the tindog coffeehouse

I’m currently blogging my way through From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. A few days ago, I covered most of Chapter 7, titled “Redemption”. But there was one section I didn’t get to, which dealt with the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

Genesis 11 says that sometime after the Great Flood, the people of the world gathered in Babylonia and built a huge tower made with fire-hardened bricks.

Then they said, “Come, let’s build a great city for ourselves with a tower that reaches into the sky. This will make us famous and keep us from being scattered all over the world.”

But the Lord came down to look at the city and the tower the people were building. “Look!” he said. “The people are united, and they all speak the same language. After this, nothing they set out to do will be impossible for them! Come, let’s go down and confuse the people with different languages. Then they won’t be able to understand each other.”

In that way, the Lord scattered them all over the world, and they stopped building the city.

Dyer makes a couple of different points about this story. First, he reminds us how powerful the technology of language is. As powerful as it is today, it was potentially even more so to the inhabitants of Babylonia, all of whom spoke the same language. By confusing people with different languages, God caused them to scatter to different lands, which not only stopped them from building the tower, it helped fulfill His command to “fill the earth”.

Second, Dyer explains how confusing them affected change by acting as a disruptive technology. While God could’ve simply leveled the tower, He instead changed an underlying technological component: their language. And in so doing, He changed their behavior.

[W]hat happened at Babel illustrates that when a technological change happens within a culture, that change in technology results in a change in the culture. Technology does not make people do anything, but it does alter the choices people have in front of them. God didn’t force the Babelites to move, but by changing their communication technology, he made it extremely difficult for them to choose to stay put.

In Chapter 6, we talked about how merely the presence of a particular technology was enough to cause a behavioral change in society. By creating a web-based dictionary, for example, people come to value its convenience over the traditional book-style versions. Both tools do the same job, but they are not valued the same, and therefore people choose the one that has the greater value to them. The result is a shift from one technology to another. Initially only a few people will make that shift while others choose the more traditional option. But as more and more people make that transition, a certain amount of conflict is generated, a sort of societal dissonance. It’s only when enough people have made the transition to the newer tool does the conflict subside, and eventually there is so much agreement that the new tool is no longer even considered to be technology.

Interestingly, this idea of societal disruption caused by technological change is similar to Karl Marx’s “materialist” concept of history. Marx argued that how humans work on nature to produce the means of subsistence forms the foundation of any given society. All other non-economic components such as social classes, political structures, religion, etc. are built on top of that. When there is a shift in the “productive forces” (whether that’s a technical shift such as new tools, machinery, land, or infrastructure or a shift in labor), it upsets the balance of that society — sort of like playing a game of Jenga. The only way to realign that balance is for the underclass to “liberate” the old productive forces with new ones, thereby in essence creating a new tower upon which society will be built. While Marx argued that “liberation” often required revolution, he believed that it was an unavoidable consequence of technological change which itself is brought about by our own human nature:

Not only do the objective conditions change in the act of reproduction, e.g. the village becomes a town, the wilderness a cleared field etc., but the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language. …

Humans act upon the world, changing it and themselves; and in doing so they “make history”.

Going back to the Tower of Babel, we see how when the technology changed (in this case God changing their language), it affected the choices the people made. And those choices had a ripple effect throughout the society, eventually causing it to split into smaller ones.

Of course, the advent of a technology like the Internet would not necessarily cause a society to revolt, and obviously no one is suggesting that. But we can see how it can act as a disruptive force, creating a dissonance, not just within the world as a whole but within the Church itself. And the more disruptive the technology, the more conflict there will be. That’s why it’s so important for the Church to recognize both the corrupting and redeeming qualities of a given technology so that it can choose the right tool. As Dyer concludes:

Even today, technological change often results in a realignment of a society. When we introduce technological change in our families, jobs, or churches, we too will face a different set of choices, limitations, and abilities. Each new tool has a series of strengths and weaknesses and a unique set of values, and these factors work in concert to shape our world and influence our choices.

Previously:
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 1: Perspective
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 2: Imagination
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 3: Reflection
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 4: Definition
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 5: Rebellion
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 6: Approach
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 7: Redemption