It might look and feel like any other website but rebuildbabel.com is just a portal to a greater project. It is a motion set thousands of years ago and that still echoes in our souls, a quest that started with the fall of a great tower where our ancestors first gathered and where the first civilizations were born.
At that time, nomadic tribes gathered in and around the city of Babel where a great lord was building his mark on the land. The slave market flourished with captives brought in from the four corners of the known world. The conditions were hard and the death rate was very high among the workers. There was no other law but the King’s law, changing with his moods. There was very little organization or planning. Science was witchery and magic. Technology meant iron working, masonry and at best, the invention of the brick. How far we are now from our ancestors, how different we turned out to be.
It is said that at that time, all humans spoke one language. Which can be true if we identify language as it was at that time. Vocabulary then was hardly 1% of today’s vocabulary, grammar was probably inexistent, and literacy level was around 0.00001% of the world population. The one language theory therefore stands a chance of being true, language still being at its genesis. Â
The interpretations around the fall of the tower are many. It goes from practical reasons, such as the death of the King and the abandonment of the expensive and lengthy project by his predecessors, little knowledge in architecture and engineering that led to the tower crumbling under its own weight, an earthquake that shook the fragile pillars of the tower… To mythical reasons, such as the wrath of the Judeo-Christian God or other Mesopotamian gods challenged by the symbol of greatness that the tower was and who therefore plotted schemes to destroy the tower and scatter the builders.
What remains from the legend nonetheless is that the fall of the tower led to the greatest schism in the history of humanity. It is only after deserting the tower that “nations†appeared. Before, there was only one nation, one kingdom, symbolized not by race, not by social classes, but by ONE basic language, ONE understanding of the world and ONE common future.
This makes perfect sense. As long as we all agree on calling things by the same name, there are no differences, and we are perfectly united in our thoughts and actions and capable of building towers that would make the gods jealous. When an individual or a group begins using different words to describe a thing or a situation that was commonly agreed upon, differences start appearing, unity is lost, and our great achievements as a species are destroyed since now they represent different meanings.
That is exactly what happened to the tower of Babel. It is not the sudden appearance of 72 languages that made the work impossible, but the appearance of 72 different perceptions of the tower. When the scriptures talk about the workers speaking different languages all of a sudden it does not literary mean that one is speaking French and another Chinese and a third Swahili, it means that workers stopped communicating. The failure of the whole endeavor was not an engineering problem or a religious problem, but differences in perceiving the world and its meanings, a difference in visions.
The lesson to be taken from the legend of the tower of Babel is not that we can’t build towers, but that those towers will keep falling as long as we don’t have a common understanding of the world and particularly when we do not share the same visions for the future.
Fortunately, things have changed today. Never before has humanity witnessed a higher level of communication between all its civilizations. Organizations such as the United Nations are sponsoring talks between world leaders and diplomacy is exploited for defusing tensions between countries in conflict. Wars and destruction are no longer the destiny of political misunderstandings. Globalization and free market are opening new borders and concepts, ideas and technologies are reaching the most remote regions of the planet. A communication network set in the early 90s, along with the revolution of personal computers in the same decade, connected an increasing number of people around the world to each other; the Internet is a modern miracle, an invention unequaled in the history of inventions.
All these global political, economical and social advancements would have never been possible if humanity wasn’t ready to communicate. This will to understand each other, to exchange views and ideas is becoming stronger every day. By watching the market of translation and interpretation entering a golden age we can see the extent of this determination. We want to unite again, we want to understand each other, and we know we share a common future. The quest is serious and it is finally on the right track. Day after day humans are realizing that they are not very different from each other, that their dreams and motivations are the same, that even with the language barrier they can understand each other and see the common future of the species. Every day we are reaching out to one another, every day we want to know more about each other, every day we are making one more step toward global unity, and every day we are looking for more understanding, more cooperation, and more exchanges. We are creating and reinforcing a superhighway between our nations, a road that will lead us again to this mythical site where thousands of years ago we have gathered for the first time to build a tower as a symbol of our greatness and our unity. There we will roll up our sleeves and work together one more time, communicating in the same language, and we will rebuild Babel!
