The Tower of Babel is a Biblical story that describes a community of men attempting to reach God by building a tower that reached the heavens. Because of their ego in this endeavor God scattered man across the world and made it such that no two families would speak the same tongue. It is my belief that the effects described in these passages share a striking similarity to social dynamics that can be observed today.
Diversity of ideals and community are incompatible.
You can hold either deeply, or both shallowly.
Communities are not organizations you sign up for, they are not events you watch, they are not shared activities. While these can all help organize or build community, they are not a community. A community is a network of relationships. How you fit into a community is how you relate with those within it. Community means that your friends are friends with one another. One can belong to several communities.
Diversity is a collection of individuals, largely from disparate social groups, engaging in the same environment. A largely diverse area is thus antithetical to larger communities as even though you may have many relationships and a large social network, it is rare for individuals in your network to know individuals in other networks that you participate in.
Access to more diverse social groups, whether that be through a digital or physical medium, encourages those members to be more antisocial to the larger community; or more accurately the cumulative grouping of every other niche group. This dynamic disables the opportunity for a larger community to exist.
Digital communication networks enable those using them to become increasingly fulfilled as an individual but simultaneously isolates them from their local, real and physical, communities. You have too many options to pick from socially and thus simultaneously never face long term social consequences and have almost no behavioral correction forcing functions.
Likewise, living in massive physical communities (metropolis) can also induce these anti-social tendencies.
This is the Tower of Babel; an endless selection of groups that enables the person to become more and more individualistic, growing their ego massively, forgetting the larger community. A language broken down into the individual level and without a societal social cohesion.
Participating in shared ideals allows the individual to participate in a larger social community in exchange for personal discomfort. No individual's tendencies will ever match that of a larger community when more individualistic, specialized, diverse, options exist that better fit their personal ideals.
Babel was not division but rather a perversion of unity: one people, one tongue, raised toward heaven by their own hands. The scattering was a judgment of that pride. We arrive at this same ruin by an opposite road: not scattered against our will but by scattering ourselves, each into a private tongue. The curse of Babel, provoked without unity, driven by ego alone.
Pentecost reverses this curse. Many tongues, and yet one understanding, not because men built high enough, but because something descended. Babel reaches up and breaks; Pentecost comes down and gathers. The Church is not a better tower. Its unity is not achieved but received.
Religion supersedes the isolation of individual comforts, by enforcing rules for their members. Shared personal sacrifice brings individuals of religious communities together, it bonds them. To reject the sacrifice of religion is to reject the community that goes along with it.
Similarly, any religion without rule is doomed to fail; a house divided against itself cannot stand. No temple, church, or synagogue, that preaches acceptance of sin, of what it defines itself as degeneracy (even if indirectly) or rejection of rule, can persevere.
The longer someone associates with a community, the more likely they are to assimilate. For someone to start their own community is a rejection of the existing community that the individual participates in.
Thomas Aquinas described religion as "A virtue whereby man offers due worship to God." Concisely, a relationship with God must entail worship, obedience, and moral life, but religion itself is specifically the virtue that orders and expresses that relationship rightly.
By participating in this religion, you participate in Christ's community. Catholicism turns no one away. It asks the same of all its participants. The rules it enforces are not a fee for entry but rather the language the community speaks - to be inside is to be learning it, however imperfectly.
When each group understands words in their own way, they may fundamentally agree with other groups while simultaneously not being able to recognize another as an equal. If everyone is a minority, large communities become impossible.
The Minnesotan, the Spaniard, the Nigerian - all Catholics speak one language. This is the antidote to Babel.
In order for a healthy society to persist, individuals must impose upon themselves a strict regimen of discomfort. This Pentecost Sunday I urge you to live with a lower ego and to accept the blessing of discomfort.