About 5,000 years ago, somewhere in the middle of the desert in the land of Shinar (south of what is now Baghdad, Iraq), a group of migrants decided to stop and build a city. One among them, quite possibly Nimrod, suggested that they build a tower so tall it will “reach to the heavens.”
But the Lord came down and, so displeased with what they were up to, confused their language and scattered them over the face of the earth.
The (Great) Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1563
In 2020, our modern civilization experienced a similar system failure on a global scale. We were building something.
Or so it seemed.
And then it all went terribly wrong.
Now, bodies are invaded by the state, children are killing themselves, and the world is burning. We are more disconnected than ever before and we have lost our ability to communicate with each other. And yet our destruction is well masked in the pretence of progress and unity.
We seem to be having another “Babel Moment,” a punctuated moment in history when excessive pride in our own abilities leads to our destruction.
Like other similar moments in history — the fall in Eden, the Late Bronze Age collapse, the Destruction of the Roman Empire — it’s a story of the natural consequences of human ingenuity running ahead of wisdom. It’s a story about misguided unification projects. It’s a story echoed in so many of the fractures we see today: between the left and right, liberals and conservatives, Israelis and Palestinians, truth and lies. It’s a story about what’s breaking between us and within each of us.
I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say that we are reeling.
Like different tribes who inhabit the same country and are subject to the same laws, we have wildly different views about what it is to be good, whether we are citizens or subjects, whether history can teach us anything, and whether human life, in all its forms and at all of its stages, is sacred.
We look at our neighbour and are disoriented, unable to understand the person staring back at us. We are a people adrift in a historical no-man’s place, “unmoored” as Brett Weinstein poetically but hauntingly said. We are orphans of history, of liberty, and even of our own sense of conscience.
…
If we take a bird’s eye view of human history, we can see a series of cycles between accelerations in reason and technology, and then decelerations and eventual decline. We innovate, we progress, and then we stagnate, and sometimes regress or even collapse. We developed tools, perfected metalworking, invented the printing press, and then the internet.
Never has our world felt so large, yet also so interconnected and unified in language, lifestyle, and thought. In many ways, we are closer than ever to being “one people.”
But never, in my lifetime anyway, have things felt so precarious, and so aimless and futile. As Canadian songwriter Matthew Barber wrote recently: “Oh we may have sharper tools, But we don't always know how to use them, After all we're only human…”
This is an exerpt from the chapter “Babel Moments” from my book Our Last Innocent Moment (Brownstone, Institute 2024).
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