Everything man-made begins with a thought or an idea. Everything. Whether it is a car, a pop song, or a concentration camp, it starts with a germ of an idea in someone’s mind. Take Majdanek for instance.
This concentration camp built outside the town of Lublin was by no means the first of its kind, nor did the Nazis originate the idea of incarcerating civilians en masse. They applied a concept already decades old when they came to power in Germany in the 1930s. They then extended it into the territories they conquered, like Poland.
The idea of corralling people together in a concentrated space, without proper judicial process, was first mooted in 1895 during the Cuban war of independence and implemented there by the Spanish overlords a year later.1 Whoever came up with the idea should have patented it because the concentration camp has never gone out of fashion. Probably its best-known manifestation today is at Guantánamo Bay, interestingly also in Cuba.
The concentration camp is not the only concept that, when made tangible, edges our world closer to darkness. The hand-gun and the hydrogen bomb are obvious other examples. But what about less clear-cut cases like the internal combustion engine, the computer (upon which I am typing these words), or the mousetrap? Clearly these have benefited mankind, haven’t they?
Admittedly it is difficult to find much that is positive about the mousetrap but at the very least this device reassures householders worried about their homes being invaded by disease-carrying rodents. The development of the internal combustion engine led to faster and more comfortable transport, like cars and planes. These have opened up the world to ordinary folk whose horizons would otherwise be very restricted. When combined with the Internet, the computer has taken the drudgery out of research and made it possible to communicate over long distances, cheaply and quickly.
But there are downsides.
Many thousands of people have been killed or maimed by the car. According to one source, the total number of motor traffic fatalities in the USA during the 20th century is 3.2m.2
When computers are dumped for so-called recycling (usually in poorer parts of the world), the lead and other toxic substances inside them pollute the earth and poison the local inhabitants.3
And the mousetrap usually kills its victims.
So is everything we invent or initiate morally ambiguous or downright destructive, even when the negative consequences are unintended? Is this what is meant by the familiar adage: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”? Is it the case that we want what is good, but we do not understand how to make it so?
And the rest of us who drive the cars, buy the computers, or set the mousetraps? Are we not complicit in sustaining and supporting the junkyard spreading around us? If we shunned the products of humanity’s well-intentioned but ultimately destructive tendencies, what would our world be like? Is humanity predestined to create or consume only what leads us down a “road to hell”, whether it be dangerous chemicals, deadly weapons, or nihilistic art forms? Or have we the capacity to make our own heaven on earth?
The poet John Milton thought so:
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n4
Playwright Oscar Wilde would have agreed. He put this famous line into the mouth of one of the characters in Lady Windermere’s Fan:
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.5
What both writers were saying is that humans have a choice, a choice in how we think about the world. And if the thought begets the deed then we can start to make everything truly better, once we decide we want to. And we have one enormous advantage. In its unspoilt natural state, our Earth is a wondrous and beautiful haven.
In a previous post I wrote about the benefits of the restrictions on personal freedom imposed intermittently since the current crisis began around March 2020. As the noise and pollution caused by human intervention declined, fragile nature became more apparent. Anyone lucky enough to live near a forest or a lake knows what I mean. Even urban dwellers could hear the birdsong more clearly as the roads became quiet again. With no planes in the sky it was possible to look up and be calmed by the silence above our heads.
It felt like the world had returned to a pre-atomic age - like a foretaste of heaven. But as I argued in another article, “We automatically equate our fortunes with those of the planet, its other inhabitants, and its resources”.6 And so for thousands of years Homo sapiens has been imposing his will on nature. As Joni Mitchell sang:
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.7
But it is not enough to rip up the paving and reveal the beauty beneath. We can emulate that beauty in what we create, if we focus on “the stars” rather than on “the gutter”.
Artists like Oscar Wilde present us with a vision of an alternative reality they are almost magically equipped to perceive. Their artistic gifts enable them to communicate their vision to the rest of us. So anyone can catch a glimpse of the heightened reality behind our material world, a reality that can be heavenly. But as one astute observer noted, “All that survives, even in the greatest art, is a hint, a shadow of what the artist saw”. But that can be enough to induce in us a delicious sensation, which that same observer called “a shivering in your soul”.8
We each have different tastes of course. What moves one person may leave another cold, and vice versa. In my own case I have experienced that “shivering” when reading Oscar Wilde’s “The Selfish Giant” or his De Profundis. If art sometimes reflects a heavenly perspective, then I have felt it in the songs of Franz Schubert, the surrealist paintings of Henri Magritte, and the exquisite forms and gorgeous hues of Andalusia’s Moorish palaces.
Tchaikovsky believed himself to be at the mercy of a capricious fate, but he could also see into a different and better world when he wanted to. In the music for his Nutcracker ballet, for instance, he conjured up a children’s fantasy of gingerbread soldiers, Christmas trees, and snowflakes. Tchaikovsky’s music is delightful and brings the listener on a journey into a land of magic and mystery that is as far from the despair of the Pathétique symphony as it is possible to imagine.
Our species, Homo sapiens, has spent much of its history remaking our world into a hideous caricature of the gift we inherited. That project is almost complete and the godless dystopia imagined by its architects is upon us. We may choose to accept the “new normal” because it seems like a fait accompli that we cannot resist. But that is the point: it is still our choice.
Neither those architects, nor the one they serve, can do anything without our implied consent. They may frighten and bewilder us into compliance, but they cannot frogmarch anyone into captivity who does not wish to go. We are free - until we decide to surrender that freedom.
We can say “no”, perhaps because we wish to protect our children and grandchildren from an incipient tyranny that threatens to destroy their futures. Or we may be concerned about the wellbeing of the other creatures with whom we share the planet. Or we are motivated by gratitude to the God who created the beauty around us, a beauty that evil would like to bury forever.
Above all, we can surely see that heaven and hell are not simply labels for something distant and unimaginable. They are real and concern us now. We can reject with confidence the “new normal” being prepared by the architects of the present crisis because - thanks to a handful of inspired individuals - we know that a different and better reality is possible.
Of course, saying “no” is only a first step. But it is a necessary one if we are to restore our precious home to what it once was, and can be again.
Andrea Pitzer, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (New York, 2017).
Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities & Fatality Rate: 1899 - 2003 [https://web.archive.org/web/20110921222129/http://www.saferoads.org/federal/2004/TrafficFatalities1899-2003.pdf], 3 Nov 2021.
John Vidal, ‘Toxic E-Waste Dumped in Poor Nations, Says United Nations, Our World, 16 Dec. 2013 [https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/toxic-e-waste-dumped-in-poor-nations-says-united-nations], 3 Nov 2021.
John Milton, Paradise Lost and other poems, intro. Edward le Comte (New York, 1981), p. 44.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, and other plays (London 1986), p. 54.
J. P. Bruce, “Hell into Heaven (Part 1)”, 15 May 2021, History in the making
Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi”, YouTube, 6 Nov. 2021.
Brian Cleeve, “The Magic Mountain” (unpublished essay, c. 1990).