Heaven Is a Place on Earth?

December 31, 2021 | By Sharla Moody BK ‘22

image description: two futuristic, spherical buildings, as glassy as their reflections in the water beneath them.

The science fiction of the first half of the twentieth century appears much more optimistic than what we see today. This optimistic sci-fi can perhaps be best exemplified by Hanna-Barbera’s 1962-1963 cartoon The Jetsons, which imagines what life might be like in the year 2062. The Jetsons drive a flying car, live in an ultra modern city built in Earth’s atmosphere, and exist as a happy nuclear family.

But the Sixties was certainly not a decade of pure positivity or sitcom-life satisfaction: it was a time marked by civil and racial unrest, the long fight for justice, the Vietnam War and all its associated traumas and atrocities, the assassinations of JFK and MLK and RFK, and the ever-constant threat of the nuclear apocalypse hanging over the entire world. In many ways, the world we inhabit today is safer, or at least might feel safer, to the average American. But the Sixties was also a decade of hope—a decade that still believed there were things to look forward to. The Jetsons might be a cartoon, but it displayed a hope that the future would be a time of unparalleled innovation with pleasant political and domestic demeanors. As far-fetched as some of its predictions may have been, the show presents a narrative of stability not despite, but because of, boundless technological innovation. Even as a children’s show, The Jetsons posits that the world can only keep improving, while underlying structures and institutions like the nuclear family will remain unchanged even a hundred years in the future.

Today, few futures in the popular imagination seem positive, and certainly none are as cheery as The Jetsons. The 2000s and early 2010s saw a resurgence of interest in dystopias, which dominated as blockbusters and became fixtures on bestseller lists. The great American writer Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road, a novel taking place after a mass extinction event in the United States that was adapted into the nightmarish film of the same name in 2009. The famous young adult series The Hunger Games imagines a world run by bloodthirsty elites and abject subjection to a totalitarian regime around eight hundred years in the future. The critically acclaimed HBO series Westworld, which began airing in 2016 but is based off the 1973 Michael Crichton film of the same name, imagines an amusement park populated by androids who are daily murdered, sexually assaulted, and tortured by wealthy clients who use the park to fulfill their darkest fantasies. 

It is interesting to note that the utopias and dystopias of the 2000s and 2010s tend to imagine internal villains: artificial intelligence with a vengeance, societies built on corruption, man-made environmental disasters. These universes are occupied by bloodlust and moral depravity. The seeds of destruction were planted at the genesis of these worlds, innate to their structures and maybe even their people. We no longer pin the blame of every apocalyptic tale on extraterrestrial neighbors, and gone is the technological optimism of the Sixties. Rather, we expect that whatever does finally come to wipe us out will come from within ourselves. None of these works offer particularly upbeat perspectives of what life might be like a few decades or centuries from now. Was the utopian optimism of the Sixties just wishful thinking? 

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In some ways all utopian constructions are wishful thinking––etymologically, the word is self-contradictory and indicates that a utopia cannot ever truly exist. The word utopia was coined by Saint Thomas More in his 1516 book Utopia and comes from the Greek ou, meaning not, and topos, place––a utopia is a ou-topos, a not-place. This idea comes out in many dystopian novels and films. On the surface, the world appears  perfect, until some secretive, structural evil comes to light. For example, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, a staple on middle school reading lists across the country, focuses on the necessity of memory in preventing moral catastrophe. It features a peaceful society where every aspect of life is well-ordered. Later in the novel, the protagonist learns that people are systemically euthanized in the society when they are no longer useful or consume too many resources. This concept of the fundamental impossibility of perfection isn’t just a twentieth century doubt, though. The Renaissance poet and thinker John Milton raised it in his biblical epic Paradise Lost in 1667. The poem traces Satan’s fall from Heaven and the temptations and first sins of Adam and Eve. In Book IV of the poem, Satan, arguably the poem’s protagonist, contemplates Adam and Eve’s contentment in Eden and wonders,

Forbidden them to taste: knowledge forbidden?

Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord

Envy them that? Can it be sin to know, 

Can it be death? And do they only stand

By ignorance, is that their happy state,

The proof of their obedience and their faith? (4.515-520)

Here, Milton implies that even in Eden, a place that was definitionally perfect, something was deeply wrong with the universe. If Eden could only be maintained as heaven on earth through ignorance of evil, then evil still existed. Satan asserts that the perfection of Eden is simply an illusion to Adam and Eve. If they knew the reality of the hell that opened when Satan rebelled against God, if they knew their serpentine interlocutor was actually the crowned prince of all demons, if they knew they might one day have the capacity of death, they––and Eden––would no longer be perfect. These things all exist without them knowing, and their mere ignorance provides them with the facade of happy perfection. And, as in contemporary dystopias, Milton depicts figures in Paradise Lost with inherent fundamental flaws: the angel-turned-demon who loves the gold streets more than God, the desire to know evil constantly present in Adam and Eve. Satan might be the instigator of the fall, but all the pieces that made it possible were there before, waiting to be put together.

This seems to be the root of the utopia/dystopia problem. We all have this nagging voice: “Why shouldn’t I do [insert bad thing] if I benefit from it?” The best people are good at suppressing this voice. The worst of us are prone to talking to it like a best friend. Some practices seem bent on bringing this voice into the public sphere, better at encouraging us to give into every whim, better at diverting the outcomes of our filthiest desires away from ourselves to provide some moral distance. Is it any wonder that we face a looming climate crisis after decades of luxurious living? As much as we might want to be good people, we can never really cast out that voice, only try to quell it. As we reach for more perfect worlds, our capacity for twisting them into hellscapes never empties. The philosopher G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” Looking at the boundless human appetite for destruction and my own frequent, conscious decisions to do bad over good, Chesterton’s thesis seems indisputable. 

It might seem ridiculous then to suggest that we should, or even can, continue to strive for goodness in our worlds and in ourselves. Why not give into our basest temptations? If the higher we rise the harder we fall, why bother at all? 

The nihilism and disillusionment of our present time is not without reason. Deep doubt of institutions and systems is understandable, even merited, after the abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts, after the recent appearance of extremism and unbridgeable division in democratic political systems, after the industrialization that produced modern wealth and luxury has forecasted climate destruction. It’s only natural for popular culture to produce media that places these doubts as failures in the bedrock upon which the world was built. Doubts do not, however, negate the chance for good to come, particularly in individual actions. Literature, history, and folklore through the ages is crowded with stories of one just man, one act of righteousness, being enough to change the course of history.

While imagining myself in a similar position might be fantasy, I can push against the narrative of hopelessness that so dominates today if I acknowledge my own agency, even if infinitesimal depending on the situation, and act where I can to do good. When every intention and thought of mankind was evil, Noah was righteous. 

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