Trump Tower of Babel

Times are long past when most of us sought insight in a Sunday Bible sermon. But these are not ordinary times, with many of us struggling to understand what “one nation, under Donald Trump” really means. Why do so many conservative Americans support a leader determined to turn his back on what were once bedrock American values? In 2016, evangelicals' support for Trump, a man whose history, acts, and temperament should make him radioactive to them, was 81 percent. It has not signficantly dropped since.

To understand why, let the congregation open their Bibles to Genesis 11, v. 1-9—the story of the Tower of Babel. Here, humanity is at the stage of reclaiming an earth newly redeemed after the Flood. In one place, on a plain called Shinar, the people decide to “build a city and tower, whose top may reach unto heaven…” The rationale for building the tower seems to be nothing more than post-diluvian showing-off, “to make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” (The implication that a tower as high as heaven would keep people safe and dry from future floods is only implicit, but interesting.)

We all know what happened: “And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower…and said, ‘Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.’” This being the jealous Old Testament God, such an affront cannot stand. “Let us go down,”, He says, “and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech…and so the Lord scattered them abroad…and they left off to build the city.”

This is usually taken to be a just-so story about how human beings came to be divided by language. And indeed, it is framed that way in Scripture. But it is striking that the impetus for God’s intervention isn’t to help humanity, but to hobble it. God doesn’t want people to attain above their station, and in fact dreads them accomplishing “[anything] which they have imagined to do.” As such, the Babel story isn’t only about where languages came from. It’s also about how the Lord deals with mortal presumption.

Such anti-humanistic sentiment rings through into early Christianity. In Corinthians, the apostle Paul pours scorn on the “experts” of his time, declaring “For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent…”. Instead of placing faith in human authorities, better to take our chances with fools, “because the foolishness of God is wiser than [that of] men.” In his Prescription Against Heretics, Tertullian agreed, “We have no need of curiosity after Jesus Christ, nor of research after the gospel. When we believe, we desire to believe nothing more.”

These are the lenses through which many evangelicals today see science, progress, and the liberal project. To progressives, the achievements of technical civilization, from the eradication of disease to the physical comforts we take for granted, are concrete proof of what we can achieve when we put our minds to constructive ends. When Barack Obama tweeted “There’s nothing we can’t do” in 2013, he probably intended nothing more than to be casually supportive. But in his phrasing, so uncannily close to the Babel story, he reflects the rationalist vision to remake the world in our image.

In other ears, such optimism only affirms what the Lord feared when He saw the tower rising, of humans threatening to achieve “which they have imagined.” Today, the vanity lies not in some physical structure, but in the “tower” of privileges and entitlements progressives want to build, a human attempt to rival God. To them, the real threats aren’t disease or hunger or war, but the arrogance of trying to fashion a kind of “Heaven without God”. They look at dreams of a just, equitable, prosperous and peaceful world, where people are free to love who they choose, where alliances keep the world from chaos, where everyone enjoys basic rights to good health and a living wage, and where humans work to protect the planet—and shudder. 

They want no part of your technocratic utopia. If we are meant to enjoy such boons, they are for God alone to bestow. God will take care of your preexisting condition. God will decide whether the planet burns. If God wants the world plunged into war, there will be war. The only true “vaccine” against measles is God. He will decide when and how you suffer. Not Nancy Pelosi, nor scientists, nor career diplomats at the State Department.

From a certain point of view, there’s a logic to it. After all, what’s the point of devoting one’s entire life to a faith whose ultimate reward, its afterlife, is only marginally better than modern Sweden? Better to “burn it all down” than face the prospect of God made irrelevant. By these lights, the agenda of expansive, activist government is begging for shoving-over, a good Biblical scattering. Crass and corrupt as he is, Trump “the chosen one” is doing the Lord’s work, laying low the slender Jenga tower of rationality. Just as the Lord Himself did on the plains of Shinar, the last time human beings dared dream of reaching Heaven on their own. 

Glimpsed from outside, this yearning to “burn it all down” looks deeply perverse. Such is our state of Babel-like mutual incomprehension, where the deeply-held faith of some seems like a nihilistic death-cult to others. For us, “You have to go through Hell to get to Heaven” is just something people say. To the forever-Trumpers, it is a promise. And it looks like we still have a lot of Hell to go through. 

Nicholas Nicastro is a PhD in psychology, novelist and critic. His latest novel, Ella Maud, is available now from Endeavour Media UK. 

© 2019 Nicholas Nicastro

Naples: Hot Mess

Spaccanapoli at dawn

Italy is one of the most visited nations on earth. But when it comes to Naples, the country’s third largest city by population, even seasoned travelers go wobbly. “It’s noisy. It’s dirty. And it’s full of crime,” declare the Neapolitanophobes. Even my dear departed grandmother, who sailed to Europe solo before women did such things, who regularly faced the challenges of Palermo, and who joked about rubbing shoulders with capos in Corleone, drew the line at Naples. 

The city’s heritage of endemic corruption is one reason for the bad taste. Another, undoubtedly, is its position as Italy’s major seaport. Many migrants from other parts of the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries either embarked from or transferred to trans-Atlantic vessels at Naples. To men and women from rural areas, the place must have typified all the dangers associated with waterfronts: sin, crime (organized and otherwise), godlessness, tumult. Many of these transient rubes may well have been preyed upon, cementing the city’s legacy in oral tradition. “By all means,” they advised later, “see Rome, Florence, Venice. But stay the hell out of Naples.” And their children and grandchildren passed on the wisdom.

Part of my motivation to finally spend a chunk of time there was borne out of sheer contrariness. No place with such a sun-kissed setting, with close to three millennia of history and a deep patrimony of culture and art, could be entirely without interest. Anyplace so strenuously avoided simply had to be investigated. 

In fact, my interest was piqued first during a one-day glimpse I had of the city in 1994. There, walking down a street whose name I can’t recall, I saw a woman use a rope to lower a basket from her window to the street. There, a peddler took her money and filled the basket with groceries. Then she hauled her purchases back up to the fourth floor. The transaction was quick, silent, and routine as we use an ATM. This was exactly what my grandmother had described as once common on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side. In other words, things you’d need a time machine to see in New York now, they still do in Naples. To someone who has made a career of portraying the past, this was irresistible stuff —I need to go to there stuff.

I went there, dragooning an old friend for company. He’s a classical historian who knows Italy well but has always skirted Naples in favor of Pompeii and Herculaneum. (“A dangerous shithole,” he called it). His preconceptions were not dispelled by the neighborhood I picked for our stay: right in the center of the Centro Storico, the bustling core of the old Greek city of Neapolis. The buildings there seem to hunker together, rubbing grimy shoulders. The streets are like paved corridors, crowded with a mix of merchants, tourists, and university students. The cobbled strip of Naples’ most infamous byway, the Spaccanapoli (“Naples splitter”) runs through it. Nothing seems to be given its proper space here, neither the churches (of which there are many lovely examples) nor the vehicles, nor the businesses. Everything is thrown together and expected to find a way. Indeed, in this old, unpicked knot of humanity I felt what it must have been like to walk an ancient city, far more than in the relatively broad esplanades of modern Rome, or the preserved carcass of Pompeii.

There is a much-debated word that describes this Naples: authentic. I use it not in the sense that everything there has been passed down intact from the past, or untouched by tourism. It is authentic in the sense of not pretending to be anything it is not. Is it dirty, graffitied, and a touch overwhelming? Maybe so. But it is also full of casual beauty, of baroque edifices that bestride the streets like misplaced pieces of bedroom furniture. Of sweet and savory smells wafting from overwhelmingly Mom & Pop businesses (no Starbuck’s here, and the closest McDonald’s is miles away). Of faces that you’ve seen before, in some Dino Risi or Antonioni movie from your college days. And reclining in the center is a marble personification of the Nile, now fashionably bearded, seeing it all unfold since the 2nd century AD…with a sphinx for a pillow.

There’s a proximity here between the elegant and the ghastly that is reminiscent of Mexico City. This is apparent in places like Cappella Sansevero, an architectural gem that was founded in the late 16th century, but reached its final form in the late 18th under the direction of Prince Raimondo di Sangro, polymath and mystic. The baroque sculptures in his chapel, including a veiled Christ rendered in marble, are magisterial, exquisite—the kind of masterpieces that generate lines in Rome or Florence. On this level, di Sangro belongs to that particular intellectual species, the Enlightenment gentleman-scientist, typified by Jefferson or Franklin.  

But in a chamber below the art is displayed something else entirely: di Sangro’s so-called “anatomical machines”. These are life-size figures of a man and a woman with every detail of internal anatomy laid bare, down to the capillaries. For centuries it was suspected these were actual preserved bodies, “plastinated” by some secret process of di Sangro’s invention—perhaps not entirely with the subjects’ informed consent. There was once even an infant “machine”, since disappeared. 

Recent microscopic examination has proven that the figures are not preserved tissue at all, but made of fabric and wire. Still, the Chapel’s combination of beauty and creepiness, and the esoteric symbolism that run through the place, makes it feel uniquely Naples. These eerie, skinless “machines” are just a few yards off the Spaccanapoli, where you get your gelato and tea-towels. 

Plastinated capital

The other Naples—the plastinated remainders of its time as capital of “The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies”— isn’t hard to find. On the the heights of Capodimonte, for instance, with its splendid palazzo, now art museum. From the royal gardens, views extend to the double hump of Vesuvius, the apron of development spread to the Bay, and the distinctive profile of Capri beyond. Or in the monumentality of the Piazza del Plebiscito, embraced by the grandiloquently named Basilica Reale Pontificia San Francesco da Paola, otherwise discernible as Naples’ answer to the Pantheon in Rome, with maybe a little Vatican too. Posh, “official” Naples is there, yet it still has the feel of overripe grandeur, of a dusty library of books long since digitized, but with the finger-smudges and pressed blossoms of books that were used and cherished by human beings.

For the descendants of those who shipped out of here, the legacy is more bittersweet. These green hills, this mountain that disgorged such fertility, once seemed to reject whole generations. To them, the bay was not a simmering picturesque, but a way to sluice away the trash. The view I climbed the Capodimonte to see was the same one my ancestors turned their backs on. And as they slid by the yachts and villas and playgrounds of emperors on Capri, they wondered if they would survive the voyage ahead. For some, that anxiety went on clear over an ocean and a half, until perhaps they saw the low hills of Staten Island, where no emperors ever played. 

Now the trash washes back. Not with any sense of vindication, but with trepidation. After five days in Naples my friend and I went to the Piazza Bellini. A relatively calm, leafy space, prowled by cats who eye the pigeons who eye our crumbs, the piazza is a good place to nurse a prosecco in view of Naples' full profile, from the exposed walls of the Greek polis to the tarted-up townhouses around it. After we’d drunk a little, I asked if our visit had changed his opinion of the city. He thought for a moment, taking in the swath of time around us, the contained physical chaos, and said, “A beguiling shithole.”

© 2019 Nicholas Nicastro