The Tower We Keep Building

Section I

The Promise That Keeps Arriving in a New Wrapper

In the spring of 2023, Sam Altman told an interviewer that he believed artificial intelligence would solve problems that have stumped humanity for generations — not merely automate work, but compress, in his phrase, “potentially the next hundred years of scientific progress” into the coming decade. He said it without particular drama, the way one might describe an improvement in logistics. The extraordinary had been rehearsed into the ordinary.

He was not alone in the register, though the company he keeps is less unified than it appears from a distance. Ray Kurzweil, who has spent a career producing predictions about technology’s horizon with a specificity that reads, depending on one’s disposition, as prophecy or provocation, has long argued from something close to a transhumanist framework — that the boundary between biological and machine intelligence will, within decades, dissolve in ways that effectively transcend the human condition as previously understood. Peter Thiel operates from a different set of premises entirely: a cultural pessimist in many respects, skeptical of progressive assumptions about history, yet similarly convinced that death is “a problem to be solved” — a framing that locates mortality not among the conditions of creaturely existence but among the design errors awaiting a competent engineer. Sam Altman occupies a more pragmatic register still, less interested in eschatology than in capability.

These figures differ sharply in philosophy and temperament. Yet beneath their differences lies a recurring confidence that sufficiently advanced technique can address problems once regarded as permanent features of the human condition.

That confidence is not new. It is not even modern. It is, in fact, old enough to have its own origin story.

In the previous installment, The Ones We Almost Didn’t Keep, we examined how a culture’s hidden anthropology surfaces in the faces of those it finds it cannot accommodate — and argued that the Christian account of the human person stands in direct contradiction to every meritocracy that quietly decides some lives are a net cost. The question before us now is upstream of that one: Where did the meritocracy get its confidence? What is the theology — for it is a theology — that tells a civilization it can engineer its way past every limit the species has previously encountered?

The tower, it turns out, is not a relic. It is still under construction.

Section II

Babel in Concrete and Code

The structure at Babylon was not built by people who thought of themselves as defiant. That is the detail most readings miss.

The builders of Babel, as the account renders them, were not impious in any obvious sense. They were organized, technically capable, and motivated by something that sounds, on the surface, like civic ambition: they wanted to build a city, and they did not want to be scattered across the earth. The tower was not designed to mock God. It was designed to solve a problem — the problem of dispersal, of vulnerability, of what happens to a community when nothing holds it together. They would build something high enough that their unity could not be undone by geography.

The error was not engineering. It was address. They asked a real question — how do we secure ourselves against dissolution? — and sent it to the wrong office.

This pattern recurs across the history of civilizations that possessed, in their moment, more technical capability than any previous generation. The philosophes of the Enlightenment who subjected theology, politics, and social organization to systematic rational critique were confident, in many cases, that the application of reason to human affairs would eventually produce a kind of heaven — not through grace but through method. Many of those thinkers would have rejected Auguste Comte’s conclusions outright; the Enlightenment was never a single voice. Yet Comte drew from a shared well when he designed an entire religion of humanity to replace Christianity, complete with liturgical calendar, sacraments, and saints — the saints being scientists and philosophers rather than martyrs. In the following century, the Progressive movement’s faith in scientific management generated genuine advances in public health and labor protection; it also drew, from some of the same intellectual premises, pressures toward the optimization of human populations in ways that the era’s reformers did not always recognize as continuous with what they were otherwise opposing.

The pattern is not technical overreach. It is the recurring confusion of method for salvation.

What is instructive is not simply that these projects fell short — but how they fell short. The Enlightenment’s political architectures did not collapse because the reasoning was poor. Many of the constitutional frameworks they produced have proven remarkably durable. The failure was anthropological: each project calculated without sufficient account of the human being who would operate the system — the one who arrives at every new arrangement of power with the same unreformed interior, the same capacity for domination dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.

The historian Jacques Ellul spent a career documenting this dynamic in The Technological Society (1964), arguing that the defining feature of technical civilization is not its tools but its habit of mind: the assumption that every problem is, in principle, solvable by method, and that the accumulation of method is equivalent to the accumulation of wisdom. Ellul was not arguing against technology. He was arguing against the theology that technology, unexamined, generates about itself.

Roman hydraulic engineering was extraordinary in its ambition and execution. The aqueducts endured longer than many of the political arrangements they were built to serve — which is itself the kind of irony that history tends to produce when a civilization’s technical achievement outlasts its capacity for self-governance. The engineering was not the problem. The problem was what the engineering could not reach.

Section III

What the Tower Was Actually For

Genesis 11 is a short passage — nine verses — and it has been read, for centuries, primarily as a story about pride. The builders wanted to “make a name” for themselves; God scattered them; the end. The reading is not wrong. But it is incomplete.

Babel was not fundamentally a story about technology. It was a story about humanity’s attempt to secure itself apart from dependence upon God. Technology was simply the instrument available at the time. The tower could as easily have been a political alliance, an economic system, or an ideology — any of the arrangements by which human communities have tried, across history, to construct their own safety from the inside out.

The fear underneath the project was the fear of dispersal — of exposure, of the vulnerability that comes with being small and uncollected. “Come,” the builders say, “let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4, NIV). The tower was not hubris for its own sake. It was hubris in the service of anxiety.

This matters because it means the project is recognizable. The Silicon Valley executive funding longevity research is not, in most cases, primarily motivated by a desire to be worshipped. He is motivated — often quite transparently — by the fear of death, by the recognition that his intelligence and his resources cannot negotiate with the particular deadline that waits for him as it waits for everyone else. He is building, as the Babel builders were building, against the terror of dissolution.

The account does not mock the fear. It interrogates the address.

“But God came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.'”
— Genesis 11:5–6 (NIV)

The sentence is frequently read as divine alarm — God threatened by human capability. That reading has always seemed insufficient. The text reads more like a diagnosis: here is what happens when the engineering is excellent and the anthropology is absent. Not “nothing will stop them,” but “nothing they plan will be impossible” — and the plans of unreformed human beings, operating with expanding technical capacity and no account of the interior condition that directs that capacity, have a demonstrable history.

The Apostle Paul, writing to a community in Corinth that was stratified, internally competitive, and deeply impressed with its own wisdom, locates the failure of the tower-building impulse at exactly this point:

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.'”
— 1 Corinthians 1:18–19 (NIV)

Paul is not attacking intelligence. He is attacking the confidence that intelligence, accumulating, eventually becomes adequate to the human problem. The cross confounds that confidence not by being irrational but by being addressed differently — aimed at something that the wisdom of method cannot reach.

“See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.”
— Colossians 2:8 (NIV)

The phrase “elemental spiritual forces” — stoicheia in the Greek — referred in Paul’s context to the basic principles by which the world understood itself to operate: the axioms of power, of status, of technical mastery, of the arrangements that pass for wisdom in any given century. Paul is not warning against thinking. He is warning against the axioms that thinking, when it forgets its own limits, quietly imports.

The moral condition that the Babel project revealed was not cruelty. It was the particular blindness of competence — the inability, which grows rather than diminishes with technical capability, to see what the engineering cannot address.

Section IV

The Variable That the Model Left Out

The sociologist Robert Bellah, in Habits of the Heart (1985), identified a pattern in American civic life that he called “utilitarian individualism” — the working assumption, threading through the culture at a level below explicit philosophy, that the primary measure of a good life is the efficient achievement of individually chosen ends. The problem Bellah identified was not that Americans were selfish but that the cultural vocabulary available for describing human purpose had been quietly narrowed to a register in which certain questions — about obligation, about the common good, about what one owes to those who cannot contribute — had become, not forbidden, but increasingly awkward to articulate.

This is the variable that every version of the Babel project tends to exclude from its modeling. Not malevolence. Not stupidity. The simple, recurring failure to account for the human being who will operate the system — the one who arrives at every new arrangement with the unreformed interior, the competitive appetites, the capacity to use any tool in the service of dominance.

The data has begun to register the omission.

The smartphone, designed to connect, generated a crisis of connection. A 2020 study published in JAMA Psychiatry found that rates of depressive symptoms among adolescent girls nearly doubled between 2012 and 2018 — a period corresponding closely to the saturation of social media in that demographic (Twenge et al., 2020). The causes are undoubtedly multiple, and researchers continue to debate the relative contribution of social media to the trend. But the direction of the finding is consistent with a broader pattern: the platforms designed to address human loneliness appear, under some conditions, to have intensified it. The researchers who built them were not trying to produce this outcome. They were optimizing for engagement. The variable they did not model was what engagement, extracted from embodied relationship and reconfigured into a performance for an audience, does to a social animal over time.

The technology was excellent. The anthropology was absent.

Neil Postman, writing in Technopoly (1992) a decade before the smartphone existed, named the underlying dynamic with a precision that has not aged: every technology, he argued, is also a way of thinking — and a society that adopts a technology without examining its embedded epistemology has not merely acquired a tool; it has altered the conditions under which it asks all its other questions. Ellul identified the theology that technique generates; Postman mapped how that theology reshapes the interior life of those who inhabit it. Together they describe not a conspiracy but a climate — the kind that forms, gradually and almost imperceptibly, around any civilization that has decided its tools are more fundamental than its convictions.

Every serious tradition eventually develops a vocabulary for this recurring distortion in human conduct — the gap between what a tool is designed to do and what the human being operating it actually does with it. Christianity names it sin: not primarily as a catalog of moral infractions but as the structural orientation of the self away from the source of its own coherence. It is the condition that means the human being operating the new tool brings to it the same interior, regardless of the tool’s sophistication. It is also, the tradition insists, the condition that no tool, however sophisticated, is designed to address.

The vocabulary of Silicon Valley’s projects is, structurally, eschatological: “disruption,” “moonshots,” “making the world a better place” — language that describes a movement toward a destination, a state of affairs in which the fundamental problems have been resolved. It borrows the grammar of redemption and reassigns the agent. The destination remains. The source of the movement changes.

What the tradition calls grace, the platform calls the next release.

The problem with this substitution is not that it is pessimistic about human capability. It is that it is optimistic about the wrong thing — locating the resolution in the output of human ingenuity rather than in the transformation of the human being who produces it. The cross is not an engineering solution. It is the address where the variable the models kept leaving out was finally, and irreversibly, included.

Section V

The Steward Does Not Own the Tower

The Christian response to the Babel impulse is not Luddism. It is not the refusal of the tool. It is something more demanding: the refusal of the theology that the tool generates about itself.

Albert Borgmann, the philosopher of technology, proposed in Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) a distinction that has worn well: between devices, which deliver commodities while concealing their workings, and what he called “focal practices” — activities that gather and orient a life around something that requires presence, skill, and attention. A furnace is a device; a fireplace is a focal practice. A food delivery app is a device; cooking a meal for guests is a focal practice. Borgmann was not arguing against furnaces. He was arguing for the kind of attention to what technology does to human formation that technology itself, by design, tends to discourage.

The theological category that corresponds to this is stewardship — a word that has been softened, by overuse, into something that sounds like responsible budgeting. Its original weight is heavier. A steward is not an owner. A steward manages what belongs to another, according to purposes that are not his own to revise, accountable to a reckoning that does not arrive on a schedule of his choosing. The technology a Christian uses — the platform, the algorithm, the tool — is held on those terms. Not owned. Not worshipped. Not trusted to do what only the cross can do.

This produces a specific set of questions that the Babel project does not ask and cannot, by its own logic, generate. Not “is this efficient?” but “toward what end?” Not “does this scale?” but “what does it do to the people who use it?” Not “can we build it?” but “should we, and in whose service, and at whose cost?”

The church that has understood the cross is the community that asks what the tool cannot ask about itself.

The tower is still being built. The ambition is real; so is the fear underneath it. The Christian is not called to oppose the construction but to stand near it and ask, with whatever patience the moment allows, whether this particular structure is being built high enough to reach what it is actually looking for.

The Babel builders were not wrong to fear dispersal. They were wrong about what could prevent it. The engineers are not wrong to want to solve death, to close the gap between human capability and human suffering, to connect the lonely and heal the sick. The question is not whether the ambition is legitimate. The question is whether the address is right — whether the thing they are building toward is the kind of thing that can be built toward, or whether it is, instead, the kind of thing that arrives.

The tower will keep arriving in new wrappers. So will the grace that stands outside it, patient and unchanged, waiting to be recognized as the destination the builders were always, under the ambition and the anxiety, trying to reach.