3: The Age of Unmeaning

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Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
................Genesis 11:1-9 (NIV)

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
.....who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
.....who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.
Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.
................Isaiah 5:20-12 (NIV)

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The long and short of it.... Diversity is not a blessing, but rather a curse.

Scatter shot
One of the most interesting stories of Genesis is of the Tower of Babel. Mankind, in his arrogance, starts building a tower that would reach up to Heaven, so he can move into the penthouse suite and barbecue on the deck immediately across from his new neighbor, God Himself. The tower represents man’s capabilities. 

God saw the tower of Babel and thought, “There goes the neighborhood.” When these men worked together they had great potential, so long as they could swarm. They united in a single cause to seek God by their genius and works.  The tower wasn’t a threat to God, but rather a monument to mankind’s likeness to God.  It was an idol to themselves.  So God struck them with a curse, the inability to speak to each other. God obliterated their similarity and replaced it with diversity. Once they lost the ability to relate to each other, they lost their purpose and melted into chaos.

It is probably dismissed as a children’s story because it is seemingly so farfetched, but it holds an interesting truth—at the core or our being we are all the same, and in our sameness there is power.  If you diminish our uniformity, you diminish our power. 

Celebrate Diversity?
Diversity is the curse of Babel. The more we focus on what makes us different the more quickly we lose sight of the things that make us one single race of people, a family. When we focus only on the minutia that is different between us (language, culture, preferences) and ignore what makes us all the same (bodies, emotions, soul), we flail around in a chaos of noise and confusion.  When we obsess on the little differences it is easy to make decisions with horrific consequences. The Holocaust of World War II is not the first time when the celebration of diversity was expressed in genocide.

Instead of celebrating diversity, we should celebrate humanity. The blood of a Peruvian lama farmer or a little old woman working in a Taiwanese open-air food market could go directly into your veins and keep you from dying.  The hearts of Osama Bin Ladin or Adolf Hitler could be transplanted into an "infidel" or a Jew.  Any O+ Dalits (untouchable) in India could save the life of any O+ Brahman. The Arabs and the Jews come from the same common ancestor, father Abraham, and yet they are hell bent of killing one another.

All Roads Lead Home
At the foot of Babel, all of humanity is scattered into chaos. They call out into the confusion and find others who they can understand, and then they set off, by foot, by ship, abandoning a power now lost.  They wander into the darkness of pre-history.  In all directions they move out.  Over time Babel becomes a distant memory, a fable.  Over time even the thought of other people, speaking differently, looking differently, becomes alien and threatening.  People once united in power are swallowed up in pockets of isolation, weakened by division.  They multiply on the other side of history. 

The world being finite, it’s only a matter of time until the fringes overlap.  We rediscover each other.  All ships have sailed around the world, all ships are in sight once again.  The people are congregating on the decks, pointing, wondering.  From every direction the ships are converging at the end of time.  They are far away from the old tower, but a new tower is being built. At the base of that new tower the families are coming together, greeting one another, teaching each other how to speak their languages, and with the learning of new language comes a roar of fresh perspective.

The new Babel is not about collective meaning or power or accomplishment. The new Babel is about diversity.  We are still deluded about our capabilities; we are still under the curse of the old tower even as we try to build a new one.   Before the curse there was one “we” trying to be like the one God.  Now, as we crowd together we burn with the friction of "them."  Will the pagans and the Muslims and the Christians and the scientists and the witches ever really agree?  As we try to embrace the expanding diversity the curse grows more powerful.  

The Age of Unmeaning
Our common base understanding of the universe is gone. Our sense of diversity is so strong that some people now believe that the color of the skin indicates a differentiator of species, and that a black man and a white woman are not even of the same race. We are transfixed by difference, surrounded by a hurricane of ideas, a swirling vortex of information.  All points of view have equal weight, equal impact, equal validity, everything meaning anything meaning nothing—unmeaning. The curse is unbroken.

Welcome to the Age of Unmeaning. Unmeaning is not non-meaning, in which meaning cannot be found. Unmeaning is the confluence of all meaning. Unmeaning is the engine that drives the modern incarnation of the curse of Babel. Unmeaning is the grease that will quicken our slide into the end.