Christianity was one of the most powerful ideologies in human history. Its symbol – compassionate and forgiving Jesus crucified to redeem the sins of the humankind, has changed an ancient mentality believing in fate and destiny to an individualistic approach where one was responsible for his own deeds.

 

This symbol is still broadly present in modern civilization as a cultural icon, without religious connotations, over-used and stretched to fit every possible context, analyzed from various angels; a simulacrum washed out from sacral meaning. Its role of Biblia Pauperum, a reminder of human fragility and embedded evil, fades away being diluted by laic, post-modern culture which recycles all symbols in the scrap yard of history. What does it mean nowadays? Is it just a reminder of our imperfect nature, a contingency of life on Earth and a promise of afterlife redemption for chosen souls, or just another inherited burden of a long forgotten mentality in the evolutionary path to the super human fiasco?

The Tower of Babel (Hebrew: Migdal Bavel Arabic: Burj Babil) forms the focus of a story told in the Book of Genesis of the Bible. According to the story, a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar where they resolved to build a city with a tower "whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth”. The Tower of Babel has often been associated with known structures, notably the Etemenanki, a ziggurat dedicated to the Mesopotamian god Marduk by Nabopolassar, king of Babylonia (c. 610 BC). The Great Ziggurat of Babylon base was demolished by Alexander the Great. A Sumerian story with some similar elements is told in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta.

 

Humankind is building its modern version of the Babel Tower from the pride of its achievements and on the layers of previous mistakes. How much higher can we go in our illusive progress before we collapse and turn our world into rubble?

 

A. Einstein once said that nobody could predict in the 50's that humankind would know so much and understand so little.

Civilization is steadily and constantly strutting forward, cruel and deadly to its lovers like a mantis. We are being swallowed and recycled by its inevitable march, used as batteries to power and fertilize it. Our lives are only vessels, expressions of her will just like selfish memes in Dawkins’ Selfish Genes theory, only in a technological dimension. 

Creating is like removing the veil which hides reality, overcoming the limitations of our biased perception to see what’s behind. Creating is revealing, opening new dimensions to see the same thing from different angles.

 

On a subliminal level our brain collects everything we experience. Like CCTV we unconsciously but inexorably process all information, recycling and reshaping data we incorporate. Like alchemists we mix various elixirs of reality and run it through the machine of our characters to create a genuine simulation of ourselves. Our ideas float until they burst when confronted with reality, like bubbles – for us though, our thoughts are as real as we are. We are unwilling translators, collectors of debris, epistemological archaeologists forever only reaching the truth we have previously created.  

Icarus in Greek mythology was the one who tried to break free from human limitations and fly to the Sun. Brave and romantic but vain and naive from our modern perspective. We prefer comfortable quasi-freedom to futile effort. We are like caricatures, empty shells of the former Icarus   who have fallen into the ocean, protected by rationalism and pragmatism from the unknown and secured in the armour of culture. We just look at the distorted world through broken windows dreaming about the meaning of life from a safe distance.

 

Homo Faber (Latin for "Man the Creator" in reference to homo sapiens meaning "wise man") is a philosophical concept articulated by Hannah Arendt and Max Scheler that refers to humans as controlling the environment through tools. Henri Bergson also referred to the concept in The Creative Evolution (1907), defining intelligence, in its original sense, as the "faculty to create artificial objects, in particular tools to make tools, and to indefinitely variate its makings."

 

We are blended with technology and amalgamated in a junkyard of items we create for our own benefit. They become part of our existence and invade our bodies – advances of medicine make us almost cyborgs, biotech creatures. Do we still control our tools or do we slowly become so dependent on technology that we can’t distinguish ourselves from them?

 

The famous Polish aphorist S. J. Lec said that one day technology became so perfect, that man goes without himself.

Immortality is a paradox – we can’t outsmart biology and the limitations of our physical constitution but we become immortal only when we die. We can be immortalized in the memory of people that knew us, the achievements and legacy of deeds that left footprints among our successors. Immortality is not an extension of life; it’s more like an antidote to a silent and ultimate death.

“Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m'effraie - The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”
                                                                                                                                                               Blaise Pascal.
What if these infinite spaces are not silent at all? What if we are just looking in the wrong direction, blinded by our arrogance and narrow senses? Real stars may be just in front of us, waiting to be discovered and understood but we can’t see them in our haughtiness of obsessed conquerors looking for Eldorado. We turn to stars for answers to our naive questions, limited to only known language and earth-based perceptions but we may be just asking the wrong questions and not understanding the answers we are already getting. We are like children of the universe created by exploding stars who forgot their past and are now lost and helpless. Like Santayana said: “Those who don’t know where they come from and who they owe themselves to will never discover where they should go”.

We recreate the past in our memory, recycle the present and mix it with dreams and thoughts. It is never clean and objective, resting in safety deposit until we reach for it. We always filter memory through our personality – this constantly changing lens to dissect reality. We construct our past according to the current state of emotions, intellectual abilities and associated knowledge, like Midas, condemned to turn everything we see and touch into our own interpretation of it.

 

                                         Aldous Huxley

We’ve been convincing ourselves throughout history that Homo sapiens is a pinnacle of evolution, a goal of natural development, or even watchman descended from Gods to look after all creation. This spoiled us and armed us with arrogance which blinded generations. What if this foolish belief has stopped us from developing, from recognizing the role and place we are given in this Greatest Show on Earth and now we are just monuments to possible glory? What if we missed our chance of becoming something more because we were too self-centred? Life is probably much bigger than we have ever thought and we may be just its side effect, a far cry of possibilities. Our dreams of greatness are merely shades of chances we have squandered.

 

Newton himself often told the story that he was inspired to formulate his theory of gravitation by watching the fall of an apple from a tree. Although it has been said that the apple story is a myth and that he did not arrive at his theory of gravity in any single moment, acquaintances of Newton (such as William Stukeley, whose manuscript account of 1752 has been made available by the Royal Society) do in fact confirm the incident, though not the cartoon version that the apple actually hit Newton's head.
In similar terms, Voltaire wrote in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1727), "Sir Isaac Newton walking in his gardens, had the first thought of his system of gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree."

One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society is a 1964 book by philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

 

Marcuse argues that "advanced industrial society" created false needs, which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought. This results in a "one-dimensional" universe of thought and behaviour, in which aptitude and ability for critical thought and oppositional behaviour wither away. Against this prevailing climate, Marcuse promotes the "great refusal" (described at length in the book) as the only adequate opposition to all-encompassing methods of control. Much of the book is a defence of "negative thinking" as a disrupting force against the prevailing positivism.

 

We are just pawns of ideologies and history on a playground indifferent to our individual needs and plans. We take insignificance and de-humanisation as a norm and sell ourselves out to the chimeras of ideologies we have obliviously created, as if  they are transcendent beings that enslaved us by the sole right of their evolutionary supremacy.

Intuition, feeling or this uneasy hinge that shakes our body sometimes like a short circuit is our biological intelligence installed by eons of evolution and inherited as the experience of countless previous generations. It’s our archetype software, independent of rationality which seems instant in comparison with ambiguous and forever undecided thinking. Are we really torn between our mind and intuition, rationality and feelings? What if these are just two different tools adapted to various conditions, covering each other simultaneously? Our intelligence may be just a natural harness, a control switch keeping intuition hostage in the safe, artificial environment of modern civilization.

Ach, zadumani, zadumani wiecznie

W kroki zegarow, w wierszy kragly lament

W lzy – dzwonki nocy, smutki obosieczne

Ja wiem: te lzy – pol-woda, pol atrament

 

Pod nieba biala korona, pod racami blasku

Drzycie jak kret na sloncu, ktory zgubil droge

Ja mam gest. Ja was wszystkich kupic moge

Za jedno zywe ziarnko piasku.

 

K.K. Baczynki, 1941.

Our “self” is being created on a subconscious level. Identity is a mixture of memories, experience, thoughts and characters of other people, who left their traits in our mind, influenced and fed it with ideas and feelings. “Me” is never singular; it’s a side effect of interaction, a wave function. To paraphrase Michail Bahtin: the main symbol of a modern man is “a grotesque mind”. Surrounded by others we grow with alien convictions and beliefs like a coral reef. We are always between ourselves and others, never establishing fully distinctive beings, like a kaleidoscope assembled from separate parts but pretending to be consolidated. Eventually we lose all references to the environment that composes our Identity. What remains is a personal simulacrum, an encrypted directory without a vantage point.     

 

We also see ourselves in the mirror of our own imagination, more like a projection of who we would like to be, not who we are. Stuck in carefully carved shells to deceive the classifying eyes of the outside world, we create ourselves from the randomly collected debris of other lives. Consciousness is in the eye of beholder.