When Babylon absorbed Israel, an interesting thing occurred regarding the “superorganism” of cultures. Two cultures, both with simple texts and their own system of math, combined. The most interesting thing is, why didn’t Babylon simply destroy Israel, as later cultures overran Greece and destroyed their books and ancient texts?
As I pointed out earlier, Israel acted much like any organism when threatened with a disease that will destroy its bodily integrity. They began a cleansing process, “vomiting” out all unnecessary cultural additions that got ion the way of efficient function. They got rid of idol worship once and for all, they focused on the sabbath and dietary laws, and got back to basics, as many organisms will attempt to do when attacked by a virus.
Inside the larger organism of Babylon, they began to act as a kind of cultural virus themselves, learning and adapting, taking the cultural “DNA” of Babylon, developing a new form of “RNA” known as Mishna, which extended their understanding of trade, commerce, and necessary legislation. Jewish citizens began to rise to the top of the Babylon hierarchy, people such as Daniel and many others, who still retained dedication to Jewish ideals.
As a result, the “superorganism” became far more complex, as McLuhan pointed out in Understanding Media. It was developing a “code” for replication that allowed it to be more resistant to any threats from “outside”. In fact, by developing strategies for trade and commerce and recording them, it was doing the viral “cut and paste” of cultural “DNA” in much the same fashion that viruses act in traveling from species to species, devising “mutant” DNA which then infects human bodies.
In Egypt, as historian Max DiMont points out;
“She leaped from infancy to maturity, skipping a cultural puberty period. By 2500 B.C. we are confronted with a full blown civilization, surpassing in art, literature, and political unity anything that had been achieved in Mesopotamia, her tutor.”
In earlier Mesopotamia, stages of civilization developed, leading to development of the use of bronze, when men learned to forge copper with tin, allowing for more deadly warfare and expansion. Technology early on produced war, which extended human territory and control.
The next stage was development of cuneiform and pictographic writing. As the superorganism began extending itself by the “mechanical” means of warfare, as men learned to organize themselves according to strict rules, they developed simple processes of writing and communicating for all to see. This use of an unchanging writing system paved the way for development of the state. These developments took place in one small area of the world, Palestine and Mesopotamia.
Employing these developments, Egypt was able to rapidly expand and ignore any limitations of competing cultures.
As DiMont points out, however, Egypt has some shortcomings:
“Having begun at the top, Egypt repeated her first experience over and over again. In spite of her precociousness, she never developed any further ideas of her own. The world has inherited nothing of consequence directly from Egypt. She had no written law, no political theories, no wealthy merchant class to give the state versatility. Hers was a priest-ridden culture in which a vast feudal officialdom of scribes, soldiers and bureaucrats squatted like parasites on the backs of an exploited peasantry”.
Part of that exploited peasantry were the descendants of Abraham, who had added a cultural distinction of his own: monotheism.
Even more, as DiMont points out:
“The Jews in Egypt, however, were not slaves in the classic sense of the word….Their status was more like that of indentured servants working on vast government building projects alongside other enslaved peoples. The Jews had a right to exist as a community, to live according to their own laws, to practice their own religion, and to worship their one invisible God–until the time of the Exodus.”
About that time, writes DiMont, the ” Aton” cult, with worship of one God developed in Egypt. Obviously this was a challenge to the Pharaohs, who considered themselves as god-kings and queens. If there was one God, and if that God was as eternal as the newly developed writings of the Egyptian people, then the people themselves could know that one God through “His” word.
As writer Leonard Shlain writes in The Alphabet Versus The Goddess, Israel organized their laws in Sinai around an even newer form of text–the alphabetic text. As McLuhan pointed out, the simplicity of this system of interchangeable text, where letters represented sounds, allowed the destruction of the priesthood of Egypt, opening the way for the people themselves to both learn the text and “know God” as the one God for themselves.
Just as in later Babylon, the Israelites had grown, expanded, and replicated, and then burst out in similar fashion as a virus, that explodes the cell in which it has replicated, to expand outward to other territories.
The alphabetic text became the new code, the “DNA” that simplified messages, gave power to the mobile military class, and allowed extension of civilization by its much simpler method.
Shlain, a brain surgeon, wrote that the alphabetic gave an extra advantage to the male warrior class:
“The ability to focus on a single task and remain emotionless is a more desirable attribute for a hunter than are gestalt awareness and emotional depth. A detached subject/object inherent in dualism, a viewpoint indispensable for killing, is the opposite of a mother’s binding love for her child.”
In time, as Claude Levi-Strauss has written, men began to exchange women in a form of barter, and began to recognise them as a kind of social commodity.(Mark Kinney was quite familiar with this). Once men conceived of women as a commodity, they began appropriating women’s power in society. But even further, Shlain shows that there is a transition from spoken word to written word. In the spoken word, we use both hemispheres of the brain for articulation. Societies before alphabetic text depended more on spoken word, since the earlier texts were hard to learn and depended on expert, priestly, translation.
In the development of the alphabet, with its linear text, Shlain explains:
“…reading requires only a small circle of tunnel vision to follow the linear progression of words on a page. Information contained in the paragraph further down the page is of no interest until the reader gets there….Writing involves the muscles of only one side of the body. Pure writing using stylus, quill, pencil or pen, engages the dominant hand, which the dominant hemishpere controls….The written word issues from linearity, sequence, reductionism, abstraction, control, central vision, and the dominant hand–all hunter-killer attributes. Writing represented a shift of tectonic proportions that fissured the integrative nature of gatherer/hunter communication, and brain cooperation. Writing made the left brain…dominant over the right.”
The left brain controls the right hand, and written communication by the use of writing were consistent with male attributes. The alphabet allowed the “superorganism” to quite literally use its male member for expansion in other territories.
Israel, having developed its alphabetic text, burst the cell walls of Egypt and began focusing on its “internal circuitry” while wandering in the desert. They became a culture that saw themselves not only chosen of God, but chosen of a male God for whom they would fight, and for whom they would extend obedience without regard to environment or territory. Their culture had been conditioned in the desert to respond to ONLY its own internal circuitry, based on the laws of God.
As Shlain points out:
“The triumphant march of literacy that began five thousand years ago conquered right-brain values, and, with them, the Goddess. Patriarchy and misogyny have been the inevitable result”.
Not only had the alphabetic text transferred power to the military, but it had transferred social power to the dominant traits necessary not only for the machine-like response, but the use of the male as dominant member in society. The alphabet had produced the extreme of a culture with one God, and a culture that began to define itself exclusively in the service of that God without regard to time, space, or territory.
From the beginning of their history with Abraham, who himself had been ‘called out’ to a new land, Israel had never inherited that land which was promised, because the land promised hinged on their successful completion of the “assignment’ they were given. Like birds who have a “homing instinct” but must travel to reproduce, Israel had been instilled with a “homing instinct” of a promised land they would inherit ONLY after a period of trial established by their God.
Having been absorbed by two “superorganisms”, they adapted and developed more extensive and complex ability for communication and representation of ideas, but in their development in Babylon, they had to develop different codes that allowed them both to retain their identity as Jews AND integrate with the rest of the world. Further, there had to develop a different medium to accommodate commerce, as we will see in the next essay.
