Babel as Gift

- 2 minutes read - 275 words

Obligatory picture of Breugel’s “The Great Tower of Babel” c. 1563

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

Genesis 11:7, KJV

I’ve started to wonder lately, what if the lesson of Babel was this:

  1. At scale, humans are foolish with an inability to calculate the n-th order side effects “from [the] nothing [that] will be restrained from them…” Despite your ignorance, we will endeavor mightily
  2. Group identity makes you easily coerced and cajoled (nationalism, patriotism, sports fans, [skubism])
  3. Frictionless communication makes coercion and cajoling extremely fast

The dream of Babel, then:

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech… and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

Genesis 11:1-4, KJV

would pretty much be the worst-possible outcome.

Yuval Noah Harari notes in Nexus (2024) that the top-selling book of the printing press era was a piece of disinformation called Malleus Malificarum: The Hammer of Witches a guide to witch-hunting (otherwise said, “murder”) built on appeals to in-group (2, above), ignorance (1, above), and contagion (3, above).

Update (2024-12-04)

I realize it might be the case that I read the following wonderful article by the talented Jonathan Haidt and it influenced my thinking: “WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID.”

Regardless, Haidt reflects the conventional narrative of “Babel was a punishment, a negative that we have to recover from.” I maintain that the Biblical fracturing of the one people into microcommunities without an over-arching or consensus-inflicting communications mechanism was a gift that supported survivability.