Eden Unfinished: The Empire Within

Eden Unfinished: The Empire Within

Abstract

Eden Unfinished: The Empire Within explores a question that emerged through both musical composition and interdisciplinary research: if humanity has spent thousands of years attempting to build a better world, why do we repeatedly recreate domination, rivalry, fragmentation, and scapegoating under new names and new systems?

Drawing on the work of thinkers including René Girard, Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Alasdair MacIntyre, Priya Satia, William Dalrymple, Hilary Lawson, and others, this project examines recurring patterns that appear across empires, revolutions, ideologies, technologies, and political movements. Rather than treating violence, domination, and social fragmentation as isolated historical failures, the project investigates whether they emerge from deeper and more persistent tendencies within human beings themselves.

The accompanying portfolio of five original compositions approaches these questions through music rather than argument alone. Each work expresses a different aspect of the thesis, including mimetic rivalry, ideological certainty, conscience, reconciliation, technological power, and the possibility of genuine human relationship. Musical processes such as accumulation, fragmentation, improvisation, collective listening, and communal performance become ways of embodying ideas that cannot be fully expressed through language.

Alongside historical and philosophical analysis, the project also examines figures who attempted to resist these recurring mechanisms. Particular attention is given to the examples of Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi, and Desmond Tutu, not primarily as religious authorities, but as individuals who pursued alternative responses to conflict through forgiveness, non-retaliation, reconciliation, and radical concern for others. The central claim of the project is that the mechanisms of domination are not confined to particular groups, nations, or historical periods. They are human. The question that remains is whether human beings can learn to recognise the patterns within themselves, and whether another way of living together is possible.

Publication Date

7-1-2026

Campus

Boston Campus

Keywords

Power; Conflict; Conscience; Love; Reconciliation

Eden Unfinished: The Empire Within

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