The Legacy of Babel: A Quest for Global Understanding

The core of human history is a push-and-pull between unity and dispersion. This tension is perfectly captured in the ancient tale of the Tower of Babel.

The Original Strategy: Division Through Language

According to the Book of Genesis, humans, in their unified purpose and common language, attempted to build a gigantic tower—Babel—to "reach God in the heavens." This monumental effort represented a peak of human organization and ambition.

The divine response was a strategy to prevent their unified progress: God confused their single language, creating a multitude of tongues. This simple act shattered their ability to communicate effectively, forcing them to disperse across the face of the earth and abandon the tower. The end goal was clear: to prevent people from organizing and communicating effectively toward a single, potentially misguided, purpose.

The Reversal: The Rise of a Lingua Franca

If the curse of Babel was linguistic division, the modern era has witnessed a surprising, perhaps even "divine," counter-strategy toward re-unification. The narrative suggests that a new force was chosen to reverse the initial dispersion: the British Crown and the English language.

Through conquest, colonization, and commerce, the British Empire spread its influence across vast territories, including Canada, the United States, South Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand. This colonial enterprise, supported in part by the reach of the Catholic Church, was historically complex, yet its undeniable long-term effect was the global distribution of the English language.

While local cultures resisted or adopted the spread of British food and customs with varying success, the language took root. This process paved the way for a modern lingua franca—a common language for global communication.

The Modern Unifier: English in the Digital Age

In the contemporary world, the push for global unity through language is accelerated by technology.

• Technology's Engine: Today, the vast majority of technology, particularly software and the internet, is written and developed in English. Even nations with significant technological expertise, like Russia, operate with languages that lack the broad accessibility and universal adoption of English in the global tech space.

• The Power of Access: English provides the direct access to the digital infrastructure that governs modern life, making it the unavoidable language of science, finance, and cross-border collaboration—a modern-day common tongue for a world that needs to communicate better.

A Final Thought: The Imperfect Blueprint

The narrative concludes with an intriguing, highly speculative connection to the present: the suggestion that important projects are being created in a place like Charlotte, North Carolina (named after a Queen), and are somehow modeled after the "mess in royalty life's."

This final point suggests that if a unifying human project is to succeed, it must be designed with human imperfection in mind. The historical spread of English—driven by an imperfect institution like the monarchy and its colonial past—serves as a strange, messy blueprint. The flaws, scandals, and sheer human complexity of the royal lineage might, in this view, be a deliberate lesson: unity does not require moral perfection, only a shared capacity for communication and organization.

The journey from Babel to the modern world is a movement from unified isolation to global integration, with the English language functioning as the unexpected vehicle for humanity's second, more informed, attempt at global collaboration.

Leo Mora

Oct 19 2025