This Is Not The End Of Days

All defeat is temporary, and so is every victory

Many people see human history as having a sort of purpose, a direction it is always pointed in. All events are to be interpreted in the light of this purpose - one way or another everything that happens brings us closer to this end. If a good thing happens, it moves us closer to this end incrementally. If a bad thing happens it exposes the corruption of our current system and brings us closer to the moment when we move towards the end of history in a great and violent leap. Either way, this end of history is a) real and b) at least partially knowable and c) ultimately inevitable. 

You might see this end of history as being fulfilled through science, as the moment when all Truth is understood and affirmed. You might see this end of history as being fulfilled through class struggle, as the moment when exploitation is overthrown through proletarian revolution. You might see this end of history as being fulfilled through an act of God, as the moment when Christ returns to end all human suffering once and for all. 

This vision of an end of history can simultaneously inspire action and inaction - it can embolden activists who see themselves as bearing the unstoppable might of history itself as they change the world, or it can cause a deep kind of passivity in those who seek consolation in some vision of inevitability. It might hurt too much for me as an individual to pick up the fight in the face of this defeat, but it’s ok if I lay down my arms - my action or inaction won’t change the inevitability of our victory, since victory itself is built into the universe. If not for me today, then for someone else someday. 

For some, the fall of constitutional abortion rights represents a step towards the end of history as they see it, the inevitable victory of Christian Virtue. They see society itself as having a purpose, namely the generation of as many Virtuous Christian Souls as possible, seeing our world as a factory for getting as many people into heaven as possible. For them society has deviated severely from this purpose, and it is their solemn and total duty to correct its course. 

Those of us who do not see society as having an intrinsic purpose, or who do not see history as having any sort of inevitable end, cannot just point at the calendar and exclaim that their views are retrograde and thus automatically bad. Just because time has advanced doesn’t mean that we today are any closer to some sort of goal. To them, the advance of time has proven to be a bad thing, since decay can take place over time just as much as growth can. 

So: all victory is temporary, and so is all defeat. No event expresses the inevitable, and all can be changed and reversed and changed back again. 

The road ahead will be very long, and faced with much more pain. Today, many people with terminal pregnant conditions learned that they are going to die in childbirth - people carrying fetuses with fatal genetic conditions learned that they are going to be forced to carry a doomed corpse to term, that they will be forced to witness one tiny useless scream followed by silence - and a hefty hospital bill. Our world just got worse, for the people living in it today and the people about to be forced into it. Our fight must carry on, not for an abstract vision of a future utopia that’s ours for the taking, but for the sake of the weak and suffering here and now today.

We humans don’t deal with eternity - we deal with each other, here and now, and in doing so find that even our darkest moments don’t bear that mark of inevitability and finality. We will get through this, even if it has to be one breath at a time.

No matter what happens, no single moment is truly unendurable.

Onwards.