebrews described in the Old Testament appear to have been semi-nomadic herders of sheep and goats and occasional farmers, without knowledge of metal working, sophisticated craftsmanship or a written language. Like other nomadic herders, they were tent dwellers -- as Abraham is described in Genesis 13:3. And, as was common among herders, the Hebrews had a masculine god of the sky and weather. The Hebrews organized themselves around their extended families, and Hebrew families were combined into kinship groups governed by a council of elders that left the head of a family with a sense of self-rule. These heads of families were males with absolute authority over their wives and children, and they were the priests for their families, each family having its own sacred images. "

So.

• Semi-nomadic herders - check.
• Bugger-all technology - check.
• Weather god - check.
• Extended family patriarchal society - check.

ie. could be anybody.

So what started this particular, totally unspectacular people off down the tortuous path they later followed..?

"When the pharaoh Ramses II returned from Syria with his treaty of "everlasting peace," he put slaves to work on his creation of great buildings and monuments to celebrate what he claimed was his victory. Art work from this period depicts a tall and threatening Ramses holding a Semite, an Asian and a black man by their hair -- three slaves feeling the sternness of Ramses' rule."

Well, for a start, they were enslaved by another group. The Egyptians. But let's stop a moment, and ask why..? Why didn't the Hebrews enslave the Egyptians instead..?

Is it:

1. The other group was stronger. They were weaker.
2. The other group was more technically and culturally advanced. They were primitive.
3. The other group was numerically superior. They weren't.
4. The other group were a bunch of expansionist bastards. They were non-expansionist for wtf.ever reason you'd like to make up.

(Remember to think probabilistically)

...Hopefully you'll have picked 3. because contained within 3. are all the other traits.

ie: (1) Strength comes, in the absence of serious firepower, from numbers. (2) Technological development and culture (in the form of social stratification, and governance) are driven forward by the increased need for food production and distribution methods required to feed a large number of people. And finally (4) a large number of people, needing space, is expansionist.

A large population, more specifically a stable large population and more specifically still a high-density stable large population - like that of the Egyptians, can only achieve that state because they have solved the problems of food supply with farming, and domesticated meat sources. Domestication operates on the same principle as robotics does today: Cheap labour. Domestication also lends itself to the invention of transport which lends itself to trade, and trade specialization - the beginnings of economy. It also initiates bio-warfare in the form of transgenic diseases, and immunities.

A large group of people factionates easily, and in order to remain a large group of people they must police themselves by some means. The principle of police, is a principle of coherence. A policeman is at base, a warrior faction. In larger groups still food supply logistics demand some form of governance.

But of course, you cannot farm without easily domesticatable plant species. And water. And after a while, cheap labour in the form of animals or whatever. Which means, you must live in an area that has these things. Geography is the bottleneck, the limiting factor.

Large population size demands all these things. They are inevitable traits. We do not need to dig up half of modern Egypt to know this.

So, when it came to the crunch, the Egyptians were always going to squash the Hebrews. Not because they were better, simply because they were bigger.

But we leap ahead. We were talking of slavery. Cheap labour, to a large population, is a must. And slavery is about as cheap as you can get. Slavery is a type of domestication, because one of the most obvious, if not most easily managed of domesticatable animals, is man.

Slaves can be found by:

• Culturally enslaving women.
• Creating a caste of your own population who are effectively slaves to the rest.
• Enslaving another group.

But we must stop again. The Egyptians and the Hebrews hadn't bumped into each other just the day before, they'd co-existed for generations. Why did the Egyptians suddenly decide to get all heavy with their bumpkins..?

Remember the oil and the water..? Remember assumption three..? The third element - somehow forcing them to mix - the detergent..? In a word, or rather, a picture:


Pyramids. Awfully big. Awfully Expensive. Expensive enough to cripple an economy. Unless corners could be cut. And the corner that was cut, was unfortunately, the one the Hebrews were living in. They were enslaved not because nobody liked them, but because they were there, couldn't defend themselves, and there were a lot of huge massive stones that needed pushing.

Nothing personal really. Just economics.

Okay - time for reality check number 1. Sorry to be pedantic but I think this bears emphasizing. There was no destiny involved. Nothing was 'written'. The Egyptians did not need to 'hate' the Hebrews to enslave them. It was not racist malice aforethought, and to claim there was is foolish. We cannot know the mind state of the ancient Egyptians.

We can however see the pyramids. And also look at other similar episodes in history.

eg. Black slavery. America was a country being built from scratch, there were a lack of white 'Americans' to do the drudge work, and no money to pay them anyway. Same as with the Egyptian scenario, a big black economic sucking whole into which somebody was going to get pulled.

This time however, it was the blacks. Why were the blacks defeated..? Not numbers this time, but coherence. Though there were many more blacks, comparitively, than there were Hebrews, very few of the black tribes were united, and so, despite their numbers, they could never resist the slavers en-massé. Indeed, some blacks actually aided the slavers in aquiring slaves from competing tribes.

But at base, on the part of the would-be slave-owners, still economics. The racism and the KKK. came later.

Could we blame the Egyptians for not just enslaving a sector of their own people..? For not saying "Okay, these are our pyramids, and gosh-darnit, they are our responsibility and we're gonna do it all by ourselves. We'll leave those nice, defenceless hill-folk alone."

Enslaving part of your own group is madness if others are available. It is in effect - a self-created civil war. Plus, worse still, you've less population to make into soldiers. It's suicide on a civilisation-wide level. Any people who did this, would be overrun, and you know what, those that replaced them would go imediately into the slaver-business. And if not them, the next lot.

ie: given the general situation: the enslavement of the Hebrews was Inevitable.

Okay, so let us entertain the idea the initial act of enslaving another might just be driven by economics, but what about the ethics of day-to-day slavery..? The Hebrew slaves got treated horrifically. Could we surmize then, that the ancient Egyptians were particularly barbarous..? That, in light of how they treated their Hebrew slaves that they must have had it in for them right from the start..?


This is a picture from a modern American POW. facility. 21st century torture.



This is a picture from the infamous Stanford Prison experiment, which had to be cut short when after only six days, the randomly appointed psychology-student 'guards' began to seriously abuse a set of equally randomly appointed 'prisoners'.

Six days. After over two thousand years of human cultural and social... Improvement..?

The abysmal behaviour of those completely in power toward those completely helpless would seem to be a common human failing - And so, horrific treatment in such a situation is to be expected, is inevitable.

ie. It was nothing personal. The event of the enslavement of the hebrews by the Egyptians was simply led directly by the economic, social and enviromental forces pre-extant within the sphere of the event, and the commonly held property of 'being human'.

Reality check over.

But, this is just the beginning of the way. We're pretty much still in Genesis. Time for Charlton Heston to put his vest on.


But maybe you should go and have a cup of tea and come back in five minutes, it's been a long read.

[Intermission]

Okay. Better now..? Let's move on.

In the long view of human history, groups have been enslaved by other groups metaphorically every other Tuesday. It happens. What is surprising in this case is that the group so enslaved managed to stay together, and preserve a high degree of social cohesion. Strange.

For example. Let's say there once was a gang. Let's call them the H-boyz. For as long as they can remember they've been lounging around the crib, popping the odd cap, tagging the odd wall, and generally congratulating themselves on just how f**kin' cool they are.

Then one day, the neighboring gang, the Pyramidz, just walk in and absolutely kick the crap outta them. Burns down their crib, drags them all off and forces them to polish the pimp-wagon while the Pyramidz chat up their girlfriends and chuck beer-cans at their heads. Worse still, the whole thing gets filmed on their i-phones and put it up on Youtube™.

Their shame is complete.

Eventually they escape under cover of nightfall. They find somewhere else to hang. But it's not the same. Being a member of the H-boyz now isn't cool, in fact it's embarrassing. Store-keepers who used to tremble now laugh. Old-ladies who used piss in their bloomers now cackle and wave their false teeth. So slowly gang members drift away. The crib empties out. The gang of once proud H-boyz dissolves into nothingness.

Happens all the time. Why not this time..?

Every Saturday, near where I live, the Shemikler Pazar opens for business. A large open air market, where all the local farmers congregate to sell their fruit and veg. And every Saturday, I shoulder the rucksack, hike for a very sweaty half an hour or so under the noon-day sun - we're talking 40oC sometimes - and then do a spot of broken field-running through swathes of village women with arses the size of VW Beetles. For a person anti-social at the best of times, a small slice of hell. Then I walk home again, my once-light backpack now dragging at my shoulders with a weight of 20 kilos plus.

Every Saturday. Without fail.

I don't have to. I mean, for only a very small difference in price I could just hop in the car, nip to the local supermarket and spend twenty minutes cruising the wonderfully air-conditioned aisles for the weekly greens instead. Root for lettuce and tomatoes surrounded by air-brushed MILFs with arses shaped by hours cycling to nowhere in the gym.

Why haven't I just quietly faded from the whole Pazar scene..?

Well, you see, in the name of my mid-life crisis, I usually walk/run a couple of kilometers to the sea-side every day anyway. Track-suited under the sun. When I get there I spend a half-hour lifting heavy things at the public fitness area, and then go home again. Feeling virtuous, a fraction of my youth reclaimed.

So on Saturdays, the pazar trip becomes a keep-fit routine. The pain involved becomes gain. Hell quietly flees and I am surrounded by a host of fat-arsed angels, all urging me along.


I hope this illustrates the importance of mindset.

So, how do we translate this charming homely into the situation the Hebrews were in..? What changed their mind-set, gave them the strength to carry on actually being Hebrews..? To not just quietly dissolve, fade from history's pages..?

C'mon, you already know the answer. Religion. Their belief system changed.

Now here, as we could have done with the chemistry textbooks, we could drag out a well-thumbed bible, and a library full of commentaries, and let others do our thinking for us. But no. Let's look first at what a religion, and its accompanying God-aspect would have had to deal with, to persist in this situation.

An enslaved people. What do they feel..?

They are caught on the barb of terrible shame and this must be explained and assuaged, its sting drawn. The collective ego, the pride of the tribe, must be restored, and vengeance taken.

And Lo! Did the Hebrews become God's chosen people, constructed in his image, and he in theirs. He does not choose the hated conquerors, the Egyptians, but them, them. Compared to that, having a whip and a bunch of pyramids is nothing.

Is that enough though..? Some big guy with a beard comes along and says "Hey guys, don't sweat it, you're still cool. Look, you are my favourite guys in all the world. I loves youse guys. You are the shit."

Not quite. You need someone with a little more authority than that.

"And, as was common among herders, the Hebrews had a masculine god of the sky and weather."

This little common-or-garden God has to change. Here comes Moses.

"According to the Book of Exodus, Yahweh instructed Moses to return to Egypt, and Moses did. There Moses converted Hebrews to the worship of "the Lord" and convinced them to flee with him from Egypt."

"The Lord". The Lord Our God. Or perhaps, in keeping with their slave-and-master conditioning, the Lord of Gods..? All other deities subject to Him..? The possessor of the final word..?

That God is big enough for his appraisals to carry weight. His voice drowns out that of all the other gods, he can be trusted. Or can he..? Is simple monotheism enough..?

Whenever my little son falls over and busts his knee, and is feeling a little sorry for himself, I pick him up and tell him not to worry, that he rocks, and that I love him, and soon he's all smiles again. Works just fine for a primary-schooler. But, I don't think it's going to cut the mustard forever. A kid soon works out that their dad, unless their dad's a real monster, is bound to tell him he rocks, even if he doesn't really, all that much.

A loving-father God, in the convential sense, wouldn't have had much staying power. Doubt would have crept back in. The Hebrews needed the other kind. The tough-love-test-you-to-breaking-and-beyond kind. The kind whose praise was hard won, but could be trusted. An Old-testament kind of father/God.

The benefit of this spiritual POV. of 'being tested' works by changing your view of suffering. Submitting to a slavemaster does engender shame, for you and he are just men, and equal. He has beaten you, ergo - he is better than you, you are nothing, the camel-shit beneath his sandal. However, submitting to the will of a harsh god entails no shame, and the slavemaster becomes a pitiable puppet - a mere instrument of your God, there to... In some twisted way... help you...

And so the sting of subjugation is drawn, the slaver reduced to the status of some kind of spiritual personal-trainer, and your suffering finally given cosmic purpose.

But what purpose..? A pat on the head and a lolly..? It would need something a little more satisfying than that.

No. To win a place next to God in the afterlife.

"When someone died in the Old Testament he went to Sheol, the heart of the earth. When Samuel appeared to Saul, we see him coming up out of the earth (1 Sam. 28:12-15). Even when Jesus died he went to the heart of the earth (Matt. 12:40: Acts 2:27; Rom. 10:7; Eph. 4:9; 1 Peter 3:18-19). It seems that Sheol (aka the Underworld, Abyss, Deep, Hades) was compartmentalized into a place of torment and a place of comfort."

Here maybe we should pause and say something about originality. I've said in earlier posts that true originality - newness not based on anything that has come before - is impossible. And here we see facets of the religion of the Egyptians surface in the new religion of the Hebrews. The underworld.

It is not until Jesus and the New Testament that heaven and hell take on a more concrete form in the collective mind. It's fairly easy to work out why. For the Hebrews at that time, hell was their everyday lives.

Set to toil half-naked interminably under the burning heat of the desert sun. (Foreign) devils with whips scourging their breaking backs. Their wives and daughters routinely raped; their babies' heads dashed against rocks, those that defied pegged out on rocked with their guts wrenched half out of their bodies to be pecked at by birds.

Who needs a hell..? And simple freedom is heaven enough.

But Hell, when it does become more defined, is a lot like that desert, born again, from cultural memories. And heaven..? Palaces of cool white marble..? Ambrosia, nectar on tap, a sense of sancity..? Peace, comfort..? I wonder if any of those enslaved hebrews ever visited the palaces of the Pharaohs, and then recounted the tales of what they'd seen..?

What of Satan..? Lucifer..? Classically horned, bestial, bearing the proverbial pointy stick, dark skinned..? Chief demon of the underworld..?

Anubis anyone..? Anyone..? Look - sharp stick, beast-face, pointy-ears...

And of course, angels.



Isis, winged. And Ra was a kind of sky/sun god wasn't he..? They'd already have an affinity for him.

Anyway, living in hell, given the promise of heaven's comfort, suffering becomes a kind of spiritual currency, an entrance fee to be paid in blood, sweat and tears. The suffering and shame of your fathers..? Money in the bank.

Shame lifted, exhalted even, just leaves us with vengeance.

"...In keeping with the common belief in
collective guilt and punishment, Yahweh is described as punishing more than Egypt's pharaoh (who alone among the Egyptians had the power to hold or release the Hebrews). Yahweh is described as punishing Egyptians far and wide, including all of
their first-born. Yahweh is described as adding misery to the Egyptians (in much the same manner that a Mesopotamian tale described the goddess Innana as having punished Sumer. Innana had sent three plagues against Sumer). Yahweh is described as having cast down upon the Egyptians plagues of boils, frogs, insects, hail to destroy their crops and a disease that killed their cattle."

And - Boom - need for vengeance satisfied.

Which leads us on to the final component required - social cohesion. And Charlton Heston again:

"According to the Old Testament (Exodus 20:1-17), Yahweh commanded that Moses and his followers have no other gods,worship no idol "or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth." He commanded that they should not take his name in vain, that they should keep the Sabbath a weekly day of rest, that they should honor their father and mother, not murder one another, nor commit adultery, steal, bear false witness, and not covet their neighbor's possessions, including wives and servants."

The short version - do not f**k each other over - remember that I'm the only God that matters, and my opinion of you (as being the very best kind of people) is true.

Social glue.

And so, just like I continue to go to the Pazar every Saturday, the Hebrew race went on. No pain, no gain. And that, I think, will do for the Hebrews. Let's move on to more modern times.

But first: Reality check number two.

It must be remembered that religion, and God, are separate entities.

Humans are naturally spiritual beings. For us, developing a spiritual facet to our psychic make-up is as natural as is developing an arm or a leg is to our physicality. Drop any human, anywhere, and sooner or later they will form some conception of God.

A religion, however, does not serve God but society. A religion serves the cultural and social needs of the people that form it, it clothes our individual and natural concepts of a supreme being or beings in some generalised aspect which appeals to the, usually very mundane, psychic wish-list of the group mind. It aproaches not God, but God as. And from that aspect, religion borrows the authority to impress itself as a social force.

And as such, the God aspect of Yahweh and the old-testament religion of the ex-slave Hebrews did not rise spontaneously by coincidence. Nor from divine revelation, but from the specific needs of the group, tailored exactly to allow them to continue to exist as a group.

Without the trials and tribulations of the Hebrews, there would have been no Yahweh, and without Yahweh, there would soon have been no Hebrews. The one could not have existed without the other.

Happy, contented people create happy beneficient Gods who judge happiness as virtuous - or perhaps no concrete gods at all, just some nebulous watcher. Sad people invent Gods that make them feel better, or at least give their sadness some deeper meaning.

The hour makes the man, but it also makes the God.

Now. Shylock. The much besieged hero of Shakespeare's play.

To get to Shylock, from the ancient Hebrews, here's a (very) potted history of the Jews:

• King David [1005 to 965 BCE] created what was to be called a golden age for the Hebrews.

• King Soloman, David's son. The Old Testament also finds fault with his love of luxury, his marrying pagans and his turning to idolatry.

• Manasseh, king from about 692 BCE, ruled as Assyria's puppet. He gave his support to the god Assur, whose image he placed at the entrance to the temple that Solomon had built for Yahweh. He allowed pagan priests in the "House of the Lord" alongside the priests of Yahweh. The Old Testament described Manasseh as erecting altars for Ba'al worship, practicing witchcraft, using divination and mediums.
  
  Some in Judah were dismayed at Yahweh's toleration of the success of the wicked and the subjugation of the righteous. Merchants in Judah abandoned their identities as Hebrews and adopted foreign dress.

• The Chaldeans (Assyrians) Overrun Judah. Their army went against the Egyptians in Syria. They drove the Egyptians back to Egypt, and while doing so they conquered Judah in 587 BC.

• Eleven years later, the people of Jerusalem rebelled , and the Chaldeans responded by burning Jerusalem and tearing down its walls. This was the first dispersal of Jews into neihboring countries: into Babylon, Egypt Arabia, and Mesopotamia. The Old Testament would describe Judah's loss of independence as more of Yahweh’s punishment for his people failings.

• Hebrews found in Mesopotamia a prosperity that the priests of Yahweh had claimed that Yahweh would provide them in Judah. Some of these Hebrews became farmers. Some prospered as merchants, rent collectors, contractors or bankers. Some among them adopted local names, converted to the worship of local gods and were content to remain in Mesopotamia permanently.

• Those who were taken to Babylon as captives were also allowed to live according to their customs, including a freedom to worship Yahweh. These captives found Babylon a magnificent city compared to what they had known in Jerusalem. Like some other devout people who were to arrive in a big city, they found Babylon filled with wickedness and temptation, and in combating these temptations they clung desperately to their worship of Yahweh.

• In Babylon, they heard derision spoken against Yahweh and they responded defensively. Was not Yahweh, they asked, the god who had formed and made the earth? They concluded that rival gods were false and that Yahweh was the only true god.

Speaking very loosely, we see a kind of Boom-Bust history following Exodus and King David. Following the happy people-happy God hypothesis, we are maybe unsurprised to see a gradual decline in the strictness of religious observations running through the golden age of Solomon and Manasseh's rules and the beginnings of assimilation.

We then see a revival (sad-people -> sad-god) when the Jewish sandcastle gets kicked over again by the Assyrians, and they are forced out as minorities into neighboring areas. Culture-shock polarizes some once more onto familliar spiritual territory in Babylonia, and others into assimilation in Mesopotamia, emphasising the usefulness of Yahweh as a layer of insulation against social integration.

Let's jump into Roman times, and the revolts of the Jews against Roman forces.

• 222–187 BC As a part of his attempt to unify the different cultures of his empire and to eliminate a source of resistance to his authority, Emperor Antiochus III ordered the Jews in Jerusalem to begin worshiping Zeus, and commanded that they end circumcision and their celebration of the Sabbath. In exchange, Antiochus offered Jerusalem the right to govern itself in other respects. Such transformations had been made in his dominions farther east - where Jews worshiped Yahweh under the name of Zeus Sabazions. The Jews resist, and eventually rebel against his successor Antiochus IV in the The Maccabaean war

• In the year 66 BC, rebellion spread to Jerusalem, and with whatever weapons the Judeans could find they attacked the Romans. Roman troops in Judea were hopelessly outnumbered, and the Jewish rebels killed many of them.

• Rome crushed the rebellion. It sent to Judea an army that was allowed to plunder, massacre and burn. A Roman blockade of Jerusalem created famine among its inhabitants. Calls for help from Yahweh went unanswered. Roman soldiers poured into the city, and raped and massacred thousands. They left the inner city destroyed and Yahweh's temple burned ruins.

• Rome stationed an army permanently in Jerusalem and forbade the Jews to rebuild their temple. Rome abolished Jerusalem's High Priesthood and Council of Elders. It forbade the Jews from proselytizing anywhere in the empire. According to Rome there was no longer a Jewish nation. Several million Jews remained in and around Judea, but Rome allowed non-Jews to settle in place of the Jews who had died or had been taken away as slaves.

• AD 100+ Numerous Jewish communities rose against the Romans. In Cyprus and Cyrene, Jews massacred gentiles in great numbers. Emperor Trajan ended his war against Parthia and brought the great weight of Rome's military might down upon the rebellions. Rome let local majorities have their revenge, which resulted in massacres against the Jews. In Cyprus every known Jew was killed and a law was passed forbidding any Jew, even from a shipwreck, to set foot on the island.

• The last of the Jewish rebellions - After Hadrian returned to Rome, the revolt began. The Roman legion on the outskirts of Jerusalem was caught by surprise and was driven from its encampments. Hadrian sent new armies into Palestine. In two years the rebellion was crushed. Perhaps as many as 580,000 Jews died fighting. The Romans again glutted the slave markets with Jewish captives. Jerusalem was rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina and colonized with non-Jews, and the penalty for Jews entering the city was death. Judea was removed from the map. The prohibition against circumcision was renewed and celebration of the Jewish festivals, observance of the Sabbath, study of the Torah and possession of a scroll of Jewish Law became punishable by death.

The Jews are once again dispossessed of a homeland, and dispersed.

• During the Middle Ages, Jews divided into distinct regional groups which today are generally addressed according to two groupings: the Ashkenazi (Northern and Eastern European Jews) and Sephardic Jews (Spanish and Middle Eastern Jews). By 1764, there were about 750,000 Jews in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The worldwide Jewish population was estimated at 1.2 million.

***************

It instills a kind of cultural masochism.

Coherency promoting commandments.

why do they go on to distrust and attempt to screw gentiles..? Because they deserve no better. They enslaved and hurt them.
Revenge. An endless cycle. The slaves embedded belief that all other groups are potential slavers. Mistrust. Resentment.







treachery of foreigners:

"As described in the Old Testament, Samson was both a leader in the fight against the Philistines and had a weakness for Philistine women. The Book of Judges describes Samson as burning Philistine crops and killing a thousand Philistines in a place called Ramathlehi, which means "the hill of the jawbone." Judges 15:17 describes this as the place Samson killed Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey. According to the Samson legend, the Philistine woman Delilah learned from Samson that he was a Nazirite and that if his hair was cut he would lose his strength. As Samson slept, Delilah cut his hair - a lesson for Yahweh worshipers about the dangers of foreign women."

The size of a man often led people to ignore his vulnerability. Not so David. According to the story he took up the challenge and slew Goliath with a rock to the forehead

intrigue, shrewdness, cunning.
Battles with philistines. treachery of king saul. david king of judah

Jewish leaders in different branches generally agree that possible assimilation is a crisis, but they differ on the proper response to intermarriage.

All branches of Orthodox Judaism refuse to accept any validity or legitimacy of intermarriages.

ie. non-sanctioned marriages

Among ancient Israelites, the inheritance is patrilineal it come from the father whom bequeth only to the males descendants (the daughters don't inherit) the eldest son received twice as much as the other sons. Because this the father give his name to his children.

If a man dies, his possessions are divided by his sons. His wife can either take her Ketubah or can live off her husband's estate for as long as she wishes.
If there is a firstborn son, he receives a double portion.
The daughters are supported off their father's estate until they get married.
Each daughter receives a dowry from the father's estate.
If there aren't any sons, the estate passes to the daughters.
If a woman dies, her husband inherits all her possessions.
If she has no husband, her sons (or daughters, if there aren't any sons) inherit her possessions.
If one doesn't have any children (or grand-children) the estate goes to the deceased's father.
If the deceased doesn't have a father, the estate goes to the deceased's brothers (or sisters, if there aren't any brothers), or, if they are no longer alive, their descendants.

http://www.fsmitha.com/h1/ch04.htm

...Continued...

Dale Kay

Dale Kay withered in the womb. Victim of some horrible collusion between hormonal hiccup and genetic chicianery. He emerged from his mother's nethers like a stick-insect surreptitiously slipping from an orchid. Not so much a baby as a lockpick with a head.

His girlfriend - Bot - was a double amputee; self-inflicted. One leg gone to a shotgun blast at the knee, the other ground down to mid-thigh in what was officially termed an industrial accident for the purposes of legal nicety. Unwise pehaps of the company involved to have allowed Bot to temp in the meat-processing plant after her CV had clearly listed "self-mutilation" under the heading of "Hobbies & Interests".

They'd met at a gadget-festival in mid March. Dale had siezed-up near the wearable-tech stands, pounding a sticky knee-joint with his alloyed fist, and she'd been his Florence Nightingale with a half-full can of WD40. Romance had blossomed from there, he both admiring and coveteous of her relative physical wholeness, and she the same of his walking-car-crash good-looks. "He looked like he'd covered himself in crazy glue and gone swimming in a skip of scrap-metal" she'd say.

to be continued

...Continued...

The Ducks of Meaning.

Hmm. Hokay, I want to try to describe how 'meaning' can be ascribed to a physical point located on a neural network. There is nothing special about the particular neurons there, they are all indistinguishable to the eye. They don't have "Hi I'm your concept of fashion" tattooed on their membranes. So why does one neurone-body mean "affable" and another mean "snot"..?

I want you to imagine a pool of still, unrippled water. The edge of the pool is populated by specially trained ducks. Each has a pebble to push in with its beak. They all have electrodes wired to their butts. All these wires coil away into the back of our volunteer for the evening - Bill's - head. Each wire is connected to parts of Bill's sensory sytems - His visual centre, his tactile centre etc. A very cute nurse is handing things to Bill for him to percieve, and every once in a while wiggling her hips for no reason in particular. Let's call her Miranda. And make her a blonde-bombshell.

Anyway. Miranda gives Bill a big blue bowling ball. The 'blue' bit of Bill's visual perception centre goes 'bing' and the impulse sent along the wire causes the duck attached to it to nudge his pebble into the water - it goes 'plop' and makes a big ripple widening across the placid pond. At exactly the same time the 'size' bit of Bill's perception is causing a duck somewhere else to nudge a pebble, and the 'round' bit, yet another pebble somewhere else.

So - we have three separate circular ripples spreading across the pond, each with a different duck epicentre. Three big rings, getting bigger, touching, then crossing eachother.

At the exact point where the three ring cross - another of our little friends - Larry the dragonfly - zips down and drops a little floaty buoy with "Big blue ball" written on it.

Now here's the clever bit. We wire up the ducks' webbed feet and attach recievers sensitive enough to detect sequentially where the wavefront of any ripple, generated on the pond surface, hits duck-toe. - And send the impulses back to the corresponding sensory centres of Bill's brain.

Now we send out Dragonfly Larry to jump up and down on the "big blue ball" buoy. The ripple produced heads toward shore, lands and activates the recievers ashore in the same exact sequence that created the location of the buoy in the first place. And Bill, for no particular reason he can fathom - Gets a sudden sensory 'recreation' built out of the individual attributes of the previously percieved object - an image of a "Big blue ball"

ie: in a neural net - the simple connective positioning (what portions of the sensorium it is connected to, and how strongly) of a single neuron would be enough to indicate its 'meaning'. No awareness or understanding necessary. Simple mechanics and sensory 'signatures".

This is not a perfect picture of neural 'meaning' - It's only 2D for a start, the real thing would be more like a sphere, with a lot more ducks. But still. Am I getting paid for this..?

So each node in the net, simply from it's connective position, holds effectively a sensual 'map' of a specific object. And now let's add some new connections - The internal commentary of pain and pleasure, and also the emotional colouring that has arisen from that simple black and white. And another thing, a sense of time, or if not exactly time, at least a sense of things that came before, and things that came after.

So now, when Larry jumps up and down on the big blue ball buoy - Bill gets not just a static ball, but a myriad of overlaid sensations - the happiness of childhood balls past, associations with his father and the times they played, a wince from the time he caught a ball in the face... The list is quite literally endless, as, like dominoes, each association triggers others at tangents, and those at greater tangents still - Till the entirety of his experience whirls around this stupid blue ball. Referenced. Real. Whole.


Not so much what 'ball' means, but what it means to Bill.

"Okay Tab - That's fine for concrete objects" you say... "But what about abstract concepts, uh, like 'generousity' for example... Huh-huh..?"

Childsplay. Okay - First we accumulate a whole bunch of 'nouns', built from our perceptions of their attributes. And, because our own bodies are effectively 'external' to our sensorium and their movements intimately 'sensible' to us, we also quickly build up a whole bunch of 'verbs' and 'prepositions of place' - Run, walk, up, down, bend, straighten, etc. We see other people's faces - We get 'adjectives' - happy face, sad face, pain face. We don't have to guess - Mirror cells in our brains reverse-engineer our perceptions of others' movements to help us recreate personally the feelings that engender these faces/actions - divining the physical/emotional meanings of others' movements.

These are the first layer.

Now - Each of these nodes of meaning has effectively become shorthand for a vast range of sensory qualities. A single connection to any one of these 'words' is a connection to the whole of its underlying physical 'meaning'. Imagine each node is now a note on a piano keyboard. Play one, you get a single note. Now imagine hitting a few of them together, now you get a chord. And the number of chords, even on a piano keyboard, is huge.

- Now imagine a keyboard with a million keys.

'Generousity' is node with connections to:

Give. Recieve. Happy face. Pleasure. Grateful face. etc.

A composite. Abstracted - But with hard connections to physical/emotional sensations. In itself though, largely devoid of an immediate invocation of these sensory remembrances.

Organic shorthand. The ghost in the (bio)machine.

...Continued...

The Carrier and the Content.

AMOEBA, another marvel of engineering, but this time one not aspiring toward being alive. Now we can write our names upon the water, and not be overly Keatsian about it. Anyway. What is this doing here..? Well, it illustrates my ideas about the carrier and the content very well.

In the last post I talked about a TV:

"None of the components of a TV are individually alive. But, together, in orchestra, they support a picture, a story, the content of which has very little to do with the mechanics of the device supporting it."

But this device - comprising about 50 small wave generators acting on a common medium to form a standing wave of meaningful content - acts as a much better analogy to our own situation.

Standing waves occur all over the place in nature as well as science - a wave at equilibrium that seems to stand still, even though water, or whatever other medium in which it occurs, is constantly passing through it. For example - on the beach:
Anyway, before we get carried away with the pretty pictures, let's imagine the sum total of our remembered experiences as the pool in which the letters form in the picture right at the top, and the differing areas of the vast network of neurones in our brains as the series of wave-generators around its circumference.

Anyway, the important thing to remember is that though the wave-generators act to create and support the central symbol, they have no inkling of its meaning. They only blindy fire as they are programmed to do according to whatever external force - in the case of AMOEBA a human programmer - supplies the directives.

This is a crucial divide I think - though the entity we take for granted, our ever-lovin' selves, our "I", our persona or wtf.ever term you prefer, is initially generated by our neurophysiology, indeed constantly supported and lent a sense of continuity by the mechanics of the brain throughout its functional lifespan, the nature of that central symbol - In AMOEBA's case an 'S' but in our case an "I" remains somehow other, aloof, like the plot of a story copied out perfectly over and over by someone who cannot read.

ie. The generator, and the generated are separated, by barriers of comprehension/meaning if nothing else, however intimately they may be emeshed.

One last picture:



The pile of rubbish on the floor is just rubbish on the floor. The arrangement, to the eye of our 'I' looks random, no rhyme or reason to it. Just as from viewing a brain floating in a jar you can in no way discern the persona it once projected.

Meaningless, just as 'we' are meaningless to the skeins and tangles of the indivdual neural nets that in concert, throw us forth.

But shine a light... And suddenly, there we are.

...Continued...

Definitions of life.

Anyone being overly-flexible with the concept of 'life' and 'what is living' really pisses me off.

It's like the word: 'beautiful'. Everyone is beautiful these days. They all have inner beauty or outer beauty or spiritual beauty, or some kind of hidden beauty that no-one can understand etc. etc. etc. It's bull. Some people, in fact a very great many, many people, are just true-blue, butt-awful ugly.

Sorry, but that's just the way it is. And to say it isn't, is to insult poor old Angelina. And no-one insults Ange, not on my watch.


It's the same with people claiming damn near everything is 'alive'. Yeast is 'alive' apparently, and Bacteria are full members of the 'alive' club.

I mean hell - I'm holding two living things hostage - I've got a Glock to the temple of the one, and a bottle of Bleach held over the other.


You can only save one of them Punk. Think fast.

To claim this jumped-up pond-scum 'lives' in any real sense beyond the absolute mundanities of biological dogma is in my opinion a serious insult to every truly living being who has ever wept at the graveside; who has been subject to torture or persecution, or ever loved another more than they do themselves.

So, I'm sorry, but to get into my living club, you have to be able to do a little bit more than wiggle your fucking flagella, or blow bubbles in baking bread.

These days even a chip with a few cultured rat-neurons stuck to it is applying for membership.


Is it alive..? Depends on how flexible your definition is. Can it forage..? Can it reproduce..? Can it go on holiday to Ibiza and pull a cashier-girl..?

As for its body - does it have the wherewithal to feel any sense of connectivity or ownership over this apparatus..? Is this keyboard and this internet we write upon in any way part of our bodies..?

If MEART is 'alive' then at best it is alive in the way a chronic brain-damaged coma-patient is alive, the lowest possible ebb, limbs shifting restlessly in the neuronal breeze.

"But Tab, it, it makes makes slightly different grades of scribble in response to changes in its visual enviroment..."

And that qualifies Mr. "Hi I'm a nerve cell strapped to a bit of silicon" to be put in the same catagory as Picasso..?

"Yeah, Rembrant, yeah - er yes, you're over there next to the debatably 'alive' lump of snot stuck to a circuit board, quickly now - the ceremony's about to start..."


Is the slime-trail coming out of a snail's arse art..? Hmm..? It's certainly laid down in a response to the enviroment on the part of the Artist formally known as Brian.

Current conventions of meaning would propose that MEART is a member of the linguistic catagories 'artist' and 'Lifeform'. But they neglect to stress that MEART is part of the catagory "living artist" in the same way that I am part of the linguistic catagories of 'Martian' - in that I occupy the same solar-system as Mars, and a bit of our planet has visited theirs and wasn't told to go away - and also of the catagory 'flower' - in that I enjoy sunshine and need a shower every now and again.

But, and this is the crucial bit so listen up, I am not a good example of either set. Not prototypic; non-intuitive. If I was in the line to be picked for the Martian football team, I would be picked last; and it is unlikely anyone would want to give me to their girlfriend on Valentine's day.

To compare MEART to a human - C'mon. Joe the plumber drops one too many spanners on his head and goes into a persistant vegetative state. How many more spanners would he have to drop to go into a persistant MEART state..?

And anyway - what do we sometimes do to our poor vegetative relatives..? That's right - we switch them off. Why..? Because in our hearts, philosophic debate aside, we know that what made them really alive, is already gone.

But you know what we don't do..? That's right again - We never ever wire our vegetative relatives up to robotic arms and then claim they are just as alive as you or me because "they draw scribbles on bits of paper..."

If we really considered MEART to be alive in any true sense, we would fall all over ourselves to obliterate the poor bastard, and sue the fuck out of the white-coated monsters that allowed a life to be so tortured.


Okay, let's take this somewhere else. MEART gets credit for 'aliveness' due to its ability to react - in the form of differentiated drawings - to the things it 'sees'. Yes..? And that it has some rat neurons connected up to a chipset.

Neurones are just glorified wires, albeit of organic matter, with a few odds and sods chucked in.

How about we take that bit out, and put in a software substitute, of a purely electronic conventional nature, which produced the same, indeed the exact same output varients for simular changes of visual stimulus.

I'm sure then the question of life would not arise.

Why not..?

Because machines, even our most advanced computers, are not classed as alive.

This seems crazy to me. For example:

I bought a robot hoover the other day. It's nocturnal. It comes out at night, and hoovers the living room floor for me, picking up dust and grit much like a coral polyp sieves the sea for nutrients. It uses complex algorithms to avoid stationary objects like chairlegs and also to avoid going over the same bit of floor twice. It senses proximity by the use of sensors studded along its surface. In its memory it carries a map of the room, and uses that to precisely work out where it is.

After it's done, it returns to its cubby hole and backs itself onto the prongs of its recharger, renewing itself for another day.

What - not organic enough for you..?

How about machine 'feeding' - one machine digs the 'food' out of the ground in its crudest form. Let's call that machine the 'teeth'. Another machine factionates crude into its many refined combustable consituents. Let's call that machine the 'digestive system'. More machines ship the various factions to the areas where they are required. let's call that transport system the 'circulation'. Then finally, engines burn that refined fuel to produce heat and movement. Let's call those machines the 'mitochondria'.

The only difference in principle between this technologic 'body' and our own is that the machine body is a dispersed entity - The various operations of its extended metabolism enacted in different places.

Unrealistic..? Non-organic..? Hah. Did you know I eat grass..? That's right, I use this organic machine as a proxy stomach to convert grass into a form of fuel I can process myself. You might have heard of it - its called a 'cow'. Wonderful invention, dunno what I'd do without it. I'm having sunlight for lunch. Yeah, I invented these green stalky machines as an aid to photon capture and transformation. I'm gonna call them plants. Do you think they will catch on..?

ie. having a dispersed digestion system is nothing new. Machines do it, men do it.

So, what is then, the difference between high-level machines, and low level lifeforms..?


In my book, functionally none. If you're going to insist on classing moulds and lichens and corals as 'alive' and autonomous robots as not, then somewhere, something within the next century or so is going to give.

Organic life, at the moment, has the properties of self-repair - healing - and reproduction, as qualities as yet unduplicated in machine-form. However, if you cannot be critically damaged to the point of immobilisation easily - why bother with complex healing mechanisms..? Why not just carry spares..? I mean, what would you rather do - You have an accident and break your leg. Ouch. Would you rather spend six weeks or so in a plaster cast, losing muscle tone and itching like crazy, or simply snap the leg off, turn it into the shop for repair while you parade happily around on your 'second best' leg..? Or imagine perhaps, the next time your car blows a tyre, that maybe you'd better put your car to bed with a hot water bottle and an aspirin, until it's back on its feet.

Reproduction too, like healing, could be considered as a form of self-renewal. Our bodies, however well we look after them, however many pills amd vitamins we tip down our turkey-necks, wear out. We have a cellular sell-by date stamped onto our telomeres so, every generation, as part of its lifecycle, lifeform X. builds and nurtures or otherwise brings into being a 'replacement' body or bodies.

A machine however - why should it *need* to reproduce..? It's not going to die of natural causes within three score years and ten, at least not all at once. And then you have the "axe-blade/axe handle" form of continuous existance - lending it effective immortality. Reproduction is a symptom of the fraility of organic life, not particularly its dominance or superiority.

Immortality at the price of sterility..? Tough one.

So anyway - If we are going to buy into the idea that "Machines are, or at least will be, functionally comparable to some forms of organic life - and therefore either machines of this sort must be regarded as alive, or organic 'life' of that sort must be regarded as machines." Then really, we should refine our definitions of what we regard as 'living' and 'non-living'.

But if we can no longer use function as a basis for distinction, what are we left with..?

The soul.

Oh yeah. You heard me. The soul.

It's okay, don't take me out of your favourites list, I've not gone over to the dark-side, I'm just borrowing a little of their lingo.


Call me crazy, but last night I took a sledgehammer to my TV, and I'll be dammned if I could find the programmes anywhere inside of it. All I found was just a bunch of stuff. Where were the Baywatch babes..? They'd been *right there* only a few minutes before. Bastards.

It's the same kinda thing that happened to those back-street anatomists back in the day, dissecting corpses 'donated' to science by nice men with dirty shovels. Chop and chop but no soul anywhere.

None of the components of a TV are individually alive. But, together, in orchestra, they support a picture, a story, the content of which has very little to do with the mechanics of the device supporting it.

Do you see..?

The [only] difference between the TV and the brain however is that whereas a TV relies on a signal from outside - beamed from a sattelite or sent down a wire - our brains, and the brains of other animals to a degraded extent, do not, they take the basics from outside and begin to generate their own narratives, their own never-ending recursive soap-operas, with themselves as characters. But these stories have nothing to do with the mechanics that support them, just as back episodes of the Family Guy in no way depend on the resistors, semi-conductors and vaccuum tubes of the TV in question for their plot lines.

One other important thing to remember with a TV is that it's ability to carry a picture is not a smoothly linear progression. You cannot start with a single component projecting a really crap, pixellated image, then add more components, resistor by transistor by capacitor, getting a slightly better picture each time. A TV is an either/or device in that it either works, and you can watch your favourite soap, or it doesn't and you're staring at a blank, dead screen. Below a certain threshold of complexity, a brain cannot support the picture of the self.

I am not a bunch of neurones. Just as Homer Simpson is not a collection of transistors. Homer is more - and I am more. I am the standing wave they carry. I am information turning sporadically into action in the world, and then back into information again - like a snail popping its head out of its shell.

I am the story I tell myself.

And that is what MEART lacks, what bacteria, coral and pondscum lack, what machines lack too. The life intangible.

[This is not an appeal to vitalism btw. As in - "The theory or doctrine that life processes arise from or contain a nonmaterial vital principle and cannot be explained entirely as physical and chemical phenomena." Because I'm not saying that all of life's complexities cannot be reduced back into their relevant constituents, but I am saying that the emergent property of a supported informational 'entity' cannot be seen beyond a certain critical point in said deconstruction.]

Still not convinced..?

So, information doesn't matter, life chugs on happily without huh..? Those neurones just flailing about, linking here, linking there, for fun perhaps..? P-A-R-T-Y..?

Okay, say I take your brain, and, without diminishing the total number of your neurones, nor lessening their functionality and conductivity in any way, I simply randomize their connectivity - remove any coherent information the network stored simply through its structure.

Do you think you'd be okay - Just shrug it off..? The body trotting off happily whistling "Ah don't need no edjoo-kay-shun..."

No, you'd be dead. If not right away, then very soon after. Information is crucial to life, crucial to being in a living state.

But is gross biochemistry, vital to life in the same way..? Could I destroy, with alcohol consumption perhaps, a few million brain cells (not to mention a few million liver cells ) without overly impairing my ability to 'live'..? How far can Alzhiemers progress, without the patient turning up their toes..? Years, decades. Hell, you can fire pool-cues through people's heads, and stick knives into their skulls, and sometimes they'll survive.

"This amazing X-ray shows how a man survived being stabbed in the skull with a five-inch knife."

Seems to me the connectivity, the information of me, is as at least as important to life as the biochemical nuts and bolts.

"But Tab, waddabout those widdle biddie bacteria and their other microscopic mates..? Huh..? Huh..? They gotz no information, dey iz stoopid - but dey are still alivez. O Hellz Yeah..!!!"

Aha. S'pose I, without changing the existant proportions of C,G,A, and T or whatever the RNA equivalent is (??Uracil??) in their genomes, I scramble, randomize the order they are in - erasing that information..?

Would those little sea-monkeys be able to shrug that off..?

How about I lop off a few flagella instead..? Or push them down some stairs and damage their cytoskeletons..? Put those fuckers in a full-cell-plastercast..? I think they might survive.

Information is key. Either purely mundane - biochemical/biomechanical - in the form of DNA/RNA with your lower level 'organic machine' forms - or emergent, intangible in the form of network conectivity/complexity and supported autobiographic narrative in the higher lifeforms. And there is the divide.

ie: To be alive, you gots to have soul.

Oh hell yes.

...Continued...