“U.S. Inflation Accelerates, Consumer Spending Slows.”
“Study Shows Minimum Wage Workers Can’t Afford a 1 Bedroom Apartment Anywhere in America.”
“World’s Oceans Hit Hottest Temperature on Record.”
The news is so apocalyptic it seems like scripture. Heat waves scorch Europe. Polar bears starve on ever shrinking ice floes. There’s a persistent sense that the world is getting worse. It’s easy to shrug and surrender to a nihilistic “who cares?”
But what if the end of our world is really just the birth of a new one?
In The Beginning Comes After the End, poet of politics and patron saint of hopefulness Rebecca Solnit challenges our commonplace conceptions of transformation. Oftentimes, we romanticize the results of transformation: the earthbound caterpillar metamorphosing into a creature capable of flight, the past tense “became” rather than the present progressive “becoming.”
But the process of becoming is far more chaotic than we might realize. In the disordered dark of the chrysalis, the caterpillar first digests itself, releasing enzymes to dissolve all of its tissues. Gestating in primordial goo, the caterpillar assembles and reassembles itself, growing imaginal discs that will transform into entirely new body parts. It’s only by unmaking that the caterpillar can remake itself.
Beginnings and endings are not irreconcilable antipodes—they’re two corresponding, if opposite, halves of the same whole. The end of the caterpillar is the beginning of the butterfly. The middle is messy. As Solnit writes:
“The beginning comes after the end. A chrysalis is the beginning of a butterfly, but in that chrysalis is no elegant transition. The caterpillar falls apart—it turns to goo, and something profoundly different reconstitutes from it guided by the hitherto dormant imaginal cells. In that slurry, the dissolving caterpillar’s immune system perceives the imaginal cells as alien and attacks them. But they survive, multiply, and set in motion the instructions to become a butterfly. A many-legged crawler becomes a six-legged winged creature, an animal that devours leaves becomes one that sips nectar from flowers. In recent years, as we’ve paid closer attention to the natural world and learned more about it from scientists, this metamorphosis has become a metaphor for the transformation of society, often with the sense that we are at the stage of dissolution, imaginal cells under attack. A butterfly is the end of the caterpillar. The beginning—the next era—comes after the end of the last one, and in between comes a lot of falling apart.”
In a poetic passage, Solnit examines how—in the natural world—cataclysm often carries the seeds of renewal:
“Seeds spread by many means. Some, encased in fruit, are eaten by birds and excreted on the wing far from the berry bush; some have their own wings or are shaped like parachutes so they can travel on the wind, as do the seeds of dandelions and maples; some explode from the pod, as do the bean-like seeds of wisteria; some travel by sticking to fur or hair or fabric; some are carried away and stored by squirrels whose forgetfulness begets forests. Some seeds lie dormant for years or decades and only germinate when fire sweeps over the land. Sequoias, those largest beings standing on the earth, only drop their seeds when fire comes and melts the resin in the cones. In destruction is their regeneration.”
Ideas begin as small seedlings but can take root as forests of rules and rights as sturdy as oaks. Most things start as seeds: civil rights, women’s rights, democracy. We take for granted that how things are isn’t always how things were or how things will be.
Take human rights. For much of human history, those accused of crimes were tortured and executed without due process. But in 1689, the English Bill of Rights outlawed “cruel and unusual punishment,” setting the groundwork for the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment. Over time, our notion of “cruel and unusual” evolved: the brutal, belittling punishments once casually viewed in the village square became intolerable.
Two centuries and two world wars later in December 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a revolutionary document which asserted all people—regardless of race, religion, sex or ethnicity—were born with equal rights and deserved to be treated with dignity. The notion that humans have rights seems self-evident now but such an idea would be inconceivable to an ancient Egyptian merchant or Roman magistrate.
Once an idea germinates, it’s almost impossible to destroy. You might be able to cut it or clip it but you can’t uproot it entirely: a flower can’t snap its petals shut and swallow its seed; a centuries-old oak tree can’t rush backward, sucking its sprawling branches down its trunk and shrink back into an acorn.
Reflecting on the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, Solnit argues the belief in reproductive rights—no matter how fiercely attacked—cannot be taken away:
“Ideas, too, have many ways of traveling, and some ideas that begin in obscurity spread and proliferate and strengthen to become powerful elements of a culture, a society, a civilization. The ideas that have taken root in the last three quarters of a century have borne fruit—as laws, rights, beliefs, roles, possibilities that did not exist before—and they add up to changes so profound that they amount to the end of a civilization and the beginning of another with different values and beliefs. We often speak as though we are here to toil, endlessly planting and cultivating seeds and seedlings but we have also feasted on harvests from what was sown and tended by those who came before.
You can chop down a tree, but ideas tend to outlive their attacks. You can, for example, take away rights but not belief in those rights; ideas in this sense are trees that will not become seeds again, are the genies in The Arabian Nights who, once released from captivity, will do anything but be bottled up again. Undoubtedly, some American women who lost reproductive rights after the June 24, 2022 decision overturning the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision forty-nine years earlier believe that they and others should not have those rights…They are significantly outnumbered by people who believe in those rights for all.”
Today we live in a transitional period between two worlds: the dying world and the world not-yet-born. We’re the caterpillar before it bursts from its cocoon.
Translating a famous quote from the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s prison journals, Solnit observes:
“The old world is dying. The new one is slowly appearing. In this light and shadow, monsters arise.”
Expanding on Gramsci’s diaries, Solnit’s friend, British environmental writer Robert Macfarlane, writes:
“Yes, the monsters are abroad, but as we know monster comes from monstrare, meaning to demonstrate and to warn. Monsters—the bad kind—show us the way forward, as well as pushing us back.”
Hegel had a word for this long before Gramsci: the dialectic, the idea that progress doesn’t move steadily in a straight line but lurches ahead, one step forward, two jarring steps back, thesis meeting antithesis. History is action and reaction: the prim propriety of 1950s crew cuts and poodle skirts giving way to the counterculture long hair and tie dye of the 1960s; strict gender roles and Jim Crow segregation catalyzing the feminist movement and the Black Panther Party.
We tend to imagine history as a march toward progress but it’s more like a birth: bloody, agonizing, a shrieking cry as new life gasps for air. Civic unrest is met with batons and tear gas. Protests explode into riots. Those who fight for change are sometimes assassinated.
The monsters of our moment—the Tates and Trumps, the regressive red-pillers, the aproned trad wives, the white supremacists—are fighting to maintain the old world order. After all, why overhaul a system that serves you? Often, the powerful will do whatever it takes to preserve their power:
“So many old orders are falling apart, so many systems no longer work, so many assumptions no longer fit. Cruelty, greed, and division are not new, but when the old order that institutionalized them is threatened, its beneficiaries come out fighting to hold onto advantages that used to go unquestioned.
Uncertainty is full of possibilities and not only positive ones. However flawed or ugly an existing system, it’s reasonable to wonder whether what succeeds will be better or worse or more terrifying, especially if that system serves you. In many cases, monsters arise out of the attachment to the dying order, monsters willing to use monstrous violence to prevent the new world from being born.”
But the emergence of monsters isn’t a reason to despair—it’s proof of just how much we’ve moved forward. Monsters only crawl out from under the bed when the old order is threatened.
It might seem like we’re at the end of the world but maybe it’s more like that R.E.M. song: “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” The world we know is gone—we don’t know what comes after it.
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