Ted Lasso, Social Justice, and the Tower of Babel

 This Medium article:

The Imperfect Politics of Ted Lasso

https://gen.medium.com/believe-ted-lasso-bro-bravado-tower-of-babel-a9d0af7c4f

contains this interesting portion about the Tower of Babel: 

"Which invites us to a quick visit to the Tower of Babel. Set in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 11:1–9), it’s the short (nine sentences long!) story of the time a bunch of (let’s say) guys tried to climb their way to heaven in response to which God says “Hell no!” and makes everyone suddenly start speaking different languages. It’s often understood as the story of an attempted human overthrow of God’s kingdom in response to which God unleashes a total communications breakdown to keep humans in their place moving forward.

But we can also read this as a timeless (and also timely) teaching about the human political condition: There is never a perfect time or place where “we all speak the same language” — which is to say, even when many of us are literally speaking a shared language, we are still never really speaking a shared language.

It brings us back to history and memory: Your neighbor’s lived experiences are filled with resonances from their own cultural or racialized or minoritized or marginalized past and present which includes the experiences of countless others in her family, community, and positionality who have suffered at the hands of hatreds you will never know, who have been subjected to structures of inequity you will never see, and who have risen up in the spirit of hopes you will never feel. To the extent that we all breathe different histories and presents, we all “speak different languages.”

Setting out to do good politics is about learning to engage with this difficult fact, not “rah-rah” our way over it. And it’s about taking up a spirit of creative political action that is hopeful in just this sense. Not “you’ll do as I expect” hopeful and not “are we having fun yet?” hopeful, but Lasso-believe, imperfect, off-kilter, hanging-on-by-a-thread hopeful. It’s a spirit that is not optimistic, not pessimistic, and certainly not perfect. It’s a kind of “difficult hope” where we sleeve-roll in the face of impossibility and forge imperfect solutions toward radical new futures that break step with the injustices we have created thus far.

Better politics requires real change, including real structural change. And it also requires difficult hope."

 The issue with this interpretation of the Tower of Babel story is that it applies current pop-culture sensibilities to a story that offers deep insights into human nature. These insights, when ignored, paradoxically lead to some of the problems our pop-culture have given us today. 

What pop culture tells us is with respect to this article is two things: 1) that we are all separated from a shared human experience by race or other categories, and, 2) that politics can be "good." 

Taking the second assertion first, politics is a human endeavor, which, in democracies concerns itself with the balancing of values. Asserting that any one priority ranking of values is "good" and any other is "bad" is a human endeavor- not a universal morality endeavor. God does not come down on the side of the conservatives or the liberals. Humans are inherently flawed, thus any kind of human ranking of values is, by its nature, flawed.

The first assertion misses the point of the Tower of Babel story by a mile. The Tower of Babel story is about the hubris of mankind. It is about humans thinking they can reach God if they build a tower tall enough. It is a metaphor- and can be very easily applied to the perpetual idea that human technology or human smarts can fix problems associated with human nature. The current pop-culture idea that humans can usher in "social justice" on Earth. That humans can fix the weather and the climate. That humans can eradicate poverty, rape, war, violence, and disease. That humans can bring an end to injustice. 

This hubris was what the Tower of Babel story was about. It was a story that should have told generations of humans that they shouldn't be hubristic. That they shouldn't think they can fix human nature. That they couldn't usher in an age of justice on Earth. 

The entire Biblical story was about the Afterlife. It emphasized that justice would never be found on Earth. Humans were inherently flawed. Only through acknowledging that failing could humans be saved. Today's pop culture- increasingly invading into today's Christian religions- preaches an opposite message: that humans can usher in justice on Earth. That humans can fix human nature and Earthly problems. That through our amazing technology and intelligence we can eradicate injustice, poverty, hunger, violence, war, and other ills. 

Paradoxically, this misunderstanding of human nature, Christianity, and the Bible's lessons will lead to more injustice, violence, and suffering.