Proof that the Babel story is alive and well

Once, nearly all of the Western World believed something along these lines: the historical truth of the Babel story, the dispersal of the tribes, and the resultant birth of the modern nations and languages. During the 1600s, scores of books were written claiming that this or that nation was descended from the only righteous tribe. What is now very much a fringe ideology was widespread and taken very seriously, and is just beneath the surface of many contemporary beliefs and attitudes. It is part of the foundations of the binary framework so crucial to the operations of our culture, and is almost always expressed with very rigid black-and-white thinking:

"It is an existence that functions in darkness - not in light, in error - not in truth, in unrighteousness - not in righteousness, and in godlessness - not in godliness. The end result of this delusion is the absolute damnation and eternal ruin of its practitioner..." [taken from a post aptly called Babelology]

There is a raw persuasive power to this kind of logic. It's like the crocodile, unchanged and undiminished for millennia. Living here in the City, I fear and respect it.