Postmodern Fable 2, a Reflection

Genesis 11, which opens with the brief account of the civilization that produced the Tower of Babel. (I speculate, though I haven't been able to verify, that the phrase "towering ambition" comes from this story.) This story follows the story of Noah and the great flood, which covers the last part of chapter 6 through chapter 10.

Those of us who have witnessed the towering ambition of major corporations and conglomerates (pioneered by New York's Empire State Building, followed by the World Trade Center (twin towers), followed by Chicago's Sears Tower, followed by a rivalry between the Bank of Manhattan building and the Chrysler Building, followed by the Petronas Towers (twin towers) in Kuala Lumpur (the first major competitor outside the US), etc., etc. Like the original Tower of Babel, these towers have an unmistakable Freudian symbolism, a symbol of power and potency.  They also testify to collective narcissism on an epic scale.  Thus, they are true representatives of the Tower of Babel in our midst.

The story of the Tower of Babel, however, has an interesting ending. God, looking down upon this display of narcissism, decided to confuse their language (which had been one) to divide the people into separate language groups. God then scattered these language groups across the face of the earth. This story has the obvious form of a fable, yet, composed in only 11 verses, it speaks volumes.

It may occur to you to ask, "Why revisit this? What else can be said about it that has not already been said?"

It struck me that this point about language groups leading to scattering seems to be lost on (or, perhaps deliberately exploited by) our elites, who have been striving to create a new world civilization. Their towering ambition, which goes by the name of globalism, has taken on a new form which, on the surface, appears to be at a new and unprecedented level of narcissism and delusion. It's not enough for them to satisfy their towering ambition by building a new, and bigger, tower. (Perhaps that is because advances in materials science can't keep up with it. Perhaps it is because the Freudian implications have become too obvious to everybody.)  Instead, it may be that these elites of towering ambition have decided to create a civilization that exemplifies a contradiction to the moral of the Genesis story.

They are deliberately creating countries (with the U.S. and Europe leading the way) of multiple language groups thrust together in close contact. The glue that is supposed to hold these communities together is not to be found among the principles that undergird the nation states. It is a new, artificial glue, which goes by the name of political correctness. We may speak different languages and come from different cultures, but if we all think the same way about the structural elements of society and culture, so the reasoning goes, perhaps we can build a new world order, one that completely belies the wisdom of scripture.

The idea seems to be to create a global melting pot. All languages will eventually be fused into one artificial agglomeration language (pioneered by Esperanto). All races and ethnicities will be fused into one superior mix, cleansed of all impurities through a combination of selective breeding, abortion and genetic engineering at the cellular level. All cultures will be purified and fused into one. All histories will be rewritten. All artifacts of the past will be either thrown out or explained according to a new orthodoxy. The world's population will be reduced to what elites consider to be a level that is ideally sustainable.

The ambitions first exposed in George Orwell's Nineteen Eightyfour will come to fruition.

Or so they imagine. These ambitions are further complicated by dreams of Golem and Frankenstein, with a new technological twist that goes by the name of Technological Singularity. As we get closer and closer to Woodrow Wilson's dream of a New World Order, one in which humanity is redefined, we drift further and further away from a conception of the human person that bears the image of God.