Mea culpa; I’ve been wrong on this issue.
I need to rewrite my stuff about Babylon as a symbol. What I had said was close. The problem I identified is bad enough, but it was not the core meaning of Babylon; it was a symptom. I said Babylon was: “Everything has a price, and that’s all that matters.” True enough, but not deep enough. Babylon is all about mass control.
The morality of control is the problem of dehumanizing. To humanize is to give maximum space to individuality. You matter; what drives you is as valid as whatever drives the next person. To the degree I have any power to influence human behavior on this earth, I persuade everyone to give room to everyone else. Not carte blanche; your freedom to swing your arms should end at my nose. The whole idea is nurturing, not confining; if you don’t learn to quit the wild arm swinging, you’ll provoke someone who can hit a lot harder than you. You are neither a demigod nor a slave. The means to restrain your careless behavior are the means to restraining worse behavior against you.
Human nature isn’t necessarily all bad, but is blind and in need of restraint. It’s okay if you crap in your drawers, but you should know it will eventually create painful blisters on your backside. At some point, I have to let you choose, but I can also choose not to let you sit in my office with more than a modicum of stink. We can discuss all day long what constitutes reasonable restraints on human behavior, but the notion that we need none is manifestly dangerous.
Babylon is the very extreme opposite of balance and reason on human restraint. It demands everyone be forced to serve someone else’s gods and dreams. Never mind what we are building with all that manpower and forced cooperation; it’s the “forced” part that is evil. Babylon imagines a high degree of forced participation offering the excuse that it’s in their best interest anyway. It’s attempting to usurp the place of God in seizing the reins of power; it is man at the pinnacle of his achievements against the Creator.
The counter to this is the proper shepherd feudalism of the ANE. The entire moral picture is grabbing as elder someone too sensible for vigorously enforcing conformity to anything in particular. The shepherd elder doesn’t want or need conformity; he needs peace and stability. Adam’s laziness is the bad manifestation of self-restraint. The shepherd wants only enough restraint to balance between individual freedom and protecting what is necessary for optimal existence. He’s a bigger threat to predators than to the sheep.
Particularly in the West do we see a pernicious preference for excessive restraint and uniformity. This is why Rome was called “Babylon” in the New Testament, because, while Rome was considerably more free than any Western country today, it was still too crushing in demanding conformity to things no government had any business demanding. It was the birth of Western dehumanization. It’s only gotten worse since then.
The business of everything having a price is simply the primacy of Mammon, a favorite human god from way back in time. Mammon represents the primacy of hedonism, in the sense of the means to buy all imaginable human comforts and self-indulgence. However, that is merely the motivation for most oppressive controls. Babylon is the symbol of that oppression itself, regardless of what the silly motivations may be.
Babylon is dehumanizing oppression.
I wonder if the Jewish government from the time of Herod until the Revolt wouldn’t have worked equally well as a symbol of the sort of oppression you’re referring to. Maybe John the Divine was just feeling more pinched by Rome at the moment and it felt nearer home at the time?
Not exactly, though a reasonable guess. The Jewish government, strictly speaking, was the Sanhedrin. I’ve made much of how the Jewish leadership abandoned the ancient Hebrew ways. Having left behind the ancient Hebrew intellectual assumptions, they began applying the Law of Moses entirely wrong. They were semi-legit in the sense of having seized the reins of national government, but utterly mistaken on just about everything that mattered. They were evil, but didn’t follow in the steps of Babylon entirely. The reference to Babylon as a symbol was fairly specific in the sense of destroying the family, destroying the social fabric, offering hedonist seductions and enslaving those who fell for them. You can’t quite say the Sanhedrin were quite that sort of problem. But you are right in saying John was feeling the heat from Rome when he wrote the Apocalypse. If anything, Jewish government would be closer to the Harlot.