Back to Babel
The author and journalist Douglas Murray has said that the historians of future generations will look back on our time as the ‘post-Holocaust era.’ In this uneasy reckoning with the wreckage of the 20th century, all agree that the mistakes of the past should not be repeated, but no one is sure how to avoid them.
The work of Hannah Arendt, who ranks among the leading lights of modern political philosophy, offers some clues. Instead of laying the blame squarely at the feet of political and economic forces, her analysis of the rise of Nazism and Communism is deeply mythological. It mirrors the first account of man’s perennial attempt to reach beyond the bounds of a limited human nature: The Tower of Babel.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt writes that, “the more highly developed a civilization, the more accomplished the world it has produced, the more at home men feel within the human artifice, the more they will resent everything they have not produced, everything that is merely and mysteriously given them.” She places the drive to establish total control over society in the emotional heart of a corruptible human nature. So do the authors of the Old Testament.
The Babel story is as concise as it gets. In the eleventh chapter of the book of Genesis, the people of Shinar speak a common tongue. Emboldened by their unity, they say:
“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.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
This story should not be taken as a simple political allegory for the erection of a totalitarian state. Not even the archetypal tyranny, Egypt, extended total control over its Hebrew slaves, who were able to maintain their monotheism in a pagan land. The heaven that the Tower of Babel was meant to reach is not a political state, but a state of being. It is a place that human language cannot penetrate.
The Biblical identification of language with power runs through many Old Testament stories. When Adam is made steward of Eden, he walks through the Garden naming all of God’s creatures. The implication is that naming is a part of the creative process, since it is God’s speech that forms the heavens and the earth in Genesis 1. Language is also, tellingly, partly responsible for the Fall, as deceptive words lead Adam and Eve to reach for the apple of knowledge.
When the Hebrews learn God’s name, they treat it with such high regard that it is only spoken once a year by the high priest in the Temple’s holy of holies. This reverence is a perfectly rational way to treat all that is merely and mysteriously given them. After all, the name of God is part of the language that created existence itself.
This is why language is a core element of the Babel story. It’s not just that having a common tongue eases communication – it’s that the impulse to name is intertwined with the impulse to create, and to control.
The neuropsychologist Iain McGilchrist notes that there is a strange connection between language and manipulation. In The Master and His Emissary, he observes that, “when we have acquired something mental, we say that we have grasped it,” suggesting that language, “is a means of manipulating the world.” He argues that our ability to speak may share a neurological origin with our motor skills, which control the grasping right hand. If true, this would provide an interesting confirmation of the insights of mythology.
Whatever the neuroscientific case may be, the Tower of Babel is a powerful symbol of man’s resentment of the limits of nature. To climb the Tower is to step outside of space and time, into the presence of the Word. From this vantage point, all is revealed, and Arendt’s realm of the ‘merely and mysteriously given’ is no more.
It is precisely this striving after totality that links the mythological people of Shinar with the real world. In the 21st century, the human artifice is all-encompassing. As archeologists proclaim that we live in the Anthropocene, social critics tell us that gender has nothing to do with sex. The last vestiges of nature have been claimed by the human will.
Once the natural world has been conquered, society is next in line. Lenin, the first successful totalitarian, wrote that,
"[We must] bring statistics to the masses, make it popular, so that the active population will gradually learn by themselves to understand and realise how much and what kind of work must be done, how much and what kind of recreation should be taken, so that the comparison of the economy's industrial results in the case of individual communes becomes the object of general interest and education."
The implication is clear: the new language of statistics will enable the rational control of social affairs. This sounds like a radically modern idea, but it is profoundly mythological: Lenin thought that if economic activity could be translated into the common tongue of mathematics, all the complexities of social coordination would lie at the feet of human desire. No more would impersonal market forces have free reign to shape civilization.
The USSR fell just like the Tower of Babel, but the attempt to climb up to a God’s-eye view of the market lives on, underlying the impulse to name things once thought to be a matter of fate. So it is that ‘GDP,’ whatever that means, is tied to ‘the interest rate,’ which is measured to a hundredth of one percent. No amount of precision can mask the fact that economists are uttering incantations in the dark.
But perhaps this is beside the point. If there is any truth to the Babel story, man’s quest to extend his dominion over the cycles of nature and the forces of trade has nothing to do with genuine science. State socialism is as old as Egypt, where pharaohs embarked on massive infrastructure projects as their society stagnated. The fact that contemporary governments follow archaic economic policies is no evidence of progress. To the contrary, it shows how little separates us from the people of Babylon.
Perhaps the next crash will change things, but that is far from likely. The urge to bring all of life under rational control has been with us since the dawn of civilization. In the 5,000 years since the men of Shinar tried to reach heaven, the human artifice has only grown more familiar. It won’t be abandoned that easily.