Because There Is No Growth

Looking back on my time in the Tower of Babel

A few years back, I wrote a book about the Tower of Babel, as many have. It started during the eleven weeks when I was working in internal communications for one of the largest corporations on the planet. It didn’t go well, and I won’t bother with blame.

Those eleven weeks were so bad that I took to treating each day like a highly specific nightmare, or a trip to a deeply backwards and strange country. Our first daughter was on the way, so I couldn’t quit. I tried to take notes. And somewhere in it all, I felt as though I had glimpsed something.

From that glimpse, I wrote the story of a willing and ambitious communications executive employed by the Tower of Babel, his career ups and downs, and the world in which he lived. I thought I was writing about large organizations, and their endemic failures of communication even when obsessed with it. I thought I was writing about the collapse of language in the face of idolatry.

The real problem at the Tower of Babel

And, for about two years, I was researching and writing about all that. But there was something else that came through, like the uneven surface of a table through a single sheet of paper. There was a more urgent story: The giant tower will not budge even an inch higher.

In the book of Genesis, the tower reaches to the heavens. It allows the builders to make a name for themselves. And it protects them from being scattered.

The tower is only a tower at all because it grew upwards. While it was growing, it validated the efforts and the lives of its builders. But then it stopped growing. And maybe that’s where the terrible confusion of tongues began.

If it was a garden or a cottage or a small town, it could be maintained. But it’s not. It’s a tower. If it fails to grow, that’s a crisis. After all, we said we were doing tower, right? If it’s not growing, then it reflects badly on everyone involved. Some people get nostalgic for the days when it grew. Some say they never liked the tower, and it should never have been built in the first place. There are recriminations and accusations. Everyone gets defensive because everyone is implicated.

It gets harder to be honest. Some people will say that actually, the tower is growing.

Let’s talk stagnation

Maybe I’m just being cranky, but what happened to movies? Didn’t we used to have a music industry? Why are the new buildings almost without exception so ugly? What happened to journalism? Why do I need a username and password to make a phone call, or do nearly anything? How did all this crap get so impossibly expensive?

It’s 2023, and I have an iPhone. I think it’s the sixth or eighth one I’ve owned. And it does all kinds of things. It’s neato.

But I don’t remember exactly needing any of those things done by a pocket-sized object. Like the broader digital world, my iPhone doesn’t do anything very new. It may make things more convenient, but it doesn’t improve any of them. I don’t have better conversations, or take better pictures, or read more insightful news, or listen to better music.

My iPhone and the larger digital world, however, has sucked up all the record stores, newspapers, phone calls, shoeboxes full of photos, letters to friends and so forth. And it’s sucked up the people, too. Everywhere you go, most people are at best half-present, on their phones. In sum, it has left the world a little more barren.

See? Nostalgia and recrimination.

There’s also things like stagnating wages, shrinking life expectancies and a rising tide of depression. This is No Homework, so I won’t belabor the point: The tower has stopped rising.

Any of this sound familiar?

There needs to be growth but there is no growth. So you borrow money and buy something new, and poof you’re bigger. Then you show the world how to grow. Of course, you borrowed the money, perhaps at gunpoint, and probably still borrowed too much. But there it is - growth. And if the math doesn’t add up then you still have enough money to hire a mathematician who understands your vision.

There needs to be growth but there is no growth. So you shuffle the org chart and move some interior walls. You celebrate made-up achievements and deride the primitivity of the past. You raise one tax and lower another and applaud all that newfound wealth, while and criminalizing the poor.

There needs to be growth but there is no growth. So the pickpocket is called a pioneer, the Ponzi-schemer a visionary. And soon there will be labor-saving, rust-free robots - more property protecting your property in an age of unadulterated assets.

There needs to be growth but there is no growth. So you swallow your spit and double down on a world where the only viable quality is what you already have a lot of - say, data. And the bedrock and scree of the human soul can always be reshaped to fit the inventory.

There needs to be growth but there is no growth. So you shift all costs to where they  can’t be measured and then sell the resulting miracle to the suckers. The suckers are the only kind of humans now truly welcomed into the world.

There needs to be growth but there is no growth. So you hold an election and a demonstration to kick up a new cloud of old promises. No one has time to know the past, so it works. And the more it works, the more the broader story shifts from one about a human being moving through the world, to a dollar passing through a global economy or an electron through the logic gates of a circuit board.

How the tower story ends