We know the story of the first one: Before the fall, our first parents had it really good in the first Garden of Eden. They had to work hard but every bit of their hard work returned to them as their benefits. With no master they had to serve, and no government to rule over them, our parents worked only for themselves. There was no vanity in their hearts, and there was no desire in them to lord over anyone else. It was a perfect model for all their descendants thereafter where honest labor turned into life-bread and freedom into neighborly peace. Then, how did they destroy this paradise?
Very likely, the devil told Adam and Eve that they didn’t have to work so hard every day if they became “as gods” with the help of the forbidden fruit. Our first parents succumbed to the devil’s persuasion and were expelled from Eden to usher in nothing but war, famine, plague and death for their descendants thereafter. (By the way, the devil’s persuasion is still the same technique that modern advertisers use.)
But here is Act II of the story: When all seemed lost, the post-Eden misery and suffering would never end, a “second” Garden of Eden was discovered in a place called the “New World,” as if to redeem the human race. Those American settlers who stumbled on to the gift called it the “new Eden.”
No other time was ever like it, and no other place was ever like it: In it, God and man were united; in it, individual and community became the same; in it, personal stock and national wealth were equal; in it, human nature and human society became one; in it, freedom and equality were resolved into true democracy; in it, providence and fortune smiled together. In it, being “American” and being “Christian” were the same: One could be just, peaceful and happy either way. (However, Blacks had to wait for another hundred years to taste the fruit of America’s Golden Age and the first Native Americans had to suffer disproportionately).
In Golden-age America, the new Garden of Eden, free men worked and everything their work created returned to the workers in full. They believed all men were created equal (with the noted exceptions) and were free from the government or the aristocracy. Land was plentiful as God’s gift to man, and all it needed was the free men’s honest labor. Every man desired to improve his stock in life and succeed to the very extent of his hard work and ingenuity. For the first time since Adam and Eve lived and worked in the first Eden, this new Eden saw the greatest freedom and equality in one human community the world had ever witnessed.
Now, the devil came again to this new Eden to ruin it, with a clever idea for flattery (“you deserve it”) and empowerment (“you can do it”) called “capitalism” (“you can have it all”), in essence, the modernized version of “you could be as gods.” This new idea used persuasion, not brute force, to trick people into believing that they can always make somebody else do all their work for them. The devil called it “the American Dream,” a “success,” and he called the system “free enterprise.” All this, solely to control the labor and energy that belong to somebody else. A man named Hitler started World War II just to get free labor from the Slavic people. In today’s America, one of the first things “successful” people do is to quit their jobs and turn everything they do into play.
Naturally, Jesus of Nazareth opposed labor avoidance with his teachings because it was ungodly that men should be in bondage to other men; Thomas Jefferson opposed it because it was against his ideals of free democracy in America; Adam Smith opposed it because it created too many poor people just to make only few people wealthy.
In the end, selfishness, man’s greatest weakness, won and the Garden lost. The devil, now as spokesperson for capitalism, triumphed again. The woes of Eden are in essence the human temptation to avoid labor and toil, to make somebody else do the work for us. To that end, we have fought wars, enslaved the weak, conquered the unprotected, and made the poor our employees and the easily-tempted our consumers. Indeed, what is the “Garden of Eden” if it is not a clever man’s heaven and a gullible man’s hell?
Now, our second Garden of Eden has turned into a Garden of Evil where little that is good grows. In this new Garden, your sweat goes one way to somebody’s profit, your smart ideas contribute to someone else’s misery, your beautiful words turn into a script for lies and your appealing face a license to deceive gullible people. In this new Garden, little that is good or wholesome can grow because, there, everything must turn into oxygen for selfishness and energy for inhumanity. In it, we crave love, but are driven by hate and fear, so much of our life’s élan wasted in vain pride and lonely swagger.
America’s history has thus witnessed our transition from Eden II to capitalism. In the next two years, we will witness our transition from liberal democracy (a nation run by capitalism) to autocracy (run by fascism), some uneasy alliance to be formed between capitalism and fascism to rule America. We may not notice much change in our busy rounds of consumption or experience much radical personal turmoil, but our children will notice the tumultuous changes in their new AINO nation — America in Name Only. They will surely accuse our present cohort of having destroyed America’s second Garden of Eden.
So will the Founding Fathers.
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.