Alas, Alas Babylon!

One thing that can be said of the Bible is that it has provided titles to authors of books, particularly (and appropriately?) books of fiction.  The Bible is known to most of the West fairly well, as it was hammered into us by various and sundry adults we were exposed to as children.  It was the source of titles for William Faulkner,  John Steinbeck and Earnest Hemingway, and for Pat Frank who wrote a book entitled Alas, Babylon, which I read with considerable interest as a teenager.  I remember it fairly well, which is more than can be said of other books I read, whether under the compulsion of a teacher or freely.

The title of that book, and of this post, is taken from the cheery Book of Revelation, the favorite of so many of us Americans, who tend to associate Babylon, the great whore, with New York or perhaps Hollywood.  It seems likely the actual author (or authors) of the Book meant to refer to Rome, but Americans and others like to associate America or parts of it to ancient Rome or the Roman Empire, so maybe it makes no difference.

The book of Frank Pat or the Book of Revelation comes to mind as I observe the antics of our self-described stable genius and inadvertently amusing president and the ruler of North Korea as they revile one another, as Frank's novel was devoted to the describing of the results of a nuclear war on survivors in Florida.  They themselves bring to mind, to my mind at least, the Elvis Costello song Two Little Hitlers.  But comparing the president with Hitler, even to a little Hitler, is as tiresome as the president himself.

Sin and punishment of and for sin are of course the essence of the Book of Revelation and of the Bible itself.  They're also essential to any religion, and I think ethics, founded on the belief that right and wrong are determined by following or failing to follow divine commands.  Follow those commands and one acts rightly; fail to follow those commands and one acts wrongly.  As the commands are those of God, the failure to follow them must result in punishment of a particularly vicious  kind, and as what happens to wrongdoers in life is often thought to be insufficiently vicious, that punishment must come in the afterlife.  Naturally, if God decides to intervene in life, the punishment will be adequate, and in order to be adequate that punishment must be as mighty as possible, and nuclear punishment is as mighty as we can conceive at this point in our sad development.

An ethics or religion based on divine command strikes me as unsatisfactory, but I can understand the impulse to believe that our conduct presages some kind of disaster if it does not merit some kind of devastating punishment.  It's difficult not to think that bad things are bound to happen, and soon.  "Dangerous creeps are everywhere" as Warren Zevon and Hunter Thompson wrote.  We have cause to be afraid.

So it seems, in any case.  I take some comfort in the fact that it's possible we perceive ourselves to be in greater peril than in the past simply by virtue of the fact that information, good or bad, true or false, is so much more available to us than in the past, and instantaneously.  Perhaps we've always been this way and our nation and society has always been in this condition, but we were better able to cope with it, or at least ignore it, in the past merely because it wasn't there before us at all times, as it is now.

But an aspiring Stoic should be undisturbed by all of this, as it is beyond the power of our will.  Our business is to govern ourselves to do what is right, and treat what we cannot govern as indifferent.  A Stoic, and even an aspiring one, should be able to survive even our time without being disturbed.