“You can’t go home again, to a young man’s dream of fame and glory, to the country cottage away from strife and conflict, to the father you have lost, to all the old forms and systems of things which seemed everlasting, but are changing all the time.”
— Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again
“And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. […] And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die.’”(Genesis 2:8, 15-16)
Man was made in the Garden of Eden, and there exists an inexorable desire to return to that same place.
We see this return in nihilism’s finest achievement, the 3-D printed “suicide pod,” which is advertised in soothing, serene scenes evocative of the Garden.
Even the pod’s maker seems to recognize the importance of the pod to transport the dying person to an idyllic scene, explaining:
“It can be transported wherever one chooses. Facing the awe of the Rockies? Overlooking the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean? Where you die is certainly an important factor. Nice scenery at the end is hardly a new thought. The film ‘Soylent Green’ showed the benefit of the peace that pretty pictures and a soothing soundtrack can bring when drifting away from this world.”
After this serene bodily death has been realized, one’s body need not leave the Garden. Indeed, one can become the Garden itself by becoming a tree, with companies that will offer biodegradable urns to effectuate this transition:
For those humans more attached to these mortal coils of ours, much of the modern “paleo” movement, whatever scientific wisdom in it aside, is predicated on a Garden-like aesthetic, with lithe, fit people completely grounded in the Earth, bathing regularly in sunshine, and eating according to nature:
Jacques Ellul notes in The Meaning of the City:
“For characteristic of all these [pagan] myths is the notion that there was at the beginning of time a perfect and happy human race. There was a golden age when there was an equilibrium in everything and in man’s heart. Life was natural — in nature — and trouble was brought in by the pride of a Prometheus, for example, or by some other event. Whatever may have happened, from that time on, war and death have been in the world, and man has been in quest of the lost golden age. […] This Greco-Latin myth [of Arcadia] announces a return to a natural life, to the life of field and forest, and this is the basic condition for the return of the golden age: man must revert to the primitive state of the ‘noble savage’ (who was, of course, never savage), he must abandon all that man’s genius has invented, and then, in the valleys and woods from which force has been banished, the golden age of peace can flourish again. Always the same dream of an eternal paradise.”
However, that the Garden always collapses as a stable social structure for human flourishing proves once again the case for Christianity, which does not promote this quite naïve construct of an eternal return to an eternal paradise. The Book of Genesis plainly tells us that man was born in the Garden — so it is no surprise that man should try to return, by hook, crook, death, or even as plant food. However, to a Christian who is properly ordered, that the attempts to return to the Garden are not only feeble, but also outright stupid and wrought in death, should come as no surprise, either. God not only drives man out of the Garden so that he does not also eat of the tree of life, but also prohibits re-entry:
“Then the Lord God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever’ — therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.” (Genesis 3:22-24)
An angel is given specific dominion to guard the garden. We will revisit this later in another post, but for now, we must stipulate that the return to the Garden is impossible. All efforts to do so will fail. Every major movement that has tried to return to the Garden in some way, shape, or form, has found itself all wrapped up all over again in all the problems of men, but this time, without the guiding principles of society to provide any help at all.
Why does man want to return to the Garden so badly, though, beyond some nostalgia well-encoded in our DNA? Why do we see this craving manifest on the scale of Woodstock, ashrams, paleo, agorism — all with tanned, happy people frolicking, eating fruit, honey, and hand-strangled lambs, disregarding conventional sexual morality, enjoying the brief few moments that the Garden can exist as a quasi-stable identity before it returns to the everlasting promise of death?
The answer: technology.