Eve, the Devil, and Radical Critique

Many feminist thinkers have rightly criticized the story of original sin (in which Eve ruins paradise in Eden by eating the forbidden fruit) as a patriarchal story that reinforces the idea that women are inferior and secondary to men. The story locates sin, fall from paradise, human suffering, etc., in the actions of women. The story even goes as far as to say that women are “the devil’s gateway.”¹ This is an important critique because it shows the ways in which many religions exist as institutions that uphold patriarchy (and more). However, I want to present a different interpretation of original sin. This interpretation views Eve as the hero of the story (though it by no means gives credit to the authors for having consciously created a story with such an interpretation).

In “The Metamorphoses of the Devil,” Henri Lefebvre theorizes god as the protector of what is considered good or right or normal—the enforcer of rigid black and white dogma. The devil, on the other hand, in representing all that is “bad,” Lefebvre theorizes as the arbiter of radical critique, of questioning norms and assumed wisdom. For Lefebvre, the devil is that which injects grey into god’s black and white image of the world.

If we read original sin through this lens, it changes the story completely. God forbids humanity to gain new knowledge because what we know in the present moment is perfect. Any knowledge beyond that is the work of the devil. As Lefebvre says, “the astonishment which is the first step towards knowledge [and] the quest for knowledge … are [both] attributed the Prince of Evil.”² This is true insomuch as the devil urges Eve to eat the fruit, to gain new knowledge and not accept the inhumane contempt of curiosity in Eden. I say inhumane because, as Lefebvre posits, “by relegating knowledge to the margins of a life … making it synonymous with [evil],” we create a world in which we implicitly think “there is something terrible about knowledge.”³ In such a world, we take “the qualities which make human beings human, [such as curiosity, creativity, and so on], and [relegate] them to the category of crimes.”⁴

Viewing the story this way, god is a totalitarian dictator for whom a bevy of human qualities are unacceptable and the devil is radical critique of god’s society. The devil and Eve are the defenders of human curiosity and creativity. The original sin is the original radical critique. It is the rebellion against totalitarian Eden. It is humanity proclaiming that its most human qualities will not be criminalized, but celebrated. Eve may be a sinner in the eyes of god, but she should be a hero in the eyes of humanity.

There is indeed a “sin” of sorts involved in the search for new knowledge, but not one we should fear. This search radically critiques existing knowledge, disproving it, rearranging it, adding onto it—destabilizing it. Learning is inherently destabilizing because new knowledge calls into question what we thought we knew. Learning requires supreme vulnerability because in order to learn you must allow your convictions to face the trial of new knowledge. For Lefebvre, there can be “no creation, no invention without a sin against what was and what wants only to be, world without end.”⁵ Put another way, in American Pastoral by Philip Roth, in a scene that depicts two characters arguing over the meaning of Genesis, one character says that the story tells us that “without transgression there is no knowledge.”⁶ Myths, Lefebvre says, “speak of power, and justify it. Only with the myth of the devil is power challenged.”⁷ Far from being the gateway to evil, Eve is the gateway to challenging existing power structures and dominant forces in society. That we generally think of this as evil reveals a lot about the societies we live in.

Lefebvre’s is not only an account of religious gods and devils, however. Instead, he locates the idea of god and the devil in all ideology. Lefebvre argues that throughout human history, “every era, every people, every class—and every group, every political party—has had its devil, has seen it, conjured it up, made it, lived it, pursued it, and immolated it, only to resuscitate it in order to kill it anew.”⁸ The devil in all these cases is knowledge that doesn’t coincide with what is supposed to be true. This is why, Lefebvre argues:⁹

“The good, decent, loyal materialists who liquidated Lucifer along with the Lord ended up producing—oh, irony!—a completely dualistic representation of the world: the good guys and the bad guys, us and them, positive and negative heroes. In their own particular way they have perpetuated the demonic-divine dialectic, the dialectic of good and evil, of darkness and light”

This is an important insight, because it allows us to extend the theory of the devil as radical critique to all dominant ideological forces in society. In doing so, we can see that in the same way that religions try to naturalize themselves by saying that the word of god is infallible, and that everything that came before was either wrong and/or leading up to this point when our knowledge is perfect and needs no further critique, so do all ideologies. Take liberal democracy and capitalism, for instance. At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man, a book that claims that we have found the best political and economic systems, and that we have therefore reached the end of ideological history. We can see liberal democratic capitalism working this way, naturalizing itself, because, as Slavoj Zizek argues, “when economists say that present-day relations—the relations of bourgeois production—are natural, they imply that … these relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time.”¹⁰ Everything before this point was wrong and/or leading up to liberal democracy and capitalism. Any changes attempted afterwards are an attack on the god Capital and are therefore condemned as the work of the devil. Marx, who Fukuyama borrows from, likewise thought that communism would be the end of history. Although, Marx is quite vague about what communism is or would be, and he also critiqued the naturalization of capitalist relations, so we should be wary of caricaturing him. Nonetheless, Marxism as an ideology did fall victim to heavy dogmatic thinking. The point is that ideologies across the political spectrum have reproduced black and white representations of the world.

It seems to me that we should seek to avoid this naturalization of ideology if we are to avoid creating new gods and new devils. This does not mean we cannot have our convictions, but we should never try to set our convictions in stone, making them immune to critique. In doing so, we create societies in which we are humans stagnating, rather than becoming, because we put chains on our curiosity and creativity. We should strive always to be Eve, taking forbidden knowledge in the hope that we can create a society in which there is no forbidden knowledge, radical critique is continuous, and ideology never naturalized. In such a society, we would not marginalize and criminalize the qualities that make us uniquely human. We would celebrate them.

Citations

1 J’annine Jobling, “Falling in Love Again: Interpreting Transgressions and Transgressive Interpretations of Genesis 2-3,” Critical Quarterly 47.3 (2005): 79.
2 Henri Lefebvre, “The Metamorphoses of the Devil,” in Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes (New York: Verso, 1995), 58.
3 Ibid., 59.
4 Ibid., 59.
5 Ibid., 59.
6 Philip Roth, American Pastoral (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 360.
7 Lefebvre, “Metamorphoses,” 59.
8 Ibid., 58.
9 Ibid., 57.
10 Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 21.

The Cult of Happiness

The idea that you must be eternally positive, if not happy, is everywhere in our society. It’s in multiple forms of media, but especially advertising, which sells the idea of unbridled happiness through consumption (Coke’s slogan “open happiness,” for instance). The idea of eternal positivity and happiness is also in our daily interactions; we tell people who are going through difficult times to “stay positive.” Everything will be alright if you just focus on being happy. This hyperpositivity is further accelerated by the information age. The images people create for themselves on Facebook, Instagram, etc., are most commonly comprised of vapid positivity, pictures of everything fun in a person’s life, and very rarely anything distressing. This is to the point where, when Donald Glover put up a picture of Instagram about his fears, people thought that he was going to kill himself. The message is clear: if you have feelings and thoughts other than pure happiness, you must want to kill yourself. We are living in the Cult of Happiness.

The idea that you need to stay positive to get through difficult situations is completely wrong. The common supposition from the Cult of Happiness people is that you can’t achieve something unless you believe you can achieve it. If you’re poor, you need to believe you can make a better life for yourself. If you’re sick, you need to believe you can get better. A simple observation of the world around us tells us otherwise. Positive people get crushed by life all the time; negative people survive brushes with death. As it turns out, what you think doesn’t actually matter that much. There are processes and events taking place all the time that affect your life. What you think about it all is only one of many inputs (if it’s one at all). How many people believe they are capable of murder before they murder someone? I’m sure the number is very low. And yet, there are murderers amongst us. There will be more in the future. Alternatively, how often do we hear someone who did something heroic say “I didn’t think I had it in me, I just reacted”?

This idea is toxic not just because it’s wrong, but because it leads to victim blaming. You weren’t able to make it out of the working class? You should have been more positive! That’s what Oprah did. She believed until it came true. Never mind that capitalism necessarily entails the extraction of profit from workers by owners, so that no matter how many poor people “make it,” they will always be the exception to the rule. Just stay positive! You live in the global south and weren’t able to get a meal today? As Dave Chappelle says, you just need to have a better attitude about starving to death! Forget that the wealth of the global north depends on the exploitation of resources and labour of the global south. Just stay positive!  You couldn’t survive your life-threatening illness? You should have believed harder, dummy. Forget those thousands of bodily processes happening all the time that you have no control over. Forget that 98 percent of brain function is unconscious. Just stay positive!

So, from a material standpoint, the idea that you need to be positive for things go well in your life is just painfully stupid. This is an important point that I wish more people were aware of, but I would like to push my critique of the Cult of Happiness beyond the material, into the existential.

Our existential condition is not one that produces unbridled joy. Nor does it produce unbridled misery. It produces something in between. This is because our existential condition is pretty fucked up. But before I delve into that, a preface: when I describe humanity’s existential condition, I do not claim to have all the answers (imagine!), but I do contend that there is no supreme being, at least not one that we could possibly know anything about or that cares about us (and thinking that there is, is terribly self-important). I’m 100 percent atheist, which is only about five percent more atheist than any religious person. I believe in none of the thousands of religions ever created. Religious people believe in one of them. The rest they call mythology. But, for instance, Greek mythology was a real religion; people really believed in Zeus and that original reality show on Mount Olympus. That society died, and as such, its religion became myth. Thus is the arc of religions: cult (when not many people believe in it), then religion (when it achieves general acceptance), and finally myth (when the society dies and the religion falls out of favour and parts of it are adopted into the new religion of the dominant society). Whatever religion you have, in 10,000 years, if humans still inhabit the earth, people will probably think of it as mythology. We are, for all intents and purposes, alone in the universe.

Alone and small—the greater our knowledge of the universe, the smaller our existence becomes. We used to think that we were the center of the universe. Now, we aren’t even the center of an out-of-the-way galaxy. If, per chance, there was a supreme being that created us, we are certainly not the main attraction. We simply don’t matter. Our lifespans are infinitesimal compared to the age of the universe. Even the approximately 3 million years of human evolution is nothing compared to the 4 billion years of the Earth. The 10,000 years of modern civilization (post-hunter gatherer societies) is what we like to think of as a mammoth history, but it’s only a sliver in time. Whatever life forms inhabit the earth in 1 billion years will not care about us, and they will likely not even be aware of our previous existence. What’s more, evolution will not necessarily replace us with a “higher” form of being. It might be that consciousness and self-awareness are maladapted traits and that the best suited beings for life on this planet are bugs.

Thus, our existence is meaningful only to the extent that we attribute meaning to it, but that meaning still exists within a broader meaninglessness. Life is simultaneously the most meaningful thing we know, and utterly meaningless. This is the space in which humans exist. It is a profoundly confusing space, because we are being pulled in two directions at once. Nothing we do matters, so do whatever you want; everything we do matters, so make your life as wonderful as possible (note: this is the same existential condition that a supreme being would face. In believing in god, we only export this existential crisis one level higher, but we do not get rid of it. Perhaps the drama of Mount Olympus is actually more profound than we often give it credit for). Our existence is complicated. The Cult of Happiness asks us to reduce ourselves to only one aspect of our existence. We should vehemently reject this request. Doing so will enable us to grapple with the joyous and the sorrowful natures of our existence, giving us a fuller experience of human life and relieving us of the pressure to always be happy.

Not Merely Love

[People are] appealed to to be guided in [their] acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of [their] oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of [humanity], mutual support—not mutual struggle—has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.

Kropotkin, on Mutual Aid