A few weeks ago my cousin William pointed me to the following video clip of Glenn Beck interviewing Rabbi Daniel Lapin. The analogy he makes immediately struck me as an important one, but there is one key point where I think the participants are mistaken.
The Rabi points out that in the Bible story of the Tower of Babel, the builders of the tower specifically use bricks instead of stones. He then argues that this building material represents something significant. Here is a quote from a apologetic website making a similar point:
Bricks have four characteristics. First, they are unnatural and artificial. You won’t find a brick occurring in nature. Second, they are identical and uniform. It’s not easy to distinguish one brick from another. Third, they are functionally undifferentiated and interchangeable. A brick can serve equally well anywhere in a wall. Fourth, they are all but worthless. So what if you lose a brick. There are hundreds more just like it.
Recently I have been thinking a lot about the limits of rationality, and so the analogy really struck home. When we are thinking rationally, we have to use bricks. Our rational mind can only hold abstract, artificial concepts, but by stacking these concepts on top of each other we can create towers of reasoning.
I am a deeply rational person, so I am a “brick-layer” by nature. For example, when I am writing computer code I have to create these really simple, abstract and straightforward statements and then stack hundreds and thousands of them together to create something meaningful. So I do think that the Tower of Babel is a good analogy for science, technology, rational thinking, etc.
And of course, here was God’s reaction to people trying to build the Tower:
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…So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
So basically, God seems to feel threatened by the advance of technology and scatters the people and confuses them. How do I feel about this? As I have written previously, I am pretty convinced that some of the biggest mistakes of humanity are the result of Babel-like rationality. This is true in my own personal life, and in the history of humanity. For example, see here, and here, and here.
But despite these mistakes, and despite God’s attempts to keep us grounded, people keep building. And this building isn’t always a bad thing. Sure, we create significant risks when we build so high that we can no longer support ourselves with deep knowledge, and when we build institutions that treat people as interchangeable parts.
One of the biggest casualties I see in modern secular society is that the complex social relationships that make us feel grounded are deconstructed and replaced with poor substitutes. Now our relationships tend to be simplistic and shallow. For example, consider these 5 major areas of life: family, work, church, neighborhood, and child rearing. Other than my wife Mercedes and my daughter Alberta, there is very little overlap in my life between the people I interact with in these circles. Maybe I am an outlier, but I don’t think my situation is that uncommon.
I tend to believe this deconstruction of relationships presents some pretty significant psychological risks. And, going back to that Glenn Beck interview I started with, I actually do think that outsourcing power to ever more distant government organizations tends to further the process.
For those of you (probably the majority) who didn’t actually watch the clip, it ends up comparing the EU to the Tower of Babel. The comparison is bolstered by juxtaposing the following images:
Anyway, the interview ends up feeling a bit conspiratorial. But I think its a valid point that there is a substitution effect between power held (and services provided) at the local level (and by local, I mean people we actually know) and power transferred to more universal institutions.
As I discussed in my post about The Rule of the Clan, it was ultimately the emergence of strong central governments (and, I think, universal religious ideologies) that led to the breakdown of clan power.
However, I would like to point out one place where Glenn Beck and Mark Weiner (author of the Rule of the Clan) would disagree. Namely, Beck seems to think that government is a threat to individual liberty, while Weiner argues that government is the source of individual liberty.
Specifically, Weiner argues that in the absence of the giant brick edifice of nations and super-nations, power doesn’t devolve to individuals. Rather, it falls to clan, which even more effective at oppression than governments.
Individualism, according to this view, is actually a basic tenet of progressive brick-laying. It is individuals that can be passed from corporation to global corporation as undifferentiated, interchangeable parts. The irregular shape of stones, on the other hand, mainly is due to our complex relationships with other people. In other words, traditional “stones” (i.e., the fundamental unit of society) are not individuals at all, but tribes.
As a side effect of government providing great and necessary things like the rule of law, it is no longer necessary for people to rely on their clans for justice (or pretty much anything else). In breaking the Tower of Babel, God preserved the rule of the clan for a few thousand more years. but governments have finally broken the stones, and each of us (with our individualistic morality) are the bricks that remain.
