Ranting to /dev/null

The Tower of Babel

I've been mulling over an idea for a week or so now, but the article I blogged about earlier today combined with this article from the MeFi comments has finally motivated me to write about it. Additional motivation comes from The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, a book which I'm reading and which Bill Clinton apparently referenced in a recent address.

The basic thesis of The Big Sort is that Americans have been segregating themselves on the basis of ideology--a divide that tracks class and race to some extent--since about the mid-1960s. The primary evidence for this self-sorting is traced to electoral maps from 1976 and 2004, which show a fairly dramatic increase in the number of "landslide" counties, i.e. counties where one presidential candidate won by at least 20% of the vote, a 60%/40% split. The vast majority of counties in the country were Republican landslides, but the few counties that Kerry did take by large margins are all major urban areas, so the number of people living in a landslide county for either side is quite large.

The author then goes on to suggest that we've been segregating ourselves so effectively for so long that the nation is devolving into different cultures that have little contact with other cultures and increasingly find those cultures incomprehensible. Listen to partisan Democrats and Republicans for about five minutes and this should be intuitively correct: it sounds like they aren't even speaking the same language. They're talking right past each other.

Compare the talking points of left and right and you'll see what I mean. They're just completely incompatible. The degree of self-serving fact selection and suppression is just stunning. They don't even live in the same world.

But I've been finding that this isn't just true for politics either. It's also true for religion. The author discusses this as well, but he's only really interested in its effect upon the political landscape, which in my view is a rather trivial exploration of religion. I've been at a Catholic institution for two years now, and I find Catholic thought to be almost impossible to engage. Why? Because the basic assumptions about reality are different than mine. I emphatically don't believe that any two people can simply apply their reason and come up with the same result, and serious Catholics emphatically do believe that. I believe that sin is a disfiguring of human nature whose influence extends to every act; Catholics believe--or at least talk as if they believe--that sin is producing "evil" in the world and though intent is relevant, the category of sin applies to individual acts not to persons. Those who distinctions make discussion on high-level issues like jurisprudence and ethics all but impossible.

But it's not just that either. Fundamentalist Protestants are even harder, as their view of Scripture is so radically different. They seem to approach the Bible as a list of propositions which may be used cookie-cutter style, as ingredients in a recipie designed to give them what they want. I view Scripture as an actual document, written by a actual people, who actually had a concrete purpose for what they were writing, and wrote just as you or I would write. As a result, I believe Scripture should be read as if it fundamentally makes coherent sense. This creates a pretty strong limit on the kinds of conclusions that can be reached from Scripture, a limit fundamentalists simply don't have.

In some sense, I find that same division between myself and both ends of the political spectrum. I believe that people are evil, but by grace aren't as evil as they might be. Both liberals and conservatives believe that people are basically good (conservatives might object here, but their policies belie their protestations), only they differ as to the social policies necessary to bring out the good in people. Liberals think that if given appropriate molly-coddling and social service that everyone will just play nice. It just isn't true. Conservatives believe that if given the opportunity to make choices, people are capable of making the best ones. That isn't true either. So not only can liberals and conservatives not really talk to each other, but I can't talk to either of them.

Why is this happening? There are arguments to be made that it didn't used to be this way, and though partisan politics are certainly nothing new to American history (remember 1861?), this seems to be one of the first times in American history where it has become increasingly difficult to actually get anything done.

This has happened before. A long time ago, actually, and it happened because of another tower. There, the survivors of the Biblical proclaimed their defiance against God by building a tower. Why was this defiant? First of all, God had commanded humanity to disperse and fill the earth, but the rulers of men (probably Gilgamesh) realized that their fame would diminish if humanity was scattered. So the tower was built in part to make a name for them. But also, the culture had just experienced a flood. Where do go in a flood? To high ground. So if you build a tall enough tower, the thinking goes, God won't be able to wipe us out again. Not only is this rank defiance, but it also ignores God's promise not to flood the earth that way again.

What does God do? He frustrates their language. He makes it impossible for them to talk to each other. Many ascribe the origin of differing human languages to this story, but I think that's a superficial reading. I think what it really represents is God's striking the human ability to band together. The real curse of Babel isn't different languages as much as factionalism. Whenever humans band together to set themselves above God, we will always dissolve into factions before we have a chance to succeed.

America has done this. And no, it isn't because we allow gay marriage or because we don't pray in schools or because there are nekkid women in movies. Those may be symptoms, but they're not the problem. The problem is that we, on both sides of the political spectrum, are constantly violating the First Commandment: You shall have no other gods before me. We are, in essence, attempting to do without God, but more to the point, we give the glory due to God to ourselves.

"Before" doesn't just mean "prior to" or "ahead of." It also means "in the presence of," just as one appears before a House subcommittee. We shall have no other gods in His presence. As he's omnipresent, that means anywhere, so basically no other gods at all. The Left's god seems to be man himself. "Just give people enough support and we can do anything! We're all good inside!" The Right's god is man too, though they come about it a different way. Tim Keller has some insight here, as did John Gerstner, who said "The thing that really separates us from God is not so much our sin, but our damnable good works." The Right seems to think that by legislating a proper moral society, banning homosexuality, and punishing criminals, God will just have to reward us. He'll just have to love us. We'll play by his rules because that's the name of the game, but we're really what it's all about.

Now Jesus faced the Right and the Left in his day too. The Jewish authorities had divided pretty neatly along lines that are fairly easy to recognize today. The Sadducees were the wealthy, well-educated cultural elites. They took a largely secular view of the world and of their religion: the spiritual aspect was appreciated, but the supernatural was all-but-removed. The Sadducees were collaborators with the Roman occupiers and thus held rather exalted positions of power. The Pharisees were the 1st century equivalent of the Moral Majority: solidly orthodox and conservative Jews who find their ready equivalent in most Evangelical churches today--particularly those of the Baptist stripe. They believed the Bible and were largely correct in their understanding of it. Jesus directs most of his ire against the Pharisees, but that's because they're the ones who were supposed to know better. the Sadducees were just wrong, and he told them so. He wouldn't even engage with them. But the Pharisees, who were in the right about the Bible, had their own problems, in that they viewed the Bible as a way of making God like them, not a way of loving God by loving others.

In short, the Right, just like the Left, just like every other faction and subculture in America today--including no small portion of the church--want God's benefits, but not God. Not a sovereign God who can tell you want to do, who is to be obeyed not because He is rational or because He is loving but because He is God. The Sumerians didn't want God either. And just as God smote their culture, so has ours been stricken. The only answer is the gospel.

This is in part why I'm finding The Big Sort interesting but somewhat unpersuasive. Though it overstates its case in places and has some arguably unremarkable statistical data do an incredible amount of heavy lifting, the authors have latched on to what I believe is a real trend. But they don't speak my language.