TOWER OF BABEL

Think on this: If you took the last book you read, and then placed the book you’re currently reading on top of it.  Then found a book you read a month ago and placed it on top of that before placing a book you read last year on top of those, and if you carried on piling books, some you’ve read, some you haven’t, going back through more and more and more books (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Crime & Punishment, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lonesome Traveller etc.) you could keep on doing this even before books were invented, and you’d end up by putting clay or wax tablets on top of those until you had nothing but myths and fables and epic poetry. How many ‘books’ would you need for a decent experiment?

Well, I don’t expect anyone to be able to answer that because I haven’t yet said what the experiment is yet. But let’s pick a number out of mid-air, say, a mere 740 million or so will do nicely.

Mere? 

It isn’t easy to imagine a pile of 740 million books. How high would it be? Again, let’s pick a figure out of mid-air and say it forms a tower about 220,000 feet high: that’s more than 180 skyscrapers standing on top of each other. Too tall to climb, even if it didn’t fall over (which it would). After all, it would be about 40 miles high. 

But if you look at them closely, you’ll find that none of the books agree with each other, they’re just conflicting thoughts and theories. What we have in fact, is one huge Tower of Babel: Look, View, Now, Jerk, Tug, Here, There, Rational, Lucid, Swift, Pace, Tempo, Up, Down, Over, In, Out, Where, How, Who, What, Why, Eh? Uh! Clash! Spank! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom, Umpty-Tumpty-Ump! One page, two sentences, a chapter heading, a title! Then, in mid-air, all evaporates! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast …..

Yet every time you pick up one of these books, any one of them, you realise you’re looking out at the world through a different window. Isn’t that marvellous! 

You see, the magic in books is how they stitch the patches of the cosmos together into one single garment, one technicolour Dreamcoat.

….. And here’s the thing, whilst scientists try and do that with a slide-rule and an abacus, books can manage it with nothing more than a combination of 26 bewildered and often surprised letters. Yet Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ (a book I’ve just given up on because it was so boring) upset the Nazis. Jack London’s ‘Call of the Wild’ and ‘White Fang’ were both banned for their radicalism and anti-totalitarian message, which makes no sense whatsoever. ‘The Wizard of Oz’ was banned because of its strong female characters, use of magic, and the attribution of human characteristics to animals, something that’s in just about every fairy tale you can think of. Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’ was banned because in 1929 it was deemed pornographic, despite containing no scenes of a sexual nature.

‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ was banned because in the 1960’s the caterpillar’s hookah was said to promote the use of hallucinogenic drugs, which, let’s face it, it probably did. ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ was banned because the lady had an illicit and rather passionate affair with her gardener. ‘Huck Finn’ was banned because at the time it demonstrated a ‘backward talking dialect’ and, of course, for frequent use of the N-word. ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ was also banned for the same reason, and because white people said it made them uncomfortable. ‘I know why the Caged Bird Sings’ because it promoted bitterness and even hatred towards white people. ‘Gone with the Wind’ was removed from HBO Max because even though it was a product of its time, some felt that the ethnic and racial prejudices portrayed were wrong. Well, they were. They were wrong then and they’re wrong today. But books and films that convey the spirit, manners, and social conditions of a past age with realistic detail are essential. ‘The Satanic Verses’ upset the Muslims. And there’s probably Jews who don’t like ‘Oliver Twist’ because it portrays Fagin as a Jewish stereotype. ‘The Grapes of Wrath’; “A mean, nasty book,” wrote Steinbeck, “and if I could make it nastier I would. I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this. I've done my damnedest to rip a reader's nerves to rags.” The book was burned and banned from libraries, and do you know why? Because they were displeased with the book's depiction of California farmers' conduct toward the migrants from Oklahoma (the Okies). Who would have thought it? ‘The Tortilla Curtain’ (a cracking book) upset rich Americans because it demonstrated their intolerance towards Mexicans. And wait until my latest book, ‘Marching Through Madness’, is banned simply because I’ve told the truth in it. Seriously, I’m waiting for the knock on the door any night now. Or perhaps they’ll ban ‘Sleeping Beauty’ because it involves a non-consensual kiss on the lips.

Don't join the book burners,’ said Dwight D. Eisenhower, ‘Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book,

You see, nowadays nobody’s taught how to think. We’re just taught what to think. 

But people like you and me celebrate meaningful and enigmatic ideas. We paint the town red with our ideas! We often write, and that causes problems for them. Our thinking never accepts just one explanation or surrenders to one truth or authority. Our minds simply take off in a different direction. Our character assassinations of the world around us distress those who brandish cultural, academic, religious and political power.

We’ve taught our minds to misbehave …. And that has made all the difference.

Freethinkers like us clearly have a tendency to worry the powerful and influential, so they are very keen to keep us inside the tent pissing out as opposed to outside the tent pissing in, so to speak.

The truly dangerous freethinkers, the free spirits like you and me, know that the closer we come to power, the harder it becomes to speak our truth because the ideology of those at the top of the pyramid is being pumped into the soft heads of university students without being challenged by the freethinkers. And you know what happens then? Those people accept restrictions on free speech, meaning they haven’t been educated at all, they’ve been indoctrinated! They leave university so chock full of facts (Which country has the highest life expectancy How many faces does a Dodecahedron have? Where would you be if you were standing on the Spanish Steps?) that they feel stuffed, but absolutely sparkling with information. 

If I were to study anything now, and I’m more and more tempted, it would be the slippery stuff where there’s no direct answer. Philosophy, for instance. 

As I grow up and develop my own philosophy, and as I look at the ubiquitous Tower of Babel, I realise to an increasing degree that I don’t want to know how something is done. I’m not interested in that at all. I just want to know why. 

The problem isn’t that these university kids aren’t educated. Oh, they’re educated alright, but the problem is that they’re educated just enough to believe what they’ve been taught, and not enough to question what they’ve been taught.

And that particularly holds true with politics and current affairs. Whenever there’s a big story in the media, I always start looking for the story they’re trying to distract us from. Instead of discussing what they’ve told me to discuss, I ask why this is happening. I know they’re allowing very lively debate within a limited spectrum of ‘acceptable’ opinion, and once that’s clear I know to ask the right questions.

The Media: Biden and Starmer have authorised Ukraine to use US & UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles against Russia for the very first time, and Putin could respond by starting WW3

Me: Splendid, now let’s see Epstein’s client list

Copyright © Karl Wiggins