The World Will Never Be Saved
Meditations Inspired By, But Not Really About, the Events of This Week, With More than the Usual Number of Quotations as Hopefully Instructive Ornamentation
It doesn't… mean anything. In the greater scheme or the big picture, nothing we do matters. There's no grand plan, no big win.… I kinda worked it out. If there is no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. Because that's all there is. What we do, now, today.… All I wanna do is help. I wanna help because I don't think people should suffer as they do. Because if there is no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.
— Tim Minear, Angel, season 2, episode 16, “Epiphany”
There is a concept, made up like all concepts out of bits of others, that is not sufficiently often bundled together, for want of a word for it.1 It is a notion for which we need a word so as to tie it all together, so it is more often seen as one thing, the way a pile of a great many sticks becomes a bundle when bound in twine. This word would unite two different, poorly-defined and often overlapping phenomena: first, it would include that which is natural to human behavior (in our genes, say); and second, it would include that which is socially determined, but in a deep way that can’t be undone easily (if at all) within any particular society and which likewise within particular people can’t be undone easily (if at all), at least by the time that they are, oh, let’s say, of kindergarten age. Let us call such things deeply rooted. The purpose of putting forward this word is to avoid the following dynamic: someone wants to say something is deeply rooted, but, lacking the term, describes it as “innate” or “culturally deep”, and then as often as not everyone gets into a fight about whether the trait under discussion is genetic or social or due to people’s individual upbringing, and the larger point, the actual point about the specific phenomenon which is deeply rooted, is lost in the weeds of a very different debate. Needlessly so, for if something is deeply rooted in us, then for a great many purposes it doesn’t matter whether it’s genetic or social or some hard-to-untangle combination: the main point is that it’s there, and we’re not getting rid of it soon if at all. We don’t need, for most purposes, to discuss whether some scientifictional scenario about genetic or social engineering will do away with it: it’s simply part of our human nature, the nature of humans within our society, regardless of whether or not it is part of a broader human nature. The point is we’re stuck with it: we need to deal with that, rather than quibble causes.
So along these lines, I wish to begin with an assertion: it is a deeply rooted phenomenon that people believe, on many different levels and in many different contexts, in a final, climactic struggle leading to ultimate victory: that we will, or might, reach a point in time where all, or at least many, of the problems that beset us will be fixed, and thereafter we will simply live “wisely and agreeably and well”.2 In our culture, at least as seen from the high vantage point that history’s hill affords, this has most often been expressed religiously: the apocalypse, the end of time, the coming of the messiah, and so forth. But in the grand gyre that we call modernity, this tendency has been swept up into a host of modern projects and ideologies—socialism and transhumanism and all sorts of other ideologies have “immanentized the eschaton”, to use the famous conservative phrase which warns against the practice.
To be clear, I am speaking here not only about full eschatons—apocalypses, ragnoroks, the various promised and imagined ends of history—but equally about more imminent presentiments of salvation: the feeling that if we just solve this problem than that will all be well. Which is to say in small ways we imagine eschatons for our families, our workplaces, our communities, our selves. We think that if we can just get this right, or if we can just get that fixed, then things will be well, and there will be peace and happiness. We imagine our troubles are but tales, and that they will therefore end, and then we will all live happily ever after.
As I said: it’s deeply rooted. So I am certainly not standing back and tut-tutting at you foolish mortals who fall for it. No: “I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs…”. I fall for this all the time. It’s less like a bad habit that we can change than it is like one of those optical illusions that still work even once we’ve been told about them and understood the mechanism of our self-deception.
We often talk about these eschatons, big and small, in terms of “salvation”, a relic of the feeling’s roots in religion. We talk about trying to “save” this family, this community, this country, this nation, as if it were a one-time thing, as if we could say one prayer or do perform one task or mediate one dispute or expel one person and all would be right again.
But, of course, it’s not true. It’s never true. The world contains no final battles, no climactic solutions, no one-time struggles which vanquish all our problems. There’s just life: a long struggle punctuated with joy, ending in death.
The world will never be saved.
In the days leading up to the election I let myself hope—to think that it would be all right. I know this is foolish; I often quote George Eliot’s line from Middlemarch (chapter 10), that “Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.” Indeed, I quoted it multiple times just this week to several people making confident statements online about near-future events. In my own defense the one thing I can say is that I was not prophesying but hoping, which is a different sort of error—more deeply rooted, and less gratuitous. But it’s a cousin to the error of pundits and pollsters and prophets, those who claim and believe or pretend to believe that they can “look into the seeds of time and say which grains will grow and which will not”. Egven as I hoped, I knew I was wrong to do so; and yet I did it still. (The left-side circle must be smaller, damn it!!)
I went so far as to think about a mistake that those of my fellow sailors who work America’s port side were making, namely, thinking that (to paraphrase a tweet I can no longer find) “if we can just get rid of Trump, we can all figure out how to get along”. But I knew this wasn’t true! Because I remembered, all too well, how we felt in 2008, “when Thangorodrim was broken, and the Elves deemed that evil was ended for ever, and it was not so.”3 And I wanted to warn people not to get too excited: that even if we, with the splendor of our banners recalling the glory of the Elder Days and the hosts of Beleriand, routed Trump and Maga and won the trifecta, the fact that almost half of our country had voted for a fascist, believed deeply that this man, by far the worst human being to ever run for President, probably for any office of any sort in our nation’s history, this man who a dozen times over was proved unfit to serve, who promised nothing but ruin, that this man was better than someone who was, at worst, an average Democrat, with strengths and weaknesses but on the whole at a minimum decent if not quite good. Evil would not be vanquished, I wanted to say: for we thought so in 2008 as well;—well, not thought, not really: those of us who had studied or lived through history knew that it was not the case, but we let ourselves alieve it, just as we alieve the sizes of the orange circles. We felt it, knowing the feeling was false. I was worried that we were about to make this mistake again.
But, of course, as it turns out, rather than almost half of our country embracing fascism—yes, of course, not Nazism, at least not yet, I am not saying he is Hitler; but if he is merely as bad as Putin that would be bad enough—rather than, as I said, almost half embracing fascism, slightly more than half did instead.
So ended the glory of Númenor.
And now, of course, slightly more than half of my fellow citizens, the ones who chose to lead them the worst person ever to befoul our politics (not the most harmful politician, but the worst human being), have their own escatological vision. These are, of course, egged on by the men at the top of the movement, above all by the befouler himself, who in his victory remarks said he would deliver “the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve and that you deserve. This will truly be the golden age of America.”
And they, too, will find in due course that all the problems they think will be swept away will, in fact, simply go on. “You keep waiting for the dust to settle and then you realize it: the dust is your life going on.”4 Maybe they will then turn and blame others—the immigrants, the transgendered, the Jews, the blacks, the libs, whoever is their favorite target thaty week, just make sure to “round up twice the usual number of suspects”—and then, horrifically, things will get even worse for whomever they chose to take their disappointed anger out upon. And, I fear—and no, despite the accusations of some online this is not some secret hope, I do not long for any to suffer—that all too many people who voted this time for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces party will find their own faces devoured.5 Fascism is cruellest to its victims, but it is also cruel to many of its followers as well, and quite often, one by one, the latter become the former, and fall.
I envy them their victory, but I do not envy them the inevitable disappointment that will follow it, although of course I would happily bear the latter a thousand times over if by it we could have thereby gained the former.
So if the world will never be saved, then what? What do you do when there is nothing left to hope for?
You go on, of course. What else is there to do?
‘Farewell, Gandalf!’ [Aragorn] cried… ‘What hope have we without you?’
He turned to the Company. ‘We must do without hope,’ he said.
— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 6
Obviously what that will mean will be different for everyone. Some will have to scramble, now, for shelter if they can find it (and all too many will find none). Some will have the luxury of helping others who are so scrambling, some the even greater luxury of turning their attention to other things which also have value—tending a garden, watching a sunset, writing something worth reading. (And we should not blame those who seek an inner emigration: if life is worth living (and it has to be, for politics to be worth pursuing), then we should not blame those who live it.) But whatever it means for any individual person, all any of us can do is pick ourselves up, change our muddied clothes, and try to carry on.
But my point, of course, is that that would be true anyway. That even if we had won, it wouldn’t have fixed everything. It wouldn’t have made us safe, or relieved us of the burdens of care. That after a victory, no less than a defeat, all any of us could have done would have been to pick ourselves up, change our muddied clothes, and tried to carry on.
This is not to deny, not in any degree, that things would have been much, much better had we won: of course it would. At the most basic level, people will die who would otherwise have lived. People will die in the cruel chaos that will inevitably accompany Trump’s planned deportations—which will be, if achieved, “the second largest forced displacement of human beings in human history, on par with Britain’s disastrous partition of India, and second only to total forced displacement during World War II.”6 People will die of preventable diseases if RFK, Jr. is, as planned, put in charge of the nation’s health infrastructure and makes vaccines either optional or even forbidden; people will die too of tooth decay if he succeeds in his plan to remove the fluoridation from water. Trans people will die from suicide, due to either persecution or denial of necessary medical treatments. People will die from the brutality Trump unleashes, whether committed by official law enforcement officers or by paramilitaries or simply by sympathetic, freelance thugs who decide that he has given them permission to wreck their hate on another’s body. People will die in Ukraine, as Trump abandons it and waves Putin in to devour it unopposed, and people will die in Gaza, as Trump removes the (overly-light but still very real) restraining hand that Biden has heretofore wielded and gives Netanyahu leave to “finish the job”. People will die in climate disasters that now, inevitably, will be even worse than they would have been over the decades or centuries. The blood this vote will spill will not clot for a span far beyond anyone who can read this essay’s years.
For the present stalks abroad Like the past and its wronged again Whimper and are ignored, And the truth cannot be hid; Somebody chose their pain, What needn't have happened did. — W. H. Auden, "A Walk After Dark"
But even if that were all not so… even if the people (a small fraction of the people, a shift of a percent or two from that way to this) had made a different choice… we would still live in a fallen world: not one that ever fell, mind you, but one that is, nevertheless, fallen. People would still have died from all those causes or their equivalents—not in equally large numbers, but still not none. We would still have a long weary battle to fight—not until, as people speak of it online, we changed the nature of our country or until we redeemed the soul of America or we converted the millions away from fascism, but forever, since there will be no armageddon, no eschaton, since all victories are partial and temporary at best, and to live on is to fight on, and “all life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”7
Yes, it would have been better: but it would not have been salvation, and it is foolish to believe that it would. Neither will the libertarian utopia or the socialist paradise or the transhumanist ascension or whatever secular eschaton you imagine be salvation, either, for whichever of those you hope for will never come. We just have to live our life which, as Lennon aptly said, is “what happens while you’re busy making other plans”.
Victory parties end just as surely as do wakes: whether carousing or sorrowing, eventually we put the drinks away and stumble back to bed to die with sleep, and then rise hungover to struggle again, until, of course, that one time we don’t.
I am not saying not to grieve, not to be angry or frightened or depressed or any other emotion you feel: any and all are appropriate.8 I am saying that the burden of life would have gone on whatever happened (until it didn’t), and that the perfect society, in which politics were unnecessary and we all agreed and argued over nothing more serious than tax-rate trivialities would and will never happen. The human is by nature a political animal, The Philosopher tells us; and politics is never-ending struggle. Not just “the slow boring of hard boards”, as Weber famously put it, but the slow boring of hard boards which, when finally finished, we will always find inadequate for the task and have to bore again. It is the slow pushing of hard boulders, which, at day’s end, run back down the hill we just have pushed it up. I do not know if we must (necessarily) imagine Sisyphus happy, we do but if we are ever to be happy ourselves, for the happiness of Sisyphus is the only happiness there is.
So no: the world will not be saved, nor the country, nor your community, nor your family, nor you. Life will be an endless series of problems to be managed and then it will be over, and this will be true for your life, for and the life of your family and your community and your country and the world and the human race. Salvation is not on offer.
So let us try another metaphor.
Life is not a problem to be solved, politics not about a world in need of saving nor a human being a soul to be redeemed. Life is an unending series of tasks to be done.—It’s a garden, if you like; or, for those who like myself have no taste for tending them, we can step inside and try a neighboring metaphor: life is like a house.
You don’t make a repair in a house because doing so will fix it forever, nor clean it once and have it be forever tidy. You repair and clean because without regular, ongoing maintenance it will become unlivable. Of course even with regular, ongoing maintenance it will still become unlivable some day. That day can sometimes be long postponed, although doing so will at times require major renovations rather than small repairs. But however long in coming, some day it will end: the house will be swept away by a flood or burned by a fire or simply become too old and decrepit to do anything but knock it down and start over, or move elsewhere and start again. Or, if you can’t, then to rot along with it. “A man may rot even here”, as the Bard says: one thing that is true of any place upon the Earth.
But whether or not our house will some day fall to ruin, we still clean it and repair it and arrange it and fix it as best as our strength and means and time allows, because in the meantime we have to live, and that’s what living is. Living is taking a look at what needs to be done and doing the best you can, the most you have energy and heart for, and hoping that that will be enough to carry on. I am not saying that all the struggles are equally grave, far from it: just that it’s all a struggle.9
And that is true for our country as well. Obama’s love for Martin Luther King’s fine phrase that “the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice”10 has made it extremely popular in port-side circles, but of course it’s not true, not only because its teleology is aspirational not destined but because there is no place that it is all bending towards. Our country, like every other, will go along, do some good and some bad, will never be what we hope for, and then one day, somehow, will come to an end, and that will have been all it ever was: a place to live—which is to say, a place to suffer and to rejoice and to keep going until we no longer can.
Pick any golden age you like, and go read contemporary accounts, and what you will find are people worrying about the problems in their society, fretting about how this or that is not as good as it was or should be, and generally preoccupied with real problems. Even in an individual life, yes, we may step back and say things are good for us right now, but if we instead step forward into it, we will find that we are worrying and working and beset with chores and cares. Of course we are: because that is what life is.
The world will never be saved, your life will never be happy, because desires and hopes and happiness are tools that evolution uses to steer us, not goals to be attained. We think that this will make our society just or that would make us happy, but as soon as this or that is achieved, we would, after perhaps a night’s celebration or if we are lucky a week’s delight, find ourselves with new wants and new wishes which we in turn will think will be the next last thing needed, and so ad infinitum, or anyway ad mortem.
Again, this is not to say that everything’s the same, from country to country, or from life to life, or from moment to moment: things get better and worse, over time, between nations, and in the lives of the fortunate few when compared to the miserable many. There are real gradations of well-being, and we should, insofar as our feeble strength allows, strive to make things better. It’s just that even if we do, better won’t feel like better: it will just mean that we ascend to a higher level, and see all that must be done there, and go to work again. There is always another boulder to roll uphill.
This is not an easy truth to believe. We want, in the moment of struggle, to believe that things will become better—or rather, not merely better, but better enough. For things, as I said, do get better, it’s just that even the best state is one beset by problems and cares. Yet it can be hard to motivate ourselves to clean or repair the house without telling ourselves that, after this, things will remain in good shape. But they won’t, not for long; all too soon they will be broken or dirty again, and gives us yet another ask. Every night’s dinner makes new dishes to clean and empties our fridge of food we will then need to go buy more of. But to keep this in mind with every goal and every hope and every repair would drive us crazy: so we imagine that this is the final battle, and ignore the endless shelf of sequels, each with a final battle of its own.
Above all this is not an easy truth to believe in the realm of politics. Politics is so hard, is such a miserable grind, that the only way most of us can motivate ourselves to struggle and care is by telling ourselves that this one will really fix things. That’s why every election is the most important ever: not just because it’s true (although of late it has been), but because unless we raise the stakes sufficiently high it is nearly impossible to motivate ourselves. Activists always exaggerate to themselves the ends that they might achieve, and while their victories are often very real, they are never enough, never big enough to have motivated the struggle necessary to bring them about.
Pick up a history book and read the hopes and aims of the workers in the Civil Rights Movement. They achieved very real, very important, very tangible things, but while working at that they spoke and prayed as if they would fix things, and that they didn’t do. If they had known that all their blood and toil and struggle would mean, yes, the end of de jure segregation and the terroristic suppression of their voice, but would not bring real equality, and that injustice and violence and plunder would find new was to gurgle up from the foul earth… would they still have been able to rouse themselves for the fight? Or, a century earlier, would the soldiers who fought for the Union believing that “as He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!” have been able to endure the hardships and deaths that that victory took if they had known that while they would, yes, end slavery, and save the union, they would not achieve any sort of lasting justice, and that many (not all! not nearly all! but all too many) of the pains of slavery would find new ways to manifest, and that for every mile they gained they would lose 1500 yards? Would the suffragettes, the revolutionaries of any revolution, the ordinary toilers in any movement for grand social change? And yet, at the same time, would any progress ever happen if people did not believe in those bigger dreams, and fight for them, only to find, if only when they are dead and described in the dusty tomes of scholars, that what they achieved was, although real, so much less than what they dreamed? Politics is an endless chasing of beautiful mirages which turn out, when we get to them, to be small puddles of dirty water with just enough liquid to allow us to stagger a bit farther on. Without the mirages, though, we would never drag ourselves any distance through the heat and the sand and the thirst.
…men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name…
— William Morris, A Dream of John Ball (1888), chapter 4
Fundamentally this truth—the fact that there is no eschaton, that all struggles just lead to more struggles, that life is not a story nor a battle but a series of tasks whose completion will lead at best only to different tasks—is not an easy truth to believe since, as I said at the start, the expectation of eschatons, big and small, is deeply rooted within us. With some irony, we can note that holding on to a recognition that there is no final victory is itself not a state that we can finally achieve: we will never come to just believe that, but will have to perform endless maintenance upon it, cleaning the dishes after every meal, fixing the cracks in the walls or the broken handle of the sink, and every so often repainting it entirely. There are, I suppose, things we can just learn and then know them—facts about this or that, how to ride a bicycle, the words to the national anthem or the inevitibility of death—but this is not one of them. This we must endlessly re-learn, remind ourselves of, knowing that, like anything, it will never last, and we shall sooner or later have to do it again.
So I have written these words to remind myself and you, however fleetingly, of this thing that we all know and all forget, one more time.
I have discussed another problem of this sort before.
The words are by John Maynard Keynes, from his famous essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”; they were plucked out of that article and highlighted by Brink Lindsey, whose substack The Permanent Problem (soon to be a major dead-tree book, coming soon to a bookstore near you!) is a search for a solution to problems defined in those terms. The Substack is well worth reading; I advise starting at the beginning (the above-linked post) and going forward, rather than reading highlights or going backwards.
The words are from J. R. R. Tolkien, of course, from The Fellowship of the Ring, book 2, chapter 2, spoken by Elrond in his titular council.
Joss Whedon, Astonishing X-Men #22 (spoken by Kitty Pryde).
I have other personal favorites which I like more, but I have to say that, objectively speaking, considering its cultural impact and resonance and persistence, and how much it says in how few characters, this is the greatest tweet of all time:
Quote from Randy Balko’s substack, The Watch, in his post “Trump’s Deportation Army”.
From Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief”
Well, any and all negative ones. Anyone who feels relief or joy or triumph or glee is making either a moral or conceptual error.
I don’t know if the Buddha’s other three noble truths are, in fact true, but the first—duḥkha, that life is suffering—definitely is. Of course, it’s also pleasure and hope and love and delight and beauty and creation and fellowship and joy: none of those are beyond life. And if life is suffering, it is equally true that (as in the brilliant old joke from Annie Hall that sums up so much) the portions are much too small. I want more life, even if it hurts; I want to make the hurt less, not to end it.
Other people had said similar things, but I believe that precise wording is, in fact, King’s.