#115: The Long Defeat

Original Artwork: http://mattiasfahlbergdesign.com/
Quote from JJR Tolkein's Galadriel

The world is going to end someday.

That's not a metaphor, y'all, it's a scientific fact. I'm not trying to be a downer, or to scare anyone, I'm just saying; 

Someday our star will expand and engulf this tiny planet we call home. 

And maybe humanity will survive it and maybe we won't, and maybe we'll have long since killed ourselves off because we scorched the planet with CO2. Who knows? The point is, the Earth will not last forever.

Conventional wisdom says the universe won't last forever, either. The science is still out on that one, so I can't say for sure, and maybe, even if the science were in, it might be wrong. We just don't know enough about the universe itself to say for certain. But for a long time it was assumed (and some still believe) that the universe will someday run out of energy, and it will stop.

And maybe collapse back in on itself and explode into a new universe?

But maybe not.

In fact, there's an author who wrote an entire YA fantasy series around this premise. Diane Duane writes about young wizards, and in the opening pages of her first book, So You Want to Be a Wizard, she lays it out for them.

As one renowned Senior Wizard has remarked, "Entropy has us outnumbered."

No matter how much preserving we do, the Universe will eventually die. But it will last longer because of our efforts--and since no one knows for sure whether another Universe will be born from the ashes of this one, the effort seems worthwhile.

Pretty heavy for a kid's book, right? I read this for the first time when I was 13 or so, and the impact of what was said was not lost on me. Duane wasn't done, though. She had another quote that hit me like a falling rock.

"There are no prizes for the service of life--except life itself."

And that, my friends, was my introduction to the idea of the long defeat.

I didn't know it at the time. All I knew when I was thirteen was that my parents had spent ten years in service to the poor, the beaten, and the hungry, only to be reviled and cast out by the church that claimed that very service was the highest calling for a Christian. They hadn't just "not gotten" a prize, they had actively been given the opposite of a prize. And I was mad about it. I was so mad about it, I'm still mad, 27 years later. I'll probably be mad until the day I die.

But something clicked in me when I read that book. And years later, when I read this quote by Dr. Paul Farmer, I knew what that something was.

We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers? 

No, it's not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.

The long defeat is a moral philosophy, and it's pervasive through both theological writings and common cultural narratives. It's the idea that you don't pick your side based on who will win. You pick your side based on what is right, and then you accept--deep in your bones--that your side is going to lose.

You're going to lose because you've sided with the poor, and the oppressed, and that means you have no power.

You're going to lose because you've sided with the sick and the dying, and that means your time is limited.

You're going to lose because you've sided with those that are reaching for a goal so distant it seems unattainable. And it will be.

You're going to lose because we don't live in a fantasy world. "Yippee kai yay, motherfucker," will not actually help you win against insurmountable odds.

But you fight anyway. You know you aren't going to get a prize. You know you're going to lose. And it won't just be you. It will be everyone at your side, who also chose to fight that fight, and in some ways watching them lose will be even harder than losing yourself. 

 But you do it anyway.

Janusz Korczak did it when he refused to leave his orphans, even as they were marched to their deaths. Instead he held the hand of one of the littlest, and tried to make sure the children weren't frightened.

Janusz Korczak and the orphans

Alexander Akimov did it when he stayed at Chernobyl during the meltdown, to help mitigate the damage. He knew the plant was lost, knew that tens of thousands were going to die, but he also knew fewer would die if he slowed the reaction.

The ruins

The four chaplains did it on the SS Dorchester when they calmly helped evacuate as many sailors as they could, including giving up their own life jackets to four lucky men, before going down with the 600 remaining souls on board the ship.

The four chaplains

You fight the long defeat because every moment you fight is a moment that brings some glimmer of hope. Because every pebble that doesn't rain down in the rock slide might mean that someone doesn't die, even if hundreds of others do. You fight because you're not trying to win, you're trying to help prevent the moment when someone else loses.

Everything about this philosophy is contained in the beautiful and heart wrenching principle song of Man of La Mancha.

You fight the long defeat because the world is better for it. Even when you lose. The world is still better.

And you fight because you don't know what will grow from your struggles. 

Henrietta Lacks died from cancer in 1951, at age 31. She lost her fight. 

But while she was fighting, researchers took a biopsy of her cells, and developed the world's first immortalized cell line. 

Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks lost.

But without her, we would not have eradicated polio.

Quote by Lin Manuel Miranda

For all that we call it the long defeat, we do not know what will grow from our legacy. Because perhaps the universe will not die. Perhaps the moral arc does bend towards justice. Martin Luther King, Jr died before he saw his dream become a reality, but my white son has a best friend who is a black girl, and that means something.

It may not mean victory. But it means that the world is better because we strive, with our last ounce of courage.

Because we fight the long defeat.