Our Tower of Babel
You may remember the Biblical story concerning the Tower of Babel. It is told in the eleventh chapter of the book of Genesis, and Rabbi David Rosen (former chief Rabbi of Ireland) has an interesting ‘take’ on it. The story is, he says, about an ancient industrial collapse, with important lessons for us today.
At the beginning of the story, generations after the disaster of the Flood, the people of the earth are of ‘one language and one mind’ and they get together to build a city tower that would reach the heavens. God is disturbed by the project, which is then abandoned, and the people are scattered across the world, losing their ability to communicate in one language. Why was God disturbed?
Rosen turns to some Jewish commentaries to seek an explanation. They suggest that the project went to the heads of its developers to the extent that they saw it as their supreme value and were oblivious to anything transcendent, higher than their subjective material interest. One commentary even notes that ‘if in the course of building (the tower), a human being fell and even was killed, no one batted an eyelid; but if a brick fell and shattered, they all sat down and cried’. Rosen goes on to say that what this reveals is a profoundly distorted sense of values in which human life and dignity are subordinated to material achievement.
We know what this feels like in the Ireland, the world, of today. Like God’s chosen people ‘we have gone astray’. In important ways we have been seduced by the Golden Calves of wealth and celebrity, and our values have been distorted.
We squandered our wealth, failing to provide ourselves with a good health system, a social service capable of providing adequate protection for children and all those in need, a properly funded educational system, sufficient social housing, a reformed penal system. And now, with unemployment soaring and even comparatively well-off people under pressure to meet mortgage re-payments, we are angry and resentful that it should have come to this. In a sense, of course, we are only getting a taste of what has been the daily lot of by far the majority of the world’s population for so long: but, still, the taste is bitter.
And now we appreciate, like Dives after he died and looked back at his omissions in failing to notice the poor man Lazarus at his door-step, any understanding, any welcome smile, any little concrete help that comes to us in our need. We look eagerly for the ‘green shoots’ of recovery, for signs that all will be well again.
But we need to look in the right place, not simply returning to the kind of infinite-growth model of economics which was neither sustainable nor capable of making us happy. The vision provided by the Gospel, or indeed found in most religious traditions, is more trustworthy, and Catholic social teaching has much to say that is wise and dependable. Our Christian tradition in particular tells us that our dignity as human beings is based on being created in the ‘image and likeness’, called to be sisters and brothers of Jesus Christ. As such, our lives are intimately bound together so we need to strive for that common good which integrates personal as well as communal flourishing; we need to take care of the weakest among us as, rightly, occurs within families when a mother and father pay particular attention to a child who, for whatever reason, is a bit more needy than other siblings.
The venerable devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is about this notion of the compassion of Jesus for human weakness of whatever sort, and we know that the Gospel pages are shot through with this compassion. In modern times this devotion blends with the social teaching of the Church which calls for work, housing, and the basic needs of living to be recognised as basic human rights, which should be the corner-stone of any civilised society.
Perhaps then we need to think in terms of the ‘richness of sufficiency’ (1999 Letter from an Ecumenical Group of Churches in Bangkok to Churches in the North) rather than easily assuming that constant economic growth, a rise in consumer spending and all the more conventional signs of economic ‘progress’ are the way forward? For the sake of our environment, for the sake of justice and fairness both within our countries (think of banks being bailed out while so many private citizens struggle in Ireland) and between our countries (think of over half the world’s population living on less that two dollars a day), we need to look for a new economic paradigm for the future. We can do this by keeping ourselves informed of what is going on, by the way we vote, by the conversations we have, by our prayers, by the groups we belong to – whether in civil society or (why not?) in political parties – by being contemplative Christians who are also active citizens.
Evangelist Jim Wallis would resonate with the Pope’s intention for this month, and he puts the situation well: ‘We’re buying things we don’t need with money we don’t have. My parents didn’t do that. And yet a whole generation has been lured into that kind of behaviour by a culture that says your self-worth is because of what you have, what you wear, how you look…This is how we define ourselves as human beings. And that is a spiritual problem, but it has led to an economic breakdown’. Let’s use this breakdown, this crisis, as an opportunity to move towards a more humane, values-led society of the future.