Building a new Tower of Babel - the view from the top

How many species of birds are there on the planet? When I was growing up, there were around 8,500 or so. That’s a big number, but it was not out of the realms of possibility for someone to see, if not every species, then at least most of them. However, at the time of writing, there are more. Many more. Depending on which authority you rely on, the list is currently around 16,000 and most of the people involved in the counting of bird species believe that this will grow up to 30,000 or so before we have finished.

What is going on here? It is not as if, in the last few decades, 10,000 or 20,000 species of birds never before seen by people have been discovered. What has changed has nothing to do with the birds themselves: the difference is that our knowledge of birds has improved.

A species is a group of organisms which, left to their own devices in the wild, only breed with each other. Once I went to a patch of forest in the South American jungle and saw a bird. We called it a Patchwing. There were lots of them, all with the same size and shape and nesting habit and eating preferences, all living happily together. All was well. Until one day someone noticed that, in fact, the only Patchwings which nested together were those with the same songs. Turned out that, in this group of Patchwings, there were five different song groups, so five different species, who could only be distinguished by voice.

To be a serious ornithologist these days, your ears are just as important as your eyes, because birds are “lingualists”: they discriminate on the basis of language.

So do people, of course. There are many countries which will not accept you as a citizen unless you can speak the local language. Though, like Patchwings, we all come from common stock, from an Adam and Eve, somewhere in the passage of time. And we, like Patchwings, can actually interbreed across linguistic barriers, and increasingly do so.

When it comes to defining bird species, there are fierce debates held between the so-called lumpers and splitters. As the names imply, lumpers argue for big groupings of birds while the splitters head in the other direction and subdivide groupings.

I have two sets of friends who are lumpers. In both cases, one partner is of Asian descent, and the other Caucasian, and they have “lumped” their stock together in their children. All of them, the parents and children, were born in Australia, and so all of them belong to the one lumped group, Australian.

It seems to me that when it comes to ornithology we are heading in the direction of splitting, but that when it comes to people we are going in the other direction, and increasingly becoming lumpers. Extrapolate current trends and one day those groupings of people we call “races”, like white, black, Hispanic, Indian, Arabic, and so on, will for all intents and purposes disappear. Race, as a principle of lumping, was always a poor one, and the sooner it becomes entirely redundant the better.

However, we still have language groups, and counting languages is a way of counting how many groups we fall into. Counting languages produces the same kinds of problems that ornithologists have when counting species. For example, when is something a language or merely a dialect? The linguist Max Weinreich suggested, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. I recently saw a TV documentary about Jamaica and, although the Jamaicans were speaking English, without the sub-titles SBS kindly provided it might as well have been Greek to me.

Nevertheless, we count languages as we do everything else, and by one estimate, there are almost 7,000 languages used today. Of these, 809 are spoken by the 3.9 million people living in Papua New Guinea, which is an average of 4,500 speakers per language. Within the lifetime of my children, for good and ill, the number of effective languages - those which are more than museum pieces - will be reduced by at least half.

All languages are falling to the power of English today, with the Internet perhaps having provided the coup de grace to the prospects of other languages becoming dominant. It is far too early to know this with any certainty, of course, with fully a quarter of the world’s population speaking Chinese, but the direction towards, if not a mono-lingual world, but at least one with a universal lingua franca does seem to be inevitable.

This was the dream L.L. Zamenhof, who designed Esperanto in 1887 as an easy-to-learn universal second language. His vision was that by lumping everyone into a common language group the world would be a better place. English, in all its dialectical forms around the world, seems now to be succeeding where the Esperanto project failed.

Long before all of this, people had of course noticed there were many groups of people which each shared their own language. People of Old Testament times asked the obvious question: why? Why were there so many different language groups, especially since everyone shared the same ancestry that had stemmed from Adam and Eve?

The Tower of Babel story in the Old Testament is an exquisite explanation for the very surprising phenomenon of linguistic diversity. As this thinker of old had it, man, in his hubris, sought to reach heaven by building a tower. Build a tower high enough and we would reach heaven and know God directly. The story goes that God was not enamoured of this plan. In his wrath, to punish the people for their pride and ambition, he destroyed not only the tower, but also people’s capacity to co-operate with one another, so they would not try build another one. To this end, he put people into different language groups and scattered them to the four corners of the earth.

However, we have not given up. Ever since then, we have, in one way or another, been trying to rebuild the tower. And lumping people into one shared language is just one part of our strategy for doing this.

The world’s first lumper of any real note was Jesus Christ, a carpenter’s son, who came of age at a time when the world was already something of a melting pot, with Jews, Samaritans, Egyptians, Sumerians and Romans, among others, all bumping into each other in Judea. He took the view they were all people and should all lumped under the one God, so introducing religion as a second principle for lumping. As we know, other Jews, especially the Scribes and Pharisees, were not persuaded, but the trend of history, if nothing else, seems to be against them.

The next big religious lumper was Mohammed. Like Jesus, his plan was also to lump everyone under the same God, but his overtures to both the Christians and Jews were rejected and, with considerable regret, he turned his prayer mat away from Jerusalem towards Mecca. While he did succeed in getting most Arab groupings to stand under the same theological umbrella, the plan fashioned by Jesus and taken up by Mohammed has never been fully implemented, at least not yet.

Between times, we also discovered a third principle for lumping: for rebuilding the Tower of Babel. This is the principle of “place”, whereby we lump people together on the basis of where they live. We draw circles in the sand, and keep doing this until all the land is in one circle or another, which we then call “states”. Everyone on earth is a member of one state or another.

This idea is profound because it lumps people on the basis of where they happen to live, joins people by shared land rather than - or in addition to - shared language, shared religious beliefs and or shared blood.

If states form the first tier of the new Tower of Babel, the second tier is formed by lumping states together. The very first large lumping of states resulted in the formation of China, about 5,000 years ago. The Roman Empire was perhaps the second, though this fell apart, and is only now, 1,700 years later, reforming under the banner of the European Community (EC). In America, the United States were firmed up after an horrific civil war that concluded just 140 years ago. India and Indonesia are other large lumpings of states, as are most nation states, including Australia.

The third tier in this new embryonic Tower of Babel, being only about 60-years-old, is the United Nations.

The current arrangements are not too dissimilar to those set out in that work of genius, the American Constitution, with its finely tuned balance of power. The current General Assembly is a congress of sorts, the Security Council acts somewhat like a senate; the Secretary-General is not unlike a president.

My own view is that the world will soon follow the precedents set by the EC States and should only be able to join the international community when certain standards are met. Don’t meet the standards and you stay out in the cold, as a part of the international society, but not part of the community. When the United Nations Assembly is formed only by states meeting certain standards, we will have made tremendous progress. World peace, if defined as an absence of war, will at last hove into view. And the standards themselves have already been established, in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

All up, I doubt we have ever had so much room for confidence about our capacity to live together on a global scale. The achingly slow but inevitable disappearance of race as a lumping principle, the emergence of English as a global lingua franca,  the tortuous but inevitable formation of sound international governance arrangements based on place, all point in the same direction. Though religious tensions are great at the moment, the main fighting is between people who believe in one God, and commonsense will inevitably prevail.

Sooner is better. Australia is making its own contribution to the process of lumping - to the building of the new tower of Babel. The horrific scandal of our inhumane treatment of asylum seekers apart, we are actually doing all right on this front. There can be little doubt that Howard’s tendency is towards lumping Australia with Caucasians, so he is for retaining ties with Mother England (no republic) and strengthening ties with Daddy USA (support for the “war on terror”). But we are also deeply engaged with Asia generally, and Indonesia in particular. And our role in East Timor, the Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea in recent times is to be commended, along with our active involvement in seeking reform of the UN. This is a substantial contribution, especially given that we are, numerically speaking, an almost completely insignificant lump. There are barely enough of us to make a modest province of China, India, Indonesia, the USA or the EC. We bat far above our numerical weight, and for the most part, with considerable skill.

Whether one is an ornithological lumper or splitter, the fact remains that all birds are members of one huge lump, the Order of Aves, and every bird alive today is special in its own way. In the same way, every person is lumped with all others, and each of us is unique and so precious. So long as we use this realisation to cement our new Tower of Babel it will, once built, stand in perpetuity. And it is inevitable we will, for there is no other cement that will stand the test of time.

Following this greatest of engineering feats in the history of the world, the question - for my grandchildren perhaps - will be: what will we see from the top of the tower? For instance, might we see God? Or will we, when we are all finally lumped together under the one government, speaking a shared language, on this one planet, still seek a Messiah, showing that the Jews were right all along? Above all, though, we will be sure to ask the inevitable question: are we now able to be happy?