By Julie Ponesse at Brownstone dot org.

[The following is an excerpt from Julie Ponesse's book, Our Last Innocent Moment.]

Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.

Genesis 11:4

Oh we may have sharper tools

But we don't always know how to use them

After all we're only human

Matthew Barber, "Viral"

About 5,000 years ago, somewhere in the middle of the desert in the land of Shinar (south of what is now Baghdad, Iraq), a group of migrants decided to stop and build a city. One among them, quite possibly Nimrod, suggested that they build a tower so tall it will reach to the heavens." But the Lord came down and, so displeased with what they were up to, confused their language and scattered them over the face of the earth.

In 2020, our modern civilization experienced a similar system failure on a global scale. We were building something. Or so it seemed. And then it all went terribly wrong. Now, bodies are invaded by the state, children are killing themselves, and the world is burning. We are more disconnected than ever before and we have lost our ability to communicate with each other. And yet our destruction is well masked in the pretence of progress and unity.

We seem to be having another "Babel Moment," a punctuated moment in history when excessive pride in our own abilities leads to our own destruction. Like other similar moments in history - the fall in Eden, the Late Bronze Age collapse, the Destruction of the Roman Empire - it's a story of the natural consequences of human ingenuity running ahead of wisdom. It's a story about misguided unification projects.

It's a story echoed in so many of the fractures we see today: between the left and right, liberals and conservatives, Israelis and Palestinians, truth and lies. It's a story about what's breaking between us and within each of us.

I don't think it would be an overstatement to say that we are reeling. Like different tribes who inhabit the same country and are subject to the same laws, we have wildly different views about what it is to be good, whether we are citizens or subjects, whether history can teach us anything, and whether human life, in all its forms and at all of its stages, is sacred. We look at our neighbour and are disoriented, unable to understand the person staring back at us.

We are a people adrift in a historical no-man's place, "unmoored" as Bret Weinstein poetically but hauntingly said. We are orphans of history, of liberty, and even of our own sense of conscience.

"…piling mountains up to the distant stars"

The story of Babel, like so many in the Bible, is frustratingly brief, offering only a few lines and few specific clues about what the tower looked like, whether the Babylonians thought they succeeded or failed, and why their punishment was to be radically dispersed.

Artists' renderings of the tower mimic the sort of prestige architecture that was common in the ancient world, possibly modelled on Etemenanki, a stone ziggurat the height of New York's Flatiron building dedicated to the Mesopotamian god Marduk. What we do know is how the story ended: God was so displeased that he confused their language and spread them as far apart from one another as they could be.

Cautionary tales about the costs of human pride running amok are not unique to the Christian tradition. There is the love origins story from Plato's Symposium that I mentioned earlier, in which humans became "so lofty in their notions" that Zeus cut them in two leaving each one cursed to roam the earth searching for their other half.

In Greek mythology, the "Gigantomachy" myth describes the desperate struggle between the Gigantes (giants) and the Olympian gods to rule over the universe. In Ovid's telling of the story, the twin giants Ephialtes and Otis attempt to reach the heavens by stacking the Ossa, Pelion, and Thessaly mountain ranges on top of...