The artist colony of New Athens represents the resurgence of humanism and, as a symbolic counterpoint to the stagnation that humanity experiences while living in a utopia, effectively represents the failure of utopia to foster the human spirit. Noticing that humanity has become over-satisfied with utopia and lost all of its ambition, a group of visionaries spend twenty years designing and forming the island colony as a place for artists and intellectuals to recover the pride that humanity once took in its own accomplishments. The colonists of New Athens put themselves to the task of creating new breakthroughs in art and science, recovering the lost momentum humanity had had before the Overlords arrived.
The Overlords, who are rational, material beings, did not account for or consider significant that humanity, bored by the ease of utopia, would begin to lose its soul. Thus, the fact that New Athens exists at all is an indication that utopia has failed to meet all of humanity’s needs. Although the Overlords have managed to meet all material concerns—everyone is safe and well-fed—they have failed to account for humanity’s need for agency and ideals to stimulate its creative potential or challenges to stimulate its growth.
New Athens is successful in stimulating the human spirit for some years, but it is ultimately destroyed by the arrival of the Overmind. However, considering that New Athens aspired to human progress and the Overmind represents the mystical, god-like transcendent destination of a portion of the human race, it is not such a failure after all. Indeed, it was New Athens that produced the first two children to develop the latent abilities that signaled the Overmind’s approach. The colony which sought to bring humanity into the future truly did so, though in a much different manner than it had intended.
New Athens Quotes in Childhood’s End
The end of strife and conflict of all kinds had also meant the virtual end of creative art. There were myriads of performers, amateur and professional, yet there had been no really outstanding new works of literature, music, painting, or sculpture for a generation. The world was still living on the glories of a past that could never return.
“There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments. Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over various channels? [...] Soon people won’t be living their own lives anymore.”
Suppose, in [the Overlords’] altruistic passion for justice and order, they had determined to reform the world, but had not realized that they were destroying the soul of man?
The universe was vast, but that fact terrified him less than its mystery. George was not a person who thought deeply on such matters, yet it sometimes seemed to him that men were like children amusing themselves in some secluded playground, protected from the fierce realities of the outer world.
Twenty years ago, the Overlords had announced that they had discontinued all use of their surveillance devices, so that humanity no longer need consider itself spied upon. However, the fact that such devices still existed meant that nothing could be hidden form the Overlords if they really wanted to see it.
Nothing in [New] Athens was done without a committee, that ultimate hallmark of the democratic method […] Because the community was not too large, everyone in it could take some part in its running and could be a citizen in the truest sense of the word.
“Everybody on the island has one ambition, which may be summed up very simply. It is to do something, however small it may be, better than anyone else. Of course, it’s an ideal we don’t all achieve. But in this modern world, the great thing is to have an ideal. Achieving it is considerably less important.”
It was thus with [New] Athens. The island had been born in fire; in fire it chose to die. Those who wished to leave did so, but most remained, to meet the end among the broken fragments of their dreams.
New Athens Symbol Timeline in Childhood’s End
