When words get in your way

The Tower of Babel, the paradox of language, and the beginning of wisdom

The Tower of Babel (c. 1563) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

My friend “Lauren” grew up in the church, but became disillusioned by what many religions have in ample supply: fairy tales and fantasies, irrationality and hypocrisy, childish dreams and an aversion to adult responsibilities. As a result, Lauren long ago walked away from Christianity and anything you might call Biblical.

I can’t say I blame her. I first heard the story of the Tower of Babel in Sunday school, when I was nine years old. Babel, my teachers told me, explained why the world is a constellation of different nations and languages: Yahweh — aka The Mighty Sky God — didn’t want a single people who spoke a single language to work together to build such a mighty ziggurat because Yahweh’s sovereignty would be… umm.. because the Lord didn’t want… uhhh… well, I didn’t understand Yahweh’s problem with Babel. He did plenty of things that seemed arbitrary and unfair to nine-year-old me, so when He broke up the Babel project by confounding humanity’s language and dispersing us to the four corners of the earth, I thought: Yup, that’s totally on-brand for moody and impulsive ol’ Yahweh.

By the time I was a teenager, the Bible specifically, and religion more generally, seemed superstitious, incoherent, divisive, painfully absurd, and not worth my time. Why, I wondered, does anyone believe this nonsense? (To which Lauren is now saying: Amen, brother!)

But soon after graduating from college, I had the nagging feeling that I’d missed something important. So, over the years, I’ve read the story again… and again… and again… and it’s been a revelation of sorts, especially with Leon Kass as my guide.

In his book, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis…

… Kass is less interested in the nature of G*d and more interested in what Scripture might be saying about the nature of Man. He reads the Hebrew Bible not as divine revelation, but as a source of wisdom. To study Genesis with Leon Kass, you don’t need to be a believer. You only need to be curious.

Here’s a Kass sampler re: the tower of Babel, along with a few annotations by me:

The project of creating order, the meaning and goal of Babel, is rooted in logos. Speech and language, reason and the arts are at the heart of the story…. Poetic craft and linguistic subtlety are enlisted to sound an alarm about language and crafts. …

Language to sound an alarm about language echoes one of the main goals of the Substack I wrote from 2019 to 2023. Called Towers of Babel, it was my attempt to use journalism to sound an alarm about journalism specifically, and storytelling more generally.

The story of the city and tower of Babel... shows the impossibility of transmitting the right way through the universal, technological, secular City. 

Which is where most of us live today.

Human reason gradually creates in speech a complete linguistic world, layered over but distinct from the given, natural world. This second, shadow world, though it was invited by the articulated natural world, gains independence from it. The word is not the thing; the map is not the territory. 

As you look at this photo of a man tending to the dead after a poisonous gas attack in Syria, pay close attention to your reaction:

Now imagine you were there, in Syria, standing in this place, surrounded by death. Your reaction, I suspect, would be radically different.

The word is not the thing… and neither is the picture.

(See also: the Second Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth….” Why? Because if we immerse ourselves in images we make — in that “second, shadow world” — then we risk confusing our creations with Creation.)

But because speech is colored always by human perceptions, passions, interests, and desires, the world as captured in language is necessarily partial — both incomplete and biased — and ever pregnant with the human impulse to do something to it. Language, therefore, conveys less the world as it is than it does the self-interested and humanly constructed vision of that world.

If that’s true, then journalists cannot be truly objective because they cannot escape their “self-interested and humanly constructed vision of [the] world.” Their biases, values, and worldviews shape their choice of stories and how those stories are told.

Speaking animal, rational animal, artful animal, political animal, animal distinguishing good and bad, and opining about the just and the unjust — it is all one package: man becomes truly human only when he lives in a polis, providing for himself and ruling himself by his own light of reason, through speech and shared opinions about good and bad, just and unjust. Though the biblical author almost certainly did not read Aristotle's Politics, he seems to share a similar view of the meaning of the city — though not of its goodness. Precisely what Aristotle celebrates, Genesis views with suspicion.

Uh oh.

Mistaking their crafted world for the whole, men live as cave dwellers, ignorant of their true standing in the world and their absolute dependence on Powers not of their making and beyond their control. The city that does not look beyond itself to the truly transcendent realm cannot be a home for what is best in the human soul. 

Looking to the heavens for moral guidance cannot succeed; the heavens may, as the Psalmist says, reveal the glory of God, but they are absolutely mute on the subjects of righteousness and judgment. One can deduce absolutely nothing moral even from the fullest understanding of astronomy and cosmology. 

Science is necessary but not sufficient.

The causes of our malaise are numerous and complicated, but one of them is frequently overlooked: the project of Babel has been making a comeback. ... Can our new Babel succeed? And can it escape — has it escaped — the failings of success of its ancient prototype? What, for example, will it revere?… Will it be self-critical? Can it really overcome our estrangement, alienation, and despair?

I don’t know.

But if you keep reading the Story, this is what happens immediately after Babel:

Shem was 100 years old when he begot Arpachshad… he begot Shelah…Eber… Peleg… Reu… Serug… Nahor… Terah… This is the line of Terah: Terah begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran begot Lot… The days of Terah came to 205 years; and Terah died in Haran…

And then:

… and suddenly, right after the failure of Babel, a completely new path reveals itself. Where does it lead? What ultimately happens to Abram’s family — and the human family?

Again, I don’t know. No one does. The Story is still underway.

The once and future Tower?

When I was nine years old, the Tower of Babel read like a silly fairy tale that had no more relevance to my life than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Now that I’m 65, I read the Babel story as a warning about the all-too-human temptation, then and now, to see ourselves as gods.