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Marconi said, "I mentioned my book earlier. The Babel Threshold."
"Yeah. I said I hadn't read it. I usually wait for the movie."
"Try to focus, please. Do you understand the significance of the title? You know the Tower of Babel, right? You went to Sunday School?"
"Yeah, sure. In ancient times everybody on earth spoke the same language, then they decided to build a tower that would reach heaven. Then God cursed everybody on the job site to speak a different language and mess them up."
"Exactly. 'And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men buildeth. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do, and now nothing will be restrained from them. Let us go down, and there confound their language.' It's right there in the text, Mr. Wong -- God's motivation in that story is that he was afraid. He limited our ability to communicate because he was afraid that, operating as one, we would challenge His power."
"Man, I hope you're not about to tell me that all of this shit is a curse from God because we built our buildings too tall. Kind of a flat town to impose that lesson on. You'd think he'd take it to Dubai."
"No. But there is a parallel. Are you familiar with Dunbar's number?"
"No."
"You should, it governs every moment of your waking life. It is our Tower of Babel. The restraint that governs human ambition isn't a lack of a unified language. It's Dunbar's number. Named after a British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar. He studied primate brains, and their behavior in groups. And he found something that will change the way you think about the world. He found that the larger primate's neocortex, the larger communities it formed. It takes a lot of brain to process all of the relationships in a complex society, you see. When primates find themselves in groups larger than what their brains can handle, the system breaks down. Factions form. Wars break out. Now, and do pay attention, because this is crucial -- you can actually look at a primate brain and, knowing nothing else about what species it came from, you can predict how big their tribes are."
"Does Owen have a watch? Because when you told him fifteen minutes I'm not sure if he's going to take that as a literal fifteen minutes, or..."
"We'll deal with him in a moment, but I take your point. The salient issue here is that every primate has a number." Marconi gestured to the crowd gathering outside the fence. "Including those primates out there. Including you and I. Based on the size of a human's neocortex, that number is about a hundred and fifty. That's how many other human's we can recognize before we max out our connections. With some variability among individuals, of course. That is out maximum capacity for sympathy."
I stared at him I said, "Wait, really? Like there's an actual part of our brain that dictates how many people we can tolerate before we start acting like assholes?"
"Congratulations, now you know the single reason why the world is the way it is. You see the problem right away -- everything we do requires cooperation in groups larger than a hundred and fifty. Governments. Corporations. Society as a whole. And we are physically incapable of handling it. So every moment of the day we urgently try to separate everyone on earth into two groups -- those inside the sphere of sympathy and those outside. Black versus white, liberal versus conservative, Muslim versus Christian, Lakers fan versus Celtics fan. With us, or against us. Infected versus clean.
"We simplify tens of millions of individuals down into simplistic stereotypes, so that they hold the space of only one in our limited available memory slots. And here is the key -- those who lie outside the circle are not human. We lack the capacity to recognize them as such. This is why you feel worse about your girlfriend cutting her finger than you do about an earthquake in Afghanistan that kills a hundred thousand people. This is what makes genocide possible. This is what makes it possible for a CEO to sign off on a policy that will poison a river in Malaysia and create ten thousand deformed infants. Because of this limitation in the mental hardware, those Malaysians may as well be ants."
I stared at the crowd outside and rubbed my forehead. "Or monsters."
"Now you're getting it. It's the same as how the crowd out there doesn't see us as human. The way the rest of the country won't see anyone outside the city limits as human. The way the rest of the world soon won't see anyone in this country as human. The paranoia rippling outward until the whole planet is engulfed. This infection, this parasite that dehumanizes the host but is utterly undetectable, it is perfectly designed to play on this fundamental flaw, this limitation on our hardware. That will be the real infection."
Marconi emptied his pipe into the bedpan, and pulled out a bag of tobacco.
"Which brings us back to the Tower of Babel. Humans were always destined to be derailed by this limitation in our ability to cooperate. At some specific point, determined by the overall size of the population on the planet and a host of other factors, we will destroy ourselves. That is the Babel Threshold. The point at which the species-wide exhaustion of human sympathy reaches critical mass."
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That was a excerpt from This Book is Full of Spiders by David Wong.
I am getting a lot a milage out of that passage this week. I brought up Dunbar's number yesterday in macroeconomics while we were talking about Marx's writings, and now this post makes it once again relevant.
I did some research on Dunbar's number, as in I skimmed the Wikipedia page, and it turns out that the number could actually be anywhere from 100 to 230, based off of the statistical error of Dunbar's findings. Regardless, I think the idea is pretty cool and definitely worth discussing.
If I had to pick a second language, it would most likely be Mandarin Chinese because many people, especially in the math/science fields, speak it and it sounds equally badass and ridiculous at the same time, which is cool.
The following picture relates to the book that the above passage was taken from. There is drug in the story called soy sauce that, once taken, allows you to see all sorts of crazy inter-dimensional stuff that is going on in the town. I would definitely recommend the books to anyone wanting a fun read that doesn't take too much brain power to process.
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| Soy Sauce [source] |
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