COLUMN: Tower of Babel, a warning for the Information Age

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The following column first appeared on Feb. 20, 2005. It’s a warning about the power of the internet and the foolishness of mistaking its vast compendium of knowledge for truly eternal wisdom. The one thing I would add today is a notation about the danger we face from companies like Google that are accumulating knowledge for their own aggrandizement. In 2005, I did recognize the danger of superhuman knowledge being centralized in one “place,” but did not adequately intuit the extent to which the modern Tower of Babel would be composed brick by brick of formerly private information about each and every one of us. It remains to be seen whether this tower will be toppled or not.)

Has anyone yet made the connection between the internet and the Tower of Babel?

    The Tower of Babel was built by the descendants of Noah at a time, we are told in Genesis, when “the whole earth had one language and one speech.” For reasons best known to themselves, some of these sons of Noah decided to build “a tower whose top is in the heavens” and to “make a name for themselves.”

This tower apparently was quite successful, and was well on its way to becoming the center of human industriousness after just a short time. Indeed, when God saw it, and thought of the ambitions of the people who had built it, he declared, “... the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.”

It’s a little fuzzy exactly why God was worried about the funny little humans and their brick tower, but suffice it to say that God in the Old Testament is known as a “jealous God” and he lives up to that reputation here.

Presumably angry at the presumptuousness of mankind, God “confused the language” so that all people could no longer understand one another, and he “scattered them abroad all over the face of the earth.”

Which is where we pick up the story nearly 3,000 years later.

We are indeed scattered abroad, but apparently the instincts of humankind have not changed too much in the intervening centuries. There is still an urge to build, to challenge and to “make a name for ourselves,” maybe even to measure up to God.

Here is man once again laboring to bring together all knowledge and all language so that nothing will be hidden from him. The internet has become a kind of “Alice’s Restaurant” of the soul in less than two decades. Just as in Arlo Guthrie’s song about the hippie restaurant, it’s also true that “you can get anything you want” within easy reach on the internet. Philosophy, friendship, religion, science, love, literature, magic, mayhem, pornography, satanism, truth, lies. It’s all there, for anyone to access, and it doesn’t even necessarily cost a dime.

And certainly on the internet the idea of a language barrier has been nearly obliterated just as it was before the Tower of Babel. Numerous sites such as Google allow users to translate diverse languages instantly. For instance, “Potete ottenere qualche cosa che desideriate al ristorante della Alice” explains why Arlo Guthrie did not write “Alice’s Restaurant” in Italian.

So what’s the point?

Simple. The internet is a miracle of modern technology, built byte by byte instead of brick by brick. It’s like one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World in that it shows just how darn much the human mind can accomplish when it wants to. But let’s remember that of those Seven Wonders, only one — the Great Pyramid — remains. The rest have been crushed by time just as the God of the Old Testament crushed the dreams of those sons of Noah who built the Tower of Babel.

We can marvel at the internet, but let’s not mistake it for omniscience. It can tell us everything that man knows, but nothing of what God knows. “You can get anything you want” except what matters the most — the truth. And though we can profit from our industriousness, we should take a lesson from that old tower, which is pointedly nowhere to be seen today.

Our handiwork is pretty good, but it’s nothing compared to what comes from the hand of the Master. Only that endures.