Technology and 21st Century Babel

Technology, Part 2: In reaching for the heavens, are we torturing ourselves?

Hendrick van Cleve III, The Tower of Babel.

1 || our programming has outpaced our capacities

It’s 2012 and Dr. Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, begins noticing drastic spikes in anxiety, depression, and suicide among the iGen generation (people born between 1995 and 2012). Rather than being a small blip, they sustained their rates as 2012 turned to 2013, 2014, and 2015. It was unlike anything she had seen before. Finally, she discovered what caused it:

“It was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.”¹

In his book Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein writes about groups and the effect of social media on polarization.

“We are exquisitely tuned to understand and manage our role in the small, necessary groups that defined our world as hunter-gatherers, but we’ve not had long to adjust to the digitized, globalized, accelerated world we’ve built.” A few sentences later he quotes the philosopher Joseph Heath, “When it comes to large-scale cooperation, we humans have clearly exceeded our programming.”²

New research, leaks, and revelations continue to roll out:

• The guy who invented the retweet button watched as it fomented outrage.

• Facebook failed to make public its own internal research that Instagram significantly added to negative body image among teenage girls.

• The breadth of social media means the fears of America’s founders are coming true.

• The business models of these social media behemoths are designed for addiction because the more time users spend surfing, the more money they make via ads. As Johann Hari writes in Stolen Focus, “It’s not your fault you can’t focus. It’s by design. Your distraction is their fuel.”³

Clearly, our programming has outpaced our capacities. Our ability to be limitless isn’t just a nuisance, it’s a mental and public health emergency.

2 || twenty-first century builders of babel

The Christian worldview has a story for this: the Tower of Babel. The world shared a common language and wanted to dine with the gods, so they began to build a tower to the heavens. Just like the snake told Eve in the garden, they believed limitlessness was accessible, and they were the ones smart and sophisticated enough to achieve it.

God saw what was happening and dispersed them by scrambling their languages and sending them off to the farthest corners of the earth. Humankind could not be unlimited; it wasn’t in their DNA.

I’ve spent the past couple of years reading a lot of books and articles on technology and social media, and I can’t shake the idea that we are just 21st Century builders of Babel. All of us are seeking the infinite—punching above our weight—but this time instead of building vertically we are building horizontally—attempting to connect the East and the West.

And, as I wrote last week, American Christians are bred, trained, and indoctrinated to be early adopters, happily building these unlimited horizontal platforms in service of sharing the Good News as far and wide as possible. But are we Divinely designed for that? Is this a part of the Great Commission? Or is this just another way the enemy appears as an angel of light, tricking us into standing on virtual platforms we cannot control?

3 || Pentecost and the normalization of limitedness

The narrative of Babel has a resolution in the Bible: Pentecost. After Jesus rises from the dead and ascends into heaven, the disciples find themselves in Jerusalem surrounded by devout men from the farthest corners of the earth. During this time of fellowship, the Spirit descends on each disciple as a tongue of fire, and suddenly they begin preaching in foreign languages. The people “were bewildered, because each one was hearing [the disciples] speak in his own language. And they were amazed and astonished, saying, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?’”

With the Tower of Babel, humanity tried to ascend; with Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended. With the Tower of Babel, humanity began together but was dispersed; with Pentecost, the dispersed peoples came together. Pentecost was a redemption of the Tower of Babel, revealing that the Holy Spirit brings people together into one family.

However, the Holy Spirit did not revert to pre-Babel by creating one common language. Instead, God purposely chose to redeem diverse language rather than create an unlimited, universal language.

Humanity remained limited, and the only access they had to unlimitedness came through a specific act of the Holy Spirit, providing the ability to transcend language briefly to preach the Gospel.

In this act, limitedness was normalized.

4 || the beauty of being limited and loved by an unlimited God

Just as it’s not natural to speak a foreign language you’ve never studied, it is also not natural to stand on unlimited virtual stages. So what does it look like to embrace limitedness on our virtual stages? A few ideas:

• Preachers can preach to local congregations and still post their sermons online for those who can’t make it to church—the elderly and immunocompromised for example—without trying to “blow up” and go viral.

• Writers can write faithfully and sustainably to specific audiences without aiming for clickbait or polemics.

• Christians can use social media to encourage tangible people in tangible places, utilizing the democratization of voice on social media platforms to amplify those marginalized by society.

And all of this—all of this—can be done under the umbrella of blessed limitedness.

And—with limitedness as normative—we can celebrate when the Spirit uses specific, God-chosen people to preach from large platforms. We can see these moments for what they are—miracles, modern day foreign tongues preaching the Good News to great crowds. May these platforms be specific callings of the Spirit, miraculous intrusions of God’s will, opening doors independent of human cunning or intellect. And may they not be the assumed destination for every Christian on every platform.

In a virtual world shilling out false promises of unlimited access to knowledge and platform, Christians have the opportunity to preach the beauty of being limited and loved by an unlimited God.

1. Jean Twenge. “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” The Atlantic, September, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/.

2. Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2020), 59.

3. Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again (New York, Crown Publishers, 2022), 114.