What does it mean to live in a Babel?

MONDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2023

Here's where the story starts: What does it mean to live in a "Babel?" According to the leading authority on the topic, here's where the well-known locution got its start:

Tower of Babel 

The Tower of Babel narrative in Genesis 11:1–9 is an origin myth and parable meant to explain why the world's peoples speak different languages.

According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language and migrating eastward, comes to the land of Shinar. There they agree to build a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Yahweh, observing their city and tower, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world.

[...]

The story's theme of competition between God and humans appears elsewhere in Genesis, in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

The story of Babel dates back to Genesis. According to that same leading authority, quite a few other cultures feature "comparable [origin] myths."

The story of Babel is an attempt to explain the existence of the world's many human languages. According to the Genesis text, the creation of this state of affairs was, in effect, a type of punishment, or perhaps a type of restraint, visited upon us grasping humans:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the LORD said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech." So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused (balal) the language of all the earth, and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

According to that passage from Genesis, the deity decided to "confuse [human] language," apparently as a way to make it harder for us humans to work together and thereby get out of line.

At any rate, that's where the specific locution starts. Today, we Americans are living in an obvious type of Babel.

Red tribe members are told about certain events. Blue tribe members hear about other, different events.

Meanwhile, to the extent that red and blue tribes do hear about the same events, they hear vastly different accounts of those events.

It's very, very, very hard for a large modern nation to function this way. In our highly diverse modern nation, the presence of a wide array of identity groups makes it that much harder for us the people to achieve a common understanding of basic facts and events.

All the way back in 2006, Babel was the name of an Oscar-nominated motion picture. The moving finger writes upon the wall:

Babel (film) 

Babel is a 2006 psychological drama film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and written by Guillermo Arriaga. The multi-narrative drama features an ensemble cast and portrays interwoven stories taking place in Morocco, Japan, Mexico, and the United States. An international co-production among companies based in the United States, Mexico and France, the film completes Arriaga and Iñárritu's Death Trilogy, following Amores perros (2000) and 21 Grams (2003).

Babel was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where González Iñárritu won the Best Director Award. The film was later screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.... Babel received positive reviews and was a financial success, grossing $135 million worldwide. It won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture–Drama, and received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and two nominations for Best Supporting Actress... 

The film of that name explored the difficulties involved in attempts to communicate across the cultural lines of a rapidly shrinking global village. The Babel in which we Americans now live is just one part of that larger design.

The so-called "democratization of media" has hardened the lines which define the Babel in which our nation now lives. Given the rise of talk radio, cable news, the internet and social media, each person is now able to hear only the conceptual language he or she is predisposed to hear.

Seldom is heard a discouraging word as we ingest our tribe's preferred factual claims, stories and myths. Can a large modern nation hope to function this way? It seems to us that the answer is no.

We'll continue to explore this rather obvious sociological / cultural problem in the weeks ahead. As far as we know, the deity didn't send us this scourge. In large part, the problems of this American Babel stem from the behavior of many self-interested parties within our nation itself.

(Some of those parties are well-intentioned. Some of those parties are not.)

It's hard to succeed as a very large modern-day Babel. Blue tribe members speak one language, red tribe members another.

Under current arrangements, very seldom is the twain required to meet. It's quite hard for a nation to function this way. 

In our view, this is an existential problem. It should be discussed as same.