14 March 2001. It is a marker for one more revolution of this planet around its primary star in the history of the cosmos, a marker arbitrarily designated by the finite beings that are confined to the surface of this planet. Yet for us who live down here with our minuscule perspective filling our universe of vision, it holds hope and meaning.

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote of a steadily progressing, mystical future in his "2001: A Space Odyssey," where mankind was exploring the solar system and once again discovering that there are great and as-yet-unknown powers in the universe. Yet here we stand in 2001 A.D., in reality, still confined to the surface of this planet and waxing philosophical in our creative productions about the hope of mankind and our evolution through technology and social awareness.

I am somehow reminded of the ancient tale of the Tower of Babel, or Babylon, the capital of Babylonia in the Fertile Crescent. In some of the oldest recordings of human history and progress of technology as far as back as mankind can go with our collective memory, we find a story that sounds eerily familiar in our modern day. It tells of a society in which everyone spoke the same language, and agreed together to build a monument to human achievement and unity. They developed the technology, and they said, "Let us build ourselves a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." (Genesis 11:4)

According to the story, God saw this city and tower that men built, and He saw that mankind in unity could do anything it planned, and so He caused the one language to be fractured into many, and scattered the people across the land, isolating the different language groups.

Several thousand years later, we find ourselves in the same place again: communication around the global community is unprecedented, and we create technology that enables us to reach goals that we never were able to reach before. We have made ourselves a name, though it is nothing to be proud of in many ways. We are scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth, and yet we are moving back towards worldwide unity in spite of it. The further we move towards unity, the more that we are able to achieve.

However, in seeing the technological and sociological progress around us, it is so very easy to make the logical extrapolation that we moderns are therefore more evolved than our "primitive" ancestors. I'm not speaking in the biological sense; there is evidence of biological evolution on some level. We are adaptive organisms, living in a dynamic ecosystem on this planet, and there are changes evidenced by our biological responses to our environment. I am primarily speaking in the sociological and psychological sense.

Simply because we have more widely embraced the importance of personal hygiene and the concept of personal freedom does not mean that we have evolved away from the limitations of the scientific and philosophical inadequacies of our ancestors. We may have cel phones, ATMs, laser eye surgery, and psychologists, but at the core of who are as human beings, when we strip away all the technology and the societal structures, we are not really any more evolved than our ancestors who lived thousands of years ago were.

Many people view history as a series of dead dates and occurrences that a filmmaker or a novelist sometimes attempts to replay for us today. The only thing that really separates us from the people who lived through those experiences is Time. None of us could determine the date or location of our birth; what is to say that if we were born a thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent we each would not have done exactly what our ancestors did?

We cannot read ancient texts and history books with the fallacious assumption that we are now so much more evolved into superiority and enlightenment. We cannot assume that all the old stories in the Bible tell of people any less intelligent, cultured, reasoned, studied, and real than we are. There is some general assumed sense in modern intellectual society that ideas contrary to those propounded by the Bible are new and revolutionary and deserving of higher respect than the ideas conceived by people living thousands of years ago. I wonder how many "forward-thinking" people would be surprised to find out that their "new" ideas of sexual freedom and humanism are actually as old as everything else, and can be found in ancient history. If Qoheleth could say 3000 years ago that "the thing that has been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9)," what makes us think there really is anything new in our generation of mankind? Sure, now we have microwaves and a couple of space stations, but who we are has not changed, and no amount of technology or philosophical discussion of the human condition will change that.

The reason that we have such books as the Bible today is that our ancestors saw that what they learned as real and true in their lifetimes of experience was important enough to pass on as guidance to their children, so that we would not suffer the same mistakes that they did. But as a wise person said a long time ago, those who do not listen to the voices of history are doomed to repeat the very same old mistakes that they warn us of. We continue to ignore the voices, assuming that we are better-informed, more evolved, and wiser than they are.

But though I would be hard-pressed to find an intelligent, thinking person who would disagree with the above statement, I would not have to go far at all to find just such a person who at the same time discounts what the voices say. It is not enough to intellectually agree that the voices have merit: they have no power to change us if we do not give them the power to do so. We cannot reasonably expect to avoid our ancestors' mistakes if we do not honestly and humbly heed their warnings and change our own hearts and minds at the realization of their words.

We might be in an age of great technology and progress in human history, exploring the stars and creating new works of artistic beauty, but if we ignore the voices of the real people who are separated from us only by Time, we have no hope of progress at all.

© 2001 Rachel Smith