The Tower of Babel

Tower of Babel. Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Source: Wikimedia

There is no god, but as those who know me have probably heard me say — there is language and language is the closest thing to divine we can achieve. In this regard, the etiology of the Tower of Babel is a captive one, if only as a stepping stone to a few points about human communications, and a few fallacies.

It is the story of one tongue, that all men understand, therefore a condition that simply cannot be. Problems start with the misunderstanding that language is a tool to name existing objects. This would mean not only that objects, rather than concepts, exist, but also that in theory, there is a right word, a name, for every object.

This is fundamentally wrong, as a characteristic of language is producing an infinite combination out of a definite set — for example by using phonemes limited both by our physiology and cultural background, we can express endless amount of ideas. This is what language is. Naming every single item out there with absolute precision is a classification system, and one that is impossible to achieve.

Why? Because when you take a lump of sugar and plunge it into your cup of tea — or whatever is your poison — the cube goes through an infinite amount of steps from being a sugar cube (and what is that, exactly?) to being sugar molecules dissolved in herbal infusion. I dare you give a name to every stage as the cube progresses on that scale. Every single stage, not the main ones, or we cannot speak of precision and have to resort to vague concepts. And once you've named them all, you need to repeat it all over again with next cube, if you're a sweet-tooth as me, because no cube of sugar is the same as the other. It's the basic “how many trees is a forest” type of problem.

There is an obvious solution to this, and to a great host of situations where it is easier to blame others rather than accept our limits — “God could do it!” Beyond the magical boundary of the supernatural lies the power to precicely name all the cubes of sugar in the universe, in each of their stages, both in the past and in the future, including the imaginary ones. Yes, indeed, in a divine language, where everything has its proper name, that is possible. But that language in turn would be absolutely useless for communicating divine knowledge to mortals — AFAIK, most religions have a thing or two to say about how we can not fully grasp the divine, and in that they are correct — for the simple reason that every single word uttered would be uttered only once, as the thing that it referred to would not be that thing any more after the word has been used. Divine language is the ultimate deconstruction of meaning.

Therefore it is not things that are named, and words refer to concepts, rather than realities. Some men might have different concepts in mind than others, and thus the words they use carry slightly different meanings, hence confusion is bound to arise. Confusion is that natural state of languages, but only up to a certain point. As humans are different, they are also the same, and while our understanding of sugar cubes, or colours, or what is right or wrong, morally, might differ to some extent, it also overlaps to an extent that makes communication not precise, but adequate. Whole human civilization rests upon the fact that I sort of understand you, and you kind of follow my meaning.

Thus when all men suddenly spoke one language and understood one another, god had every reason to be worried. For those men must have crossed the aforementioned border of divinity and achieved omnipotence. And were I a god of a monotheistic religion, I too would very upset at this news of competition. Hence the ensuing acts of retribution and the crumbling of the tower.

For me the beauty of languages is their very imprecision, which allows for new meanings to be generated, and the beauty of communication is that it happens regardless of the confusion, and allows us, very briefly, to touch one another.