Quest for The Garden of Eden

Indranil Sarkar
Man’s sorrows and sufferings started the very day when Eve tasted
the forbidden Fruit. God’s plan of making the life of His son(Adam) absolutely
happy in the mortal world suffered a severe jolt from which none of his inheritors
could escape. Man has been suffering from untold pains and agonies all through the
ages. That is why from the beginning of the modern world thinkers are dreaming of
another Eden, an abode of virtue, innocence, love and happiness. A place which is
free from enmity, cruelty, bloodshed and tears of the tortured souls.
In Greek language we find three terms- (a) EUTOPIA meaning “A
good place” (b) UTOPIA meaning “No place” and © DYSTOPIA meaning “ A bad place”.
Now as the idea of another Eden is purely visionary so my discussion will be
totally concerned with UTOPIA .
Our earth was once an EUTOPIA ,a place of love and happiness ,but
our misdeeds have made it a DYSTOPIA. The heirs of Adam can not live in a
Dystopia. So he must find out a better place , another Eden or EUTOPIA. And if it
is not found then he has to make our present world an EUTOPIA by casting away its
present vices. For this reason our philosophers and thinkers have given several
ideas of a perfect UTOPIA or make our present Dystopia into a Utopia again. That
is why we have got a number of UTOPIAN ideas from the pen of our thinkers and
scholars so far. All these Utopias are composed of, at least in part, with plans
of improving human societies. And obviously, these ideas sounded fantastic or
impractical lunacy at the time of creation. Generally the transitional periods of
human history gave birth certain Utopian ideas.
The first venture in this regard is undoubtedly The Republic(420B.C)
by Plato. It was written when Athenian society suffered decay after the death of
Socrates(399B.C) and defeat in the Peloponnesian Wars.
Plato’s Republic represented the ideal city state based on unity,
order and perfection. It was , of course, neither a vision nor a dream but a well
thought agenda for an ideal city-state. In the 4th c. Athens , there were
Timarchy, Oligarchy , Democracy, Republic and Tyranny. According to Plato the
structure of this society was historical consisting of priests, warriors,
artisans, and slaves. The republic showed that the ideal society would be like a
Utopia if it functioned on the principle of justice.
The second venture was undoubtedly the UTOPIA by Thomas Moore. It was a
well guarded attack on the chaotic religious and political condition prevailing in
the 16th c. England. It was written in 1515. More projected his unique ideas of
another Eden in a very different manner but still, the influence of Plato was
undeniable.
The ideal city-state , there, was located in “ Nowhere” . A traveller
narrated a fantastic Tale of an imaginary place named “Nowhere”. The author
described the chaotic condition of the 16th c. England and then compared it with
his ideal Utopian state. The original title was UTOPIA or ‘The Discourses of
Raphael Hytholoday, of the best state of a commonwealth’ written first in Latin
and in two parts. It was first translated into English after Moore’s death by
Ralph Robinson in 1551.
Moore’s Utopia was ‘ the first monument of modern socialism’ In its general
conception and trend , it was in direct succession from Plato’s Republic, though
Plato’s Utopia was an aristocratic Communism , Moore emphasised the principles of
democracy. It was a People’s state, with an elected Govt. .The ultimate control
of the State was mandatory. But Moore concluded, “However, there are many things
in the Commonwealth of Utopia that I rather wish, than hope to see fulfilled in
our Government.“ (His observation was quite right, isn‘t it?)
So, it can be said that it was in part a scholar’s dream of what might
be, and in part a reformer’s dream of what should be. Whatsoever, Moore’s Utopia
has become the basic entena for all future Utopian ideas.
Next comes Francis Bacon. The learned diplomat gave us the 3rd model of a
Utopian state in his The New Atlantis .The typical snobbish aristocrat wrote it in
1626. In writing ‘The New Atlantis’, Bacon did not rely on the fantastic or the
imaginary. His idea was based on the factual or the plausible. In ‘The New
Atlantis’, Bacon described a journey to an imaginary island in the Pacific ocean.
The island was called Bensalem ,an obvious take off from Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
Bacon then described the imaginary ideal social condition based on reason and
rational values. It was an example of the earliest attempt to combine Faith with
Scientific knowledge. Bacon wanted to project an ideal society where science was
esteemed and rational thinking was valued. Bacon presented a new form of social
Utopia relying on narrative rather than dialogue.
The next model of a Utopia is that of Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’
specifically Bk.4(The Land of the Whinwhoms ).Swift, like Moore satirised his own
society (18th c. England) and ridiculed the prevailing social follies. Swift was
disgusted in seeing the dirtiness of the civilized people of his country.
According to him those people were man-eating animals. He portrayed the ugly image
of those people who stayed in the upper and privileged strata of the society. He
viewed the artificial Humanism of his time. He found his countrymen artificial and
hypocritical. They were liars, shameless flatterers and greedy power mongers. So
he magnified Man into a giant and then diminished him into a Manikin. He found his
man wicked and mean; He regarded the people as wise but found them fool. He felt
despaired and turned his attention from man to lower animals. So, in the last Bk.
Of the travels, he discovered a clarity and sagacity in the lower animals before
which humanity grovelled as a creature beastly beyond measure.
The Book started with the travel of a ship’s doctor Martin Scribblers who
visited the land of the Lilliputians. Then his name was changed and he became
Samuel Gulliver. He then, visited three other Lands -Land of the giants, Land of
the Laputans and Land of the Whinwhams(the land of the horses).
He satirised the beastly qualities of man and this became most evident
when he wrote to Pope, “I heartily hate and detest that animal called Man.”
Swift’s purpose was to uphold the basic virtues of human being. His main
concern was to see Man as Man and not as Brute. This purpose placed it in the
category of ‘Dystopia’’- the presentation of the obverse of the ideal world of
Utopian Literature. The Last Bk. ‘A voyage to the Whinwhams’ cleared this view.
Here horses were held up as wise creatures and human beings as bestial. In acute
satiric tune , he tried to awaken human rationality and cast away all the foolish
faults.
In the 19th and 20th century Utopian literature became very frequent.
Extreme materialism, erosion of values, free trade, lassie-faire, rise of
Capitalism and Industrialization with all its resultant evils, led the thinkers to
pen their ideal Utopian State. But most of them often bordered on Dystopian
literature instead of being a Utopian one.
In the 19th C. the first Utopian idea came from the Pen of Carlyle. He
wrote “ Past And Present” in 1843. He believed that only Man’s moral uplift could
lead to Social uplift. Outward material prosperity could not bring Man’s moral
change. So, “ shoot the logic and excel in revolution” he said. He gave the
clarion call to rectify ourselves. He believed that only sacrifice, casting of
selfishness and dedicated work could lead us to the proper Utopia.
Carlyle repudiated the spirit of the contemporary England completely in his
monumental work. “ It is”, he wrote to John Sterling, “a moral, political,
historical, and a most questionable red-hot indignant thing for my heart to look
at things now going on in England”. A medieval monastic community governed by
Abbot Simon was chosen as an ideal society for the materialistic people of the
Victorian age. Carlyle presented , with all the impassioned zeal of a Hebrew
prophet, his denunciation of the many evils rising out of the worship of the ‘Mud-
gods’ of modern civilization. Here Carlyle denounced scientific materialism and
utilitarianism which went along with it. In fine, all the sinisterism such as
Sectarianism, Mammonism , totatilitarianism, imperialism met hammer blows at his
powerful hands.”
 The next 19th c. UTOPIAN fantasy came from the pen of Bulwer Leyton in his ‘The
Coming Race”.
In his Romance of the future , the author described his visit to a Siberian
race that in distant past took refuge from inundations in the bowels of the
Earth. Owing to the discovery of the vril, a form of energy embodying all the
natural forces , this race had reached a high degree of civilization and
scientific achievement. Their country was an Utopia in which there was neither war
nor crime ,neither poverty nor inequality. The inhabitants regarded with contempt
the type of society which they described as KOOM POSH. There Women were physically
stronger than Men, and it was the women who choose their spouses , a custom which
involved the narrator in great embarrassment and finally in danger of life, from
which he was saved by the devotion of his host’s daughter and restored to the
upper regions of the Earth.
(A tendency to maintain the Original Divine social order !)
The next name in this regard is Samuel Butler(1835-1902). He was one of the
most original thinkers of the 19th century. The ‘Literary bad boy of the
Victorians’ gave his Utopian ideas in his famous novel ‘Ere Hon’(1872).
‘Ere Hon’, the anagram for ‘Nowhere’ was a satirical Utopia on Modern
civilization, with its crimes, its poverty and sickness. It fulminated against
machinery and the dependence of man on machinery. The Ere Honea’s ,in their wisdom
had banished machinery, the bane of modern civilization. In the character of the
Ere Honea’s ,there were certain virtues which Butler found lacking in Modern
civilization. They had good nature and were urbane and compromising in their
attitude. Butler wanted the people of his time to cultivate some of the virtues of
the Ere Honea’s, and discard priggishness and bigotry which were considered taboos
in the land of the Ere Honea’s. This was , in reality a fantasy visit to the
NewZeland Wilderness.
Whatsoever, Ere Hon revisited (1901) was a more compact and unified work. It
was largely based on the author’s disbelief on the reaction of the Higgs to the
credulity of the Ere Honea’s who had grafted sunshields on their old religion, and
started believing in the doctrine of Man’s ascension into Heaven.
The next thinker or dreamer in this regard is certainly Edward Bellany.
Bellany was very much influenced by socialist thinkers like Karl Marx and Engle’s.
As such in his “ Looking Backwards”(1888) , we were presented a Utopia which had a
classless society.
William Morris was the next name in this regard who presented two distinct
Books -(1) A Dream of John Ball(1888) and (2) News from Nowhere(1891) Stimulated
by Edward Bellany’s ‘Looking Backwards’ but disagreeing with its concepts , he
wrote ‘News from Nowhere’.
Bellany predicted that when capitalism would become all-embracing ,it would be
taken over by the State without the necessity of any violence. Morris held that
Monopoly would never become co-terminal with society but that there would be
disintegrations and rearrangements accompanied by competitions and wars , till the
revolution destroy the entire system. Bellany held out the promise of a reduction
of labour to minimum; where as in Morris the promise of a reduction of the pains
of the labours were promised. In “ News from Nowhere” , we found again a dreamer
who visualized a classless society. The end of the book is highly emotional and
this had made it a classic in the literature of Socialism.
Next name in this regard was definitely H.G.Wells. His first book of
fiction in this category was ‘The Time Machine’(1895) . It described a contrivance
based on the theory that ‘Time is the 4th dimension‘. Travelling on the Time
Machine we could go back to year 1802 and 1701 when the process of natural
selection had achieved perfection. At that time the human race was divided into
species, a hyper civilized type descended from the leisured class; and a bestial
type descended from the workers. These workers lived in underground and ate up the
elegant , ineffectual ‘Eliot’. Travelling on the same Machine again, we could go
to the Far future where we would find the whole process of evolution completely
reversed. Giant Crustaceans represented the highest form of life. But he hated
Democracy or the rule of the Proletariat.
Among the 20th century thinkers , George Orwell came as the leader of the
Utopian literature. He looked at the future of man and narrated his vision in a
lucid but satiric language. Both ‘Animal Firm’ and ‘1984’ were Utopian in nature.
Animal Firm presented his ideas in an allegorical manner. It was an allegory on
the failure of the Russian Socialism under Stalin. In 1948 while in Jura of the
Scottish coast, he wrote ‘1984‘. Here he presented the horrifying vision of a
totally state controlled human society of the future. Surprisingly, we found a
close similarity of this human society with that of the German society under
Hitler. The total control of human life by the state machinery killed the very
‘Man’ in Man. Our human sentiments were horrified in seeing such irrational
activity. Orwell suggested Democratic and scientific socialism instead of Marxian
Communism. He did not believe in the onslaught of individual interest for the sake
of the so called COMMON GOOD. His Utopia thus, was a place where socialism should
run without hampering the individual interest.
Published in 1954, ‘Lord of the flies’ was William Gelding’s first novel and
it brought him Nobel Prize for Literature(1983). It was his Utopian novel and till
date it is the best of its kind.
It was written deliberately to upset the customary notion that “Boys are
innocent” and that they would behave innocent and admirable even when released
from parental control and school discipline. In R.N.Ballantyne’s Victorian story
‘Carol Island’, the school boys behaved in a most praiseworthy manner when they
found themselves in an uninhabited island. In that story , the school boys rose
virtuously to the occasion. But Golding in ‘Lord of the Flies’, rejected such a
false view. Golding’s schoolboys, victims of a war time air disaster , reverted to
savagery, attempted to sustain the discipline and organization of civilized
beings, gave way gradually , under a perverse leader Jack Merridew,to hunting,
killing,and barbarous rituals. A Christ like boy called Simon was killed as a
sacrifice to the mysterious power of the universe. And then another boy,nicknamed
Piggy, was murdered by one of the followers of the perverse leader.
The story demonstrated “ the end of innocence” and “the darkness of Man’s
heart”.Golding developed this theme in loose analogy with the Biblical story of
the ‘Original Sin’ in the Garden of Eden. A group of boys marooned in a paradise
like deserted island fell to devilish activities instead of remaining virtuous.
They became the followers of Fleis (Devil) and indulged themselves in barbarous
activities. An officer who rescued them at the end remarked in a tone of utter
disappointment, “ I should have thought that a pack of British boys would have
been able to put up a better show than that. Their situation reminded me the
situation in Carol Island”. ‘Lord of the flies’ belonged to an age of
disillusionment and therefore presented the picture of a Dystopia. It even denied
the faith that ‘Human innocence exists in children’.
So, we have noticed the eternal craze of the thinkers of the world for
another Eden all through the ages. There are several changes, modifications,
corrections as well as ramifications to the basic concept at the hand of the
thinkers during the passage of nearly 500 years. But we have reached to a
Dystopia in this dawn of the 21st century instead. Our condition is similar to the
boys of “Lord of the Flies’. And like them, we have no other alternative but to
wait for a messiah( someone like that army officer but certainly not a divine
representative from Heaven) to rescue us from this present day dystopia and take
us to the real Garden of Eden.
*********************
Ref.
1. A History of English Literature by S.C. Mundra and J.N.Mundra
2. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
3.The Literary History of England edited by A.C.Baugh
N.B (Copyright restrictions are followed )