“Because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives.”
George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By
If only all human beings could communicate with one another! Breaking down barriers to communication could “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” (Mission statement of Meta, Facebook’s parent company).
As the world struggles with the dark side of social media—increased loneliness and depression, incentivizing outrage and lies, contributing to genocide, and more—I am reminded of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
The story describes a time when everyone spoke one language. With their ability to communicate, human beings engaged in the ancient world’s version of “building community and bringing the world closer together.” They decided to build a tower that would invade the heavens, to “make a name for ourselves, otherwise we will be scattered over the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:4)
God disapproves of this building project. The result of this disapproval is that people are indeed “scattered over the face of the whole earth” and they speak different languages (Genesis 11:9).
In the May 2022 edition of The Atlantic, Jonathan Haidt published an excellent article about divisiveness in America. Haidt believes social media to be the main contributor to our present situation and uses the Tower of Babel story as his governing metaphor for our experience.
“The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”
In Haidt’s reading, the tower represents social progress through massive cooperation. The destroyed tower represents social chaos due to an inability to communicate.
“The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement. That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel. We were closer than we had ever been to being ‘one people,’ and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by language. For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.”
Haidt’s understanding of the Babel story is very different from that of the ancient Jewish commentators. Here’s how the ancient Jewish commentators understood the reasons for God’s disapproval of the tower:
· Human beings were given the earth as their charge but people wanted the heavens as well. The purpose of the tower was to wage a fight with God for the heavens.1
· A vanity building project whose purpose is self-aggrandizement (“making a name for ourselves”) is a misuse of the creative spirit.2
· If a brick was hoisted up but accidentally dropped before it could be added to the tower, people would cry over the loss. But if a person fell from the top of the tower and died, they paid no attention.3
Haidt understands the division of human beings by language as a curse. The ancient Jewish readers saw this division as a necessary remedy for human foibles.
After humanity is divided into groups speaking different languages, the Bible turns its attention to just one of these language groupings—the Hebrews. The remainder of Genesis, and almost the entirety of the next thirty-eight books of the Bible, is focused on them. The Bible will share with us how this small group of people struggles to bring social improvements to their community. And the Bible will share how this small group of people struggles to make their community serve humanity.
Before the tower story, the Bible speaks universally about humanity. After the tower story, the Bible’s universal concerns are given voice through the service of this smaller group to the rest of the world.
For the ancient Jewish commentators, dividing humanity into smaller groups isn’t a punishment. It’s a prescription for how to make things better.
Let’s compare these two different readings.
Depending upon how the story is read, the metaphor of the Tower of Babel carries different meanings. Watch what happens when we apply these different readings to the challenges of how social media is functioning in our society. What are the governing questions to which each of these readings point?
Looking back at Meta’s mission, “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” the ancients’ reading encourages us to ask: toward what end? What if we are helping to build communities devoted to harming others? Who is benefitting from the way the platform is being used and managed? Who should be benefitting?
What is Meta for?
Technologies, whether in the form of bricks or computer code, are neutral. In the Bible story, God’s solution to the abuses of the tower isn’t to abolish bricks. Many chapters of the next two biblical books (Exodus and Leviticus) are devoted to a different use for bricks—a building that will serve as a portal for God’s presence: the Temple.
Applying the Bible’s metaphors to social media’s problems suggests that solutions will be found by finding the right use(s) for the technology. Haidt’s suggestion of reducing the volume of some voices while increasing the volume of others may be a good beginning.
The tower story won’t provide an instant solution to our present challenges. But in the hands of both Haidt and the ancient Jewish commentators, it provides a provocative starting point for inquiry.
“In all aspects of life...we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor.”
George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By
Genesis Rabbah, 38:6. Genesis Rabbah was written sometime between 300 CE and 500 CE
Genesis Rabbah, 38:8
Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer. This work was composed between 750 CE and 850 CE
To put an exclamation on your point (bad pun & weak metaphor) Pharaoh required the Israelites to make bricks without straw. Bricks for good bricks for evil. On metaphor I highly recommend Toba Spitzer’s recently published God is Here: Reimagining the Divine. Toba examines both how metaphor is ubiquitous & how the metaphor for God that we gravitate to profoundly influences how we think about the Divine..
I loved these insights and thoughts. Thanks for writing them. I just recommended your post on my most recent newsletter because I felt like it was relevant.