What Paradise Lost Can Teach Us About Being Human

This article was featured in our weekly newsletter, the Liberator Online. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here. It’s no secret that, politically, this year has been unprecedented. Electoral politics have dominated every media source for over a year, making it impossible not to notice the ideological divide that has separated each of the political parties. This has made one thing clear, our system is broken. This has created animosity on the national political stage that we have never seen before. With everything happening around us, sometimes we forget that we can make a difference, as humans, and that we don’t have to accept our broken political system. In Paradise Lost John Milton retells the Christian creation story of Adam and Eve. It is considered to be the story of “man’s first disobedience.” However, what is most important to consider is what that disobedience causes. Milton writes that without Adam and Eve’s classic example of disobedience, God would never have been able to show his grace and love, creating a better outcome than if they hadn’t disobeyed him. We have this opportunity every day. As humans we are flawed, but this doesn’t mean we have to accept the flaws of our world, or even our broken political system. This means that we are given the opportunity to turn the negative into positive. We can even see traits of humanity within Satan’s character. He went off on his own and created his own army, only to have nostalgic feelings for Heaven, asking himself why he couldn’t just be content in the presence of God. In our world we have both good and evil. It is unavoidable, and as long as one exists, so will the other. We live in a world of contraries and we see that play out every day in politics. Peace vs. war. Love vs. hate. We must ask ourselves which side we want to fall on, then we must act. What Paradise Lost teaches us is that it is a beautiful thing to be human and know both good and evil. As much pain as evil brings about, it also gives meaning to good. The difference between the two help us understand what we should seek, and what we must certainly should avoid. Whether you believe that humans are innately good or evil, there is importance in remembering that we are all still human.. We must remember to first be good humans, THEN be good libertarians, but also remember that those two things can go hand in hand. When Satan says that it is “better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven” is he right? It is better to pursue the existing evils for the sake of winning instead of turning the bad into good, reaching across party lines and working together to create long-term solutions?