Exile, Modernity and the Countercultural Garden
As a conceptual metaphor, a garden of god is a natural medium of relationship between the human, the Divine and nature, and consequently, a space of collective coexistence, a political economy. Humanity has conceived of this medium in a variety of ways. Given the chapter of human history in which we find ourselves, that which defines itself as the Common Era (CE) to normalise the global history of colonialism, it is proper to start our consideration of this relational space with the image of the Abrahamic Kingdom of God. This kingdom is in fact a garden, but a patriarchal garden, owned by ‘the One’ who controls its space and lets it out to ‘its others’, creatures who must obey its laws of control. Such a dualistic garden is structured by the judgement of good and evil, in which the creatures can express evil and from which human creatures, by the exercise of a will to evil, that is, a will that defies the laws of control of the garden, can be and are exiled (Genesis 2:4–3:24).
The exile from the garden is a rupture of the unity between nature, the human and the Divine. As a result the human knows the ontology of separation. This exile pursues the Western world, leaving it restless and in need of a home in every homecoming, anxious for a messianic time of redemption (Genesis 49:10; Isaiah 11:1–9; Mark 8:29, 14:61–62). At the same time, the consequences of the exile accumulate eschatologically; it is a fleeing away from the garden while replicating increasingly distorted simulacra of the garden. Modernity may be seen as an intensified eschatological chapter in this long exile, an exacerbation of the discourse of guilt-stained ownership and mastery leading to colonialism, industrialism and the techno-consumerist globalisation of the Anthropocene.
Its sardonic garden is the concrete jungle, plastered over the dead remains of a poisoned earth, extending to the desolate sterilities of death. This extreme point of human exile replicates the patriarchy of the original garden in a substitute human form – the patriarchy of capital established in the artificial habitat of the wasteland and the concrete jungle. Yet, the greater the distance from the Kingdom of God, the greater the angst for the return.