How the Bible’s Misreading of Human Brokenness Made Its Worldview Too Conservative

This piece ran on Daily Kos in August, 2025.
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I’ve been reading a brilliant book on the Bible’s first book, Genesis. It is titled The Beginning of Wisdom, and the author is Leon Kass. After teaching a University of Chicago seminar on Genesis for twenty years, Kass was able to build from the stories of Genesis an astoundingly rich web of meanings that capture the biblical worldview.

It is hard to imagine anyone doing a better job of using the deep text of Genesis to illuminate a whole worldview — one that deals with questions of good and Evil, God and human, how human beings deal with each other, and the question of humans’ inherent nature.

One shouldn’t be surprised that this single book of the Bible would provide such abundant material for constructing a worldview: Genesis contains a very big share of the Bible’s most powerful stories:

• The Garden of Eden and its fig leaves.
• The Serpent getting Eve to start humankind on its downhill path.
• Cain murdering his brother, Abel.
• Noah and the Flood sent by God to destroy corrupt civilization.
• The Tower of Babel.

—and that doesn’t even bring us halfway through Genesis.

Out of these stories, our interpreter, Leon Kass, captures much of the worldview at the heart of the Judeo-Christian religions, that have regarded these texts as the Word of God. These penetrating interpretations make clear that — in its understanding of human nature, and of how much the top-down order of hierarchy should govern the human world — that biblical worldview is deeply conservative.

Kass interprets these opening stories of the Bible – which reach a point where humankind has shown itself so corrupt and ugly that God actually repents having made us – as showing humankind to be — without the improvements to be imposed from God — as deeply pervaded by a sinful nature. As the stories unfold, we are shown to be creatures who:

• Disobeyed God about that one tree.
• Are so jealous of our status that we’d murder our brother.
• Create a civilized world so plagued with destructive activities that God wants to drown the whole disgusting affair.

When righteousness enters the story, it is imposed from the top down.

God tells Noah a few moral fundamentals. (“Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”) God insists that the ways of other peoples be shunned. Life is to be lived under the dictates of God-given law. (The Ten Commandments — written by God on tablets of stone — come in the Bible’s next book, and mark perhaps the climactic moment of the Old Testament.)

I found myself chafing with how automatically Kass endorses the Biblical view.

Take as an example the story of Ham, Noah’s son. Noah gets drunk, his nakedness exposed in his tent, and his son Ham happens to see him. Instead of treating the son’s witnessing the father’s indignity as the kind of thing that can happen, as no big deal, the text makes Ham’s failure to preserve the father’s dignity into a cosmic offense. Ham’s lack of concern about covering up the patriarch is presented as a sin of sufficient magnitude to justify the father’s calling down a curse on his son’s whole line of descendants.

Kass swallows this as natural. But what it reveals is a worldview so absolutist in its hierarchy — top-down patriarchy — that a father’s bodily human form must be shielded from sight. The father’s authority seems to require he be seen as other than the human animal he is. (It is like the Wizard of Oz insisting that the little man behind the curtain be ignored.)

Kass didn’t ask: What does it say about a culture if the dignity of the father must be protected even from momentary lapses, the kind to which all human beings are prone? The man who built the ark and saved all life had one inebriated night, and got careless. No big deal — except in a worldview that deifies top-down authority and demands it never be seen faltering, never be brought down to earth.

Top-down authority reaches its absolute apex in the figure of God. Millennia after Genesis was written, the same spirit was still alive in the conservative American Bible Belt, where bumper stickers declared: “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” “That settles it” means there is no point in discussing further — authority itself is final.

This is conservatism in its essence: it sees humankind as too corrupt to be trusted, and so insists on control from above. It imposes order on human life through a top-down hierarchy, in which an unquestionable authority decrees sacred laws. Its demands for orthodoxy – dogma — leaves no room for legitimate challenge.

Such conservatism is both importantly right, and dangerously wrong.

Yes, the conservatives are right: humanity is broken. But they are wrong about why.

The writers of Genesis looked out at the world around them and correctly saw pervasive brokenness. In the ancient civilizations they knew, there was conflict, ambition, greed, and violence enough to make it credible that the Creator would regret creating such a species— to the point of wanting to destroy it all with a catastrophic Flood.

But they made the error — understandable, but costly — of assuming that the ugliness they saw was a faithful mirror of what human beings are by nature: sinful, rebellious creatures, needing powerful and unquestionable authority to keep them in line.

My life’s work reveals an entirely different explanation of that pervasive brokenness. Utilizing an evolutionary perspective on the emergence of civilization that would have been unavailable to the peoples of the ancient civilizations, it shows that such brokenness would inevitably pervade the world of any creature, on any planet, anywhere in the cosmos, whose intelligence enabled it to step onto the path of “civilization” — i.e. to extricate itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically by inventing its own new way of life.

The evolutionary perspective shows that this step out of the naturally evolved order inevitably plunges a civilization-creating species into an anarchic system, where societies are compelled to struggle for survival. It shows why such systemic anarchy would inevitably unleash a force that — regardless of the inherent nature of the creature — would drive that species’ civilization to develop in broken ways.

(Who wouldn’t regret creating a world where the Spirit of the Gangster inevitably would be given a greatly disproportionate role in shaping the civilized world?)

The conservative advocates of the top-down worldview of Genesis correctly saw all that “sin.” But, not seeing the forces that inevitably warped the way civilization would develop, they proceeded to make the understandable mistake of blaming the victim.

Since we civilized humans are indeed broken, as the conservatives say, they are also right that – given our condition – we do indeed need a good deal of top-down order to keep broken people from inflicting their brokenness on the world.

But consider the costs in terms of an unbalanced — excessively top-down — view of how human “Evil” is to be understood, and how the Good is to be achieved, if the truth about the human story is this: The ugliness we see in human history is not human nature writ large. 

If our brokenness were, as Kass and the writers of Genesis assume, inborn, we would conclude that there’s no way to a better human world than to erect the best possible authoritarian structures to keep us inherently flawed creatures in line.

But if, as the evolutionary perspective reveals, it was not our nature, but the inevitable systemic dynamics resulting from a creature taking an unprecedented step out of the natural order — into the disorder of Anarchy — that led to our brokenness, then humankind could be capable of participating in a world not only better-ordered but also more humane. More humane than excessive conservativism allows people to envision.

It’s not surprising that the Flood didn’t solve the problem of “Evil.” Nor even did the covenant between God and the people He chose to follow His Law. Nor the writing of Commandments on tablets of stone.

The emergence of civilization has required another kind of top-down ordering that must be achieved for the Human Story to turn the corner.

Once we recognize the true source of so much of the brokenness that would inevitably beset the Human Story — the inevitable disorder in the interactive system of civilized societies —  we will understand the need to create an encompassing global order that brings the Force of Brokenness under control.

(If Europe is now again a war zone, it is not because the Europeans in some general way were morally deficient. It is because humankind does not yet have a global order that can prevent a single sociopathic Gangster from seizing control of a great power, and single-handedly make the decision to invade his neighbor.

(No Flood, no set of commandments, will solve that problem.)