Who hasn’t felt like the end is nigh? That the book of history is closing upon us? Right-wing populism is spreading like wildfire while we see scenes of horrific violence on our screens, all on the backdrop of looming environmental catastrophe caused by global warming. Artificial intelligence spreads misinformation which politicians and billionaires successfully capitalize upon. I myself have groaned “the world is ending” out loud several times since Trump was elected. Our despair is most likely not misplaced in the case of any of these events. 

Our generation is anything but alone in this sentiment. Not long ago, the idea that nuclear weapons ensured our path to absolute obliteration was commonplace. The end of history must have felt equally tangible to our parents and grandparents as they stared down the barrel of two superpowers, mutually assuring one another’s destruction. I don’t think any one of us would say that they were wrong to despair. From that vantage point as from ours, the facts do not easily lend themselves to an alternate understanding of the direction of history. Perhaps this is a condition of the post-World-War-Two era: the horrors witnessed in the twentieth century creating an arrow of implication to worse horrors on the horizon. Maybe this condition digs itself even deeper into the corners of human thought: perhaps it is even essential to the way we see history whatsoever. 

Two weeks ago, I attended a conference on the (notorious) philosopher Jacques Derrida. One of the speakers, Rafael Zagury-Orly, in his reading of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, reflected on the way we conceptualize history. He described the persistence of a kind of teleological thinking in our thinking about history. In Greek philosophy, and especially Aristotelian science, the telos was the purpose, end, or final cause of something.1 The telos of the hammer is to hit nails; the telos of a cell is mitosis. In Christianity, the last judgement is the telos of history, in which the narrative which began in the Garden of Eden is carried through to its finale. This eschatological construction of history in Christianity is granted in revelation, and while the latter is an epistemological notion that has seriously fallen from grace, the notion of a knowable and determinate structure to history has done anything but.  

The German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel continued the project of teleological-eschatological history, but he grounded it in a theory of human reasoning. History was the narrative of human knowledge, with different historical ages characterized as shapes consciousness takes. History moves dialectically: that is, the inherent logic of one mode of knowing inevitably leads to its own negation and thus replacement with a new mode, or shape, of knowing. This goes, too, for social arrangements and norms. Polytheism necessitates the emergence of monotheism, which has responded to the limitations of polytheism to capture the truth about the world. Through this process, we eventually achieve true knowledge of the absolute. This is an oversimplification of one of the most complicated thinkers in the history of philosophy, but it gets at the main tenets: history has a logic, one knowable to human minds; history is moving towards one final point at which it will become complete, with each moment in history is understood in relation to this grander narrative; the end of history is the completion of the project of human progress. 

Hegel thought these configurations of social, moral, political, and epistemological norms were moving towards a definitive end. The arrival and spread of political liberalism after the French Revolution intersects with the achievement of absolute knowing, and history progresses no further than this, its final, absolute configuration. This strikes us as rather silly. Of course, history did not end in the early 19th century. A fellow named Karl Marx thought it was silly too—not because of the idea that history could end, but for the fact that it was not yet over, that liberalism was the final form of social configuration. Marx endorsed the idea of the end of history, which he determined would be the outcome of the dialectical movement of material conditions and the effects they produce, eventually ending in the classless society which communism strives towards. The idea was taken up again, more recently, serving yet another political master, in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, in which the collapse of the U.S.S.R. heralded the ultimate and final victory for liberal, capitalist, democratic states.  

To be clear, we should distinguish the end of history from the end of time; rather, history’s ending indicates that the constantly shifting allegiances of power have resulted in their final arrangement. Hegel thought history was over but that the Napoleonic code would continue to spread across the (relevant part of the) world;2 Marx did not believe the classless society would then stop making things or doing things, but that there would be no other political or material arrangement coming in to replace it; and Fukuyama certainly believed that the fall of the USSR inaugurated a period in which liberal democracies would spread and flourish across the world.  

These are all optimistic attitudes toward the telos, in which the end of history ushers in widespread freedom and justice. We might think that we, unlike these political thinkers of the past, have a more nuanced and mature understanding of the movement of history. It is no longer popular to think of history as a determinate, logical process as these thinkers did. Fukuyama is primarily an object of ridicule from his philosophical hubris—a rare opportunity for a philosopher to be proven wrong by emergent facts in his own lifetime. We do not share the optimism, and perhaps we fancy ourselves to have excised the final cause from historical thinking the same way Descartes and Bacon excised teleology from scientific thinking. But have we? The notion of the end of history and its inevitability dog our perception of the present; we see ourselves barreling down a track towards a conclusory point. We, too, impose a moral evaluation on that conclusory point, albeit without the optimism of those thinkers before us. 

The combined convictions that one knows the end of history and intense optimism about that end become dangerous. It gives those with power the mandate to employ whatever means can be thought to bring about the end. Examples of this abound. The pessimism with which the post-war generations have regarded the end of history appears free of this danger. But another, albeit less dramatic, danger lurks under this combination too: the conviction that one knows the end of history combined with intense pessimism about that end leads to fatalism, in which no means are useful for countering the inevitable end. I think this captures something about our moment, even more than, say, five years ago. Anecdotally, almost everyone I knew who went vegan for environmental reasons in 2018 has given up on it. Perhaps it’s a result of the extremism of the vegan diet; perhaps it’s a product of growing up a bit. But I think many of you know what I am getting at: there is a feeling that we are giving up. It seems to me that this fatalism grows in proportion to the combination of these convictions. 

Zagury-Orly, via Derrida (or, perhaps more accurately, Derrida via Zagury-Orly), did not offer many answers in the talk I attended. Instead, he ended the talk with questions: Can we think the event without a horizon of historical meaning against which to interpret it? Can we think of history as a series of discontinuities and disjunctions, without an essential narrative? I don’t know whether history will end, or what that end would look like. I do not, however, believe that human thinking is essentially teleological, in history or in any other subject. If we can shake teleological thinking out of physics, chemistry, and biology, why can’t we do so with history? 

Unlike Zagury-Orly, I would like to end with a more concrete conclusion to these reflections about the teleological nature of our historical thinking. On the one hand, it is clear that there are several serious dangers looming on the horizon, and these are not to be trivially shaken off as illusory; we should not simply put on a bright face about right wing populism or climate disaster. On the other hand, if we think about history with too essentialist of a framework, we foreclose the possibility to change it.