“Etherealization” and “Spirituality”

In the evolution of four major world empires, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome, the monetary systems began to etherealize in order to support each successive empire, allowing it to have greater complexity. Persia was able to achieve incredible size and power by its use of coinage, combining gold and silver as pre-weighed systems in which they could carry money in their clothing for every necessity. This became a more mobile storehouse of exchange possibilities, and allowed greater power of the government for tax collection.

The more the state could rely on symbolism for power, the greater its ability to rule vast territories.

The etherialization of the monetary system was accompanied by the etherialization of the cultural symbol-system. Hillel had composed his “Seven Rules” by which the vast array of symbolic knowledge in the Mishna could be reduced to basic principles of logic. This was the conscious attempt at etherealization of law itself, a reduction to standard “language” by means of relating all symbols to a single process of reason and logic.

In terms of organisms, this conforms to Bloom’s description of the organizing activity of bacteria. The first rule is “conformity enforcer”. As Bloom describes it:

“Conformity enforcers stamp enough cookie-cutter similarities into the members of a group to give it an identity to unify it, when it’s pelted by adversity, to make sure its members speak a common language.”

I have already pointed out that the Mishna evolved pragmatically as a unifying organization of symbols, but this organization of symbols arose because the Torah, which had been the guide of Israel, was insufficient for use in matters of trade, commerce, and legislation, from which the Jews were now profiting.

Hillel’s “Seven Rules” was the first conscious attempt at reducing the Mishna in accordance with Torah, thereby imposing a “common language’ on all actions in Israel. The Torah, in terms of Bloom’s description, had thrown out “cookie-cutter molds”, but when Israel became captive, and found themselves not only forced to adapt to Babylon, but to find methods to keep their original law while building interconnections with the new reality of a larger integrative system. This meant they were forced to develop a pragmatic symbol system on top of their older symbol system. That is, they maintained their “immune system” as Jews, but operated pragmatically to integrate systems of law with other nations.

As time went on, however, the “immune system” of the Torah began to act in conflict with Mishna, and as we have seen, “meaning” must exclude certain factors in exchange for other factors. In order to give a greater, a more “etherealized” meaning to the Torah, Hillel devised Seven Rules by which a well trained rabbi could direct the lives of the Jews. This would have the effect of placing the circle of rabbis on top of both the “secular” and the “spiritual” teachings of Israel. By the use of Hillel’s rules, they could “filter” the secular into the “spiritual”.

This effort, however, caused a problem, again described by Bloom:

“[conformity enforcers]….pulled the crowd together in efforts so vast that no single contributor can see the scheme in its entirety.”

The great flaw, which Hillel had NOT taken into account, was a feedback process that “checked” the power of the rabbis. Hillel’s rules assumed, of necessity, that they were the only requirement for proper judgement.

As Bloom further states:

“In humans, conformity enforcers…lead , among other things, to a myriad of cruelties and a shared worldview which both shapes the wiring of a baby’s brain and literally changes the way adults see, a collective perception which makes one group’s reality another group’s insanity”.

Hillel’s rules, wrote DiMont,

“Were based solely on Aristotelian logic. But modern scholars have shown that in reality Hillel’s syllogisms went beyond those of his Greek masters, approximating the method used in modern logic today….one of his rules, known as Binyan Abh, is almost identical to that of John Stuart Mill’s ‘method of agreement’. Hillel’s Binyan Abh was used by rabbis to discover new laws of scripture in much the same way that Mill’s method of agreement was used by scientists centuries later to discover new laws of nature”.

Hillel’s rules served as a kind of bridge between the secular necessities of Mishna, and the “spiritual” needs of the Jews. He had composed a system or a set of symbols that related to different sets of symbols, or what Toffler refers to in Powershift as “super symbolic”. The shift, the evolutin of power, is described:

“The main weakness of force or violence is its sheer inflexibility. It can only be used to punish. It is, in short, low quality power.
“Wealth, by contrast, is a far better tool of power. A fat wallet is much more versatile. Instead of just threatening with punishment, it can offer finely graded rewards–payments or profits–in cash or kind. Wealth can be used in either a positive or negative way. It is, therefore, much more flexible than force.
“The highest quality power, however, comes from the application of knowledge. High quality power…implies efficiency–using up the fewest power resources to achieve a goal”.

Etherealization, a process of which, by necessity, the Jews were forced to use as “parasites” of world empires. They were the social genetic engineers, of necessity. Their position as dependents on the power of greater empires forced them to apply adaptive knowledge to every change and transaction, to “cut and paste” civilizational “DNA” from system to system, using the “etherealization” of symbols at each new adaptive level.

Knowledge, however, has its own drawbacks. While violence and wealth serve for power and control, the problem is that violence and wealth have limits. They are finite. But as Toffler points out:

“By contrast, both of us can use the same knowledge either for or against each other–and in that very process we may even produce still more knowledge. Unlike bullets or budgets, knowledge itself doesn’t get used up…Knowledge is the most democratic source of power, which makes it a continuous threat to the powerful…the power-holder…wants to control the quantity, quality, and distribution of knowledge within his or her domain”.

As we saw earlier, “meaning” is achieved by excluding some things in favor of other things. In Aristotelian terms, a thing cannot be both true and false at the same time under the same circumstances. It stands to reason, therefore, that the power-holder will not seek to allow all knowledge available equally to all, since he can manipulate certain “meanings” simply by exclusion. The power-holder employs an anti-logical use of Aristotle’s “excluded middle”.

As Ayn Rand stated, “Men have a weapon against you(collectivist power-holders). REASON.” In other words, knowledge is “democratic” in the sense that it can be held equally by any person. Therefore, any person can use it equally against any collective. As one cell can co ntain all necessary information useful to re-build an entire body, one human can contain enough knowledge to re-constitute whole societies based on knowledge.

That, in essence was Jesus’ challenge to the Pharisee “power-holders” of his day. The exclusion of knowledge could serve the purposes of the power-holders by simply rewarding those who followed the patterns that brought success to the “superorganism”. For knowledge to be filtered, even by the most well-intentioned process, people would be excluded from existence due to their lack of admission to knowledge itself.

“Woe unto you, lawyers! For ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in, ye hindered.(Luke 11:52)”

“But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men. For ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer them that are entering to go in”.(Matthew 23:13)

For the Jews of that time, the “kingdom of heaven” represented the place where God abode, and the earthly kingdom, this world, in which the Jews had been, in their minds, entrusted with the “keys’ to that kingdom, by law. The Pharisees saw themselves as spokesmen of the “Oral Law”, that law which was not contained in the written Torah, but given to initiates. Jesus, on the other hand, called them hypocrites who sought to control the important knowledge and exclude the masses, whom Jesus taught and educated. The process of “etherialization” took a fork in the road at this point, declaring that knowledge and understanding, “wisdom”, would be the guiding factor, but it should be available to all, Jew and gentile, slave and free, male and female. This emergent freedom, proclaimed by first Jesus and his disciples, and expanded to the gentiles by Paul, would be challenged by the “supereorganism”, of nationalism, under Constantine.