The Serpent of Caesar

Posted: November 7, 2025 | Author: David | Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness, What is an Art Farm | Tags: George Fox, Leviathan |1 Comment

I am the “Serpent of Caesar” acting for and on behalf of the Religious Society of Friends local school.  I chose this role willingly, in my position as the Facility Director of the physical plant and property.  The roof leaks.  Even after its repair.  And so I lead the Quakers into battle.  

Prior to January the terms “construction litigation” and “Forensic Engineer” were not in my vocabulary but now they dominate my thought and action.  Some hoped to approach this problem amicably, asking for the help of the Architect and Builders.  I turned to the Agreements signed in 2014 when the School’s building project began.  Contracts are, by their nature, adversarial; they define the course to cure problems when things go wrong.  And a repeatedly leaking roof, clearly, is something gone wrong.  

Only an Expert can opine in construction litigation; it takes one licensed Architect to argue against another licensed Architect.  As a mere carpenter my opinion is moot.  Within the trades, the Plumbers and Electricians are “Masters,” because they are licensed and trained to have and to hold special knowledge.  Carpenters, at best, become Journeymen, but none of us dare come to a job site claiming the mantle of “Expert.”  

The first Expert retained was indeed a licensed Architect, who showed up on the job site wearing the wrong shoes.  He was a cowboy, “all hat, no cattle” and “all sizzle, no steak.”  He gladly criticized another Architect’s work, but when asked to design the solution he deferred, saying, “I will have to think about that.  My liability insurance might not cover that.”  Off into the sunset he rode.  I did not look back.  

The second Expert retained was a licensed Architect and member of an engineering firm founded by three MIT professors.  He, and they, are the Brahmins of Boston.  Meticulous and thorough, at an exorbitantly high cost, on one hot day in July they opened up the roof and did find 80% moisture content, 3” down into the insulation.  By the nature of the design, to replace any of the insulation you must remove all of the roof.  

And so knives were sharpened, a lawsuit was filed.  When the investigations were ended, I wrote the Demand Packet to establish the damages sought.  The opposing counsel’s counter arguments were brutal, a challenge not to take personally the barbs thrown my way.  But they are only doing their job.  This fight is about money, and they are its sentries.  

The pace of a lawsuit, and its forensic investigation, is slow and ponderous, and this week all of the parties finally gathered in mediation.  Dressed in business casual, all parties came bearing sword, saber or pocket stiletto.  The opposing counsel – all men – were abrasive in their prevarications and circular reasoning, doing everything possible to point the other way, to avoid the central fact that the roof has failed.  It was trench warfare, fought to a draw in the opening round of the long battle ahead.  

The origin of our story lies centuries ago in England during the Civil War, also known as “The Great Rebellion.”  The Royalists fought the Parliamentarians in a winner take all battle.  Life for the Nobles was grand and sumptuous while the tenant farmers struggled, long before electricity or indoor plumbing, working from 6am until 6pm, children beginning to work as young as age 7.  

In 1651 “Leviathan” was published with the infamous sentence that “Life is nasty, brutish and short.”  This work is foundational for political realism, defining the authority of the State over the individual to avoid the “war of all against all” that results from the pursuit of rational self-interest amidst the absurdity of death.

Also in 1651, a Dissenting Preacher was imprisoned for challenging the orthodoxy of the King’s Church, and his sentence then doubled for refusing to take up arms in Cromwell’s army fighting against the Royalists.  That preacher’s core tenet was that the “inward Light” belongs to every man, woman and child; no intermediary is needed to receive divine guidance because the sovereign is not the King but God, itself.  And so George Fox formed the Religious Society of Friends.

In 1681 William Penn, one of Fox’s adherents, was granted by King Charles II 45,000 square miles along the North Atlantic Coast of North America.  Such then did the Quakers settle on virgin soil, acreage which today constitutes Pennsylvania and Delaware, and a different form of political realism was practiced, which became foundational to the American experience.  Colin Woodard, a local historian and author who lives in Freeport, Maine, described Penn’s social experiment:

“Penn envisioned a country where people of different creeds and ethnic backgrounds could live together in harmony.  Since his faith led him to believe in inherent goodness of humans, his colony would have no armed forces and would exist in peace with local Indians, paying them for their land and respecting their interests.  While all the other American colonies severely restricted the political power of ordinary people, Pennsylvania would extend the vote to almost everyone.  The Quaker religion would have no special status within the colony’s government, the Friends wishing to inspire by example, not by coercion.”

Penn’s “Holy Experiment” became the sine qua non as Philadelphia emerged as the largest and most influential city in the Thirteen Colonies.  Thomas Jefferson wrote there, in a rented home at 700 Market Street, the most radical progressive sentence in the history of politics: “We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Friends Schools have been central to this “social contract” and “holy experiment,” in the belief that spiritual, social, and intellectual growth are intertwined.  Since 1656, when Quakers first arrived in Maryland, the schools have always taught both boys and girls.  

And so 368 years later I arrived at the Quaker school bearing a Transcendentalist message from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Your goodness must have an edge, else it is none.”  Kindness alone is not enough.  

Circa 30 AD the street preacher taught in Aramaic: “ܗܐ ܐܢܐ ܡܫܕܪ ܐܢܐ ܠܟܘܢ ܐܝܟ ܐܡܪ̈ܐ ܒܝܬ ܕܐܒܐ؛ ܗܘܘ ܗܟܝ” which circa 120 AD was translated into the Koine Greek – the lingua franca – as “…γίνεσθε οὖν φρόνιμοι ὡς οἱ ὄφεις καὶ ἀκέραιοι ὡς αἱ περιστεραί,” but when the Italians settled the Holy See where Nero’s Circus had been, circa 382 AD, the Latin Vulgate was translated, “Estote ergo prudentes sicut serpentes, et simplices sicut columbae” until 1611 when all the King’s scholars and all the King’s scribes wrote the masterpiece which is the King James Bible: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”

For two millennia this wisdom’s fulcrum, its hinge, is the humble conjunction and:  “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”  Life’s complexity does not reduce to either/or but more often is both/and, which is especially challenging when waging war over a leaking roof.  

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