FEBRUARY 21 2016
THE TOWER OF BABEL AND THE DISSOLUTION OF TODAY’S INSTITUTIONS
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The Second Coming is a poem composed by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919 just after the War ended. One hundred years later, the Second Coming is that much closer.
Let me first say a bit about the Tower of Babel. Genesis 11 relates that even then, some 6000 years ago, people were technically quite advanced. They had the expertise to mine big blocks of granite, to transport them to a central place, and to hoist them high up into place using bitumen for cement (this was in the Middle East where there was then and is now loads of that tarry stuff).
To build a tower of that magnitude called for a strictly regulated organization, required a structure of command, and lots of ‘slave’ labour, as well as an intricate monetary system to finance this all. The unified language the Bible mentioned also implied a singleness of purpose, a pyramid of power, with dictatorial tendencies, where human freedom was made subordinate to the overall goal of building a world empire.
It is exactly that sort of governance that the Lord wanted to prevent from existing. Therefore God, by personal intervention, confused their language so that they could no longer communicate. I also imagine that among those dispersed were true believers who saw God’s plan and took with them some of the truths still evident in many an indigenous folk tale.
Back to today.
We now live in a situation described in Deuteronomy 31: 17: “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.” Yes, today we live a life without God’s universal guidance, all too evident everywhere, leading to certain cultural death.
We again have a universal language: English. We now have built not one but twin Towers of Babel, coming to you in the dual forms of the Carbon Age and the Internet, both amazing structures that allow us to communicate instantly with people all over the world and reach any point on the globe in a few hours. That actually is a boon for the Gospel and its world-wide proclamation, fulfilling one of the requirements before the Lord’s return: Matthew 24:14 tells us that “the gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in the entire world, and then the End will come.” Brace yourself.
Yes, we have built our own towers of Babel in the forms of our Carbon fueled life and the WWW, the World-Wide-Web for good and ill. The Lord used the old Tower of Babel to create a multi-lingual and pluralist society, expressed in Jesus’ words: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.”
Now the new Towers of Babel are crumbling, testing the faith of all believers. Climate Change is causing the weather to go weird and World-Wide communication has generated world-wide confusion and dissatisfaction and universal surveillance.
Look at American politics. Bizarre. Bernie Sanders, a 72 year old Senator of independence status, from Vermont, is challenging Hillary Clinton, who, more or less, represents the status quo. Sanders’ success shows that much of America is tired of rising inequality and sick of seeing the rich become richer and the poor poorer. He intends to revive both a progressive agenda and the American tradition of egalitarianism. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, who fought to the left of Barack Obama in 2008 on topics such as health insurance, appears today as if she is defending the establishment, just another heiress of the Reagan-Clinton-Obama political regime.
Sanders makes clear he wants to restore progressive taxation and a higher minimum wage ($15 an hour). He advocates free healthcare and free higher education in a country where inequality in access to education has reached unprecedented heights. That’s the situation on the left.
The ‘religious’ right reminds me of Adam and Eve. Just as the first human pair easily fell for the ‘ great deceiver’, so too the Christian segment of the USA are flocking to Trump and Cruz, succumbing to a hyper-nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-Islam and anti-Christian discourse and a limitless glorification of the fortune amassed by rich white people.
Today we see the revolt of the masses and the threatened dissolution of age-old political institutions. This is also evident in Europe where similar movements are at work and nihilism is also gaining ground.
It is true: for many in the USA the current conditions are not working. Especially the Republican Party has made it its main message that government is not the solution but the problem. Don Trump’s success is extra scary as he appeals to the worst in human nature. In spite of his atheistic language, ridiculing his opponents, blaming minorities for taking jobs away, the so-called Evangelical section flocks to him, exposing their basic ignorance of Christian values. Of course it was no different in Canada where the fundamentalists too voted for Harper who had no regard for God’s creation whatsoever, preferring the profit-seeking, technology-can-fix-it ideology of fossil-fueled capitalism: the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babel.
Are Christian Institutions also vulnerable?
Christian institutions have benefited from the modern Tower of Babel to build churches and Christian education on all levels. Their continuance depends on maintaining these cosmos-killing conditions: in other words, they are relying on the Tower of Babel syndrome, in spite of paying lip service to more ecologically sound measures. Yet it is our Christian duty to promote the death of our secular civilization, by abandoning the Tower of Babel’s destructive practices because they imperil God’s Primary word, Creation. John 3: 16 makes it abundantly clear that loving creation is the Christian’s primary duty. Strange as it may seem, the building of all these Christian institutions, seen as necessary at the time, has now become a hindrance to adapting to the new reality: the coming collapse of the world economy will force them to abandon the entire network of educational institutions. The trouble with physically building churches and schools is that we are making an absolute statement that this is how it always will be. Already the youth is shying away from these human enterprises in record numbers, imperiling the institutions from within because the current Tower of Babel built on fossil fuel is crumbling, while the WWW is as fragile as the electricity supply.
God, in his goodness and omniscience, is now forcing us to seek out a new course as financial and environmental constraints will compel us to do so.
“In our Father’s House there are many mansions”.
Our truth, our perspective, our Judeo-Christian-Western values need a thorough re-examination, seeing our world not just with Western eyes but with Indian and Chinese eyes and Inuit eyes, not just only with human eyes but with golden-cheeked warbler eyes, coho-salmon eyes, and polar bear eyes, and not even just with eyes at all but with the wild, barely articulate being of clouds and seas and rocks and trees and stars.
Today we are on the cusp of experiencing the dissolution of all institutions, finding ourselves on the eve of what may be the human world’s greatest catastrophe. None of us chose this, not deliberately. None of us can choose to avoid it either. It’s all in God’s plan to prepare us for the New Age to come, where Christ will be all and in all, where he will be the Primus inter Pares, the First among equals, all children of God and sisters and brothers of Jesus.
That means that THE SECOND COMING is not far away, evident in the disintegration of all that has made our life so different from our forebears.
For most of human history life has been solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The fortunate coincidence of factors that drove the unprecedented improvement in living standards following the Industrial Revolution, and especially in the period after World War II, has been unique, an historical aberration. Now, different influences threaten to halt further increases, and even reverse the gains. Yet, we have experienced how materially benevolent life can be, a foreshadowing of Eternity, the New Age to come in God’s Kingdom.
Now all signs point to looming shortages of critical resources, such as water, food and energy due to manmade climate change and extreme weather conditions. Europe is currently struggling to deal with a few million refugees fleeing conflicts in the Middle East. How will the world deal with hundreds of millions of people at risk of displacement as a resulting of rising sea levels?
Today we live in an age of ‘extend and pretend’, whereby authorities choose to ignore the underlying problem, cover it up, or devise deferral strategies to ‘kick the can down the road’. The assumption has been that government spending, lower interest rates, and the supply of liquidity or cash to money markets would create growth. It would also increase inflation to help reduce the level of debt, by decreasing its value. Human wisdom hasn’t worked: global debt has increased, not decreased, in response to low rates and government spending. Banks, considered dangerously large after the events of 2008, have increased in size and market power since then.
The policies have also set the stage for a new financial crisis. Easy money has artificially boosted prices of financial assets beyond their real value. A significant amount of this capital has flowed into and destabilized emerging markets. Addicted to government and central bank support, the world economy may not be able to survive without low rates and excessive liquidity.
Authorities increasingly find themselves trapped, with little room to take a different tack and unable to discontinue support for the economy. Central bankers know, even if they are unwilling to publicly acknowledge it, that their tools are inadequate or exhausted, now possessing the potency of shamanic rain dances.
Politicians know all this, but are unwilling to openly discuss the real issues. They argue that the problems are too far into the future to require immediate action, fearing electoral oblivion, but in so doing they are merely pile up the problems.
It is not in the interest of bankers and financial advisers to tell their clients about the real outlook because bad news is bad for business. The media for the most part, accentuate the positive. Facts, they argue, are too depressing. The priority is to maintain the appearance of normality, to engender confidence.
So the Twin Towers on which our economy depends are slowly disintegrating, until they reach a sudden point of collapse. For the moment, the world hopes for the best of times but is afraid of the worst. The world has postponed, indefinitely, dealing decisively with the challenges, choosing instead to risk stagnation or collapse. But reality cannot be deferred forever. Kicking the can down the road only shifts the responsibility for dealing with it onto others, especially future generations.
The lesson here is that we should not grow too attached to institutions or confessions or even contemporary statements of faith: the all will disappear.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!