Universal Emptiness

In the essay Seeing and Using: Art and Craftmanship, Octavio Paz writes:

Technology is international; its constructions, methods and products are the same everywhere. By suppressing national and regional particularities and peculiarities, it impoverishes the world. By spreading all over the globe, technology has become the most powerful agent yet of historical entropy.

Clearly by technology Paz means more than just the physical products of mass production. He is referring to an idea: the idea that greater efficiency, greater functionality and greater uniformity are signs of universal progress. Faith in technological progress is not exclusive to any one ideology. Marxists and neoconservatives share the belief that the "end of history" (what Paz calls historical entropy) is the final result of technological progress.

The "international Jew" tends to be associated with the adverse effects of technology and is scapegoated as its embodiment. But the Jew who maintains his national particularity is precisely the symbol of resistance to technology's sway. It is out of resistance to this resistance that individual Jews reject national particularity for the universality of technology. What is less efficient than a day of rest?

The danger of technology does not lie solely in the death-dealing nature of many of its inventions, but in the fact that it threatens the very essence of the historical process. By putting an end to the diversity of societies and cultures, it puts an end to history itself. It is the amazing variety of societies that produces history: the clashes and encounters between different groups and cultures, between alien ideas and techniques.

Of the three great monotheist religions, Judaism is the only one that has not sought to end the historical process through conquest and conversion. Christendom despised the Jews in its midst because they represented a perennial obstacle to the completion of its task: the unity of the world through faith in Christ. The House of Islam despises the state of Israel in its midst because it represents a perennial obstacle to the completion of its task: the unity of the world through submission to Allah. The desire for theological uniformity is the premodern antecedent to the desire for technological uniformity.

There is no doubt an analogy between the historical process and the twofold phenomenon that biologists call inbreeding and outbreeding, and that anthropologists call endogamy and exogamy. The great civilizations have been syntheses of different and contradictory cultures. Where a civilization has not been forced to confront the threat and undergo the stimulation of another civilization - as was the case in pre-Columbian America up until the sixteenth century - its destiny is to mark time and go in circles. The experience of the other is the secret of change - and of life.

Western civilization is the synthesis of different and contradictory cultures: the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian. Jewish civilization, which heavily overlaps with Western civilization, has maintained its vitality precisely through stimulation and confrontation with others. The exception proves the rule, in that the Hasidim who refuse intercultural confrontation go in circles according to the repetition of the Jewish calendar. We need the other for spiritual vitality, but we also need our own particularity for spiritual survival. The conversion of the Jews signals the end of history and the end of exile: not through redemptive return, but through universal emptiness.