The Drunkenness of Noah
Michelangelo
Sistine Chapel Ceiling
Recently, NPR advertised a new Ken Burns' documentary with the tag line: "Prohibition: The Law that Made America Illegal."
Not only did Prohibition criminalize an irrepressible human behavior (of all peoples, only the Inuit did not concoct alcoholic beverages), prohibition made America a comprehensively criminal place with vertical integration of nefariousness from street thugs to federal judges.
The presumed desirability of "Impossibly Pure Principles" - whenever propelled by puritanical political passion - leads to wrack and ruin.
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.” Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 1968 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton
"The profoundest truths are paradoxical." Lao Tze (Laozi)
The Prohibition: The Law that Made America Illegal - http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/
Prohibition and The Volstead Act: A Study in Unexpected Consequences. See the section entitled “Enforcement and Impact” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volstead_Act
Purists Gone Wild, by Timothy Egan - http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/purists-gone-wild/#more-103753
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Noah and Ham: A Cautionary Tale
It is unclear what abominable act Ham performed on his naked, drunken father, Noah - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_(son_of_Noah)
The Talmud suggests that Ham sodomized Noah.
Whatever occurred between father and son, it was of such magnitude that it evoked The Curse of Canaan.
In recent times, "some scholars have suggested that Ham may have had intercourse with his father's wife.[20] (Frederick W. Bassett, "Noah's nakedness and the curse of Canaan : a case of incest?" VT 21 [1971] p 232-237. John S. Bergsma and Scott Hahn, "Noah's nakedness and the curse on Canaan (Genesis 9:20-27)," JBL 124 [2005] p 25-40.)
Although the story of "Noah's Ark and The Flood" is commonly interpreted as a moral tale to spotlight The Restoration of Righteousness to a Fallen World, subsequent events play out so that Noah becomes a drunken vintner while his son Ham degenerates to vility more horrifying than the abominations presumably purged by The Flood.
The moral of Noah's story "should" be: "No enduring Good can be achieved by violent purification."
Even when God Himself imposes violence, such destructive Puritanism - to quote Merton - "becomes evil."
"Liberty is bound up with imperfection, and... limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary."
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