God, the original counterinsurgency guy
As the author of Surveillance Valley, I’m somewhat of an aficionado of counterinsurgency/pacification technologies. I have also been doing some intensive biblical reading for my novel, and recently reread the section of Genesis dealing with the Tower of Babel. And Babel is a strange story. It’s injected into the Genesis narrative seemingly out of nowhere, kind of at random, and completely outside of the flow of the story. Its function, on the one hand, seems to be explanatory. It provides a mythological foundation for why there are so many different languages and cultures and so many divisions in humanity, when…you know…the narrative was that early biblical people were supposed to be unified under their One God. On the other hand, the story is a warning about hubris. Humans are not gods and should not aspire to be gods. And if we do, all sorts of bad things will befall us. I guess Icarus falls into that hubris warning category and I’m sure stories and myths like this have existed for as long as people could communicate.
Here’s a bit from Babel:
Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.
They said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them hard.” Brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.”
The LORD came down to look at the city and tower that man had built, and the LORD said, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.”
Thus the LORD scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city.
The question is why would this god care? Why would this god limit human ingenuity?Why unity such a threat? There’s something in this story that’s highly suspect…
What came to mind is that this Israelite God is acting suspiciously like a classic imperial power — like the Americans or the British and countless other societies throughout history that have ruled over vast lands by dividing and conquering…by pitting their subjects against each other to make sure no one under their rule is able to organize and challenge them. This kind of divide-and-conquer approach has never been just about controlling foreign territories. It has also applies to domestic populations — to managing your own. You could say that the Culture Wars that are running wild these days in America — algorithmically aided and micro-targeted — are part of this same kind strategy. Americans nominally speak the same language, but the cultural references are now wildly divergent and in conflict to the point that the different sides of this culture war don’t really understand one another, recreating a kind of Tower of Babel situation in which people are kept artificially divided and powerless.
Looked at historically, I guess it makes sense that this divide and conquer myth would be injected, seemingly at random, into the Hebrew Bible. The Israelite God was developed in the shadow of the first big empires in Mesopotamia — societies that, as Miller McDonald described in his book Progress, practiced large-scale bureaucratic parasitism on the people and the land that they ruled. These were the first centralized mega-technological societies and they required a sophisticated ideological system that allowed the many to be ruled by the few…with an emperor or a king serving as a god just below the God or Gods. So it would make sense that this Israelite God would display the same kind of ruthless centralized management system deployed by earthly rulers to manage restive populations. After all, all our gods, when they become systematized and part of a ruling structure, are just reflections and justifications for how power on Earth is wielded. Our gods are descriptive of the time and place they are worshipped. So, yeah, it makes sense that the Israelite God would be a counterinsurgency guy.
—Yasha
Want to know more?
If you are interested in the religion and empire bit, "Kingdoms of This World: How Empires Have Made and Remade Religions"
Is very compelling.
The Tower of Babel story also makes me think of AI. I have been reading Genesis lately also and I am continually struck with how spiteful God seems.