Wiring the Tower of Babel
16 May 2004 – Steve Tomkins, church historian and regular writer for Ship of Fools, preached about the Tower of Babel, during a service which saw a huge amount of babelish, off-stage entertainment by hecklers.
It's not as easy as you might think, you know, finding a biblical text about the internet.
The bishop already used the "cast forth thy net" one last week. There's plenty of stuff in the Bible about what to do with your RAM, and there's Belshazzar's feast where disembodied fingers write on the wall -- the first digital text (ho ho) -- but that's about it.
So let's do the tower of Babel. (Genesis 11 in your cyberpew Bibles.)
A young humankind is united in one language, the original global village. They decide to cooperate in building a huge tower which God finds surprisingly threatening.
He says, "Let us go down and confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another".
Humanity is divided, the tower is abandoned and God says, "Phew, that was close".
I can't say that God comes out of this story very well, but perhaps we'll put that down to poetic licence and mysterious ways.
The point is that we talk a lot about the information age making the world smaller. A few clicks get you Arab news, Japanese animation, Australian chat and US merchandise. Are we somehow moving closer to the alluring pre-Babel community that Genesis imagines?
Possibly. Though we need some big improvements in translation software first, and rather more importantly for the worldwide web to reach the whole world rather than the West.
But the story reminds us that we are divided not just by different words but by different understanding. "They will not understand one another," says God in the Tower of Babel story.
Our failure and refusal to understand others is deeper than words, bigger than Google, as old as Babel and as (de)pressingly up-to-date as al-Qaeda and George Bush.
This is an ailment no tech, however hi, can remedy. The only cure is something as hard to learn, in its own way, as ancient Babylonian: listening, seeing the other's side. The internet cannot unite people who will not hear each other, but it gives us an invaluable chance to listen.
Dr Steve Tomkins is a writer and church historian.
