Undoing Babel

I recall, around the time of the first Gulf War, that a U.S. General was supposed to have said, “Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.” Apparently this quotation was misattributed and was first made in 1987. Nevertheless it had currency shortly after the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain fell and Operation Desert Storm showed how effective the U.S. military could be when it set its mind to it.

In classical Greek times, of course, such a statement would be called “hubris” and pious people would start looking over their shoulders expecting Nemesis to make an appearance. But another quotation also seems relevant: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” (This version from Longfellow is probably the latest of a long series of similar statements that may stretch all the way back to Sophocles and beyond.)

It seems that the U.S. is flirting with madness. For a long time people have criticized the notion that the U.S. has an obligation to “police the world.” But after the fall of the Soviet Union it seemed that the U.S. finally had the power to do it and make it stick.

The U.S. was the world’s sole remaining superpower. The world was now “unipolar” and the U.S. was the “essential nation.” An infamous book came out called THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, by Francis Fukuyama. The thesis of this book was that “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” signified the end of history.

Events since then have hinted that, like Athens in the Peloponnese war, a triumphant power can become fatally overextended. The U.S. got bogged down in long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars were reprisals for the 9/11 attacks, those attacks themselves showing that the world may not have been as unipolar as some thought.

At the same time increasing divisions within U.S. society have undermined the stability and power of the U.S. itself. The U.S. also funded the development of another burgeoning superpower, China, by buying massive quantities of consumer goods from them. The current conflict between Ukraine and Russia has caused the U.S. to fundamentally upset the international financial order by cutting Russia off from many international financial institutions.

This is likely to be self-defeating: the U.S. for many years has been able to export its currency inflation by being the reserve currency for the world and by being the chosen medium of exchange for energy resources (the “petrodollar”). Now Russia, aided by China and a number of other ostracized countries and even by some putative U.S. allies such as India, is establishing alternate ways to make international transactions that do not depend on the dollar. On top of the trillions of dollars of debt added in the past few years to cope with the economic fallout of the COVID lockdowns, the undermining of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency threatens to cause a massive repatriation of dollars that will exacerbate an already looming crisis of price-inflation.

To put the above simply, we’ve been able to avoid the inflationary consequences of government deficit spending because other countries wanted dollars for trade and financial security. If alternatives to the dollar exist, the international demand for dollars will drop and we will wind up with all those international dollars coming home to the U.S. (dollars can always be spent in the U.S.). A large increase in supply will result in a large drop in value, and the result will be that people will demand more dollars for a given commodity. This is commonly called “inflation” but is really “price-inflation,” which is the consequence of the oversupply of dollars known as “currency-inflation.” (Was that simpler?)

So what does all this have to do with Babel?

Genesis 11:1-9 describes the process whereby, to borrow from Fukuyama’s thesis, history began. 11:1 says that “The whole earth had one language and the same words.” 11:6 quotes the Lord saying, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” The Lord then proceeds to scramble the language of mankind “so that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:7). The result was that they were scattered over the earth and stopped trying to build the tower.

Many people have wondered why the Lord would do something like this. It sounds like a case of jealousy — he was worried that mankind would be able to reach the stars (or the heavens, as the passage has it). They would “make a name for themselves” and become a force to be reckoned with even on a divine level.

I think another explanation makes more sense. Consider the notion of the end of history and a unipolar world. Is not such a world the ultimate tyranny?

We in the U.S. may not like the fact that the Afghanis did not allow girls to go to school. I personally do not like the fact that girls were not allowed at least a modicum of education. But does that mean that western “liberal democracy” is the only valid way to organize society? Because “liberal democracy” is not just a way of choosing leaders and organizing a government. It is a whole complex of progressive ideas and values. The main common theme uniting this complex of ideas is the rejection of traditionalism. It is, perhaps, best summed up by a quotation from Woodrow Wilson (admittedly taken out of context): “The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible.”

Wilson meant that the university should make students into generalists, “struggl[ing] to put them in touch with every force of life.” But the effect of this is to reverse the quotation from Malachi 4:6: “And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

Even Wilson’s ideal can be defended. But the problem is that a unipolar world will impose values of this kind by force. Once you make such a notion mandatory — or even funded with tax dollars — you make it tyrannical. (Why should I have to pay to undermine my relationship with my children?)

The punitive expedition to capture the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks became a “nation-building” exercise aimed at transforming Afghani society. The failure of this attempt shows that the aftermath of Babel still applies. There are things that will remain impossible for even the most powerful human country, because humanity is not one people and that oneness cannot be imposed by force.

And this is a good thing. Because every country has major flaws. Would we prefer it if the Chinese conquered the world? Would we like it if the Soviet Union had taken Europe and from there came to dominate the world? The U.S. was not even willing to live under the British Empire.

Even within the U.S. there are forces of dissent. And to the extent these forces are suppressed and lose their voice, to that extent tyranny rises.

Let us thank the Lord for winding the clock of history. Let us be glad that it continues to tick even if we do not like the conflicts it continues to engender. Because “freedom lies in the interstices.” A unipolar world would be one where there was no room for anything but the mainstream.