Chapter the Twenty-Eighth: Forty-Six Wars, and Why We Prefer to Think Ourselves Already Gone
In Which We Find Ourselves Grateful for the Wrong Kind of Peace
There is a theory circulating in the more tired corners of the internet — which is to say, most of them — that we are all already dead.
The details vary by narrator. Some favor purgatory. Others prefer something more bureaucratic: a spiritual waiting room with inadequate seating and no one at the desk who knows anything. The essential claim holds across versions. Something happened — some collective event of sufficient magnitude — and what we currently inhabit is not life as previously arranged but its aftermath. We are ghosts who have not yet accepted the paperwork.
I will not pretend the argument lacks appeal.
—
What it would mean if true: the Iran war becomes, if not comfortable, at least legible. A supreme leader assassinated. His son elected to replace him within the week. The man whose government ordered the strikes calling the new occupant a “lightweight.” This is the internal logic of an afterlife organized by committee. It follows rules. It simply declines to explain them.
The Houthi drones that struck Amazon’s data centers in the UAE acquire, under the same hypothesis, the quality of allegory. We built civilization’s memory in the cloud. The cloud caught fire. The internet flickered across the Middle East, and somewhere a package was delayed, and the person waiting for it did not ask why. That last detail — the person, the package, the absence of curiosity — may be the most purgatorial element of all.
The last nuclear arms treaty between the United States and Russia expired in February. It had been in some form or another since 1991. No ceremony was held. No one in particular noted it. The cloud, at least, caught visible fire.
—
There are forty-six active armed conflicts in the world at this writing. Researchers report this figure in the same register used for soil moisture. The highest number since the Second World War, they note, apparently in the belief that noting it will produce some consequence in someone. It is not clear in whom.
Ukraine loses ground at a pace that has become, through sheer repetition, almost ordinary. Eleven million people have been displaced from Sudan. Haiti’s capital is controlled by gangs — which is to say the gangs are, functionally, the government, and are not providing the services governments are typically expected to provide. Mali’s jihadists have blockaded their own country’s capital. Pakistan conducted airstrikes on a hospital in Kabul. Venezuela was placed in a queue for American military attention and has since been attended to.
One could continue. The list is not the point. The list is never the point, which is itself the point.
—
And yet.
On a Saturday in late March, in cities across the country, people gathered under a banner that read, in substance if not always in those words: we are still here, and we object.They had read the same morning paper. They had access to the same forty-six wars, the same soil-moisture register in which catastrophe is reported and absorbed and reported again. They declined the comfort on offer anyway — the comfort being, specifically, the comfort of believing one’s presence no longer matters, that the worst has already been arranged by people beyond influencing, that the appropriate response to an unmanageable situation is to stop attempting to manage it.
One does not wish to be sentimental about a protest — sentiment is the enemy of accuracy, and accuracy is the only thing I have to offer. But there is something in the specific refusal worth examining. Not optimism. Something colder and more useful than that. The simple insistence on remaining a participant in a world that is, whatever else one might say of it, still happening.
—
The purgatory hypothesis is appealing not because it resolves anything but because it offers a narrative. Purgatory implies sequence. Sequence implies an end. This is more than the news cycle typically provides.
What it also offers is relief from the obligation to respond. The dead cannot call their representative. Cannot attend the meeting. Cannot be reasonably expected to do more than manage their own accounting. The hypothesis converts helplessness into metaphysics. It elevates unavailability to a theological condition.
More than a hundred million Americans believe they will see the end of the world in their lifetime. A notable share find this not merely plausible but, in some interpretations of the data, something approaching a relief. The fully metabolized version of the purgatory theory, one observes, is eschatology. One stops waiting to be classified as dead and simply begins anticipating the event itself.
This is quite a long way from calling one’s representative.
—
The difficulty, as always, is the evidence. Forty-six wars require participants, who require decisions, which require people capable of making different ones. The eleven million displaced from Sudan require countries willing to receive them. The hundred and four Iranians killed on a vessel everyone knew was unarmed cannot be filed under allegory.
Neither can the people in the streets last Saturday. They are the counter-evidence — not to the darkness of the situation, which is not in dispute, but to the conclusion that darkness forecloses participation. Several of the people currently responsible for attending to this world are on television explaining why it is, on reflection, quite well managed. Several others are, at this precise moment, making a sign.
Both of these things are true simultaneously. Only one of them requires anything of us.
—
What soothes in the purgatory theory is not the death. It is the grammar of it. Death means the worst has already happened and can happen only once. The worst being behind us is an underrated form of peace.
But a society that finds posthumous metaphor more bearable than the morning paper has learned to call exhaustion perspective, and to mistake disengagement for clear-eyed realism. The people carrying signs last Saturday were not under any illusion that the signs would be sufficient. Sufficiency was not the point. Presence was the point — the stubborn, inconvenient, unglamorous insistence on remaining classified as living.
Purgatory is optional. It does not feel optional, which is rather the genius of it.
One wishes there were a more restful conclusion available. One has looked.