Technology burgeons exponentially. Spaceships send men to the moon and explore distant planets. Man-made satellites orbit the earth by the hundreds. Computers enable the most complex of calculations to be made in seconds. News and messages by the billions continually travel around the world at near the speed of light. Commercial opportunities crop up everywhere. Corporations wax financially greater than most nations. Trade treaties proliferate. International organizations expand. Scientifically and commercially people learn to speak the same language. The Utopia long-sought by humankind is now within reach. . . But, lo and behold, as people come closer together they find that linguistically and culturally they speak different languages. Despite the best translations, they can’t communicate. Misunderstandings arise. Disputes of all kinds crop up. The center cannot hold. Revolutions and wars break out everywhere. The world-wide Utopia envisioned suddenly morphs into a potential global disaster—The Tower of Babel déjà vu.
“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. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. 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. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.” (Gen. 11:1-8)
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