If there is one Bible story that is a parable for our time, it is the Tower of Babel. Only 9 verses in Genesis, it is story of men united in language and culture, seeking to glorify themselves by building a pillar to Heaven. This would make them like gods, succumbing to the first temptation. So, the Lord confused their speech and scattered them throughout the world to prevent their success on this and other similar projects. For He knew the unforeseen consequences would be disastrous.
If you look carefully at progressivism, it has the same goal as the Tower of Babel and that is to create a world void of God that gives tribute to human accomplishment.
An obvious question then must be: is it a form of idolatry and, therefore, a violation of the first commandment?
Now before you condemn me as a 21st century luddite, let me assure you that calling us to return to the days before electricity is not my point. After all, I am writing this in the heart of the Boston Public Library using its wireless technology on my Chromebook and within earshot of the radio program Boston Public broadcast live from the open air WGBH radio studio at the entrance to the Library.
In fact, it is not technology that is proscribed in the first commandment, it is acting on the desire to glorify false gods, including man, to the exclusion of God. As in the Tower of Babel story, technology is used for self-idolization which is more endemic today than in millennia past. Whereas, the source of all happiness, the saints teach us, is humbly to embrace and accept the will of God.
The first four commandments are there to protect us from walking down a path that will lead us to succumb to the weaknesses inherent in our race. They prevent humanity from becoming victim to original sin in the form of human hubris which would destroy us all.
Compare two events: The first telegraph message prior to the rise of progressivism which was “What hath God wrought?” and the declaration that the Titanic was an unsinkable ship as progressivism took hold. Man, in the latter case, believed he conquered nature through technology.
Seventy-four years later in 1986, both the Challenger and the Chernobyl accidents happened. They are the testaments of the same hubris that brought forth the Tower of Babel. We became so powerful even nature could not stop us, so we thought. The Soviets turned the atom into a worker and The Americans turned space into a classroom.
No one in 1986, except the engineers who tried to warn NASA on that fateful January morning, understood that the simple combination of cold weather in Florida and rubber O-Rings would seal the fate of the Challenger astronauts and American technological prowess.
Later that year, no one suspected that the equally technologically powerful Soviet Union would suffer a massive disaster that would doom an entire industry worldwide to this day—while leaving a whole area of the Ukraine inhabitable for thousands of years.
Adam Higginbotham in his excellent book Midnight in Chernobyl (2019 Simon and Schuster) illustrates this accident caused by design issues created a problem so serious it actually demonstrated that the 1979 Hollywood nightmare film China Syndrome was not completely implausible.
Progressivism also creates even greater disasters. Human self-glorification to the exclusion of God has within it the seeds of every form of modern genocide. The tools are always: the state in all its departments—including education, using technology and media to further promote a selective human paradise which is the goal of progressivism. Political parties and leaders rationalize killing those who stand in the way of a predicted socialist utopia.
Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust (2001 Cornell University press), explains that Hitler’s mission against the Jews was not rooted in his hatred alone, but his belief that a world without Jews would become the “hoped for world of tranquil happiness.”
In other words, progressive humanity needed to remove those who stood in its way and in Hitler’s mind this included the socially dependent, the undesirables and, specifically—Jews, just because they were Jews.
Therefore, in a tragic irony, the people who brought us the warning against all forms of idolatry, may have become victims of others committing that same sin, many of whom were fallen away Catholics who became occultists, another violation of the First Commandment. If we focus on Hitler’s hatred of Jews, we may, therefore, miss the point. His hatred created his belief that Jews stood in the way of the glory of man so he demanded their execution.
Tyler Curtis, writing for the Foundation of Economic Education warns that the deadly progressive trend toward a future utopia is personified in George Bernard Shaw.
Socialists have not only been willing to ignore the bigots and authoritarians in their midst but have gone so far as to embrace them. Few have been more adored than that eccentric playwright and unapologetic Stalinist George Bernard Shaw.
Shaw took a completely utilitarian view of life, even going on to say that murder should only be punishable if the person murdered was a value to society.
“That would involve a revised view of the sacredness of human life. We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment. It is right if a man cannot be trusted to go about in society without injuring other people that he should be killed. But a man may commit murder and be a perfectly safe and desirable citizen afterwards. It might be that it was desirable to have removed the man he murdered.” He preached in 1910.
William Jennings Bryant, meanwhile, warning against the science only ethic he saw coming in his progressive era, wrote:
Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessels. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed, but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the slip of its compass and thus endanger its cargo.
Are we watching the product of the sin of idolatry in the form of progressivism taking place and if so, are we watching the beginning of another state supported genocide? This form of horror, prevalent in the Twentieth Century, has human self-deification as its source. Today it begins with the dehumanization of the unborn and legalizing their genocide in several states today.
Is this the reason why the states and the media are so focused on painting the anti-abortion Catholics in such a negative light? Are the Catholics now the ones who stand in the way of Western civilization’s progressivist utopia. After all, Fr. Walter Czizek who spent fifteen years in the Soviet GULAGS wrote in his book, "He Leadeth Me" that the governments then used the actions of corrupt priests as a doorway to implicate innocent priests too, likewise seen in the way of the future utopia.
Saul Alinsky taught in Rules for Radicals to use the sins of the Church to bring her down. But those sins and the bishops and priests, religious and laity who commit them are proving themselves to be just as rooted in idolatry and progressive ideology as the followers of Alinsky. These Pope Pius X warned us about in Pascendi Dominici Gregis paragraphs 2-3
We allude, Venerable Brethren, to many who belong to the Catholic laity, nay, and this is far more lamentable, to the ranks of the priesthood itself, who, feigning a love for the Church, lacking the firm protection of philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, vaunt themselves as reformers of the Church; and, forming more boldly into line of attack, assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ, not sparing even the person of the Divine Redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious daring, they reduce to a simple, mere man . . .
And having struck at this root of immortality, they proceed to disseminate poison through the whole tree, so that there is no part of Catholic truth from which they hold their hand, none that they do not strive to corrupt. Further, none is more skilful, none more astute than they, in the employment of a thousand noxious arts; for they double the parts of rationalist and Catholic, and this so craftily that they easily lead the unwary into error; and since audacity is their chief characteristic, there is no conclusion of any kind from which they shrink or which they do not thrust forward with pertinacity and assurance. To this must be added the fact, which indeed is well calculated to deceive souls, that they lead a life of the greatest activity, of assiduous and ardent application to every branch of learning, and that they possess, as a rule, a reputation for the strictest morality. Finally, and this almost destroys all hope of cure, their very doctrines have given such a bent to their minds, that they disdain all authority and brook no restraint; and relying upon a false conscience, they attempt to ascribe to a love of truth that which is in reality the result of pride and obstinacy.
Pope Pius X
The attempt to imprison priests in California who choose not to violate the seal of confession, I believe, is the next step in the attempt to destroy the Catholic Church in the United States. It is now becoming clear that the faithful priests are an obstacle against the utopian vision which will use the utilitarian mechanics of infanticide and genocide to build the assumed perfect society for the current elites. In fact, Bauman explains that is exactly the result of the modern state. Since it is focused on utopia, it will use genocide to create it.
The two most notorious and extreme cases of modern genocide did not betray the spirit of modernity. They did not deviously depart from the main track of the civilizing process. They were the most consistent uninhibited expressions of that spirit. They attempted to reach the most ambitious aims of the civilizing process most other processes stop short of, not necessarily for the lack of goodwill. They showed what the rationalizing, designing, controlling dreams and efforts of modern civilization are able to accomplish if not mitigated, curbed or counteracted. (p.92)
We can only respond by eliminating progressive ideology from our parishes, schools and pulpits and return to the call of faithfulness to the sacred tradition of the Church and the Gospels on which it is based. Many of the bishops who may disagree with our action, may not be fully aware of what is at stake and just see their mission to keep the church afloat and parishes open. Jesus reminded us that we are light to the world and it seems some bishops have yet to understand how dark the world becomes when we do not seek to be the light Christ calls us to be.
Time will tell, but clearly the ingredients are there for another dark period in human history, this time in the United States. Also, as before, cooperation with a biased or corrupt mass media, without which the twentieth century genocides would never have happened, and the hubris in which all these attitudes are rooted—and have been since Genesis chapter 11—is leading us to disaster quickly. Like all attempts before, this will fail and destroy the progressives seeking to create it and many innocent victims along with them.
Photo: Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel Public Domain
Bibliography:
Anderton, Charles H. and Jurgen Brauer, Economic Aspects of Genocides, Other Mass Atrocities, and Their Preventions, 2016, London, Oxford University Press
Bauman, Zygmunt Modernity and the Holocaust, 2000; New York. Cornell University Press
Destexhe, Alain. 1994-1995. ‘The Third Genocide’. Foreign Policy (97): 3-17.
Hamburg, David A. M.D. Preventing Genocide, 2010; Bouilder, CO. Paradigm Press
Higginbotham, Adam, Midnight In Chernobyl 2019; New York, Simon and Schuster.
Pius X, Pope, Pascendi Dominici Gregis 1907, Rome. Liberia Editrice Vaticana
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