An ancient conflict among forgotten gods illuminates the tensions reshaping the modern order. Across millennia, the same question returns: which hegemonic minority imposes its claim the universal?
Hello, great article, so interesting. Here are my first set comments :
**“For most of the post-WW2 era” – yes, perhaps more precise to say that it was generally only from 1967. France was Israel’s closest and most supportive major ally from the late 1940s until 1967. But of course we have the event in 1963 surrounding the assassination of JFK to consider as well, when it comes to the Israeli lobby.
**Actually, having to repeat often, that Israel is the "greatest ally", it is "ironclad", "no daylight", is in itself a sign that possibly there could be a rift… If it actually were true and natural, there would be no need or purpose to repeat this mantra so often. That is the giveaway...
**You state that “majority rarely possesses the organization”, but if it is an “iron law” then it never possesses it, which is what I think, along with Michels. Power is never relinquished entirely but through a “circulation of the elites” to use Pareto’s term.
**When you state the Federalists who enforced “realist constitutional order designed to protect the material inequalities arising from the unequal distribution of human faculties. “, it’s too bad you don’t mention all the efforts of the anti-federalists, like Jefferson, who brought the Bill of Rights. I discussed this here : mises.org/mises-wire/how-us-became-so-dysfunctional-oligarchic-and-corrupt
**you state “A religious world in which Yahweh existed alongside Asherah.” : indeed, that is precisely why the first commandment of the Decalogue is : "You shall have no other gods before Me,". It hints, of course, at the existence of other Gods; otherwise, this commandment wouldn’t have been necessary...
1. In the UN vote for Israeli statehood the US arm twisted the Philippines and Liberia to get Israel to the 2/3rds majority. Interestingly Stalin voted three times for Israel (Russia, Ukraine and Belarus) because he wanted to create chaos for the British. Truman almost immediately recognized Israel when it declared independence in 1948 against the strong advise of the State Department and other advisors. Eisenhower and JFK were moderately pro-Israel but always put America's interests before Israel while LBJ was a fanatic Zionist who actually ran guns into the Jewish state during the independence war and was pivotal in turning US foreign policy 100% towards Israel. These facts about LBJ of course do not hurt the Israel-did-it camp on the Kennedy assassination. So I was not arguing that the US was Israel's most important international supporter, only that it was an uncontroversial position to be pro-Israel, meaning not necessarily a fanatical supporter, like one must be today.
2. Yes, indeed, constantly chanting the mantra of "greatest ally" is a sign of stress and trouble. They might soon be saying, "you shall put no other allies before Israel!" But this is a recent development in response to growing anti-Israel sentiment.
3. "a diffuse majority rarely" on the other hand a cohesive one will keep an oligarchy in check, at least for a while, but the Iron Law says the oligarchy will eventually win. The circulation of elites occurs within the oligarchy itself, it absorbs the most talented people from the majority to block them from organizing resistance against the elite.
4. The Bill of Rights was a mechanism to protect the states from the federal government, but these rights were never intended to bind the individual states. The Anti-Federalists demanded it as a condition for ratification, and Madison delivered it as a political tactic to preserve the Constitution- not as a blueprint for individual liberty. The original intent was clear: the Bill of Rights restrained the federal government, not the states. This meant that state governments could - and did - establish official religions, restrict speech, and regulate firearms without constitutional challenge.
The Virginians were a total aristocracy built on a slave economy, with a social structure that mirrored classical Rome. Wealthy planters crushed the economic power of small landowners, and the colony was governed by a tightly intermarried "cousinocracy" where nearly every man of note achieved prominence through family connections.
The individual aristocrats - Jefferson above all - were singularly brilliant, and they designed an astonishing political architecture. But in no way were they attempting to level social structures. Their concept of freedom, as David Hackett Fischer documents in Albion's Seed, was "hegemonic freedom" - the liberty of the master to rule. This contrasted sharply with the Puritans' "ordered freedom" (liberty within community and law) and the Quakers' "reciprocal freedom" (liberty through mutual consent). The Virginians were Royalist gentry who brought a hierarchical society governed by a "natural aristocracy," where class was of utmost importance and social mobility was zero. Theirs was a vision of liberty for the few, built on the backs of the many.
5. Yes, in Exodus 34:14 we read "the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God" There has to be other Gods for him to have anything to be jealous about!!
But I have a bit a problem with all these definitions of freedom, which are not used by conservatives and libertarians today and which were not use by the anti-federalists at the time, either, if I am not mistaken. For instance, we need to distinguish between Jefferson the man ("hegemonic" freedom) and the writer who defended property rights against the state.
The Puritans didn't practice anything we can call liberty; that "ordered liberty" meant banishing dissenters (like Roger Williams), executing religious minorities (like Quakers), and legislating every aspect of personal morality. So no, I cannot use the word liberty at all in this context.
Regarding Quakers, "reciprocal" means actually collective consensus ,which can leads to democratic majoritarianism and the removal of property rights, not only for the
"49%" but also for the majority, in terms of reduced property rights decided upon. The Virginia type of liberty was the Southern concept of "independent liberty", namely the idea that the individual is sovereign on their own property and that the state has zero right to interfere (minus the slavery of course, which the Constitution has nothing to say about).
As you see from my article in the Mises Institute (linked above), I do not think the Constitution is a perfect document, far from it, but it needs to be given its due. Better was the prior document : the Articles of Confederation which clearly subordinated the Federal Government to the States. As far as the States go, let them compete in terms of property rights protection ; people move with their feet then as now, and capital as well. Just look at the drain from California to Nevada and Texas.
Regarding the second part on history of Jewish religious, I learned a lot. I am just a bit curious as to why you use the modern word "bureaucracy" or "bureaucratic" so many times, in this context of deities.
Generally speaking in reference to Albion's Seed, Libertarians prefer his Appalachian archetype, what he calls "natural liberty," which is practised by migrants from the northern British borderlands which he sometimes refers to Scotch-Irish. Key features according to Fischer are that this liberty is unrestrained, in particular from government; it is clan-based and hostile to outsiders; it is NOT reciprocal - liberty for me but not for thee; and is fiercely defended through martial honour.
But our discussion was on why I did not idealize or celebrate the Bill of Rights which were basically just a tool of tyrannical, non-reciprocal Cavaliers, whose views of "liberty" were similar to those of the US today in international affairs, a an invitation to dominance. The fact that the Bill of Rights was eventually applied to the States is an example of reciprocal liberty winning and of course deeply unconstitutional.
I use the word 'bureaucracy' deliberately as a precise political-science analogy for a well-attested historical reality. Complex hierarchical administrations - with delegated portfolios, scribal record-keeping, provincial governors, and judicial courts - existed in the Bronze and Iron Age West Asia.
Ancient peoples did not invent their pantheons out of thin air; they projected their own earthly administrative complexities onto the heavens. The Canaanite pantheon at Ugarit, for instance, featured El as a supreme patriarch delegating specific domains (sea, storm, war, fertility) to subordinate divine 'officials' - a perfect mirror of a royal court.
The biblical texts that liquidate this council (Psalm 82, where Yahweh kills off the lesser gods) are deep political polemics, every bit as much as they are theological. They reflect the same centralizing impulse seen in earthly empires, where a supreme monarch abolishes the semi-autonomous rule of local vassals and consolidates all power into a single, unilateral executive. Kind of like what has happened after a certain "indispensable" nation's "unipolar moment." The structure of global order is obviously a subtext to this entire piece. Except that now, instead of allowing a failing US to allow multipolarity to rise, Israel is attempting a last-ditch conflation with the US to put themselves in charge.
You must have enjoyed a phenomenal education. Thank you for this breathtaking analysis throughout millennia of human religious history! I have not seen this complicated subject better described anywhere, especially the last part regarding the NDAA.
Thank you so much Eve! I had a reasonable California public school education, and then I studied architecture at UC Berkeley. As I think about it, architecture really helps me write these kinds of essays: I'm comfortable connecting the ancient to the present, and the bureaucratic structures of the ancient world can be held in the mind much like a city plan or a building. But most of all, it was reading Freud's Moses and Monotheism many years ago that sent me down this trail. Unfortunately, I didn't have a deep religious education, so I rely on scholarly and nuanced YouTube channels like Religion for Breakfast, Let's Talk Religion, and Esoterica - they helped me see the big picture and pointed me toward sources to study further.
Thank you very much for your reply. The way you develop your arguments and articulate complicated abstract themes is indeed impressive. I agree that architecture is an essential connective thread throughout all times. It has materialized the mindset and skill sets of past societies and civilizations. I have a history and literature education from good old Europe when it was still of substance, quite a while ago. That is why I recognize and appreciate the quality of your work.
Thank you Eve for you kind remarks. I've lived in Europe (Brussels) the past 30 years and so both of my sons have received substantial educations featuring lots of Latin and Ancient Greek. Being from California I was incredulous that such an education was still possible. My youngest even studied Classics and History at the Sorbonne before deciding to switch to Business. Of course I was constantly on the phone with him wanting to know what they were discussing - I think I was more interested than he was in the end! So in some way some of their education must have rubbed off on to me! If I understand correctly, you have made the opposite journey, from growing up in Europe to living in the US.
" I was constantly on the phone with him wanting to know what they were discussing" - like me with my children now, to check the brainwashing that French public school is trying to pump into their small unformed brains...
Hello, great article, so interesting. Here are my first set comments :
**“For most of the post-WW2 era” – yes, perhaps more precise to say that it was generally only from 1967. France was Israel’s closest and most supportive major ally from the late 1940s until 1967. But of course we have the event in 1963 surrounding the assassination of JFK to consider as well, when it comes to the Israeli lobby.
**Actually, having to repeat often, that Israel is the "greatest ally", it is "ironclad", "no daylight", is in itself a sign that possibly there could be a rift… If it actually were true and natural, there would be no need or purpose to repeat this mantra so often. That is the giveaway...
**You state that “majority rarely possesses the organization”, but if it is an “iron law” then it never possesses it, which is what I think, along with Michels. Power is never relinquished entirely but through a “circulation of the elites” to use Pareto’s term.
**When you state the Federalists who enforced “realist constitutional order designed to protect the material inequalities arising from the unequal distribution of human faculties. “, it’s too bad you don’t mention all the efforts of the anti-federalists, like Jefferson, who brought the Bill of Rights. I discussed this here : mises.org/mises-wire/how-us-became-so-dysfunctional-oligarchic-and-corrupt
**you state “A religious world in which Yahweh existed alongside Asherah.” : indeed, that is precisely why the first commandment of the Decalogue is : "You shall have no other gods before Me,". It hints, of course, at the existence of other Gods; otherwise, this commandment wouldn’t have been necessary...
Thanks Finn, I try to respond below:
1. In the UN vote for Israeli statehood the US arm twisted the Philippines and Liberia to get Israel to the 2/3rds majority. Interestingly Stalin voted three times for Israel (Russia, Ukraine and Belarus) because he wanted to create chaos for the British. Truman almost immediately recognized Israel when it declared independence in 1948 against the strong advise of the State Department and other advisors. Eisenhower and JFK were moderately pro-Israel but always put America's interests before Israel while LBJ was a fanatic Zionist who actually ran guns into the Jewish state during the independence war and was pivotal in turning US foreign policy 100% towards Israel. These facts about LBJ of course do not hurt the Israel-did-it camp on the Kennedy assassination. So I was not arguing that the US was Israel's most important international supporter, only that it was an uncontroversial position to be pro-Israel, meaning not necessarily a fanatical supporter, like one must be today.
2. Yes, indeed, constantly chanting the mantra of "greatest ally" is a sign of stress and trouble. They might soon be saying, "you shall put no other allies before Israel!" But this is a recent development in response to growing anti-Israel sentiment.
3. "a diffuse majority rarely" on the other hand a cohesive one will keep an oligarchy in check, at least for a while, but the Iron Law says the oligarchy will eventually win. The circulation of elites occurs within the oligarchy itself, it absorbs the most talented people from the majority to block them from organizing resistance against the elite.
4. The Bill of Rights was a mechanism to protect the states from the federal government, but these rights were never intended to bind the individual states. The Anti-Federalists demanded it as a condition for ratification, and Madison delivered it as a political tactic to preserve the Constitution- not as a blueprint for individual liberty. The original intent was clear: the Bill of Rights restrained the federal government, not the states. This meant that state governments could - and did - establish official religions, restrict speech, and regulate firearms without constitutional challenge.
The Virginians were a total aristocracy built on a slave economy, with a social structure that mirrored classical Rome. Wealthy planters crushed the economic power of small landowners, and the colony was governed by a tightly intermarried "cousinocracy" where nearly every man of note achieved prominence through family connections.
The individual aristocrats - Jefferson above all - were singularly brilliant, and they designed an astonishing political architecture. But in no way were they attempting to level social structures. Their concept of freedom, as David Hackett Fischer documents in Albion's Seed, was "hegemonic freedom" - the liberty of the master to rule. This contrasted sharply with the Puritans' "ordered freedom" (liberty within community and law) and the Quakers' "reciprocal freedom" (liberty through mutual consent). The Virginians were Royalist gentry who brought a hierarchical society governed by a "natural aristocracy," where class was of utmost importance and social mobility was zero. Theirs was a vision of liberty for the few, built on the backs of the many.
5. Yes, in Exodus 34:14 we read "the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God" There has to be other Gods for him to have anything to be jealous about!!
Thanks for your comments, I agree.
But I have a bit a problem with all these definitions of freedom, which are not used by conservatives and libertarians today and which were not use by the anti-federalists at the time, either, if I am not mistaken. For instance, we need to distinguish between Jefferson the man ("hegemonic" freedom) and the writer who defended property rights against the state.
The Puritans didn't practice anything we can call liberty; that "ordered liberty" meant banishing dissenters (like Roger Williams), executing religious minorities (like Quakers), and legislating every aspect of personal morality. So no, I cannot use the word liberty at all in this context.
Regarding Quakers, "reciprocal" means actually collective consensus ,which can leads to democratic majoritarianism and the removal of property rights, not only for the
"49%" but also for the majority, in terms of reduced property rights decided upon. The Virginia type of liberty was the Southern concept of "independent liberty", namely the idea that the individual is sovereign on their own property and that the state has zero right to interfere (minus the slavery of course, which the Constitution has nothing to say about).
As you see from my article in the Mises Institute (linked above), I do not think the Constitution is a perfect document, far from it, but it needs to be given its due. Better was the prior document : the Articles of Confederation which clearly subordinated the Federal Government to the States. As far as the States go, let them compete in terms of property rights protection ; people move with their feet then as now, and capital as well. Just look at the drain from California to Nevada and Texas.
Regarding the second part on history of Jewish religious, I learned a lot. I am just a bit curious as to why you use the modern word "bureaucracy" or "bureaucratic" so many times, in this context of deities.
Generally speaking in reference to Albion's Seed, Libertarians prefer his Appalachian archetype, what he calls "natural liberty," which is practised by migrants from the northern British borderlands which he sometimes refers to Scotch-Irish. Key features according to Fischer are that this liberty is unrestrained, in particular from government; it is clan-based and hostile to outsiders; it is NOT reciprocal - liberty for me but not for thee; and is fiercely defended through martial honour.
But our discussion was on why I did not idealize or celebrate the Bill of Rights which were basically just a tool of tyrannical, non-reciprocal Cavaliers, whose views of "liberty" were similar to those of the US today in international affairs, a an invitation to dominance. The fact that the Bill of Rights was eventually applied to the States is an example of reciprocal liberty winning and of course deeply unconstitutional.
I use the word 'bureaucracy' deliberately as a precise political-science analogy for a well-attested historical reality. Complex hierarchical administrations - with delegated portfolios, scribal record-keeping, provincial governors, and judicial courts - existed in the Bronze and Iron Age West Asia.
Ancient peoples did not invent their pantheons out of thin air; they projected their own earthly administrative complexities onto the heavens. The Canaanite pantheon at Ugarit, for instance, featured El as a supreme patriarch delegating specific domains (sea, storm, war, fertility) to subordinate divine 'officials' - a perfect mirror of a royal court.
The biblical texts that liquidate this council (Psalm 82, where Yahweh kills off the lesser gods) are deep political polemics, every bit as much as they are theological. They reflect the same centralizing impulse seen in earthly empires, where a supreme monarch abolishes the semi-autonomous rule of local vassals and consolidates all power into a single, unilateral executive. Kind of like what has happened after a certain "indispensable" nation's "unipolar moment." The structure of global order is obviously a subtext to this entire piece. Except that now, instead of allowing a failing US to allow multipolarity to rise, Israel is attempting a last-ditch conflation with the US to put themselves in charge.
Thanks. interesting
He’s back!
Thanks for inspiring me! Now that I have this long post behind me I hope to produce some smaller ones soon.
It was a great one
You must have enjoyed a phenomenal education. Thank you for this breathtaking analysis throughout millennia of human religious history! I have not seen this complicated subject better described anywhere, especially the last part regarding the NDAA.
Thank you so much Eve! I had a reasonable California public school education, and then I studied architecture at UC Berkeley. As I think about it, architecture really helps me write these kinds of essays: I'm comfortable connecting the ancient to the present, and the bureaucratic structures of the ancient world can be held in the mind much like a city plan or a building. But most of all, it was reading Freud's Moses and Monotheism many years ago that sent me down this trail. Unfortunately, I didn't have a deep religious education, so I rely on scholarly and nuanced YouTube channels like Religion for Breakfast, Let's Talk Religion, and Esoterica - they helped me see the big picture and pointed me toward sources to study further.
Thank you very much for your reply. The way you develop your arguments and articulate complicated abstract themes is indeed impressive. I agree that architecture is an essential connective thread throughout all times. It has materialized the mindset and skill sets of past societies and civilizations. I have a history and literature education from good old Europe when it was still of substance, quite a while ago. That is why I recognize and appreciate the quality of your work.
Thank you Eve for you kind remarks. I've lived in Europe (Brussels) the past 30 years and so both of my sons have received substantial educations featuring lots of Latin and Ancient Greek. Being from California I was incredulous that such an education was still possible. My youngest even studied Classics and History at the Sorbonne before deciding to switch to Business. Of course I was constantly on the phone with him wanting to know what they were discussing - I think I was more interested than he was in the end! So in some way some of their education must have rubbed off on to me! If I understand correctly, you have made the opposite journey, from growing up in Europe to living in the US.
" I was constantly on the phone with him wanting to know what they were discussing" - like me with my children now, to check the brainwashing that French public school is trying to pump into their small unformed brains...