OUR TIMES ARE BIBLICAL.

The Tower of Babel by Peter Breugel the Elder, c. 1563

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Those of you who have studied Old Testament literature will remember The Tower of Babel. This ancient myth has deep roots. Similar stories come from cultures more ancient than Hebrew culture in The Middle East. There are similar stories associated with the great pyramids of Central America. 

In the Biblical story, God has wiped the slate clean on Earth with a Great Flood due to the deep corruption of the human species. Noah has repopulated the world with his selected Ark passengers. The renewed and improved human species all spoke the same language and, presumably, were ancestors of Hebrews. Through some impressive breeding, there were in several generations enough human beings to embark on a mission to build a tower to reach God in the heavens. 

Now, one might speculate that these monolinguists were holding a grudge. After all, God had wiped out the whole human race and all other non-aquatic species in an act of vengeful rage. The attempt to go up to confront God makes some sense in that context. 

From Flavius Josephus (Romano-Judean scholar, 37 CE - 100 CE, Jerusalem, Roman Judea):

Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it were through his means they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his power. He also said he would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to reach. And that he would avenge himself on God for destroying their forefathers. Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod, and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work: and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very high, sooner than any one could expect; but the thickness of it was so great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was. It was built of burnt brick, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit water. When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion ...

Perhaps Nimrod was the first Secular Humanist. In any case, God, the ultimate Joker, won the contest before the tower was even completed. He confounded human beings once again by making them polylingual. Drowning them hadn't worked, so he tried something else. This is the way of reactionary (humbling) gods, who anchor us to our past. 

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Fast forward to today. The Great Flood (imagined) of the human species in modern times is nuclear apocalypse, following on the corrupt and murderous events of the first half of the 20th Century. This annihilation could come from heaven due to the pushing of buttons by human fingers, not by the hand of God. And our species has slowly pushed back from that brink with a fascinated "what if", portrayed over and over again in our advancing media. Forced awareness of our temporal grasp on life makes us angry, fearful and creative. 

Perhaps imagined nuclear annihilation has led to the globalist movement, facilitate by instant digital communication and English as a unifying internet language. Is our Tower of Babel the United Nations or the internet or the financial web that links every transaction to global stock markets or the international space program?

Certainly our reactionary gods, wishing to humiliate us into grounded awareness of things in our various distinct patches of  Earth that need attention, are many. The God of Racial Identity, The God of Feminism, The God of LGBTQI-ism, The God of Nationalism, The God of Pragmatism, The God of Politics, etc.. Like the builders of The Tower of Babel, wealthy globalists, who dominate global culture by simply buying it up, have built a towering ideal of global unity and sharing of everything to defeat The God of Greed, The God of Narcissism, The God of Revenge and The God of Mindless Procreation. 

Digital social media have become the unified voice of those who have a vision of a politically corrected and "correct" world. They are today's Nimrods, a Davos of Nimrods, willing to smite the adherents of any of the many gods who threaten the globalist vision of a united humanity in an homogenized global culture. 

And, like Nimrod, they will facilitate the destruction of their Tower of Babel with intolerance and their attempt to oppress differing views of how the world should or could be. They goad the reactionary gods relentlessly by trying to censor speech and supporting one faction's cause over another's in the name of a purer unity, from a trendy social-justice perspective. 

The Biblical Tower's destruction could be seen as the source of our humanity's great diversity of language, religion, culture and evolution into the species we have now become. The ultimate destruction of the undemocratic globalist "tower", or agenda, comprised of the ideals of oligarchs and politicians, may well boost the evolution of our species as well. The reactionary gods, like the God of the Bible, are ancient, fearsome and hard-wired in the human brain. 

In time, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Instagram and others will pass away. Their idealist "tower" of globalist unity will be leveled, and perhaps replaced by another and another. Human evolution may proceed on its own diverse terms until it reaches a fertility of common spirit from which a tall living family tree, not a tower, will grow naturally out into The Universe. Perhaps, if that occurs, humankind will actually see the face of God. But humankind may simply learn that its true destiny lies in its capacity to be at peace with The Universe as it is.