The Tower of Babel

Many are the opinions as to what exactly happened in the Tower of Babel that so irked Hashem. 

The Medrash spotlights a narrative in which man was less significant than brick, a human being than mere mortar. 

The story in the Torah itself is prefaced by the comment that the peoples of the land had taken on one language; one opinion in the Talmud is that they all spoke lashon ha'kodesh  - Hashem's divine language - and the other, that the seventy languages were all extant, having already spread through the sons of Noach, and becoming the dialects of the world. '

Thus, we are left with the very difficult question, what exactly happened in Babel? And why was it that in the biblical narrative of Breishit, Hashem is constantly intervening in such overt ways? From the flood, to the Tower of Babel, to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Hashem is constantly involved, tweaking his world, re-writing the script, and redefining humanity's role as He goes along. The second question seems to be answerable by simply stating that Hashem was seeking a representative on Earth to carry out His will, and more and more, as the trust grew between Himself and Abraham, it was possible to take a step back, and allow him to plot his own course and carry out the divine message to his offspring thereafter. 

As for the first question -"What went wrong in the Tower of Babel?" - it would seem that an answer could be found in the view that people's discourse was too rooted in the divine, too divorced from the human affairs of everyday life, perhaps hinted at by the Medrash that primacy was given to goals over the people whose lives would be affected in the process. In seeking a higher goal - the divine - the very practical ethic of everyday life was abandoned, in the name of God himself, a message so pertinent with fundamentalism and extremism at the present day. It could be that people overreacted in the wake of the flood, rather than seeking out unity founded in individualism and personal rights, the thinking was to seek the divine by trampling on the unique qualities of each and every person. The only thing people seemed to have in common was a divine root, or source, whereas the failure to dig deeper in learning the nature of one's fellow man was cast aside. 

When Hashem comes down to jumble people's languages, it could be that they maintained their old languages, as per the second view in the Gemorah, but at the same time, lost a faculty, like a vestigial limb, that no longer served to advance humanity's overarching goal, the recognition - and realization - of each and every person's right to seek closeness to Hashem as he saw fit!