Tearing Babel Down: When God Stopped Cultural Homogeneity

It’s not that hard to see how different everyone is – just attend a meeting in the office. Different accents, diction (choice of words), mindsets and cultural practices. Sometimes the differences are so vast you question if they are even from the same planet. “Closer to the apes maybe,” you think to yourself.

Have you ever wondered why we would all choose to encourage world-wide diversity over homogeneity? Did we even have a choice?

“What will be best,” I think slowly, “… is cultural homogeneity, or international same-ness, isn’t it? That way, we’ll all always understand each other.”

Or so I thought.

I go online and type in “cultural homogenisation” and the Tower of Babel appears a couple of times.

If there is something you must know about the Tower of Babel, it’s that it was a Tower built to unite all men. However, it was never completed. It’s said that God stopped them short in their tracks. The man in charge of this 10,000 B.C building programme was a man named Nimrod, which means “We will Rebel” (such frightening accuracy). He could have been the first dictator of the old world. He was rallying the people to come together in one voice and one mind, but God intervened before they could invent the crane (as I’d like to believe).

Unbeknownst to them (and apparently to most of us too), the [half-built] Tower of Babel changed everything. God, in a strange bid to prevent something (we don’t know what), mixed up all languages so that the people understood each other the way they understood ant language. In fact, they had such bad communication that they had to move away so they wouldn’t get at each other’s throats. Eventually, they scattered all over the earth: No one likes gabblers, but many gabblers are beyond toleration.

When God stopped them midway in their tracks, the tower became an icon of shame and a symbol of failure to unite all men on earth. What seemed like a harmless hope for perfect unity God saw as a threat to humanity. What’s the big deal? The days of babel are long gone, but this question still begs an answer.

I pored over some readings and writings and I came up with these five hopefully sufficient reasons why we should not perpetuate cultural homogeneity i.e. to have only one race, tradition and culture.

1. Who runs the earth? Perils of Dictatorship

• Think of maniacal Hitler. Multiply that a thousand times over. That could’ve been Nimrod’s reign; a power so vast it can swallow up all four corners of the earth. The Hunger Games is a typical picture of that regime – obey or be obliterated. God doesn’t run the earth anymore, President Snow does. To have a homogeneous society, I’ve learnt, is extremely hard work. It has to be a prescriptive system which finds its balance in shoving orders down everyone’s throats, yet it has to last long enough before everyone commits suicide. If you think Moses’ Ten laws were bad, think about what it might look like if we had another set of laws prepared to govern the entire world. Ten thousand laws should more or less suffice.

2. Not everyone’s gonna like what you say or put into place.

• There’ll always be an unhappy group that you can’t get rid of, and even if you do, there’ll be a mushrooming of unhappy groups who are unhappy about you killing the first group. It’s almost like a game of “whack-a-mole” in arcades where we used to go as kids. No matter what the government does, people aren’t robots without feelings, and that means the government must put up with the likes of Robbie Conal and his political art messages, or Jules De Balincourt’s more subtle ones.

3. You stop growing at ten. “It hinders growth”

• Like a newspaper production house churning out the papers and printing the ink, the structure has to remain the same. Have you seen your boss trying to incorporate change to the pantry? How long did that take?
• Creativity and diversity come with a price, because ideas change the world. Progress and growth stem from innovation and the challenging of ideas. This process of chafing minds and developing ideas will be viewed as defiance to the established and orderly system: “Her entire species has to be eliminated,” says the tired culture-hijacker.

4. A bad game of monopoly

• Scream, “it’s a monopolization! Capitalism! (which of course won’t be invented)” ‘cause that’s what it’ll be if homogenisation ever takes place. The government will control almost everything. It’s like your rights go out of the window when you were born. The concept of indie-ness will not exist. Nor will films like the Lord of the Rings.

5. For the beauty of it, of course.

• Beauty is in the unexpected, and the mystery of it is what enthralls us. You grow tired of something only if you see it too often. That’s what will happen in a dictatorship with no democracy (perhaps the only democracy is having rice as staple food) We’ll grow old faster than we can say the word F-R-E-E-D-O-M. The thing about beauty, culture and art is that they demand freedom of expression.
• Without polarity, the world cease to work. Extremes, differences and variety are what makes our lives colourful. We appreciate and treasure the little we have in common and come to respect and accept the differences.

I’ve thought of one major perk, though. Possible free travel!

It’s better we are alive with our differences than to be united under a restraining order. Of course, we can never have both ways, but a little homogeneity can help too, especially in board meetings.

I guess God was doing us a favour when he interfered with Nimrod’s construction of a grand ladder to a heaven he could never have reached.