Some writers have responded by trying to find a “Protestant ethic” in Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Judaism, Confucianism, or the Tokugawa religion.50 The difficulty with this endeavor is that there seem to be more service nomads than there are plausible Protestants. One could search for peculiarly Mercurian traits in the nationalized Christianity of the Armenian Gregorians and Lebanese Maronites (the majority of the original Arab immigrants to the Americas), but one could hardly argue that Orthodox Christianity provided the Ottoman Greeks with much entrepreneurial ammunition, or that Roman Catholicism is responsible for the strong representation of Italian Americans in such typically Mercurian pursuits as entertainment, organized crime, and retail trade in urban ghettos. Max Weber, too, may have discouraged some of his followers by insisting on a rigid distinction between rule-based capitalism and tribal entrepreneurship, as well as by suggesting that some “Calvinist” elements in Judaism were relatively late adaptations to the conditions of exile, not sources of commercial inspiration.
Another approach is to refer to the effects of regional trade practices on local attitudes toward economic gain and broad familiarity, and possibly sympathy, with the Mercurian ethos. According to Thomas Sowell, for example, “the economically strategic location of the Middle East, for centuries a crossroads of trade between Europe and Asia, fostered the development of many trading ports and many trading peoples, of whom the Jews, the Armenians, and the Lebanese have been particularly prominent.” The same, Sowell argues, is true of the Overseas Chinese, “who originated in similarly demanding regions of southern China, where trade was part of their survival skills in a geographically unpromising region for industry, but which had trading ports.” The same may very well be true of some Indian or East Asian Mercurians—but clearly not of others. The Korean and Japanese diasporas, for example, have tended to be much keener on middleman roles and much better at performing them than most migrants from such trading entrepôts as the Baltic or the Mediterranean.51
Perhaps the most popular explanation for successful Mercurianism is “corporate kinship,” which is said to promote internal trust and obedience while limiting the number of potential beneficiaries. Nepotism may be good for capitalism, in other words—as long as the duties and entitlements of one’s nephews are understood clearly and followed religiously.52 Indeed, virtually all Armenian, Korean, Lebanese, diaspora Indian, and American Italian businesses are family enterprises. Even the largest Overseas Chinese commercial and manufacturing empires, with offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, are similar to the Rothschild banking house in that the regional branches are usually run by the sons, brothers, nephews, or sons-in-law of the founder. The one true Mercurian faith, according to this theory, is fervent familism (which may, in a strange land, be extended to larger lineages and ultimately the whole—chosen—people). If the core of Confucianism is “the apotheosis of the family,” then the behavior of large numbers of Italian immigrants to the Americas may be attributed to what Francis Fukuyama calls “Italian Confucianism.”53
The problem with the strictly sociobiological explanation of entrepreneurial nepotism (such as the one advanced by Pierre van den Berghe) is that some of the most successful Mercurian enterprises—the German and Japanese ones, as well as the Sicilian Mafia—have not been kin groups. Instead, they have used family models and metaphors to create durable and cohesive quasi-families—from, in the Japanese case, master-disciple swordsmanship groups to zaibatsu (“money clique”) business partnerships. The upshot, it would seem, is that the best new candidates for Mercurian roles are those groups that most closely resemble the old Mercurian tribes. The principal trait that all aspirants must possess is the combination of internal cohesion and external strangeness: the greater the cohesion, the greater the strangeness, and the greater the strangeness, the greater the cohesion, whichever comes first. The best guarantee of both is an uncompromising and ideologized familism (tribalism), which may be either biological or adoptive and which can be reinforced—or indeed replaced—by a strong sense of divine election and cultural superiority. The millenarian religious sects that do not insist on celibacy are invariably endogamous—and thus potential tribes; the endogamous tribes that take their fate and their strangeness seriously are also religious sects.54
Whatever the sources of its most recent versions, service nomadism—old or new, scriptural or oral—has always been a dangerous proposition. Unarmed internal strangers, the Mercurians are as vulnerable as they are foreign, especially because residential segregation (in forest encampments, merchant quarters, or ethnic compounds) is a necessary condition for their continued existence as service nomads among traditional food producers. In stateless societies, they are protected by their supernatural powers and exclusive specialization; elsewhere, they are safeguarded—or not—by tax-collecting elites that profit from their expertise.
The history of most service nomads is a story of sporadic grassroots pogroms and permanent state ambivalence, as various regimes oscillated between more or less rationalized extortion and periodic confiscations, conversions, expulsions, and executions. The European Gypsies were usually seen as parasitic as well as dangerous (entertainment was the only “Bohemian” activity subject to profitable regulation), and thus hounded relentlessly, if rarely with great conviction. The scriptural Mercurians were often considered indispensable as well as dangerous, and thus allowed to remain both resident (including the granting of state protection and economic monopolies) and alien (including the toleration of physical separation, religious self-rule, and administrative autonomy).
The key to continued usefulness was economic success; visible economic success led to heavier taxation, popular violence, and renewed complaints from native competitors. Either way, considerations of long-term usefulness could become secondary to an urgent need for financial revenue or political scapegoats; occasionally, they might be abandoned entirely in favor of religious universalism or bureaucratic transparency. In the Spanish Philippines, for example, 12,000 Chinese were deported in 1596, approximately 23,000 massacred in 1603, another 23,000 in 1639, and then about 20,000 in 1662; in 1755 all non-Christian Chinese were expelled (and many converted); in 1764, 6,000 were killed; and in 1823, the levying of special taxes resulted in mass flight and imprisonment.55
The rise of nationalism and communism seemed to pave the way to a final solution. If all nations were entitled to their own states and all states were to embody nations, all internal strangers were potential traitors. They might, or might not, be allowed to assimilate, but they had ever fewer legitimate arguments for continued difference and specialization. In a nation-state, citizenship and nationality (“culture”) became inseparable; nonnationals were aliens and thus not true citizens. And if, on the other hand, proletarians of all countries were supposed to inherit the earth, and if only industrial workers (and possibly their peasant allies) could be true proletarians, then service nomads were to be disinherited as “bourgeois lackeys” or just plain bourgeois. Some Mercurians became communist (in opposition to ethnic nationalism), and some became Mercurian nationalists (in opposition to both), but both nationalism and communism were fundamentally Apollonian, so that many Mercurians who were not murdered became Apollonians of Mercurian descent or citizens of the newly “revived” Israel and Armenia (which tended to be more Apollonian—and much more martial—than Apollo himself).