In Genesis 11, 1-9, the King James Bible reads:
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
In his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe, physicist Freeman Dyson (1923-2020), who was too young to be at Los Alamos but who knew Einstein, Von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Feynman, and Soviet spy Ted Hall after the war, suggests that God confounding the languages so that they sounded like babble to other nations was a good thing:
Naively, one would expect, when an intelligent species evolves the use of language, that there would be only one language. One would expect that the first speaking animals would evolve a fixed structure of words and meanings, as immutable as the genetic code that evolved three billion years earlier. The wise men who wrote the Bible understood that there was a problem here. They created the legend of the tower of Babel to explain why we have so many languages. Obviously they thought, and many people today think, life would be simpler and human relations easier if we all spoke the same language.
It is true that a world with a universal common language would be a simpler world for bureaucrats and administrators to manage. But there is strong evidence, in our own history and prehistory as well as in the history of contemporary primitive societies, to support the hypothesis that plasticity and diversity of languages played an essential role in human evolution. It is not just an inconvenient historical accident that we have a variety of languages. It was nature’s way to make it possible for us to evolve rapidly. Rapid evolution of human categories demanded that social and biological progress go hand in hand. Biological progress came from random genetic fluctuations that could be significant only in small and genetically isolated communities. To keep a small community genetically isolated and to enable it to evolve new social institutions, it was vitally important that the new members of the community could be quickly separated from their neighbors by barriers of language.
I’m not sure I totally believe Dyson’s evolutionary theory of the Tower of Babel, but it makes sense explaining cultural evolution: cultural diversity has its advantages.
So our emergence as an intelligent species may have depended crucially on the fact that we have this astonishing ability to switch from Proto-Indo-European to Hittite to Hebrew to Latin to English and back to Hebrew within a few generations. It is likely that in the future our survival and our further development will depend in an equally crucial way on the maintenance of cultural and biological diversity. In the future as in the past, we shall be healthier if we speak many languages and are quick to invent new ones as opportunities for cultural differentiation arise. We now have laws for the protection of endangered species. Why do we not have equally strong laws for the protection of endangered languages? …
Just as speciation gave life freedom to experiment with diversity of form and function, the differentiation of languages gave humanity freedom to experiment with diversity of social and cultural traditions.
In 1841, the population of the 32 counties of the island of Ireland was 8.18 million, up from 6.80 million in 1821. The typical Irish workingman ate ten to twenty pounds of potatoes per day: a monotonous diet, but one rich in calories. Then Ireland’s potato monoculture was hit by the blight. By 1851, despite a high birth rate, the population was, due to starvation and emigration, down to 6.55 million, a drop of 20%.
When Dyson wrote, English was becoming the world’s dominant language, but was far behind its current status as increasingly the second language of elites most everywhere. And now we have the Internet to spread English and artificial intelligence to translate.
Does the world have enough friction anymore to slow the spread of bad ideas?
I wonder if he extends his theory to the complexity of individual languages and if that reflects the biological complexity/ IQ level of certain ethnicities.
Language complexity is a good topic. The Babel story is profound and consequential, but it's very brief, so it seems it's often overlooked in the vast scope of Biblical characters, themes, and stories.
A couple of observations.
First, I've always wondered -- as have many, I think, over the years -- why languages generally seem to move from higher to lower complexity. If you believe in the Tower of Babel story, then this makes sense. But, from what I've seen, if you ask contemporary linguists this question, they'll generally state that this common perception is wrong, i.e. languages that seem to be getting simpler in some ways will become more complicated in others. Or they'll admit that perhaps there may be some languages that are getting simpler, but that this is only a temporary swing in a cyclical process, and sooner or later they'll re-complexify. It's an interesting issue, and I'd love to learn more about it, if anyone here is an expert.
Second, Babel is important not just because of the language element, but because it represents humanity's ultimate expression of corporate arrogance. The builders of Babel assumed they could order and control the world to such a degree that they could equal -- or even usurp -- God. This impulse is still latent in human nature, and has been expressed again and again in human history. It's been waxing in recent centuries as the world has become better connected by transport and communication; its expressions range from 19th-century empire-building to 20th century utopian ideologies to 21st century techno-driven wokist world-saving. For the latter, whether it's climate change or racism or a lack of neocon-style 'democracy' that the world needs to be saved from hardly matters. All of those involved are suffused with arrogant presumption, and believe they can impose their vision of The Good over others who may not share their views -- i.e. they can 'save the world'.