Hey, I wanted to revisit this, because I got so busy I didn't keep up with Nate's comments from "Two Trees".
Last comment by Nate:
The way I read the story, humans
are predisposed toward Knowledge. That is our bent. We build towers,
weapons, alphabets, systems, infrastructure. To such a People, it would
make sense to say: choose Life. There would be more danger in saying
both trees are important; they interact in a harmonic interrelationship,
even though it's true.
Just for the fun of it, I wanted to argue the other side. Maybe I'm channeling Glen here, Nate. Sure we are People of Knowledge building towers, weapons, systems, languages, but does the average Joe Shmoe build, create,and leap to these things, or with the exceptions of a few great works, aren't these as much a gestalt emerging from the systems and events that happen to be brewing at the time, with little conscious direction? Language seems to be the easiest to single out for this argument since only crazy people like Tolkien ever build languages out of their heads.
I wouldn't be the first to point out that most of humanity simply accepts the systems they've grown up with and follow the norms without much thought. Even the thinking within communities is usually tightly controlled. Free thinking, outside of orthodoxy, in many Christian settings is not tolerated, and I don't believe that to be a good thing. In fact, I have felt that my analytical tendencies have often isolated me in a group that goes along their merry way, without questioning consequences or direction. You and I are perhaps the exception to enjoy banging these ideas around and playing our glass bead game, and to us definitely we need to hear "choose Life". But what about others, for better or for worse, who live with a great deal more ease through life without our mental angst?
To use Glen's language from our conversation in the car, don't the People just as often refuse to eat the fruit, because it is simply easier to not know and go on our merry way?
Wow. Just wrote a whole screed and then hit publish and then the computer timed out. I'll try again, but it sure won't be as good. Anyway, I seem to be at the point in this little dialectic where I repeat myself over and over again. Maybe another angle will emerge from this, but in the meantime, bear with me as I repeat my arguments again because it's fun!
ReplyDeleteSo I'm not saying that people consciously bandy about ideas or invent languages and that's a big problem for our mental, spiritual, and societal health. And I'm not saying that Big Data analytics or computer modeling are by definition such terrible things.
But suppose I had just watched families turn into clans, tribes, nations and empires on the strength of violence, ambition, and networks--and that I wanted to write an Origins story that ran counter to the prevailing myths that glorified progress. I would think about what distinguished People from other animals. What is this thing that propels and sickens us? It's not intellect exactly. It's not disobedience. It's not pride. It's something to do with our capacity for abstraction (consciously or unconsciously). But it's hard to articulate, so the only way to get at it is to juxtapose it against something else (Tree of Life) and as a rhetorical devise to urge people to eschew this poisonous thing (Tree of Knowledge) in favor of it. The Genesis writers take the theme ever further. In the next chapter, God declares a preference for pastoralists (Abel) to the more civilized agriculteralists (Cain). Unsurprisingly, Cain kills Abel because civilization is associated with violence. Then there's the tower of Babel which speaks for itself. In a world like ours with communal, sectarian, and political fault lines (abstractions all); in a world where my own identity is an infinite regression of telescoping categories; God says STOP. Let go. Just be.
The story so deep though, because it's more than just about society and the history of civilization. It's also about intimacy, fear, and dislocation. So it becomes a very personal story as much as it is an allegory about history.
Do you see that I'm not saying that intellectuals are worse off than non-intellectuals? Non-intellectuals can be just as poisoned by abstraction (nationalism, pornography, etc.) as anyone else.