The Trouble with Paradise

© Laurence B. Winn

Jun 1, 1999

What happened to hope?

What happened to optimism?

What happened to great expectations?

What happened to peace?

One answer suffices. It is that we cling to a toxic paradigm of Utopia. We are eternally constructing an Eden that contains the seeds of its own destruction, a poisoned paradise.

Dr. John Calhoun, who designed revealing experiments in animal behavior at the National Institute of Mental Health several decades ago, describes a utopian environment constructed for mice. (See Universe 25). Of four "mortality factors," the first, which he believed to be distinctly non-utopian, was emigration.

There are many different theories of perfection, among them that the secret of happiness is true religion (Christianapolis), socialism (News from Nowhere), education (New Jerusalem), eugenics (City in the Sun) or the blessings of science (Looking Backward). None comprehends the value of exploration and the settlement of frontiers.

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, immobility and conformity are built into the system. Manipulation of fetal tissue distinguishes the intellectual elite from the menial laborer. Drugs, vacuous entertainment, and sex without parenthood are the fly paper that prevents the rise of individuals, except for one.

That escape from persecution and ridicule is impossible makes Huxley's not-so-imaginary world a hell for his protagonist. But Huxley's grim view is not grim enough. As Americans should now know, as the Columbine High School massacre should have taught them, to imprison one's outcasts in the matrix of society is a deadly mistake. It is not only the persecuted individual who suffers. There is a severe social penalty for enclosure, a concept more fully explored in First Principles.

Unless they are afflicted with enclosure, few animals of any species perish by intraspecies combat. Rather, individuals emigrate after failing, in symbolic combat, to secure the right to remain in the locality of their birth. To allow the misfit and the lone wolf to fulfill their function of exploration and discovery on unoccupied land is the key to avoiding a culture of death.

It is not necessary to send away every human pariah, every rejected person. The fire called hope is especially easy to kindle in the human heart. To provide the most remote avenue of escape, the smallest visible chance of success, is all that is necessary for its spark to survive. But the chance must exist.

In America at high noon, there is good news with the bad, the sublime with the satanic. There are the kids at Columbine High School who, as Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris prowled the halls with their guns and bombs, refused to leave their dying teacher. A young man covered his sister's body with his own to shield her from gunfire. Another, with ten bullet wounds in his legs, picked up an explosive charge and hurled it away from a group of wounded kids. A student died because she would not deny her belief in God.

That the heroes who died, or were prepared to die, at Littleton did not do so in vain requires that this generation of adults finally figure it out: The difference between a healthy, prosperous community of human beings and a living hell is that the former has an exit other than death.

What happened to hope?

What happened to optimism?

What happened to great expectations?

What happened to peace?

Get in your car and drive out of the city on a clear night. Find an open spot to stop. Turn out the lights. Now look up.

The answer is out there.