Babel and the Chainsaw

“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky.” (Genesis 11:4)

We have done marvelous things, in this, our great country. We have viewed the beginnings of the universe with our space-based telescopes, we have cured forms of cancer that no one thought could be cured, we have kept peace among nations that had a history of killing each other. We have done much of this through the agency of our federal government.

Now comes Elon Musk and DOGE and the chainsaw. Research that has taken decades to develop is being scrapped, people who depended on our country for food are dying of hunger, diseases that we were near to eliminating are beginning to thrive again around the world.

I have grown up and lived my life with the dream of progress leading to perfect outcomes. I had a religious basis for that dream, in the writings of a fourteenth-century Franciscan named John Duns Scotus. He wrote (and I have to put it the original Latin, because that is the way I have always read it): “In processione generationis humanae, semper crescit notitia veritatis.” "In the course of human history, the knowledge of the truth continually expands.”

That statement fits hand in glove with Enlightenment optimism, which has dominated western cultures for the last 300 years.

I went back to the original text of Scotus’s statement and discovered that he made the statement in the context of Christian belief in the Trinity, the idea that God is triune, Father, Son, and Spirit. That puts a different spin on the statement. Because the Christian belief in the Trinity includes the Christian story of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the “Son” of God.

The Second Vatican Council, which shook up Catholic life in the 1960s, had some of the same spirit of Enlightenment optimism. The Council began as a pope, John XXIII, was seen around our western world as a beloved elder, a young Catholic named John Kennedy had just been elected president of my country, and it seemed to me and to a lot of other Catholics that things were really going well. One of my professors said “We’ve got the devil on a rope and it’s a downhill pull.” Then came Vietnam and it took a lot of denial to continue to believe in infinite progress. But we continued to deny.

I was still denying until last November.

The story of Jesus is a story of great love being crushed by human decisions. The story goes on to say that God does not let love stay crushed.

Who knows how far the crushing will go this time?

The German people in the 1930s thought that Adolph Hitler would fulfill their dreams, and the result was the destruction of their admirably scientific world. This time the death and destruction could be far more severe. Suppose someone will unleash nuclear weapons? Those who study that scenario warn us that it will be difficult to restrain the use once it starts, and without restraint, human life on this planet will become impossible.

We have to face that scenario. We can preserve the hope that things will not get that bad. We can say that in the future we will no longer dream of creating the perfect society that will abolish all evil. We will not dream of building a tower that will reach the sky.

We will acknowledge that all of us, each and every one of us, is capable of evil, and that anything we do together can be corrupted. We will need humility and contrition and forgiveness. We will not be able to make everything work right. We will keep on hurting one another. We will not be able to write enough laws to keep us from hurting each other. We will begin to see that we cannot live without forgiveness, without forgiving others when they hurt us, and asking forgiveness of others when we hurt them.

What Mr. Trump’s election has done is to remind us that the machine we were building was an imperfect machine, which was leaving behind way too many people. Maybe, after his enterprise has crashed and burned, we will resume our efforts to do good things in our worlds, but I hope we will resume those efforts without the hubris of thinking we are gods.

We are human beings. We live, we love, we die, and along the way we can do a lot of good and a lot of damage. And we can hope that the story of Jesus Christ is more than a pious tradition.