The red-light district in a city is meant to be an outlet for the restless to blow off steam, for lawlessness to play out, within acceptable limits. The unwritten rule is this: if you want to be risky and maybe destroy yourself, just go do it over here in this corner. It’s a silent agreement. Town festivals are just small versions of Fat Tuesdays for the locals. A culture or society needs a Purim or Fat Tuesday or Carnivale or a parade or a keg party or Prom to let it all hang out for a bit, because it keeps people sane.

However, the allowance of the rowdy night or weekend only makes sense if a return to normalcy and rules happens after it’s over. Notice that Halloween is followed by All Saints Day. Fat Tuesday is followed by Ash Wednesday. Lent, a period of fasting and prayer, is followed by the feast of Easter. What's interesting in the Christian liturgical calendar is that these outlets are built into the year, every year, because there is an awareness of this “need” to sin, to burn off the slag, as if perhaps we have actually learned something over time. Maybe from the thirty thousand years of human history we have learned something. Maybe wandering the African savannah to the caves of France to crossing the Bering Strait and living in the empires of Sumeria and Mesopotamia and China and Egypt and Greece and Rome taught us some things. Maybe the smart people passing down oral tales figured a few things out and warned us in stories about why full lockdown and full license are both not great ideas. Perhaps, maybe, just maybe, there is some wisdom passed down to us through these silly myths and oral stories that came from these toothless flyover illiterate goat herders from ancient times that we sophisticated internet and smart phone users might benefit from if we can take a break from our Netflix and porn.

One of these stories is the play, The Bacchae, by the Greek playwright, Euripides. This tells the story of Pentheus, a man who tries to defeat the god of wine and partying, Dionysus. To make a long play short, Pentheus gets ripped to pieces by the Maenads, the wild women, because he tries to peek and disrupt their annual ritual celebration where they let it all hang loose. The whole point of this play is what I’m talking about in this post.

The Bacchae depicts a struggle to the death between the twin forces of control (restraint) and freedom (release), and permits Dionysus to provide an answer to this question. The god's implicit message is that not only is there space within society for the irrational, but that such a space must be allowed for that society to exist and thrive. By denying or opposing the irrational, as Pentheus did, the person who opposes it, or the society that denies it, will be torn apart. (taken from Sparknotes)

So you see, database design and Greek tragedy can be discussed together.

While this play may seem to go into some strange notions, the point is clear, and the United States congress should have read this play before passing the Prohibition of Alcohol amendment, as that marriage of law and excess order gave birth to a Mount Saint Helens eruption named Al Capone and organized crime.

In more recent history, we were able to observe the lockdowns for Covid where the state put very strict rules on people, but left liquor stores open as “essential” business, which seemed to be the one element of minor rebellion allowed. IN response, people took to drinking during the lockdown as a coping strategy. However, staring into screens and drinking did not help very much, because soon many of the cities in the United States were in flames and rioting went on for month after month. The lockdown led to the upside-down. On the one hand we had complete control, while in other areas there was total lawlessness. And this happened with both the left and the right, so it’s not like just one “side” went crazy in the state of legalism.

The decision to leave liquor stores open is one thing. But then another decision came. Churches were closed, but strip joints were granted the status of being “essential businesses.” This, to me, is the summary statement of the Covid era in America, because it highlighted how upside-down our leadership and culture has become. Or rather, it simply revealed a reality that was already in existence, but just hadn’t been made fully known, at least to me.

The upside-down world had finally shown its true face. Was it God’s will to have liquor stores and strip joints and abortion clinics be open and celebrated while churches were closed? Apparently so. And most likely it was done so that we could observe the madness that ensued and then choose how we want to live our lives. The nation had long held the word God on its lips, but never had it been so clear that it has long been only lip-service.

If there is one common thread in the stories of the Bible, it is that turning away from the living God leads to disorder. No sooner did churches get shuttered in California than massive riots erupted. Correlation is not causation, but what strange luck for the devil for those two things to happen in succession. A moment in 2020 struck me when suddenly I understood why Abraham was called out of Haran. He had to leave the culture behind.

For three months straight, cities across America belched smoke into the sky, night and day. I saw places that I formerly frequented in Portland, Oregon being burned to the ground. Then we saw the capitol building invaded by a hoard. It was difficult not to see the events that played out as Biblical, because the pattern matched eerily well to those old Bronze Age myths from those smelly, backward goat-herders. The dilemma of the ancient people was suddenly shoved near to each of us. The illusion of the nation that we had been living in disappeared. It was like a glossy polish of a tabletop hiding a rotten and termite-eaten wood structure.

Like makeup removed from a hideous face, we saw the what America really had become. The empire was finally, fully unveiled. And as an empire can only come by elevating human desires to be higher than humility before God, like all empires, the pursuit of power and wealth and pleasure and honor eventually drives itself off a cliff. Empire is an attempt at self-salvation. Empire is the direct ambition of pride. But in the end, like a cell that refuses to live and die in its seasons, empire is a massive, unspoken suicide pact made among millions of people. Empire is the story of a cancer cell writ large. In making itself the most important thing, above God, an empire ends up killing the nation. A wise nation has its seasons and abides with fear of God. An empire ignores the seasons and thinks it will never die.

As soon as a nation or a people justifies its decisions by the wrong kind of “freedom,” the unravelling begins. There is “freedom of indifference” and “freedom for excellence.” This is extremely simple and ties into everything else I repeat here. We can choose the fruit on the forbidden tree or we can choose to obey God. That’s the dilemma: which type of freedom do you choose? Choosing the former, the wrong kind of freedom, precedes disorder, chaos, and eventually war, which America is hurtling toward. Order spins into disorder quickly when the wrong definition of “freedom” takes hold of a people.

You can witness this on both sides of American politics. The pendulum swings, but unlike a clock pendulum, it swings with a knife, an axe, slicing into that which occupies the middle. To avoid the knife, sides must be chosen. As the pendulum is lowered, the knife gets closer, and the sides must flee further apart. After all, the one thing we know we want is self-preservation, not death. To avoid being cut down, we huddle on the left or the right to hide. Political parties are modern fig leaves, and as Adam said to God, “I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid,” that is what we are saying when we rush into the mob of our chosen political party. We hid behind the elephant or the donkey, using those affiliations to protect our nakedness, but neither of those will save you or anyone else in the end.

The Greeks had Alexander, Persia had Cyrus, Rome had Caesar, Germany had Hitler: all of these model the same problem that is told about Babylon and Egypt in the Bible. These are the stories of empire and power. We tend to idealize the ancient emperors but see the most recent ones as monstrous. We speak of Caesar with strange admiration and despise Hitler, even though these two were doing the same thing, warring and enslaving and killing people in pursuit of power. Rest assured: the conquerors are all monstrous. These famous names are the “strongmen” of history, but they are all symptoms of an underlying disease. They only come to power because of mass fears among the people, growing out of eras like we have in America today. Hyper-polarization, distrust of authority, scapegoating, economic problems, failed attempts to overthrow the government, lies being spread, pandemics, propaganda, inflation. The canary in the coal mine for nearing the “strongman” phase of a nation is easy to spot: it is the collapse of sexual morality. America has been inching in this direction for sixty years and the snowball is now tumbling downhill.

No sociologist, historian, or political scientist need explain it, as people feel the fragmentation happening today. The lust for national power brought a lust for everything. The desire for money and power created dirty deeds and deals, compromised morality. Secret wars brought affluence, and affluence brings entitlement. The bad example in our national leaders of how power and wealth was gained leads directly to the desires of individuals that need no more justification than “I want it” and “don’t tell me what to do.” Here’s the thing: if the winners cheated to get their spot on the podium, so shall we all. If the winners cheated, so can we. And we see it everywhere. We see it in business: Enron, Wells Fargo, Theranos. We see it in sports: Lance Armstrong and Marion Jones and Barry Bonds. We see it in the wealthy: Epstein, the Panama Papers, Trump, Gates. We see it in the church: McCarrick, the 300 Pennsylvania priests, the Jay Report.

None of the models and heroes follow the rules. So we begin to ask ourselves the fatal question: “Why should I?”

And that is exactly the question that must be resisted. “If they can do it, why can’t I?” That is the temptation in the Garden. That is the voice that you must reject. In the Spiritual Combat, you must distrust that voice, and put all of your confidence into God alone, praying for Jesus to give you strength and direction, and the breath of life, the Holy Spirit, to guide you away from the easier path. Be Abraham, not Lot. Be Peter, not Judas. Aim to be a saint. The bad examples of this world should not open doors for you, but rather represent police-tape of where you do not cross, as the only cross to be concerned with is the one which Jesus will help you bear and carry.

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