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Under capitalism, Jews often prevail. Until the dominance of capitalism, Goths and Vandals and Teutons prevailed. Hitler preferred the previous regime. Hitler’s followers in the Middle East now wish to restore it.

CHAPTER SIX

The Archetype and the Algorithm

The twentieth-century descent of middle Europe into anti-Semitic mania, rage and plutophobia brought down the Austrian and Hungarian economies and centers of culture. It built up the awesome animus and momentum of the Axis armies. It unleashed the frenzies of the Holocaust and the Stalinist pogroms and finally brought forth a new global empire and apparatus of Communist movements and powers. Then the forces mobilized by the Western democracies managed to turn back the totalitarian tide.

How did the Allied victory come about?

To observers who focus on politics and statecraft, the central history of the era follows the feats and follies of generals and dictators, politicians and demagogues. In many accounts, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, Eisenhower and Montgomery may seem to have defeated Hitler. But there is another way to tell the history of the time. All of these political and military leaders were utterly dependent upon the achievements of science and technology for their military success. At the same time that Hitler and Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were on center stage in the realms of statecraft and war, behind the scenes, other more singular and cerebral forces were quietly released into the world. They launched a contrary tide that ultimately prevailed against Nazism and the Axis powers and ultimately overcame the communists as well.

Pushing this contrary tide was the Jewish diaspora. Flowing around the globe, devoid of the repulsive force of nationality, the largely homeless Jewish intellectuals honed in like neutrons into the nuclei of the most receptive centers of Western science and technology. There they galvanized the energies that won the war, shaped the peace, and transformed the global economy and the scientific culture of the age.

This process had begun early in the twentieth century. Before quantum theory, science was chiefly an enterprise of gentile Europeans — men like Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, Ernest Rutherford, and Max Planck. With the rise of quantum theory came the ascendancy of Jews in science, led by Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Max Born. In the post-World War II era, Richard Feynman became the paramount teacher and interpreter of quantum theory.

The twenty-first-century world emerged chiefly from this microcosm: the new revelation of the early twentieth century that matter consisted not of unbreakable solids but of enigmatic waves of energy, largely governed by information. From quantum theory ultimately emerged IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Google, Sony, and Qualcomm. From quantum theory, too, would spring forth — from the wretched wastes of communism and feudal paralysis — the vast new energies of China, India, and the rest of increasingly capitalist Asia.

These developments originated in Europe early in the twentieth century, with events in Budapest and Vienna first rocking and then overturning the cradle of the new science and industry. The history of Budapest echoed the history of Vienna. In both great cities of the Hapsburg Empire, Jewish entrepreneurs led an economic miracle. But in science, Budapest was preeminent. From quantum mechanics to nuclear weapons to computer technology, information theory, and holography, Hungarian Jews bestrode the history of the twentieth century, from the pinnacles of research to the practical triumphs of Silicon Valley.

Paramount among these Hungarian Jews were Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Leó Szilárd, who all played vital roles in the creation of nuclear weapons; Dennis Gabor, the Nobel laureate who invented holography; Michael Polanyi, the eminent chemist-philosopher who inspired a school of followers around the globe; and Arthur Koestler, the scientist-historian who wrote Darkness at Noon and edited The God That Failed, two books vital to the defeat of communism among intellectuals.

Of all the Jews who emerged from the anti-Semitic turmoil of Europe during World War II, however, none had more impact on the history of the epoch than the son of a marriage between Budapest banker Max Neumann and scion of finance, Margit Kann. Adding an aristocratic “von” from the title Max Neumann purchased in 1913 but never used himself, his son John’s name became von Neumann and it looms over our history. Born on December 28, 1903, John von Neumann epitomizes the role of the Jews in the twentieth century and foreshadows their role in the twenty-first. Although he was not a religious Jew and I have been challenged for stressing his role, he was genetically and paradigmatically Jewish and his vision was virtually rabbinical in its rigorous drive toward ever more exalted abstraction and unity.

Von Neumann’s record of accomplishment is as stunning as his ubiquity across the sciences of his era. But this record, like the ubiquity, can be deceptive. Von Neumann’s work intrudes widely not so much because he was a man of many ideas but because he was a man of one idea, or perhaps one idea about ideas.

Assuming an intellectual position more exalted in the hierarchy of knowledge than perhaps any of his peers, he successively imposed his synoptic mastery of abstraction in mathematics, quantum mechanics, nuclear weapons, computer science, game theory, and information theory. Bringing all these sciences and capabilities to bear, he could be said to have tipped the balance in the cause of freedom. But as Eugene Wigner wrote in his autobiography, “Despite the variety, all of his very great achievements rose from a single coherent view of life.” Since his childhood, von Neumann had been a master of the ladders of abstraction, from physical data through number and symbol to set and group, all unified by the concept of the algorithm.

An algorithm can be thought of as any step-by-step set of instructions that is sufficiently precise to produce a determined outcome in every iteration without additional human intervention. Any machine from which its human tenders can walk away while it does its job is driven by an algorithm, which can be abstracted from the machine itself. Men make algorithms, but they also discover them in the process of exploring the physical world. Not every human endeavor is algorithmic. The design of a pitching machine made by men is algorithmic; the prowess of a Major League Baseball pitcher is not. Not every natural process is or can be described algorithmically: the human genome is revealed increasingly as being within the algorithmic realm; along with many other complex and chaotic processes, global weather patterns still lie well outside it.

The algorithmic realm can be thought of as comprising all phenomena that can be satisfactorily governed or analyzed by some system of logic, from the somewhat stilted but still recognizably human language of much modern computer programming to the highest abstractions of mathematics.

The progress of science and technology into the algorithmic realm has depended on progress into the quantum realm. It was von Neumann, more than any other man of his era, who joined the two. We can delve deep into the atom only by rising up to a level of mathematical abstraction just glimpsed in the previous experimental science of the visible world.

But we do not, as von Neumann supremely understood, rise infinitely. As Kurt Gödel demonstrated in the early twentieth century, and von Neumann, as Gödel’s first interpreter and greatest proponent, repeatedly showed, the symbolic logic driving both math and science — the computer and the quantum — is ultimately axiomatic. It cannot prove itself in its own terms but must rely on a set of assumptions outside the system.