https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=R5Q9gKmpVyU
Can I ask your thoughts on Brexit? Yes, you can have my thoughts on Brexit. The other day I was doing a lecture on the stories in Genesis, and one of the stories that I analyzed briefly, and this will be posted very soon, is the story of the Tower of Babel. And I’ve been very curious about that story. It comes after Noah’s flood myth in Genesis. What happens is that human beings get together and they decide to build a massive building. And the human beings that are building that building all speak in one voice. And they have this grand vision, which you might regard as a utopian vision, which is what I think it is, that they can build a building so high that within it everyone will speak the same language, and it will reach all the way to heaven. And so you could see it in some sense as an attempt to usurp the transcendent. I kind of read it as an early precursor of the story that Milton told in Paradise Lost, where Satan, who’s God’s highest heavenly angel, and perhaps, and who’s Lucifer, the brightest light in the psychic hierarchy, you might say, and the spirit of untrammeled rationality, decides that he can wage war in heaven and overcome God, overcome the ultimate in the transcendent value. And I read that as a cautionary tale about the pride that goes along with intellectual presupposition, and the same pride that produced the totalitarian states of the 20th century. What happens with the Tower of Babel is that human beings start to build this unitary, homogenous structure, whose pinnacle will reach into God’s heavenly domain, and perhaps thereby taking the place of the transcendent. God gets wind of that and goes to earth and takes the people or transforms the people who are building the building, and who, in principle, it would house into a polyglot of people speaking different languages, and then scatters them all over the world. Well, what I think that means is that if you try to build a homogenous totalitarian structure that usurps the transcendent, it will begin to badly fragment from within. And I think it’s a warning against gigantism. And I think one of the things that’s happening in Europe is that we’re seeing the folly of the idea of too big to fail. What we’re seeing instead is the manifestation of so big it will certainly fail. And I think the reason for that is that there has to be a certain degree of homogeneity within anything that can be categorized as an organization. If the degree of heterogeneity within the organization becomes too extreme, and if the organization becomes too large, then it’s very difficult for people to feel any affinity with it. They’re going to fragment back into their subsidiary identity groups, and those might be national groups, for example, which seems to be what’s happening in Europe. And then the whole thing is going to fall apart. And I have some sympathy for that because I think that it’s necessary for human beings at an individual level to feel some sort of affinity for the power structures that they find themselves in. And maybe being one 300 millionth of an entity is to be too much of a non-entity to feel any real affinity for that structure. So that’s part of what I think is happening with regards to Brexit.