On the grounds of the English manor house of Wilton there is a deer park. Normally, this would not be anything worth writing about. After all, there are a lot of expensive houses, in England and in many other places, where there are areas where creation is to be enjoyed in such a way that seeks to combine the beauties of God’s creation with the skill and elegance of mankind’s creation. The widespread love of gardens and gardening, it should be noted, springs from the same tendency [1] to show an appreciation for our creation blended with the creation that we see around us. What makes the deer park at Wilton notable, though, is that it was made after the houses of a small village of peasants was torn down during the Tudor period. What looks on the surface to be an act of beauty and elegance ends up, when looked at more deeply, to be the result of exploitation and cruelty and violence and dispossession.
What are we to make of such a mix of art and violence? Does the elegance of surface appearance, of the artistic ends which are made out of violence, mitigate in any way our horror and anger at the violence and exploitation that were involved in allowing the art to be created, or does it exacerbate the problems? How is it that violence and exploitation are seen as being necessary handmaidens to artistic beauty? Why is it that we feel it necessary to attempt to recreate an Edenic paradise in the absence of divine blessing or moral uprightness? As is often the case, there are far more questions than answers. It is worthwhile to at least attempt to grapple with these questions, given the fact that have a desire to restore paradise to our own lives but may not sufficiently care about the repercussions of that on other people, and given that far more people are afflicted by the curse of the darker side of Eden than those who are consciously aware of the Eden that they are striving for in the first place.
When we look at the urban wastelands that surround many cities around the world, the favelas or slums known by many names and featuring the suffering of many people, it is tempting to want to turn those areas into gardens and parks that show the beauty rather than the sordid sound of life. Unfortunately, it is easiest to accomplish this task by paving over or pulling down the hovels of the poor people who live there. By destroying the visible evidence of poverty and suffering, we only compound that misery by destroying the attempts of people to make the best homes they can in difficult circumstances, valuing our own comfort more than the well-being of those whose suffering and difficulty are obvious to all. All too often urban renewal is an attempt to deaden the conscience of those who live reasonably well by removing from their eyes and lives the witness of those who are living vastly poorer. It is far easier to destroy hovels than it is to conquer or even reduce poverty, which is why it happens more often.
The destruction of villages for deer parks and sheep enclosures represented a different problem in the attempt to recreate Eden. For one, the destruction of homes and farms, and the consigning of such landed poor but respectable people to dispossession and migration for the profit of landowners would be viewed unsympathetically by many people. There was more to this though, and that was the actions involved often involved breaking covenants and violating the economic and social contracts on which the legitimacy of the landowners’ own authority. Those who do not respect the property rights of others will not likely find their own property rights treated with any respect and consideration, and those who use their power wrongly will find others seeking to combine together to form power to avenge themselves. This is not to say that such revenge is right, but those who wrong others have little reason to complain about others seeking force for themselves.
When we look at the darker side of Eden, there are a few patterns that we can see happening over and over again. For one, the creation of Eden through the destruction of what already exists that tends to trouble those who have the means to recreate a patch of the earth however they wish is automatically a problematic one. For another, the re-creation of Eden usually involves a lack of respect for the well-being, property, and rights of other people. There is something essentially self-defeating in trying to recreate paradise while increasing the amount of misery and difficulty and, perhaps most hypocritically, exile and dispossession. There is also something self-defeating about seeking to imagine a world without sin and loss while behaving sinfully and causing loss to others. Sometimes, all too often, our own self-absorption ends up making the world a darker place for everyone else. And who needs that?
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/05/06/book-review-the-water-saving-garden/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/book-review-down-in-the-garden/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/04/03/book-review-the-bee-friendly-garden/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/03/22/book-review-back-in-the-garden-with-dulcy/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/11/04/when-god-rested-in-the-garden/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/05/02/book-review-brother-cadfaels-herb-garden/
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