The trouble with Eden

You can tell a lot about a culture by looking at its myths and stories. Despite the best efforts of the founding fathers, the U.S. is a Judeo-Christian culture. One of the central myths underlying American culture is the myth of Genesis and humanity’s fall from grace. The bare bones of the myth: there was an initial period where things were blessed and wonderful, and through some wrongdoing, people were exiled from that original blessed state. The solution to re-attaining that original blessed state, then, is clear: address the source of the wrongdoing, and paradise will come again.

That basic idea still pervades many discussions in American culture where you wouldn’t think that the participants in that discussion would believe in or be influenced by the Old Testament: feminism, neo-paganism, environmentalism. In feminism, there is a mythical idea that there was once a blessed period in the past in which women were revered and cultures were matriarchal, and that a wave of warlike patriarchal invasions destroyed this Edenic scene. (Best exemplied in The Chalice and the Blade, by Riane Eisler.) More likely is that there have always been a mix of very many different kinds of cultures, some matriarchal, some not. Yes, there are many statues of female figures from 40,000-20,000 years ago around Europe. Interpreting these as fertility figures and objects of reverence is a perfectly reasonable idea. It does not follow, however, that there was an idyllic period of matriarchy from which we have "fallen" because of the "original sin" of patriarchy. The route to paradise on this view? Eliminate patriarchy.

In neo-pagan circles, there is an idea that there was an original, blessed state when the people of Europe worshipped the Goddess, and revered nature. (Best exemplified in Starhawk’s writings.) Again, the pre-Christian people of Europe were most likely a mixed bag of cultures, worshipping both goddesses and gods, as well as local spirits of the land. It’s clear they were pagan, and more nature-centered than modern industrial culture. It’s not clear that this period of time was a blessed Edenic state, as the early peoples of Europe seem to have spent an awful lot of time making war on each other, at worst, and stealing each other’s livestock, at best. I wouldn’t choose to go back and live in such a time. The route to paradise on this view? Go back to worshipping the Goddess.

In environmentalism, the original blessed state is the life of hunter-gatherers, all living in peaceful harmony with the land around them, living by a conservation ethos. Agriculture is the "original sin" that caused The Fall, in this case. (Best exemplified in Paul Shepard’s Coming Home to the Pleistocene.) The route to paradise in this environmentalist idea? Go back to the ethos of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. So does that mean giving up agriculture? The planet couldn’t support as many people as we currently have if we were all living as hunter-gatherers. So what is the practical route to paradise?

I guess this is why I have a problem with the Eden myth: it plays into the idea that if we can just correct some mistake our species made in the past, we will be able to have a utopia on Earth. I don’t believe in utopias – humans are too complex, too much of a mixture of light and dark, and too varied to ever have a utopia. Also, it is not universally true that hunter-gatherer cultures follow a conservation ethic. Anthropologist Wade Davis and historian Jared Diamond¹ have both made the point that many rainforest tribes find the idea of conservation alien, because they cannot imagine the bounty of the natural world being depleted. A conservation ethos is not part of their foraging lifestyle. Conservation seems to be part of the ethos only of hunter-gatherers living in places with more scarcity – places with harsh winters, like the Great Plains, or the Arctic North, or desert ecosystems with few resources, as in the deserts of Africa and Australia. The reason conservation is now looking like a good ethos is that humans have discovered that all of the planet’s resources are limited.

It is absolutely true that agricultural cultures have always driven out hunter-gatherer cultures, and usurped their lands, and that throughout history, this has made hunter-gatherers worse off. Hunter-gatherers have absolutely experienced a loss, a degradation of their circumstances from a previously better state². Every one of our ancestors experienced this changeover from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural or modern industrial lifestyle at some point. This has made things much worse for humans all over the planet. I don’t deny that.

Still, I believe things can get better. Revering the feminine, getting rid of patriarchal systems and having a land-based conservation ethos may well be part of the solution, but they are not part of the solution because they can redeem our past sins. They are part of the solution because they are ideas that are good on their own merits. Just because I don’t believe in utopia doesn’t mean I don’t believe in reform. I just believe that the reforms will be something new, something complex, that our species is reaching towards, but hasn’t discovered yet. The problem with the Eden myth is not that things haven’t gotten worse. It’s that the myth points us towards simplistic solutions, and teaches us to be ashamed of our species, instead of looking for our best potential. We’ll only find a way out of our current mess if we look to our species’ best potential, and use it to correct for our species’ worst tendencies.


¹ Wade Davis, One River. New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Jared Diamond, "New Guineans and Their Natural World,” in The Biophilia Hypothesis, Edited by Stephen R. Kellert & Edward O. Wilson. Washington DC: Island Press, 1993.
² Hugh Brody, 2000, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World, NY: North Point Press.

Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade. NY: Harper Collins, 1987, 1995.
Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. NY: Harper Collins, 1979, 1989, 1999.
Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Edited by Florence Shepard. Washington DC: Island Press, 1998.