The Tower of Incompleteness and Incomprehension
Franz Kafka wrote a short story called The City Coat of Arms that was a take on the ancient story of The Tower of Babel. One can easily read it as a cautionary tale with regard to what I call “intergenerational mega-projects”, amongst other things. The basic premise of Kafka’s story is that a first generation decides to build a tower reaching up to the heavens, and then subsequent generations, though they have more knowledge and better building methods, end up postponing the massive construction project indefinitely, building the city around it instead. More work is spent building the city around the tower for the workmen than actually building the tower.
It is a cautionary tale for intergenerational mega-projects, where each new generation tears down the work done by the previous generation, and again the work is postponed indefinitely. Kafka’s story in many ways is the story of human civilization itself. Culture can be described as all that is inherited from one generation to the next that is NOT genetic. It’s the epigenome. Therefore, Culture itself must be transmitted with fidelity across generations. But as we see in the story of the Tower of Babel, sometimes the transmission isn’t achieved, i.e. noise is mixed into the signal, or the signal is “corrupted”.
“ The narrator notes how many different people, from various nationalities had a hand in the construction. The massive scale of the project creates so many logistical and societal complications that it becomes impossible for civilization to ever achieve the original plan, or to even seriously believe in the plan. But the project continues on in an insincere manner, because everybody is too deeply involved to be able to leave.” — The City Coat of Arms, Wikipedia
The following is an excerpt from the parable, The City Coat of Arms (1931). Kafka must have been talking about Prague, since he mentioned the City coat of arms being a fist. The following shows how the “construction plans” get dissipated across generations.
“ So why exert oneself to the extreme limit of one’s present powers? There would be some sense in doing that only if it were likely that the tower could be completed in one generation. But that is beyond all hope. It is far more likely that the next generation with their perfected knowledge will find the work of their predecessors bad, and tear down what has been built so as to begin anew. Such thoughts paralyzed people’s powers, and so they troubled less about the tower than the construction of a city for the workmen. Every nationality wanted the finest quarters for itself, and this gave rise to disputes, which developed into bloody conflicts. These conflicts never came to an end; to the leaders they were a new proof that, in the absence of the necessary unity, the building of the tower must be done very slowly, or indeed preferably postponed until universal peace was declared.”— Franz Kafka, The City Coat of Arms (1931).
What I’d like to point out is the following phrase: “… in the absence of the necessary unity, the building of the tower must be done very slowly, or indeed preferably postponed until universal peace was declared…” According to Kafka, this is what happened with the Tower of Babel, it was forever postponed. The idea, though, that it is postponed “until universal peace was declared” essentially means that the plans will NEVER take place, since universal peace is unlikely to be declared any time soon.
This made me think of self-actualization, of the kinds of equilibrium points that often arise, what might be called stagnation or a “plateau” in self-development. I’m thinking of causal chains with an infinite regress, i.e. I can’t make my tomato sauce until I buy tomatoes, I can’t buy tomatoes until I go to the bank, I can’t go to the bank until I put gas in the car, etc., etc.
The idea of endless postponement also made me think of collaborative projects with endless deferral, which reach states I call states of “collaborative equilibrium”, or “collabrium” for short, i.e. We can’t write the Mission Statement until we write the Vision Statement, we can’t do that unless we have everyone in a conference call all at the same time, and we can’t do that until we email everyone to talk to them about the new projects, etc., etc.
I am also reminded of what might be called The Prison of Nous, or The Prison of the Mind, with our minds constantly working on Life projects.. It could be seen as a form of “inner bureaucracy”. And here as above, we can’t finish the life project until “universal peace is declared”. In other words, we are stuck in a loop, in what I call a deterministic prison-state (“DPS”).
Lifespace and Workspace collide. Is Kafka’s Construction really just a reference to the inner tabernacle? the human heart? What St-Teresa of Avila called The Interior Castle?
“The story can be interpreted as Kafka’s criticism of the layers of bureaucracy that follow projects, as well as his reaction to the changing city he lived in at the time. Kafka lived in Prague, which had a large tower constructed by many workers and large funds yet was condemned.” — The City Coat of Arms, Wikipedia.
Many years ago, I was working on a novel called The History-Project which was about a research project called — evidently! — “The History-Project”. The basic premise was a group of intellectuals getting together to try to figure out why people in the Greater Montreal Region experienced higher rates of mental illness — anxiety, panic, depression, etc. — and suicide. The real premise though is that the History-Project is an abject failure. It was bound to fail from day one, because of scope creep, amongst other things. I was trying to make a statement on large-scale collaborative projects, which often collapse under the weight of their own time and space complexities.
“How often in Kafka, it is here again a story of failure. There is even a double failure. First, the actual construction is not carried out energetically. You lose yourself in insignificant side activities and in human inconsistencies and struggles. Then, as we recognize the futility, one fails again by one remains out of convenience in a torturous uncreative situation and waits for the terminating bang from outside. It is an allegory of the impossible. The frenzy of activity with which the people under ever-changing requirements of his superiors pursues an architectural project for generations, which is not lockable, includes nonsense and hubris.” — The City Coat of Arms, Menim Encyclopedia.
It is true that building methods and related knowledge grows with each succeeding generation. I have a vision of “The Sublime Warehouse”, which is the greatest warehouse that humans have ever built, a thousand times the size of Amazon’s biggest “fulfilment centers” or other distribution centers.
In essence, I have imagined a future where every square foot of free land on the planet consists of massive warehouses, with the earth itself, and civilization, becoming one super-massive “Sublime Warehouse”. It is similar to the dream of building a tower to reach the sky. In this case, it is building a distribution center that is so perfectly optimized that it can get any good to any person anywhere on earth within minutes, maybe even seconds.
As people build the Sublime Warehouse, they find that each new level of capacity they create is quickly used up by the consumers. It’s similar to building highways, i.e. you add capacity, or call it “bandwidth”, and it just as quickly gets used up. That way the fate of the Sublime Warehouse is similar to the fate of the plans for the Tower of Babel, i.e. eventually future generations decide to take down and rebuild the warehouse to fit new requirements, etc.
“ In Kafka’s parable The City Coat of Arms, he writes of people gathering together to build a Tower of Babel. Things go well at first, and planning progresses but focuses on immediate logistics. The planners start to argue, however, about the belief that future generations would have better tools to build with. Paralysis sets in and instead of the Tower, the workers build a city for themselves. Not all parts are equal, and conflicts break out about who will live where, and become violent. They never end, and so the Tower is put off until there is unity, which will never come. The city grows, generations ensue, and people no longer believe the Tower is possible, but they are too settled to leave.” — Susan Erony: Towers and Other Thoughts
Everyone wants all the others to join them on their mission, to help them realize THEIR projects, objectives, dreams. No one really wants to collaborate. They merely want the others to help them out on their projects. They don’t have time to work on other people’s projects, but expect others to help them on theirs. The product is that no one is able to help anyone else. So you get great stagnation. This is a state of collaborative equilibrium or collabrium. They want the many projects to somehow connect together, but no one has time to help anyone else. Only those not trying to work on any projects have time to help others in their projects. So it’s always the same people doing the work, NOT those who already have projects, but those who don’t.
That’s also what I see when I look at Kafka’s retelling of the Tower of Babel. I see people working with frenzy, yet never achieving any level of success, just alway working on “The Master Plan”, never advancing, alway rewriting the blueprints, and then cultural mega-projects end up being abandoned by future builders. This isn’t just a cautionary tale about layers of bureaucracy in Prague. This is true of all cultural or civilizational “mega-projects”, including the life projects of self-actualization. “Universal peace” never comes, and one is always starting over at square one.
A.G. © 2018. All Rights Reserved.
