Babel and the Simplicity of Being
How often and easily I look back on this moment and self-righteously condemn. The citizens of Babel who longed to make a name for themselves – who wanted to shake their collective fist at God.
Who is it that has not wished to know more, to do more in the plane of activity?
I’d listened to a man the other day speak of the possibility that material existence is caught up in multi-verse from which it might prove impossible to learn the deepest fundamentals of physics and the origin of existence. So human beings might not be able to know everything. A strange but pragmatically progressive view. The harbingers of the end of knowledge are a little uncommon in our time.
Though he didn’t speak QED – Augustine recognized the problematic possibility of a multiverse instead of a universe. However, the anguish of a horizon of knowledge that is ending seems somehow harder to accept in this enlightened, post-modern morning.
It was never the knowledge, really. It was the pursuit of the knowledge. What a person might do with the knowledge. This is what gave meaning. No wonder boundaries on knowledge are problematic.
It’s a part of the chase. My life as a contribution to a greater story. The discover of everything. We are so easily and not unnaturally drawn to this. Perhaps, we were even made for something like this.
Still an alternative remains:
Being. Just being. No narrative. Nothing to see folks.
The greatest curiosity of Babel is that such a possibility is preserved through utter confusion.