Someone asked me the other day, why we sometimes refer to a utopia as 7th heaven, and instantly my brain went off to trawl through a series of vague recollections and bungled memories drawn from many late nights spent arguing about religion with an old friend of mine (a priest) for clues as to the source.
Having failed to locate the source, other than dimly remembering something to do with the Koran, I then did what most of us who are inexcusably lazy by nature do – I googled it. One of the first listings was from Wikipedia, which provided a brief and sketchy outline of the history of 7th heaven in Judaism and Islam, and most of the rest of the entries on the first page (who bothers with more than one page now that we have dynamic search on Google?), dealt with either a TV series by the same name, or a rock band i the US or a lap dancing club in Glasgow!
Having reached the conclusion that Google was not going to be the great bringer of light, I put down my keyboard and started thinking about this innate impulse we have on occasion to create an ideal for ourselves that we can then spend the rest of our lives sometimes struggling towards vainly and sometimes simply justifying to ourselves why we fail to achieve such an apparently blessed state.
Mostly, I believe, this impulse to create a clearly identifiable image of what 7th heaven might look like is driven by a need to picture a destination (for utopias are never temporary shelters) towards which we are heading – thus making the everyday seem more bearable by inventing a future reward for our current endeavours. This, at least, is what the religions who indulge in future rewards have been telling us for millennia to keep us in place, and to secure their power over us. But what of today?
In the West, many have given up the notion of a superior being who has intelligently designed life, the universe and the eating habits of iguanas in favour of something more tangible, closer to home and more human. But what has replaced our Christian, Jewish, Islamic belief in a fair return on our investment in life? Humanism.
So surely this is a step in the right direction? A move away from a fantastical belief in an invisible power that governs our existence and who created a 7th heaven to encourage us to be better people (or an injunction, at least, that provides religious leaders, teachers, bosses and politicians with the carrot and the stick they desire to perpetuate their hold on power). But what else is happening under the surface appearance of control mechanisms? What else lies behind conceptions such as that of 7th heaven, that might be even more damaging than a threat of what we stand to lose if we do not tow the line?
What we stand to lose is far greater than being refused admittance to an idyllic state when we’re dead. What we stand to lose is our grip on how life works in reality, and not in the books and parchments of the world’s religions. By clinging to a belief in 7th heaven, we risk believing in a lie. A lie that states with hard work, a solid moral backbone and a deep, unquestioning acceptance of religious dogma, we will be rewarded, that life will make sense, and that we are constantly moving towards that utopia – that we are actually closer and closer every day to perfection. This is the lie we tell our children, ourselves and our loved ones. The reality is that life changes constantly, we change sometimes and that perfection is called an ideal precisely because it cannot be achieved.
If we reject utopia, we are free to embrace the notion that life on earth is not a linear progression towards perfection, but a path that meanders, gets lost, rises up and falls away, continually. If we accept the idea that we are not on an unalterable trajectory towards bliss, we can finally accept our time here as less of a test and more of a treat.
There are no exams, no final grades and the headmaster has retired.