Chasing Eden: On the Present Age and the Possibility of Humanity

“The difference between Aleister Crowley and Richard Dawkins is that Crowley had enough self-knowledge to see where his path was leading. It’s why he called himself ‘The Great Beast 666.’ It’s why his books talk of magic as ‘new science’, and are full of talk of ‘mastery’ over powers natural and supernatural. Crowley was Faust, and Faust is us.”

– Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth

Last fall, Paul Kingsnorth’s disturbingly insightful Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity was released, and since then it has enjoyed praise from various large national journals as well as a snug place on the NYT’s best sellers list. I imagine that Kingsnorth has been a bit surprised by the book’s success, given that it attacks dearly held principles on either side of the political aisle and openly condemns the electronic devices on which everyone spends so much time each day. He undergirds his premise, that the system of the Machine is the (un)natural heir to a hyperrational West, with a conviction that the West has sought to bend all things to its will, that chemistry goes hand in hand with alchemy, science with the occult. Our only law: Do what thou wilt.

Before we rise to the West’s defense, given the many goods Christendom and science have bestowed on us, consider our present condition. It is true that I write with the convenience of a laptop, with search engines at the ready should I forget the precise word I want, and without the inconveniences of cutting a quill or blotting the ink. I sit in my air-conditioned house, enjoying the benefits of indoor plumbing on a stormy day. Much of my life has been shaped by modern medicine. That’s all very well. But what of the West’s unique and rather unprecedented horrors?

I doubt I need to cite for you the ways screens have been shown to narrow our attention and to corrode the brains of our children; read Screen Damage by Michel Desmurget if you like. Dare I remind you of the number of children and young adults who are anxious and lonely, or who have committed mass murders and assassinations, or who have requested permanent, life-altering surgeries before they are old enough to drive? And with the advent of AI and its widespread use, it seems increasingly necessary to wonder just how many people are restless and dissatisfied enough to hand over their humanity to machines, for convenience or for progress’s sake.

One of Kingsnorth’s questions is whether it is possible for us to live fully human lives in this age. Mine is whether it has ever been possible to live a fully human life. The answer is: yes, once. Once, a very long time ago, when man and woman lived in a garden and walked with God. Ever since then, we have been telling ourselves myths and stories that offer glimpses of those first days. We have been haunted by beauty, beauty that tells us of the world we left behind. Each person at his best tries to make an Eden of his life. He seeks to become fully human again. We become as fully human as we can, for now, by dwelling, by storytelling, by loving beauty, by allowing our hearts to be shaped, and by shaping our bit of earth given to us.

Every person discovers that he is haunted by beauty in his own way, and a love story unfolds. I’ll illustrate my argument with my own love story, as it is ready to hand and a bit unusual.

“It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside—but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond—only a glimpse—and heard a note of unearthly music.”

– Emily of New Moon, L. M. Montgomery

Once upon a time, there was a girl who learned what it was to be human by reading books. Her father was far away fighting a war in a desert place; her mother was busy with her brothers and sisters, who were experiencing their own trials and journeys. Because her family was often moved by the army and because she was homeschooled, she knew few people her own age. Sometimes she was lonely. But whenever she felt loneliest, she could turn to her oldest and dearest friends: Montgomery, Austen, Lewis, and Tolkien; compendia of fairytales; Longfellow and Shel Silverstein; Beowulf and the Nibelungs. It proved one of the strangest and best educations a child could receive.

My parents never told me to believe in Santa Claus, and I didn’t. I believed that Father Christmas presided over Christmas dinner, that dryads had once danced in the wood, that the elves had closed most of the doors into the otherworld. I did not think ghosts were real, but I knew about souls and shades. I thought that people were real—immortal souls in mortal flesh, one step lower than the angels—and that they mattered. Only a man could have slain Grendel. Only a girl could have softened Darcy’s heart. Most of all, I believed in beauty.

I held all that in my heart, but I was no fool. I knew what the world was. My father brought home stories of blood and battle less human than anything in a book, and previous to him, on my mother’s side, I come from a long line of women who have chosen to become one flesh with violent and bad-tempered men.

For as long as I can remember the world had been presenting me with dragons, only it did not call them dragons but “human nature” and “the way things are.” Myths and stories named the darkness witch or dragon or Sauron, but they did not stop there. As Chesterton quipped, they provided a St. George to kill the dragon. They spoke of the Pevensie children and of Aragorn, of women who would travel east of the sun and west of the moon for their love, of Odysseus battling his way home against the wrath of gods. They spoke of pain and of salvation.

That is the essence of every good story and myth, and if story and myth have been totally separated in our modern minds, it has been to our detriment. In some way, they all retell the Great Story, the One True Myth, heartening the heart and reminding the mind that humanity has yet to see the end of the story and to kneel before that myth. They orient a person away from what he wills and toward what has been willed. Thus, they instruct a person in his humanity.

The first step to recovering our humanity is to recover our stories.

“But giants, dragons, paradises, gods, and the like are themselves the expressions of certain basic elements in man’s spiritual experience. In that sense they are more like words—words of a language which speaks the else unspeakable—than they are like the people and places in a novel.”

– A Preface to Paradise Lost, C. S. Lewis

Kingsnorth gives a grim prognosis: “The West must die.” Argue about that prescription if you will, but his diagnosis of something fatal undoing our health, our bodies, our humanity, is surely correct. Every Western person now lives in a pseudo-culture that teaches him one law, “Do what thou wilt.” Perhaps Philip Rieff’s anti-culture would be a more accurate term. Culture requires cooperation, seeking your neighbor’s good as well as your own; culture presupposes such a thing as goodness.

Myth and story rechristen us by the nature of their language. In his preface to Barfield’s History in English Words, Auden distinguishes two sorts of language:

We use words for two quite different purposes; [the first] as a code of communication whereby, as individual members of the human race, we can request and supply information necessary to life, and [the second] as Speech in the true sense, the medium in which, as unique persons who think in the first and second person singular, we gratuitously disclose ourselves to each other and share our experiences.

The first sort, which supplies encodable information for purposes of survival, we might call the language of the animal; indeed Auden compares it to that later on. The second we might call the language of the divine or the language of poetry. Gratuitous, revelatory, and irreducible to code, it is a language that can only be spoken by persons of persons; its essence is communion. The many languages of humanity move between these two sorts of speech, between the animal and the divine.

Myth and story fly with Hermes’ sandals between the animal and the divine, often revealing or illuminating the divine within the everyday, the mundane, the animal. Almost all of them, from Jack and his beanstalk to Cinderella and from Aeneas to Dr. Rhyland Grace, boil down to tales of survival or mating, but in them, marriage becomes romance, and survival bows subservient to truth, goodness, and beauty, to things worth living for. They inform our sensibilities—that is, form them by Form, by the eternal—and having transformed us, send us to do our work and live more fully.

Following on the heels of Kingsnorth’s manifesto, Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild appeared. It was recommended to me by a friend who shares a similar love of all things odd, delightful, and mystical, and when I read the blurb I bought it right away. Kingsnorth ends his manifesto by asking how we can get home. Martin replies with his own book, in which he hopes myths will lead us home:

Myths are north stars to a culture deserving of the name, culture coming from Latin, colere, which means to till the ground. To make a culture you dig down into a story. That story needs to be robust enough to explain a few things whilst also accommodating mystery. Myths hold together heaven and earth, they are a crossroads between the timeless and the time-bound. Myths are connecting tissue between us and the universe. . . . They make luminous.

“‘My dear young lady,’ said the Professor, suddenly looking up with a very sharp expression at both of them, ‘there is one plan which no one has yet suggested and which is well worth trying.’

‘What’s that?’ said Susan.

‘We might all try minding our own business,’ said he. And that was the end of that conversation.” – The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis

Believing in myths and telling ourselves stories is one thing. It’s quite another to participate in them.

Kingsnorth offers a diagnosis of the West; Shaw, a handbook for the layperson looking to dip his toes into the language of myth. I mean to now offer a brief “how then should we live,” a treatment plan for those who wish to recover their humanity.

We explored with Auden how the language of the divine, of God, is gratuitous. Hopefully a further point becomes soon apparent when we return to the beginning of the story: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” Genesis opens with light leaping to obey the voice of God. God, who speaks all things into existence. God, who exists as three persons in one being, which persons appear capable in Genesis and elsewhere of speaking to each other. One of those persons is called the Logos.

This speech, creation, is purely gratuitous. That the persons of the Trinity should exist in communion is good and beautiful, the essence of all Goodness and Beauty, in fact. What follows, all that God speaks, from creation to incarnation, is purely gratuitous. There is no reason to be had, only revelation of himself.

For a long time we have been chasing after a reason for existence and calling it Progress. Kingsnorth deals with the pseudo-myths of the pseudo-god of Progress at length. But if humanity does not exist for the purpose of progress, what does it exist for?

Again: we exist for no reason, only as revelation. Existence is gratuitous. We are an indulgence. Existence is a festival, and God is our feast. Joseph Pieper describes the nature of festival in his In Tune with the World: “To celebrate a festival means to do something which is in no way tied to other goals, which has been removed from all ‘so that’ and ‘in order to.’ True festivity cannot be imagined as residing anywhere but in the realm of activity that is meaningful itself.” God, whose nature seems essentially abundant and giving, called us into existence so that we might enjoy it with him. The closest we may come to expressing a so that for man’s existence is “so that we may glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Any good philosopher can tell you that is a poor so that as far as utility goes. The final cause—the one hiding behind the cosmic curtain, speaking miracles and parables—purpose, telos—all culminates in the verb to be. And Being bids us sit and eat.

We become human when we embrace that festival of existence and orient our lives around it. Incidentally, that is why in the Church calendar feast days always take precedence over fasts. Fasting teaches us self-discipline, a virtue of negation, how to not be mere animal. Feasts tell us what it is to be children of God, and when we forget them, we forget our humanity. Pieper continues, “With the death of the concept of human activity that is meaningful in itself, the possibility of any resistance to a totalitarian laboring society also perishes (and such a regime could very well be established even without concomitant political dictatorship).” The so-that existence turns out to be a tyrannical and oppressive one, reducing human life to material, to animal, to machine.

The world’s first societies believed that they were made as slaves to the gods, chattel to accomplish divine will. Kingsnorth fears much the same for a society that worships the Machine, for the Machine is a material god of animal language. We recover our humanity by insisting that life is irreducible to code and by living gratuitously.

I’m not advocating for Epicureanism, only for living in a way that affirms the freely given good of existence. That is what God was about when he made humans as stewards rather than slaves. How do we live like that? Look to what is unnecessary for survival in modern times. Look where the language of animal fails. There you will find the home, art, and religion. These are the places where myth and story break in and shape us, as “once upon a time” or “in the beginning.”

You will find that this means embracing the givenness of everyday, which means celebrating its monotony and mundanity. It probably also means forsaking most of our pseudo-myths about progress for the real good of what is rather than the hypothetical good of what could be. I do not sweep my kitchen floor because I believe there will ever come a time, even in the next life, when I shall not need to sweep my kitchen floor. But how good it is that I have a kitchen, how good the food I prepare in it. How good is my husband, the same face smiling at me every morning, the same arms holding me each night. Delight is the heart of God. Chesterton celebrates this reality in Orthodoxy:

Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

How tired and old we have all grown. But there are mercies, new every morning.

“The real failure is to give in. If we make our house a household instead of a motel, provide healthy nourishment for mind and body, enforce moral distinctions and restraints, teach essential skills and disciplines and require their use, there is no certainty that we are providing our children a ‘better life’ that they will embrace whole-heartedly during childhood. But we are providing them with a choice that they may make intelligently as adults.”

– “Family Work,” Wendell Berry

I wonder sometimes about our current obsession with culture. Like most good things, it seems as though it is taken for granted, unnoticed, hardly ever spoken of, until it is gone. On the one hand, society at large probably couldn’t care less about culture, excepting whatever new fifteen-second video is trending. On the other, in academic and literary circles, every time you turn around, someone is either championing or deconstructing culture whilst lecturing you about it.

I don’t know what will happen to the West. I don’t know if AI is a hoax, or if we are building our latest Babel, soon to topple with it. I don’t know if I am given tomorrow. Neither do you.

In the meantime, as we will probably go on knowing not quite enough until we die, we had better set down our megaphones and close our laptops and tend our garden. In fact this is all that has ever been given to humanity to do. Problems occur when we set our hearts on more than the work before us and reach for fell fruit.

What does it mean to tend your garden? It can secondarily mean writing essays and books, if that is the work given to you. But primarily it involves these four points, outlined by Kingsnorth:

1. Past. Where a culture comes from, its history and its ancestry.
2. People. Who a culture is. A sense of being ‘a people.’
3. Place. Where a culture is. Nature in its local and particular manifestation.
4. Prayer. Where a culture is going. Its religion tradition, which relates it to God or the gods.

If I may elaborate on Kingsnorth’s argument, it seems to me that past, people, place, and prayer all orient us toward the place where God walks with us on earth, once Eden and one day the New Jerusalem. That is our past and prayer. We are a people who ought to be in that place, essentially dispossessed, strangers and pilgrims, for now, on this earth.

We begin to journey home when we renounce Hell’s one law, “Do what thou wilt,” and pray instead, “Thy will be done.”

Make good food. Adore your spouse. Arrange your home as a dwelling place and not a stopping place. Tell your children stories. Create art. Love God. A machine can do none of that. And someday you will slip through the gate, tattered and dirty and tired, and discover that you have come home. I doubt you will recognize yourself then, but God will.

Image Credit: Dorothea Sharp, “Child Picking Daisies”