I have been reading the Bible and discovering again the power of perspective. As an adolescent I always had a distaste for what I thought was the Bible - as I grew and examined more closely I realized my disdain was instead for all the things and people I saw surrounding the Bible.

A literal reading of the Bible is not feasible anymore, and has not been for centuries. A mythological reading of the Bible is easily dismissed by swathes of incurious materialists. For me personally, it required a personal interest in spirituality, in world history, in human psychology, and in existentialist philosophy to settle into a perspective from which I can constructively read the Bible without being overcome by negative emotion. I do not have faith in an afterlife, in fact I think this has become a harmful idea where cowards take shelter and confuse their fear of death with faith in God.

I recoil from the harshness of my own judgments. There exist such depths of human suffering in this world, who among us does not reach for comfort and repose? When I call them cowards, this is only a prideful veneer for my own fear of an empty, cold death.

The book of Genesis tells us of the Tower of Babel, existing at a time after Yahweh destroyed the world with a great flood and humankind had rebuilt it. Yahweh did this with sorrow in his heart for the Earth that had become entirely corrupt, that every intention in the heart of man was evil.

So Earth was destroyed and repopulated by Noah. This results in a powerful human race with a unified language and culture.

What is the foremost concern of this newly formed, unified, powerful human race? It is the same as it is for each individual: self-preservation. What would they see as, historically, the biggest threat to their continued flourishing? That’s right, another massive flood-Armageddon which comes without apparent reason or warning. So they get to work on a Tower high enough to protect them from another flood, perhaps even high enough to bridge Heaven and Earth.

Old Testament Jehovah (AKA Yahweh) is openly described as a jealous God. His jealousy is a protective jealousy that is at once vice and virtue. It has its similarities and its differences with human envy, with the key distinction that God’s jealousy is an expression of his proprietary right to his creations, while human envy is displayed to us by Cain and Abel in Cain’s frustration and desire and confusion over Abel’s incomprehensible primacy in the eyes of the father.

Almost any way you interpret the legend of the Tower, it ends in Yahweh imposing a fatherly punishment on humankind: the fragmentation of language and culture. Never again can humankind be allowed to band together in such a way and set their minds collectively to the domination of Yahweh, or of nature, or of our own minds.

If you like, you can imagine this as God using the “divide and conquer” philosophy to keep us fighting amongst ourselves. France and the UK, intentionally or not, did this to the Middle East after WW1 with the Sykes-Picot agreement. The drawing of makeshift and arbitrary borders establishing nations composed internally of ethnic and religious enemies is an excellent recipe for a weak Middle East who cannot contest you economically or militarily.

If we imagine ourselves in the modern day to be hard at work building our own Tower, I believe it takes the nebulous form of globalism. Some see the myth of the tower as the archetypal anti-globalist warning. So then… what is globalism? Is it social media? Is it American cultural hegemony? Is it natural or artificial? Is it the opposite of nationalism?

I see globalism as the logical conclusion of globalization, which is the ongoing process of all nations becoming more interdependent and interconnected. This process happens via phenomena like social media and cultural hegemony, and it is a social force in the same way that gravity is a natural force. Nationalism is an unnatural and excessive mutation of tribalism that has become so firmly entrenched in modern consciousness that it is assumed to be necessary and even natural.

The confusion of tongues was a mercy on humankind. We tend naturally toward globalism, but we cannot be allowed to attain it, and this is my interpretation of the legend. There is a delicious paradox here, and all throughout the Bible, and all throughout life. The force that most strongly opposes globalism is that of nationalism, which fosters unity at the same time as it nurtures hatred. George Orwell describes nationalism to indicate a tendency to think in terms of “competitive prestige” and “unreflective partisanship”. The nationalist places the advancing of the interests of the nation beyond the scrutiny of good and evil, beyond any semblance of human morality. Nazi is short for National Socialist.

Globalism and nationalism, and every ideology, is synthetic. The concept of ideology itself is synthetic. We would have never dared to develop such ideas while we were still oppressed by our fears of supernatural and divine forces, we would have never dreamed of creating our own demons when we thought supernatural ones might be hiding around the corner. Like Eve in the garden, we got bored, we got curious, we listened to the serpent of insecurity whispering in our ear of our own mortality.

The only relatively solid conclusion I feel I am able to form is this: The imagined unity of globalism is an illusion. Nationalism generates much evil, but it is a fragmented evil that fights against itself, and thus subdues itself. A unified human race brings the potential for a unified evil that is all-encompassing and therefore irreversible (except through supernaturally rising tides).

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