Letter: Towers of Babel in the Modern Era

Submitted by Aaron Arkin.

According to Genesis Chapter 11 of the Bible, the Tower of Babel was built to reach the heavens by a united humanity. God, observing this arrogance, resolved to confuse humanity’s previously uniform language, dooming the project and preventing any such future efforts.

Still, with mathematics the lingua franca of architects and engineers, we have succeeded in building, if not towers to heaven, very tall structures which grace nearly every large city on the planet. This may still be an example of human arrogance, but if God is displeased, He hasn’t made an effort to stop us. To find examples in the Modern Era showing God’s Plan to ensure our inability to understand each other, we need look elsewhere.

Let’s start with Psychobabble: It was defined by the writer who coined the word, R.D. Rosen, as “ . . a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It’s an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems”. In other words it is meaningless jargon that neither its adherents or its audience can fathom or agree upon.

Then there is techno-babble: This label was formed by combining techno- (meaning “technical or technological”) with babble (“continuous meaningless vocal sounds”), and unsurprisingly suggests language which sounds highly technical but is incomprehensible. Now, it’s not as though I don’t enjoy some very iconic examples of this form of expression: I mean, where would we be without Star Trek’s “dilithium crystals” which made possible the warp engine? After all, the Galaxy is a very big place; we need those crystals if we are to go visiting. But most techno-babble is just lazy writing: Fictional jargon held together by the linguistic duct-tape of scientific buzzwords that mean nothing to the writers, nothing to the actors who voice them, and nothing to the audience on which they inflict themselves.

The 21st Century has now brought us Cyber-babble: An offshoot of techno-babble, it manifests itself in detective programs about cyber criminals, their crimes on the World Wide Web, and our protagonists’ attempts to neutralize and bring them to justice. To help convey this form of babble to the audience, we are offered light-shows of flashing monitors, thousands of lines of streaming code, and heroes pounding keyboards as if they were playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2: All the while breathlessly explaining to their cohorts in cryptic cyber jargon what they are up to, why it will work, why it then turns out it won’t work, their options for a work-around, and finally of course, the infamous Plan B (which then sends everyone home happy). Perhaps there is some computer-savvy Stephen Hawking-like presence in the audience who can follow and make sense of all this, but I doubt it.

Finally, the latest iteration of babble-speak is “Puzzle-babble”: Secret-code detective fiction. Typically, the detective (and therefore the audience) is presented with a terrible crime (committed or about to be committed) and some enigmatic symbol or code that if worked out could prevent it or solve for the identity of the culprit. But this symbol needs to be translated into a letter or number which then has to be combined with another symbol-based letter or number to form a word, which then has to be combined with other enigmatic symbols that need to be rearranged and translated into a letter or number to form another word (you get the idea), before finally, revealing its message.

Now, everything needs to be carefully reexamined, rearranged, and put together in the right order to inform our detective what needs be done to prevent disaster. At this point our hero has his (but only for him) “aha” moment: The codes at last reveal the secret that solve the puzzle and prevent the crime and/or capture the culprit. All the while a baffled audience is wondering, “how did we even get here?”

If all this babble is God’s way of punishing human arrogance, He didn’t stop before reaching the realm of politics. Here is where the practitioners of the babble arts create a world that is truly indecipherable not only to its audience but to its practitioners, carrying out God’s vision in The Modern Era to drown us in our own hubris.

Here is it possible to deny ones previous assertions, make completely contradictory statements, or stake out contrary policy positions that are finessed by asserting for example (a) “I never said what you say I said even though you have it on the record”, (b) “I haven’t contradicted myself” (again even though you have it on the record), (c) “My incompatible statements don’t mean that both can’t be true”, (d) “I never said what you said I said because I’ve now moved on to a different subject, and (e) when one asserts something that never actually happened (my personal favorite), “Even though it didn’t really happen, it clearly supports the point I was making.”

So, we babble on: And no longer communicate with any sense of clarity what we are saying to each other, or for that matter, to ourselves. The realm of “political speak” continues to carry on God’s punishment for mankind’s hubris. A tower reaching the heavens will not be coming anytime soon.