The End of Babel

Anyone who is among the living has hope--even a live dog is better off than a dead lion. -Ecclesiastes 9:4

Do you agree with the following sentence?

The survival of the human race is more important than anything else on Earth.

What does this statement mean? It means that the continuation of the human species is more important than freedom, liberty, custom, heritage, country, religion, private property, privacy, etc. There is absolutely nothing more vital than the survival of human kind.

Four thousand million years of Earthly evolution has produced a creature capable of going from horse and buggy to space shuttle in less than one hundred years. For all its faults, Homo sapiens represent the crowning achievement of our little blue planet.

Yet our days as a species may well be numbered. The twin threats of thermonuclear war and environmental collapse pose an unprecedented threat to our survival. We may be the very first species to annihilate itself; to self-extinct. This doesn’t say much for the most advanced life-form on Earth does it?

The twin threats are rooted in ignorance (the source of all fear) and this fear is expressed as violence and greed. Thermonuclear war is the inevitable folly assured by continued reliance on fighting as the way to solve problems. The “good war” (WWII) simply ushered us into a nuclear nightmare. From stone clubs to intercontinental ballistic missiles, the same primitive flight/fight animal survival psychology has dictated human behavior across the millennia. The citizens of the nuclear club nations (that’s us, Americans) are basically saying: “In order to protect my country I am willing to risk terminating the entire human race by using nuclear weapons.”). This is sheer madness. For fifty years now we have been standing at the brink of doomsday. I’m not just talking about a deliberate nuclear attack (the least likely scenario). Remember Murphy’s Law: what can go wrong will. Accidents happen. Is it worth the risk? Crazy people say yes.

As for greed, every tribe on earth insists on its “right” to do as it pleases within its own borders. Stalin slaughtered untold millions to consolidate power. Pol Pot annihilated multitudes of his fellow Cambodians; Kim Jong IL dines on fifteen-course meals while his people starve, Brazil watches while a New Jersey-sized area of its precious rainforest is logged or burned every year, etc.

Babel still thrives today. We remain hopelessly divided by language, culture, religion, and border. Every tribe on this planet, from pygmies in the African jungle to the People’s Republic of China claims the “right” of national “sovereignty.” Every clan wants to be independent from every other; autonomous; free agents—and be able to behave as they please. This nationalistic nonsense is the cause of every war ever fought on earth.

Imagine each “sovereign” nation as a single survivor assigned to one area of a small rubber lifeboat. Adrift on the unforgiving sea each survivor has the right to do just as he pleases within his defined area. If a survivor decides to start stabbing at the rubber raft with a sharp-pointed object then that is his “right,” as long as he does so within his legally established space. Tolerating this dangerous behavior is as insane as the behavior itself.

“Give me liberty or give me death!” Those oft-venerated words of Patrick Henry are utterly mad when applied to the entire human race. If we are all dead then “democracy” and “freedom” and “liberty” and “fair play” and “God” don’t mean a damned thing. Who cares what you died for if there’s no one left alive to care on your barren radioactive planet?

It’s really very simple. As long as humans are alive there is hope of eventual global sanity. When every human is dead there is no hope at all.

Rather than risk killing off humankind to preserve our particular country or cause, we must have faith that eventually the truth will out. That’s because the truth is and always will be the truth...and one day it will manifest. A lie will always be a lie. And the only creature capable of receiving the truth on this planet is Homo sapiens. This is why humankind must survive at all costs—even if that means individual liberty must be sacrificed for a few hundred years.

The human race needs to be managed. The human race needs to be managed firmly.

Here’s what my admittedly distasteful theory proposes:

A World Government established with the ultimate aim of nurturing a planetary population who share a common language, common race, common purpose, and a common sense of ethical responsibility. In order to achieve this desirable state the steady eradication of all countries, borders, cultures, traditions, languages, religions, will be necessary. This Herculean task will take generations to fully accomplish.

The immediate aim of the World Government (initially a coalition of the super powers) will be to eliminate the twin threats to human survival: thermonuclear war and environmental collapse. Abolition of all nuclear weapons and preservation of natural resources will be a top priority. Resistance will be crushed. Petty tyrants like Kim Jong IL will be speedily neutralized and his disaster of a country occupied and liberated. The deforestation of the rainforests and all life-threatening pollution will cease.

The formation of this government will be motivated by the unequivocal realization that this course alone will prevent the self-annihilation of humankind.

I don’t know if this will happen or how this will happen or how many hundreds of years it will take. I only know that I have become convinced that we no longer have time for all the fragmented, ignorant, primitive, and insane peoples of the world to "grow up" and lose their entrenched tribal identities. Not to mention their individual egos…

What if the majority of citizens in the United States, the European Union, China, Russia, and Japan simply stopped cooperating with the comparative handful who “rule” them? I think it’s more likely the global revolution required will come from the masses at the bottom. Those at the “top” are far too addicted to their power and privilege to change. The internet seems a good starting point to start mobilizing. And pain is a good teacher.

Imagine someone who has had countless drunk driving citations, caused untold death and destruction behind the wheel, and yet who continues to be allowed to operate motor vehicles of ever-increasing size and complexity—culminating in a monster rig carrying a doomsday cargo which, if spilled, could destroy all human life. This person insists that it is his “sovereign right” to continue to have a license. Should he keep his permit? Or should it be taken away whether he likes it or not?

The human race needs to have its license revoked. The stakes have just become too great to allow this endless folly to continue. The human race must be forever deprived of certain rights: the right to blow up the world; the right to befoul the world for profit; the right to terminate the lives of everyone on the planet for any “reason” whatsoever.

What the majority of the human race needs is fresh water, a reliable food source, education, health care, and the opportunity to contribute the best they have within them for the betterment of all humankind.

I remember reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World when I was sixteen and being horrified at the total control the World Government held over people. Now, even though I probably would be among the first to die, I see this system as our only hope for survival. The doomsday clock is ticking and we simply do not have the luxury of tolerating the foolishness of Babel any longer.