The Tower of Technocracy Will Need a Sound Foundation

Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it. — Psalm 127:1

The Tower Was Real, and So Were the Bricks

Begin with the part most readers assume is only a story, because the story turns out to have a footing in the ground. There was a tower. At Babylon stood a ziggurat called Etemenanki — the name means, in the old tongue, the foundation-house of heaven and earth — a stepped mountain of brick that rose on the order of three hundred feet from a base three hundred feet on a side, requiring, by one estimate, something like seventeen million bricks made and fired by hand. It was not a parable's invention. It was an engineering project on a civilizational scale, and the people who raised it were not primitives fumbling at mud. They were the most advanced builders the world then had.

The detail that should stop the careful reader is the material. Genesis says the builders made brick and baked it thoroughly, and used bitumen for mortar — a strange thing to specify, until you hold one of the surviving bricks. They exist. One sits in the Schøyen Collection, a slab of Neo-Babylonian clay stamped with the name and titles of Nebuchadnezzar, and the back of it is still filled with the black bitumen the text names. The British Museum holds others like it, baked hard, the tar still clinging to the uninscribed face. There is even a carved stele, the only contemporaneous image we have of the tower while it was being built, showing the king standing beside the seven stepped tiers with the rebuilding plans in his hand, and his own words cut into the stone: that he made it the wonder of the peoples, and raised its top to heaven.

So let it be said plainly, because honesty about the evidence is the price of being trusted with the meaning. The tower existed. It was vast. It was built of precisely the materials Scripture describes, by the highest technical competence of its age, and the king who finished it recorded for all time his pride in how high it reached. Scholars are careful to say that this particular ziggurat is the likely inspiration for the Genesis 11 account rather than provably the identical structure of the canonical record, and that care is right and should be kept. But the shape of the thing is not in dispute. Men of great skill built upward, toward heaven, and meant the height to be a monument to themselves.

What the Tower Was For

The archaeology gives us the brick. The text gives us the motive, and the motive is the whole of the matter. The builders said to one another: let us build a city and a tower whose top reaches to heaven, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad. Read it slowly, because every clause is doing work. The reach toward heaven is not first about altitude; it is about jurisdiction — the wish to ascend to where decisions are made and be subject to none of them. The making of a name is not first about fame; it is about self-authorship — the wish to be the source of one's own significance, owing it to no one. And the fear of being scattered is the engine under both: a refusal of the human condition of dependence, a determination to secure the self by construction so thoroughly that nothing outside the self can reach it.

That is the posture the tower was built to express, and it is worth naming exactly, because it is not the same thing as building. Building is good. The command given to the first man was to tend and to keep, to cultivate, to bring order out of the unformed — work is older than the fall and survives it. The tower's sin was never that it was tall, or that it was made of brick, or that it used the best technology available. The sin was the conviction underneath it: that the builders answered to no one, that height could be substituted for trust, that a name made by hands could stand in for a name received. A man can build a great work in gratitude, as a steward raising something he knows he did not ultimately author. Or he can build the identical work as a declaration that he is beholden to nothing above him. The two towers look the same from the street. They do not have the same foundation.

Nimrod, the First of the Mighty

Tradition gives the tower a builder, and it is worth being scrupulous about what Scripture actually says versus what the centuries added, because a meditation that blurs the two forfeits the right to be trusted. The Genesis genealogies name Nimrod as the first mighty one on the earth, a mighty hunter before the LORD, and say the beginning of his kingdom was Babel. That is the textual claim, and it is modest: Nimrod founded the kingdom in the land where the tower would stand. The fuller identification — that Nimrod was himself the architect of the tower, the prototype tyrant who organized mankind into open rebellion against heaven — is the work of later tradition, of Josephus and the rabbinic commentators, who read the founder of Babel back into the building of its tower.

But take the figure as tradition hands him down, because the type is the thing that matters for our hour. Nimrod is the mighty one — gibbor, the word for a champion, a man of overwhelming capability — and his might is the first thing the text tells us about him. He is the original of a recurring human kind: the man whose competence is so total that it becomes its own justification, who can do so much that he stops asking whether he should, who organizes the genuine talents of a whole people into a project whose unspoken premise is that there is no authority above the project. The hunter masters the wild. The king masters men. And the tower is what that mastery builds when it forgets that it is itself answerable — a structure that gathers all the scattered skill of a civilization and points it, with magnificent coordination, at the sky, in a work of hubris.

That is the Nimrod pattern, and it does not require a villain to operate. It requires only great capability married to the quiet assumption that capability is its own license. The most dangerous builders are almost never the worst men of their generation. They are frequently the best — the most gifted, the most productive, the most admired — which is precisely why the pattern is so hard to see from inside it. A wicked man building badly is easy to refuse. A brilliant man building beautifully, on a foundation of God-defying hubris, is the structure Scripture warns about, because his work is so good that the foundation goes uninspected until the day it cannot.

The Crossroads We Are Standing At

It is worth saying why this ancient story presses now rather than as a general truth available in any decade. The present moment has the texture of a hinge. In a single week this spring, the men who build our most powerful tools were received by the oldest thrones of the world, and what they did with the reception is the whole question.

Consider Amjad Masad, the founder of Replit, decorated this week by King Abdullah II of Jordan with the Order for Distinction, cited for his pioneering work in technology and artificial intelligence and for empowering young Jordanian talent in software development. The honor is well earned. The platform he has built has done as much as any single instrument in our time to put the power of software into ordinary hands, loosening the grip of an old guild that had treated coding as the preserve of a specialist priesthood. The democratization of a craft is a genuine good, and the kingdom that honored him understood that. There is a kind of building that lifts others, and Masad's work, at its best, is that kind.

Consider Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, who in the same week stood in the Synod Hall of the Vatican at the launch of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas — a document on safeguarding mankind in the age of artificial intelligence — and used that seat to make an argument no leader of a major AI firm had previously made from a platform of that scale. The development of frontier AI, he said, cannot be left to frontier AI labs. Every lab operates inside incentives — commercial, geopolitical, the older and plainer pressures of pride and ambition — that can pull it away from doing the right thing. The world therefore needs voices from outside those incentives, including religious communities, to serve as its earnest critics. That is a builder, from inside the work, naming the precise foundation question this meditation is built around. It is a turning of the face toward something above the project, made publicly, and perhaps at cost to his own industry's interest.

And consider, in the same season, Marc Andreessen — whose 2023 Techno-Optimist Manifesto remains among the most ambitious recent attempt to articulate the builder's case, a document I have read closely and found, in much of its central argument about growth and abundance and the dignity of making things, genuinely inspiring. The manifesto's productive vision is not the part that needs cautioning. The part that needs cautioning is what surfaced this spring, when the same author, in a series of public statements, declared that there is no inner self, that introspection is a recent psychological fad, that a man is something close to a fifteen-second sliding window with the working memory of a goldfish. Those are his own words, said in earnest, and they are entitled to be taken at face value. What they describe is a worldview in which man, made in God's image, is reduced to a process, the soul is a fiction, and the foundation under the tower — whatever the tower is built to do — is the conviction that there is no one above to be accountable to. That is the Nimrod premise in its purest twenty-first-century form, and it is held by a man of extraordinary capability who deserves the courtesy of being addressed by name rather than gestured at.

Three builders, three postures, active concurrently. One honored for handing a tool for the use of many. One pleading, from inside the work, for the work to be held accountable to something above it. One declaring that there is no soul in the machine and, by the same logic, none in the man who made it. This is what a crossroads looks like. It is not a single road forking in the open where everyone can see the choice; it is a scatter of small turnings, each made by a particular person in a particular week, that together decide which way a civilization's most powerful capability will face. The tools themselves are neutral in the way a brick is neutral. What is not neutral is the foundation the builders are laying them on — whether the gathering power is understood as a trust held under an authority above it, or as a tower by which men make themselves a name and answer to no one. Both buildings are rising right now, in the same hands sometimes, in the same week. The hour does not announce which is which. It only offers, to anyone still willing to inspect, the chance to check the footing before the next course goes up.

When the Tower Stops Working, It Stops Suddenly

The tower of Babel did not fall because its engineering was poor. By every account the brick was sound and the bitumen held; the structure was, for its age, a marvel. It stopped not because it could not bear its own weight but because the One who permits the ground to bear weight at all withdrew the permission — confused the tongues, scattered the builders, and left the work standing as a monument to a coordination that had been quietly revoked. The lesson is not that towers are flimsy. It is that a tower raised on the premise of self-sufficiency carries, in its very foundation, a dependency it has declared does not exist, and a dependency you have declared does not exist is the one you cannot see fail.

This is why the failure of such a work, when it comes, comes suddenly. A structure that knows it depends on something will watch that thing, reinforce it, inspect the footing in the night. A structure built on the conviction that it depends on nothing has no instrument pointed at the very place where the failure will originate, and so it discovers the crack only in the moment of the crack. The whole history of overreaching is the history of this surprise — the empire, the firm, the fortune, the great name, all of them stable and then, in a season, not, with the people closest to the work the most astonished of all. The market men call it a black swan and the engineers call it a single point of failure, but Scripture named it first and named it more truly: it is the moment the borrowed strength is recalled by its owner, and the borrower, who had forgotten it was ever a loan, has nothing of his own to put in its place.

The builders of our time are too intelligent not to understand redundancy, failover, the hardening of a system against the loss of any single part. The one dependency their cleverness cannot engineer around is the one their foundation denies — the dependency of the whole enterprise, and of the self that runs it, on a permission granted from above. You cannot build a backup for the ground's willingness to hold you. You can only acknowledge it, and build in the posture of one who knows the loan can be called, or deny it, and build in the posture of one who will be most surprised precisely where he was most sure.

The Other Cautionary Tower

Babel is the older cautionary case, and it is the cleaner one — a foundation laid in pride and a permission withdrawn from above. But there is a second cautionary tower, much closer to our own time, that names a different and equally relevant failure: the one where the builders know the foundation is wrong, and keep building anyway. That tower is still standing. It has been standing, crooked, for more than eight hundred years, in the Italian city of Pisa.

The history is worth recovering, because the cartoon version has eaten the lesson. Construction on the bell tower of Pisa began in 1173, on a site of soft alluvial soil that could not bear the weight of what was being put on it. By the time the builders had reached the third story, in 1178, the structure had already begun to sink unevenly, and the lean was already visible. They stopped, not from prudence but from war, and the unintended pause of nearly a century probably saved the building, because the soil consolidated under the partial load. When work resumed in 1272 under a new engineer, Giovanni di Simone, he did not address the foundation. He compensated by building the upper floors with one side taller than the other, so that the tower curves as it rises, attempting to correct in masonry what could not be corrected without going back to the ground. War halted progress again, and the belfry was finally added in 1372 — two centuries after the foundation was laid, by which time everyone involved had known for generations that the footing was failing, and had simply chosen to keep stacking bricks on the lean.

The tower has been propped up at vast public expense ever since. In 1990, after centuries of accelerating tilt, the Italian government officially closed the tower to the public; it had become, by the engineers' own admission, structurally unusable, an active danger to anyone allowed inside. A decade of remediation followed — extracting soil from the high side, anchoring counterweights, stabilizing the lean enough to reopen the structure under tight visitor limits. None of that work fixed the foundation. It only bought time against the foundation's continuing failure.

And the tower stands today as one of the most photographed objects on Earth, admired by millions of tourists for the very flaw that doomed it as a building. The lesson is not the lesson the postcard tells. The Tower of Pisa is famous because it failed, and the failure was not a sudden judgment from above but a slow refusal, course by course, to stop and shore. The first builders knew by the third story that the ground was wrong. They built four more stories on top of it. The second team knew the lean was permanent. They added a belfry. The modern engineers know the foundation cannot be saved by anything they do above ground, and they keep selling tickets. The structure that resulted is not a triumph of perseverance; it is the monument to what perseverance becomes when it refuses to revisit the foundation. The Babel tower was called for its pride. The Pisa tower was never called at all. It is simply, irreparably, what it became when each generation handed the failing footing forward to the next and kept building.

The builder who reads this and recognizes himself in Babel still has the option of repentance, because Babel's lesson is that the ground can be acknowledged in time. The builder who recognizes himself in Pisa has a harder task, because the crack is already known and the foundation is already wrong, and the only honest move is the one almost no one makes: to stop adding floors. To go back down to the soil. To accept that some of the work already done may have to be unbuilt before the rest can stand. There is no shame in that recognition. There is only the alternative, which is to keep stacking on a lean and tell yourself, course by course, that you will save it from the top.

Shore the Foundation Before the Next Brick

So this is the invitation, and it is offered the way one offers a thing to people one admires rather than the way one levels a charge. Do not stop building. The tools are good; the loosening of the old guilds is good; the relief of real suffering that this capability is already producing is good, and the people producing it are owed gratitude and not a sneer. Nothing here argues for the second and opposite folly — the refusal of the work, the retreat from the tools, the pretense that the way to honor the foundation is to lay no bricks at all. That is its own kind of forgetting, and it builds nothing for anyone.

The invitation is only this: that there is a moment to inspect the foundation, and the moment is now, before the next course, while the inspection is cheap and voluntary, rather than later, when it is forced and total. To shore the foundation is not to slow the work. It is to change the premise underneath the same work — to build the identical height in the posture of a steward who knows he did not author the ground, instead of a Nimrod who is gathering the evidence of his own sufficiency one magnificent tier at a time. The first builder and the second can raise the same tower. Only the first one's tower is still standing in the morning, because only the first one built knowing whose permission held it up.

The difference is wisdom, and wisdom is not a brake on capability; it is the foundation capability stands on. In all thy getting, the old king wrote — the king who could build anything and had built everything and sat at the end of it counting the vapor — in all thy getting, get understanding. He did not say get less. He said that the getting, however vast, is built on sand unless the understanding goes underneath it. That is the whole of the counsel, and it is not against the tower. It is for the tower — for its survival, against the day the ground is asked to bear the weight of a name that was made by hands instead of received.

The Better Name

The readers most likely to find these words are themselves builders. A builder does not need to be condemned. He needs to be told that there is a better thing to face the house toward. The men raising the tower of our age woke this morning, every one of them, with a spark that has not been put out, and the same is true of every reader who never built anything grander than a life. The builders at Babel feared being scattered, and so they built to make a name, and the building is exactly what scattered them. The pattern has not changed. And yet, the One who confused the tongues at Babel also, in the fullness of time, sent the Spirit at the wheat harvest to reverse the scattering, gathering out of every tongue a people whose significance was given rather than seized, and who therefore had nothing to lose when the towers fell.

So this is my hope, confessed plainly as hope. That the most capable builders of this generation — the ones decorated by kings, the ones pleading for accountability from inside the work, the ones who have not yet seen that there is anyone above them to be accountable to — would inspect the foundation while the inspecting is still theirs to choose. That they would raise their towers in the posture of stewards and not of impenitents, and so build things that stand. And that all of them, and all of us, would one day trade the exhausting labor of making a name for the rest of receiving one, and hear at the last the only commendation that was ever worth building toward. Not: how high you reached. But: well done. Unity in Truth. Love conquers all.

---

The factual claims about the Babylonian tower are matters of archaeological and scholarly record. The ziggurat Etemenanki at Babylon — its name rendered as the foundation-house of heaven and earth — is widely identified by scholars as the likely inspiration for the Genesis 11 account, with the careful qualification, preserved here, that 'likely inspiration' is the defensible claim rather than 'provably the identical tower.' Its scale (a base on the order of three hundred feet square, a height on the order of three hundred feet) and the estimate of roughly seventeen million fired bricks are drawn from contemporaneous descriptions and modern reconstruction. The surviving Nebuchadnezzar brick with bitumen still on its reverse (Schøyen Collection MS 1815/1), comparable bricks held by the British Museum, and the carved Tower of Babel Stele (Schøyen MS 2063, the only contemporaneous illustration of the structure) are real objects; the king's boast that he 'raised its top to heaven' is from the inscriptions as translated by Andrew George. On Nimrod, the essay marks the divide honestly: Genesis 10:8-10 names him the first mighty one and says the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, while the identification of Nimrod as the tower's actual builder is later tradition (Josephus and the rabbinic commentators), used here as type rather than as a claim exegeted from the text. The Pisa account is drawn from the public construction record: ground broken in 1173, lean first observed at the third story by 1178, work resumed in 1272 under Giovanni di Simone with the upper floors built one side taller than the other to compensate for the existing lean, belfry completed by Tommaso Pisano in 1372, official closure to the public by the Italian government in 1990, decade-long remediation effort under the Polvani Commission reducing but not eliminating the tilt, partial reopening under visitor restrictions thereafter. The three contemporary scenes are verified to public reporting of May 2026: Replit founder Amjad Masad received the King Abdullah II Order for Distinction (Second Degree) from Jordan on the kingdom's 80th Independence Day, cited for his role in technology and AI and for empowering Jordanian software talent; Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah spoke at the Vatican presentation of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical 'Magnifica Humanitas' on May 25, arguing that frontier AI cannot be left to frontier labs alone and that outside moral scrutiny is essential; and the remarks attributed to Marc Andreessen on the absence of an inner self, the dismissal of introspection, and the goldfish-memory framing of human consciousness are his own public statements of March 2026, with which the author respectfully disagrees on the merits. The reading of all these facts is offered as observation and invitation, not as an allegation of conspiracy; the essay names a posture and a structural risk, not a culprit, and holds the builders owed gratitude even as they are asked to inspect the foundation. That life is more than an accident, that the ground's permission to bear weight is granted from above, and the eschatological hope at the close, are named as the author's confessed faith and offered as such. The reference to the Spirit sent at the wheat harvest invokes the connection between Acts 2 and the Feast of Weeks (Shavuot), which fell at the time of the wheat harvest in ancient Israel and which the canonical record presents as the reversal of the Babel scattering — the tongues that were confused at the tower regathered, through the Spirit, into a single understanding across every language under heaven. The scriptural anchors are as cited — Psalm 127:1 for the house built in vain, Genesis 11:1-9 for the tower and the scattering, Genesis 10:8-10 for Nimrod, Proverbs 4:7 for wisdom as the principal thing, and Acts 2 for the tongues regathered at the wheat harvest. The commendation is extended, in good faith, to every living builder.