I have looked up at the starry sky and wondered about existence for as long as I can remember. Is there meaning? Or is everything merely a strange coincidence?
But the stars are far. The universe does not answer. It remains vast, cold, and silent.
Albert Camus called this silence the absurd, the clash between our need for meaning and the world’s refusal to confirm it. He believed we must create meaning ourselves, acting without a safety net.
My father claimed that Christ had the answer, not because he was the Son of God, but because he consistently acted in our best interests. His life was not proof of God, but a model for building a healthy society on earth. Only if we understood this, my father believed, could we succeed as a species.
That conviction shaped me. I believed that the good humanity achieved outweighed the harm. In every article I have written here, urging resistance to what I see destroying us, there has been hope.
Now I am less certain.
Søren Kierkegaard saw the anxiety that accompanied freedom in the early nineteenth century. Friedrich Nietzsche later declared the collapse of old values and the burden of creating new ones. Jean-Paul Sartre insisted that we are responsible for what we become.
But responsibility does not ensure goodness.
The freedom that followed the death of God casts a long shadow. History does not suggest that the good prevails. It seems increasingly unlikely that it will.
We claim that life has value. Yet we exploit it. We claim to value truth. Yet we bend it when convenient. We claim to care about the future. Yet we gamble with it.
The great nations now act almost entirely in their own interest. Caring for life is not self-evident. It is not even common.
To care beyond the narrow boundaries of tribe and nation is a difficult choice, one that competes with pride, fear, greed, and the will to power.
There are a few signs that we are moving toward greater wisdom. Acts of care exist everywhere, but they are drowned out by our darker impulses, which are now very visible in the upper echelons of society. That fact alone speaks volumes.
And yet I return to a stubborn conviction. Precisely because nothing guarantees meaning, every act of care becomes heavier with significance.
When we protect life, we do so knowingly, aware of our own capacity for destruction, and choosing to resist it.
That resistance is fragile. It may fail. The destructive forces are powerful. They may prevail.
But the resistance is real.
It is the only force that stands against self-deception.
And it is our only hope, even though it may also be a self-deception. Perhaps then you will understand why I am no longer so optimistic about humanity.
If there is a way forward, it is not through certainty, nor through comfort, but through endurance. I see no better expression of that than in Rudyard Kipling’s words:
“If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on’”
Featured image © Eldar Einarson
