What Babel/Babble Could Have Been

The biblical story of the Tower of Babel tells of a tower built by people to reach to the heavens. The OT God knocks down this tower and confounds the language of humanity so that they cannot understand each other and never again will challenge Him, at least not with very tall buildings. (In some later traditions, the tower was built expressly in order to wage war with God.) From Genesis:

“Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the LORD said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.’ Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.” (Genesis 11:1-9)

Babel, 1984 and Freedom from Totalitarian Language

“One language and few words” reminds me of Newspeak in George Orwell’s novel 1984. One of Winston’s comrades, Symes, a linguist from the Research Department is working on the 11th edition of the Newspeak dictionary and discusses it with Winston:

“We’re getting the language into its final shape — the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone…

. ..Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?”

And Symes continues:

‘“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. “

Perhaps what we have in the Babel myth is the story of the many enslaved through language, unconsciously fulfilling the hubris of their rulers, who commanded “Come let us build a tower.” Knowing not how to formulate any idea outside of their “one language” of “few words,” they know only to obey those who set themselves up as rulers (Nimrod, et. al), and so they obey. And seeing how these mental slaves are used by the manipulators at the top, God destroys the tower of Babel, which is symbolic of the total power of the Babylonian rulers and the totalitarian, univerals language they wield. In confounding the languages of the people, God provides each individual an opportunity to become free–to force hir to think, to begin to really see and understand those around hir. Like Pavlov’s dogs, whose conditioning was erased when the Russian behaviorist’s lab suffered due to a massive flood (an interesting part of that story they probably never told you in school), God provides a shock whereby the individual’s conditioned slavery falls away.

And in that state of confusion, where all people seem to be speaking gibberish to each other, as we might imagine scene immediately upon the fall of the mythic tower, may lay the opportunity to regain a truer and rawer connection to reality. For words are gibberish–they only communicate anything by the general agreement that they consistently signify some event or process (or object?) that exists outside themselves. And in that moment of Babel/Babble, when all the old associations those sounds had held are washed away, comes the possibility to experience the joy of just making sounds and hearing them. But not only that joy–also the potential joy of really seeing, hearing, feeling, touching another through the soul’s song, the pure voice, without mediation. The language before words is regained–and not limited by the magick “spell” of words, for being beyond them, this language grants the opportunity for a people only recently unified in the most degenerate sort of way, in isolation from their humanity and the Real through the abstraction of being a “people” (or as we’d say today, “the masses”), to gain the unity of transcendence.

Thus, on this reading, the tower of B’ab (gate) El/Il (a name of a god), is the myth truly about the Gate of God, which is not the tower itself, though its destruction opened the gate to allow the individual an opening to perceive The Ineffable once again,  through a consecration or mixing.

But an gate only stays open in the moment–and as the story ends, we see the people (again, no longer potential individuals in rapport but different “masses”) scattered by the OT God, bearing their new languages (same as the old, abstract and totalizing one, but less potent due to the competition). Thus we know that for most of the unnamed persons in the tale, the opportunity afforded by the destruction of the Tower, has gone by unrealized.

But perhaps that’s as it always is–and the tower keeps getting built and keeps getting knocked down. And its a question of when each of us notices it and how we react when we do.