Orwell on Heaven

I’ve ben reading a lot of Orwell lately, fits my mood. He’s at once cynical and hopeful, optimistic and realistic. It might surprise some of you that George Orwell, a writer best known to american readers for his book Animal Farm (a metaphorical indictment of the Soviet Union), was a life-long socialist and actually fought with the UGT in the Spanish Civil war. The UGT, of course, was an independent (ie: not aligned with the Bolsheviks) Socialist labor union that was roughly allied with the Anarchosyndicalis C.N.T. and fielded one of the several different militias that fought in what was essentially a 5-way civil war that pitted a rough alliance of anarchists, socialists, left-nationalist basque separatists, and  communists against fascists, as well as pitting all of the above against eachother to various degrees. I’d love to get a bit deeper into the history but I’ll save my analysis of that particular bloodbath for another post because I’ve already wandered way off topic. In the meantime, if you’re interested, I’d recomend checking out the book Orwell wrote about his experiences in Spain. It’s called Homage to Catalonia and you can read it for free online. Did I mention that I fucking love the internet?

anyway.

So I’ve been reading a lot of Orwell. He Rocks. And I found this beautiful indictment of the concept of Heaven and “infinite happiness” in one of his essays called “Why Socialists Don’t Believe in Fun.”

Attempts at describing a definitely other-worldly happiness have been no more successful. Heaven is as great a flop as Utopia though Hell occupies a respectable place in literature, and has often been described most minutely and convincingly.

It is a commonplace that the Christian Heaven, as usually portrayed, would attract nobody. Almost all Christian writers dealing with Heaven either say frankly that it is indescribable or conjure up a vague picture of gold, precious stones, and the endless singing of hymns. This has, it is true, inspired some of the best poems in the world: Thy walls are of chalcedony, Thy bulwarks diamonds square, Thy gates are of right orient pearl Exceeding rich and rare! But what it could not do was to describe a condition in which the ordinary human being actively wanted to be. Many a revivalist minister, many a Jesuit priest (see, for instance, the terrific sermon in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist) has frightened his congregation almost out of their skins with his word-pictures of Hell. But as soon as it comes to Heaven, there is a prompt falling-back on words like ‘ecstasy’ and ‘bliss’, with little attempt to say what they consist in. Perhaps the most vital bit of writing on this subject is the famous passage in which Tertullian explains that one of the chief joys of Heaven is watching the tortures of the damned.

The pagan versions of Paradise are little better, if at all. One has the feeling it is always twilight in the Elysian fields. Olympus, where the gods lived, with their nectar and ambrosia, and their nymphs and Hebes, the ‘immortal tarts’ as D.H. Lawrence called them, might be a bit more homelike than the Christian Heaven, but you would not want to spend a long time there. As for the Muslim Paradise, with its 77 houris per man, all presumably clamouring for attention at the same moment, it is just a nightmare. Nor are the spiritualists, though constantly assuring us that ‘all is bright and beautiful’, able to describe any next-world activity which a thinking person would find endurable, let alone attractive.

George Orwell, Why Socialists Don’t Believe in Fun. 1943. There’s also a large collection of his essays here.

I love his writing here because it really shows a deep understanding of what happiness actually is. Far from being some sort of plateau that you can climb up and just hang out on forever, happiness and joy are defined by their contrast with loss, sorrow, misery, and all of the other negative emotions that we feel. Without those, happiness is meaningless, boring, and even de-humanizing. Orwell raises the point to illustrate the folly of chasing Utopias, pursuing some perfect ideal of what the world could be, and mentions heaven and the afterlife in the context of that discussion – heaven is just another utopia after all.

None of which is intended to discourage people from working to make the world a more just and equitable place, as Bakunin once put it, “[wo]man is not capable of perfection but [s]he is capable of indefinite improvement.” There is always room to make things better and there will always be imperfections and obstacles to happiness and joy, but far from being metaphorical cinders in the stew, these obstacles are the things that define our lives and give it meaning. Joy takes work.

And at root that’s one of my biggest beef with God. Instead of teaching people to pay their own debts, fix their own mistakes, and work to make the world a better place, Christianity teaches people that Jesus will pay for their sins if they just believe in him and that true happiness can only exist in some imaginary utopia after death. It simultaneously absolves its adherents from any responsibility for their own actions and removes any incentive for them to take care of our world or work for positive change. Which is probably why the Republicans love it so much.

I say they’ve got it dead wrong. Happiness in a place like Heaven is impossible, the best one could hope for is a sort of sated worry-free complacence that has more in common with the endless dreams of a man in a coma on life support then it does with the real joy of a person who’s up and active and making things happen. Hell, maybe that’s why they got so pissed off that Terri Schiavo got taken off life support. She was already in their heaven and taking her off life support meant it had to end! If they really believed she was going to a place of infinite Joy, the Christians should have been happy for her and seen it as an act of mercy to release her from a body that was little more then a prison for a dead mind. Instead they raised all kinds of hell and demanded that she be kept on life support indefinitely (apparently only the brain-dead deserve free healthcare!), which as far as I’m concerned is pretty solid proof that when push comes to shove christians know damn well that their afterlife is nothing but a dream.

Long story short: pain and suffering suck, but without them happiness and joy are meaningless. Since Heaven is, by definition, a place without pain or suffering; it is also by definition a place where meaningful joy and happiness cannot exist. Which basically means that the Christian conception of heaven is a logical impossibility. If Christians weren’t so phenomenally scared of logic they’d probably have figured this out a long time ago.

Posted: November 28th, 2007 under gods & religion.
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