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The biblical story of Babel, where a group of migrants attempted to build a tower to reach the heavens, serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of human pride and the consequences of excessive pride in human abilities.
“With all its skill and prowess to move us forward, the human intellect has one great flaw – it tends to worship what it produces, relying on its products to make us perfect, complete and wholly self-sufficient,” Julie Ponesse writes.
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Babel Moments
By Julie Ponesse, as published by Brownstone Institute
The following is an excerpt from Julie Ponesse’s book ‘Our Last Innocent Moment’.
“Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”—Genesis 11:4
“Oh we may have sharper tools. But we don’t always know how to use them. After all we’re only human.”—Matthew Barber, ‘Viral’
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 would 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.
In 2020, our modern civilisation 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 own 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 Bret Weinstein poetically but hauntingly said. We are orphans of history, of liberty and even of our own sense of conscience.
“… piling mountains up to the distant stars”
The story of Babel, like so many in the Bible, is frustratingly brief, offering only a few lines and few specific clues about what the tower looked like, whether the Babylonians thought they succeeded or failed, and why their punishment was to be radically dispersed. Artists’ renderings of the tower mimic the sort of prestige architecture that was common in the ancient world, possibly modelled on Etemenanki, a stone ziggurat the height of New York’s Flatiron building dedicated to the Mesopotamian god Marduk. What we do know is how the story ended: God was so displeased that he confused their language and spread them as far apart from one another as they could be.
Cautionary tales about the costs of human pride running amok are not unique to the Christian tradition. There is the love origins story from Plato’s ‘Symposium’ that I mentioned earlier, in which humans became “so lofty in their notions” that Zeus cut them in two, leaving each one cursed to roam the earth searching for their other half.
In Greek mythology, the “Gigantomachy” myth describes the desperate struggle between the Gigantes (giants) and the Olympian gods to rule over the universe. In Ovid’s telling of the story, the twin giants Ephialtes and Otis attempt to reach the heavens by stacking the Ossa, Pelion and Thessaly mountain ranges on top of one another. Ovid writes, “Rendering the heights of heaven no safer than the earth, they say the giants attempted to take the Celestial kingdom, piling mountains up to the distant stars.” But, clearly outmatching them, Jupiter shot his lightning bolts at them, hurling the mountains back to earth and drenching it with “streams of blood.”
It isn’t surprising that we keep telling and retelling the Babel story. It’s a perennial human story, a cautionary tale of what happens when we get intellectually “too big for our britches.” With all its skill and prowess to move us forward, the human intellect has one great flaw – it tends to worship what it produces, relying on its products to make us perfect, complete and wholly self-sufficient. Why do so many biblical stories repeatedly warn against the practice of idolatry and, more importantly, why do we continue to make the same errors?
Today, the quantum leaps in technology on almost every front are dizzying. It seems that we are always taking the Babel steps “two at a time.” In 1903, Orville Wright made a 12-second flight 20 feet above a wind-swept beach in North Carolina. A mere 96 years later, the Space Shuttle Discovery took a 3.2-million-mile voyage 340 miles above the Earth. In the last century, advances in medicine and agriculture increased life expectancy in the US by approximately 30 years, and more than doubled it in some jurisdictions. Technological wonders exploded everywhere.
And so did the horrors. In 1900, long-range artillery could fairly accurately hit targets only a few miles away. By the end of the century, we could launch long-range precision strikes with nuclear-capable missiles. And then, of course, drones allowed us to do this from an easy chair on the other side of the world. Aptly called the “Beastly Century,” never in history were so many killed in such a short period of time.
Now, these technologies have taken exponential leaps.
Then there is the exponential growth of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”). When I last taught at university, using AI to write essays wasn’t yet a reality. I can’t imagine what it would be like now, trying to tease out a student’s own work from AI-generated material. But consider where we could be in a few short decades. Most of the AI we use now is “weak AI,” AI that can outperform human behaviour but only within a limited set of parameters and constraints (e.g. iPhone’s Siri or Google’s RankBrain). But some experts are euphorically predicting that, within our lifetime, Artificial Superintelligence, AI that can perform anytask better than a human, will become the norm and could be used to eradicate disease and food shortages, colonise other planets, and make us bionic … and perhaps even immortal.
But that’s a topic for another discussion. What I’m interested in here is how our near myopic focus on technology is connected to what happened on the plains of Shinar 5,000 years ago.
You can read more excerpts from Julie Ponesse’s book ‘Our Last Innocent Moment’ HERE.
About the Author
Dr. Julie Ponesse, a 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is a professor of ethics who has taught at Ontario’s Huron University College for 20 years. She was placed on leave and banned from accessing the campus due to the vaccine mandate. She presented at ‘The Faith and Democracy Series’ in 2021 and 2022. Dr. Ponesse has now taken on a new role with The Democracy Fund, a registered Canadian charity aimed at advancing civil liberties, where she serves as the pandemic ethics scholar.
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