Yuri Slezkine argues that modernity, means everyone becoming Jewish. Adam Cadre explains:
People spend way too much time talking about the distinction between the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of humanity, when the Dionysian is simply an Apollonian on a holiday. Instead, we should talk about the distinction between the Apollonian and the Mercurian. Apollo was god of both livestock and agriculture, so herding and farming both fall into the Apollonian sphere — and historically, the overwhelming majority of civilized people have been herders or farmers. When Thomas Jefferson envisioned America as a country made up almost entirely of small farms, it didn’t really take a lot of imagination because that had been pretty much the entire world up to that point. And there were basically only three other occupations that society considered respectable: aristocrat, priest, and soldier. These Slezkine considers Apollonian as well.All other occupations — doctor, lawyer, scholar, and especially merchant — were considered unfit for respectable people and were largely left to outsiders. In Southeast Asia these outsiders were the Chinese; in East Africa, the Indians; in Latin America, the Lebanese. In Europe, there were three main groups who filled this niche. One of these specialized in “pariah entrepreneurship” — jewelry-making, fortune-telling, street theater, begging, theft — and consequently became Europe’s untouchables, the lowest of the low: these were the Gypsies. The other two were highly educated (indeed, almost universally literate) and became the richest people in Europe even as they were forced to accept second-class social status. These were the Armenians and, more visibly, the Jews.
Having established the idea of “Mercurian” groups living on the edges of “Apollonian” societies, Slezkine moves on to the next phase of his argument, contending that the modern “service economy” is almost entirely Mercurian in nature. To put my own spin on it: my day job is teaching standardized test prep, and on the grad side, the four big tests are the MCAT, the LSAT, the GRE, and the GMAT. These tests open the door to a career in medicine, law, academia, and business, respectively. And people sign up for these classes because these Mercurian fields are the elite occupations of the modern industrialized world. Even if you’re not elite, you’re part of a Mercurian system. Three hundred years ago, being part of the “working class” meant you were a peasant: you scrabbled around in the dirt trying to make stuff grow, like hundreds of generations of Apollonians before you. A hundred years ago, peasants had become proles, and you worked in a factory or a mill, the industrial age equivalent of Apollonian work. But now? Now you work in a store. You poke at a cash register at Wal-Mart, or pass meat and bread products through a window at Burger King. If you’re upper working class — what the Bolsheviks would have called a kulak — maybe you get to work in an office as a receptionist or something. In any case, you’re doing work that until relatively recently would have been done by Jews. Modernity, Slezkine contends, means everyone becoming Jewish.