I just read your Babel story and loved it! I'm a sucker for "Imagine this..." scenarios. And any "imagine this" that takes me to the foot of the Tower of Babel is an imaginative leap worth making. I also enjoyed your translator riff. And isn't that what we've all become -- translators who try and make sense of what we're all babbling about. :-) ... Thanks for writing that post... and for sharing it.
The garden, ark and babel form the myths of bronze age. Abram and family are in a time after the collapse. Although it seems to be a bit of an anachronism as the major collapse is being described in genesis. But they are still writing about a time when whole villages can be razed without worry.
I’m still waking up, so maybe I shouldn’t blunder in here at this hour.
But:
•The text doesn’t show the Almighty as somehow threatened by Babel, indeed the humor in the text has been pointed out to me. They set out to build a tower up to the heavens but the Creator has to go down just to see it, things like that
• The key sentence seemeth to be in 11:6, “nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.” In other words, if this mass-production (brick for stone, slime for mortar) epic totalitarian enterprise isn’t somehow stopped, broken up now, its inhuman idolatrous future is easily extrapolated out, spreading to fill the world. Here at Babel was seen the tremendous unity of a Nazi rally; lacking virtue, there was societal harmony to a fault
• I’ve not read the book, but surely when Kass says the city, our cities, must look to the transcendent, he isn’t talking about us finding morality in the stars. No, what he saying is that we mustn’t, like Babel, regard our scene as the whole show. This comes up in matters of governance all the time, can a democratic majority ever be wrong? Certainly it can, if indeed we have recourse to an overarching transcendent moral standard, one not derived from the majority. This is why the American Founding alluded to pre-existing, pre-political “truths” about “nature and nature’s G_d,” such that people already have rights prior to the creation of the government and the government has a duty to “secure” these rights, not invent or bestow them.
Again I can’t speak for Leon Kass but from here it looks like he’s pointing out the difference between Chris Cuomo:
“Our rights do not come from G_d.. That’s your faith, that’s my faith, but that’s not our country. Our laws come from collective agreement and compromise.”
and John F. Kennedy:
“[T]he same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of G_d”
You practice what my seventh-grade English teacher would call “effective repetition.” And it *is* effective: I’m beginning to agree with you!
But here’s my stumbling block: Let’s assume you’re right. Thought itself is divisive. And every conscious effort to overcome our divisions is doomed before we begin. Okay. Now what? Where does your insight lead us? What does Day 1 of TannyConsciousness look like? (“Just the distinction ‘Day 1’ indicates that you really don’t get it,” says Phil.)
Related question: Why does the Dalai Lama want to return to Tibet? It seems… divisive.
Good answer. What occurs to me is that we're interested in different questions. Your interest is essentially philosophical: "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline." In question form: What is true? What is reality? What is the nature of thought? ... They are interesting questions, but they're not my top priority. My questions are more like: "Why am I here? How shall I live? What shall I value? How should I spend the limited amount of time I have in this life?"
Philosophy is what the guys did in Athens. They sat around contemplating the Good -- then they screwed little boys and drank to excess and dramatized the ancient Greek myths that taught us about tragedy and that Oedipus could not avoid his fate because his fate was inevitable. And the same shit was going to happen, generation after generation.
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, my ancestors were trying to work out a way of life that was responsive to what they perceived to be their higher calling. Screwing little boys was off limits. Screwing your neighbor's wife was also off limits. Drinking to excess was not encouraged. Mimicking the values of the rest of the world was considered a bad move. Were they successful? No, not entirely. But I think they might have had a sense of a destination, one that was embedded in the Story they told their kids... who told their kids... who told their kids... and now I'm sitting here today, telling it to mine. The good news? This Story is now familiar to at least four billion people. Yes, of course there are lots of problems with the Story -- we keep killing each other (or the violent men do). But what gives me hope -- and that's what at the center of all this: Hope -- is that we now have a narrative framework to address what ails us. Almost two billions Muslims running around, people who see themselves as children of Abraham. So what we have is NOT an old-fashioned tribal conflict in which the people who worship the Moon kill the people who worship the Steve the Supreme Leader. Instead, we have a family disagreement. And while family disputes are not easy, they are potentially addressable.
Anyway, my point here -- and I do have one! -- is that we can get stuck on what exactly is the nature of thought. Or we can talk about how we spend the limited amount of time we have here. What's should we do? How should we behave? What is a just society? Those are practical, down-to-earth questions that I believe are a primary focus of my Tribe. We spend less time on the nature of G*d and more time on how we should live our lives. This is a gross generalization, of course. But I hope you get my point.
I really enjoyed reading this. You may enjoy my post on Babel from a while back. I actually originally started reading your blog because I love babel references. https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/translating-a-really-old-profession
I just read your Babel story and loved it! I'm a sucker for "Imagine this..." scenarios. And any "imagine this" that takes me to the foot of the Tower of Babel is an imaginative leap worth making. I also enjoyed your translator riff. And isn't that what we've all become -- translators who try and make sense of what we're all babbling about. :-) ... Thanks for writing that post... and for sharing it.
The garden, ark and babel form the myths of bronze age. Abram and family are in a time after the collapse. Although it seems to be a bit of an anachronism as the major collapse is being described in genesis. But they are still writing about a time when whole villages can be razed without worry.
I’m still waking up, so maybe I shouldn’t blunder in here at this hour.
But:
•The text doesn’t show the Almighty as somehow threatened by Babel, indeed the humor in the text has been pointed out to me. They set out to build a tower up to the heavens but the Creator has to go down just to see it, things like that
• The key sentence seemeth to be in 11:6, “nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.” In other words, if this mass-production (brick for stone, slime for mortar) epic totalitarian enterprise isn’t somehow stopped, broken up now, its inhuman idolatrous future is easily extrapolated out, spreading to fill the world. Here at Babel was seen the tremendous unity of a Nazi rally; lacking virtue, there was societal harmony to a fault
• I’ve not read the book, but surely when Kass says the city, our cities, must look to the transcendent, he isn’t talking about us finding morality in the stars. No, what he saying is that we mustn’t, like Babel, regard our scene as the whole show. This comes up in matters of governance all the time, can a democratic majority ever be wrong? Certainly it can, if indeed we have recourse to an overarching transcendent moral standard, one not derived from the majority. This is why the American Founding alluded to pre-existing, pre-political “truths” about “nature and nature’s G_d,” such that people already have rights prior to the creation of the government and the government has a duty to “secure” these rights, not invent or bestow them.
Again I can’t speak for Leon Kass but from here it looks like he’s pointing out the difference between Chris Cuomo:
“Our rights do not come from G_d.. That’s your faith, that’s my faith, but that’s not our country. Our laws come from collective agreement and compromise.”
and John F. Kennedy:
“[T]he same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of G_d”
You practice what my seventh-grade English teacher would call “effective repetition.” And it *is* effective: I’m beginning to agree with you!
But here’s my stumbling block: Let’s assume you’re right. Thought itself is divisive. And every conscious effort to overcome our divisions is doomed before we begin. Okay. Now what? Where does your insight lead us? What does Day 1 of TannyConsciousness look like? (“Just the distinction ‘Day 1’ indicates that you really don’t get it,” says Phil.)
Related question: Why does the Dalai Lama want to return to Tibet? It seems… divisive.
Good answer. What occurs to me is that we're interested in different questions. Your interest is essentially philosophical: "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline." In question form: What is true? What is reality? What is the nature of thought? ... They are interesting questions, but they're not my top priority. My questions are more like: "Why am I here? How shall I live? What shall I value? How should I spend the limited amount of time I have in this life?"
Philosophy is what the guys did in Athens. They sat around contemplating the Good -- then they screwed little boys and drank to excess and dramatized the ancient Greek myths that taught us about tragedy and that Oedipus could not avoid his fate because his fate was inevitable. And the same shit was going to happen, generation after generation.
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, my ancestors were trying to work out a way of life that was responsive to what they perceived to be their higher calling. Screwing little boys was off limits. Screwing your neighbor's wife was also off limits. Drinking to excess was not encouraged. Mimicking the values of the rest of the world was considered a bad move. Were they successful? No, not entirely. But I think they might have had a sense of a destination, one that was embedded in the Story they told their kids... who told their kids... who told their kids... and now I'm sitting here today, telling it to mine. The good news? This Story is now familiar to at least four billion people. Yes, of course there are lots of problems with the Story -- we keep killing each other (or the violent men do). But what gives me hope -- and that's what at the center of all this: Hope -- is that we now have a narrative framework to address what ails us. Almost two billions Muslims running around, people who see themselves as children of Abraham. So what we have is NOT an old-fashioned tribal conflict in which the people who worship the Moon kill the people who worship the Steve the Supreme Leader. Instead, we have a family disagreement. And while family disputes are not easy, they are potentially addressable.
Anyway, my point here -- and I do have one! -- is that we can get stuck on what exactly is the nature of thought. Or we can talk about how we spend the limited amount of time we have here. What's should we do? How should we behave? What is a just society? Those are practical, down-to-earth questions that I believe are a primary focus of my Tribe. We spend less time on the nature of G*d and more time on how we should live our lives. This is a gross generalization, of course. But I hope you get my point.