My devotion to Steve Jobs and all things Apple is well known amongst my friends, family and acquaintances; call it an overflowing of enthusiasm, call it a an character flaw, call it disturbing cultish behaviour, it has been an ever-present part of my life for as long as I remember.
I would like to believe, however, that my devotion, while at times excessive, disturbing and verging on the idolatrous, is not ‘completely’ blind. Take for instance last week’s article in the New Yorker on Apple’s new HQ in Cupertino. It doesn’t take a genius to observe that both in terms of size and design, the whole project smacks of hubris. This hubris of course is built into the company’s self-image at the deepest level, from the allusion to Adam and Eve’s original sin in the logo to the incessant repetition of “i” and “me” in all of their products. There is not even any attempt to disguise it through some sort of illuminati-style symbolism.
Yet this latest plan takes this ostensibly ‘playful’ sales pitch to a slightly more sinister place. One of the commenters on the article had this to say:
The single biggest problem with inherently fascist conceptions like ring-shaped buildings is that they cannot be expanded or adapted to reflect the changing realities of the business as it moves forward. Hermetic, self-referential, and essentially super-narcissist, circular shapes always beg the occupants to head for the center and stay there, in stasis. For a company as remarkably design savvy and future-driven, this is an astoundingly bad choice. Whether accidentally or intentionally, they have traded an abiding faith in elegance for an appalling display of arrogance. One can only imagine what the interior design of such a behemoth would entail. Tragic.
Self-referential, super-narcissist, circular shapes. I know where I’ve heard that before. Genesis chapter 11, the tower of Babel.
And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.
(Disclaimer: I will only be drawing analogies here in terms of a general pattern or ‘types’ that we see throughout history, not some kind of final fulfilment or conspiracy theory!)
Shinar is the area that would become Babylon, the original place where people leaving Eden (‘migrating from the east’) feel they can settle and build for themselves a world apart from God. The way they do this in the prototypical example at Shinar is through building a self-referential, super-narcissist, circular-shaped building: the Tower of Babel.
The point is this. All of us are self-referential and narcissistic to a degree. This comes from an identity that is forged out of the twin realities of the exile from Eden and the hope of its restoration. So although our current identity is at heart rebellious, yet we continue to enjoy God’s kindness and patience as we live in his world and enjoy his gifts. In fact our productivity and creativity is usually the result of genuinely wrestling with this tension. It is only when we settle down and decide to cement this temporary identity into a permanent one – a settled eschatological choice – that we enter the realm of major hubris. Building a temple is simply the material outworking of this decision.
Does this mean I am going to stop buying Apple products. Hardly! For I would have to retreat from every area of society where this happens, leaving me locked in my room and consigned to an even worse fate of self-righteousness and delusions of exceptionalism. Rather it simply is a helpful picture of where all of man’s greatest accomplishments lead this side of Eden.
Apple’s brilliance provides hope for it tells us that God’s kindness is holding out still in our day. Yet Apple’s hubris also provides a sobering reminder that God’s kindness cannot last forever, for if even a ‘harmless’ enterprise (despite the rhetoric of the anti-Apple brigade, they’re hardly putting AK-47s in the hands of young children) like a technology company can provide such a scary picture of arrogance, then surely no enterprise of man is ultimately redeemable by his own hand, for his heart will always lead him to settle down in Babylon and build huge, ugly towers.