“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.
