Babel Online By Frank Bond

You must admit we live in interesting times. The human race is metamorphosing into something other than the sum of its individual parts. Whether you see this as an advancement toward omnipotence or a regression to flock mentality depends, I suppose, upon which side of the staff you view it.

Who I am, or at least who you think I am (race, gender, physical and spiritual attributes) depends upon how I present myself textually. Is digital communication radically altering the notion of identity or just accelerating a process that has been going on since the dawn of civilization?

There are parallels between the aspirations of our age and the Legend of Babel. We dream of a great leap forward by networking humanity into a global brain; the descendants of Noah tried to reach heaven by building a tower.

The connecting link is language. A common language allowed the Babylonian brick masons to confer with the project managers who consulted with the architects, etc. Building the Internet is nothing short of reconstructing a common language, not the hoped-for Esperanto, but digitalized Roman Text, mostly English (notwithstanding the French holdouts).

Reexamining the ancient myths I was weaned on, I alternate between a healthy scepticism and the eerie feeling that they may be true. Such is the mystery and paradox of the Bible: to be understood (or misunderstood) on several different levels at once.

In the story of Babel, the element of language has always stuck in my craw. I can understand why The Lord (The Almighty, The Law of Nature, whatever) was irritated by man (I mean humans...let's say hupeople) vainly attempting to storm heaven with bricks and mortar instead of refining some of their coarser elements into spirit. If I were Him (Her?), I would be pissed off too and boot the tower into rubble.

But why did the author of Genesis complicate an otherwise understandable moral fable with the ingredient of language?

If I were God, being a liberal, humanist (huwomanist?) type, I would have blessed my people's common language. After I scattered them to prevent any further mega-projects without permits or environment impact studies, I would not have done as my predecessor, Jehovah (Allah? Yahweh?), seems to have done almost as an afterthought (or with the calculation of a despotic bully?). I would not have confounded their speech.

Or would I?

Now that I think about it, what use would they have of a common tongue tucked away in their provincial hamlets? In fact, confounding their speech may be the only way to prevent them from attempting such a stupid stunt again. Surprisingly, I find myself using the irrational, either/or mentality of a military conqueror (or an Old Testament God?). A habit perhaps He/She/It inherited from the huits? "If you don't comply with my edicts, I will destroy you. Why? BECAUSE I AM GOD."

Perhaps God (Goddess?) was scripted by His (Her? Its?) humanoid biographers to behave exactly as they would have, out of paranoid, jealous cowardice. After all, if I were God (and here I'm going to use the masculine because I'm tired of emasculating myself in the cause of political correctness), and if I could do anything I wanted without fear of public scorn, police investigation or the damnation of some patriarchal/matriarchal overlord/overlordess, then what I would do, being God (and also human), is to break up the party.

I never did like crowds.

Mobs are loud and brutish and do very inhumane things like razing public buildings, executing authority figures, and generally lording it over individuals. Now it appears that confounding the Babylonian's speech was a very human reaction. The only confusion is in the translation--the artificial gap that TV evangelists and other assorted Bible thumpers have created between Him/Her/It/Them and us. That and the narrow-minded notion that the universe is a fixed entity and no change is possible in heaven or on earth. In fact, things are evolving all the time, not just the notion of god but, perhaps even more importantly, the notion of man/woman/itself.

Although the advancement of society seems (to pessimists such as myself) painfully slow, lagging several millennia behind social and religious theory, it also seems possible (to optimists such as also myself) to make a quantum leap forward.

Now if all those dispersed peoples from the wreckage at Babel could go back to the serenity of their hovels, boot up their computers and connect online...

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