Some general cultural Babel--er, babble

I saw Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel yesterday, and I already know I'm going to want to see it again. But that's not what moves to write about it now.

I've always liked the story of the Tower of Babel, upon which one of the the main lessons of the film is drawn. It's an interesting story in itself, and it's noteworthy that it was chosen as the title for this beautiful movie. The Tower of Babel, so the story related in chapter 11 of the book of Genesis goes, was man's bold attempt at reaching the heavens. Shocked by mankind's hubris, and to spite them for having the effrontery of trying to reach the heavens, the gods tore down the tower, separated the tribes of the Earth in a multitude of different languages so that they would become incomprehensible to one another, and scattered them about the world. In this way, they would never again achieve the level of coordination required to attempt such an undertaking.

Now, despite the fact that I know the above is a fairy tale, I'm not immune to a good story, and being a language nut, the story still has an intrinsic appeal to me. The movie Babel itself isn't so much about people not understanding one another from a purely linguistic perspective. It's not that they can't understand one another, it's that their thoughts and biases are fundamentally expressed differently: they don't understand one another's culture.

And insofar as language encapsulates culture, then the story of the Tower of Babel is in fact not just a tale about the origin of language, but a prosaic account of the origin of the world's cultures.

But that's a whole other topic.