One of​ the fabulous stories that unfolds at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, the Paris apartment building at the centre of Georges Perec’s novel Life: A User’s Manual, concerns an Englishman called Percival Bartlebooth. While he is still youngish, Bartlebooth – heir to money enough to live as an idle aristocrat – decides to dedicate himself and his fortune to a peculiar project. He first spends ten years in Paris training in watercolour painting, then sets off on a twenty-year tour of the world. Along the way, he paints exactly five hundred watercolours in different ports, each of which he carefully packages and sends home to his neighbour Gaspard Winckler, a puzzle-maker, whose task is to paste each painting onto a wooden backing and make it into an artfully difficult jigsaw puzzle. The puzzles are then taken apart and stored in custom-made boxes. When he returns from his travels, Bartlebooth spends his days sitting at a table in his apartment, doing the puzzles made from his paintings.

He has had a chemist develop a process that seals up the cuts Winckler made when constructing the puzzles. When Bartlebooth finishes a jigsaw (he tries to complete one a fortnight, but this gets harder as his eyesight fails), he has another neighbour apply the chemical agent, restoring the painting to its original integrity and allowing it to be removed from its wooden backing. Then, precisely twenty years after the date of its creation, he has each painting taken to the exact spot where it was painted. There, it is dipped into a detergent that dissolves the paint, leaving only the original sheet in its ‘blank virginity’, which is returned to Bartlebooth’s Paris apartment and stored away by Mortimer Smautf, his servant and companion throughout this adventure.

You might see this as performance art, perhaps rendered all the more compelling by its incompleteness – Bartlebooth dies at his table, blind, the last piece of the 439th puzzle in his hand. But it is not a performance. Bartlebooth is his own audience, and he keeps the whole project as private as possible. He wants to leave ‘no trace’, to live a life no one notices even as it erases itself, so that when he is gone it is as if he had never been.

Does a life like that matter? If it does, does the mattering continue in a future that is totally unaware of it? Do we have to be remembered later for life to matter now? And what of Winckler, who dies before Bartlebooth, his life and craft recruited and then annihilated in the course of someone else’s exercise in self-negation? It’s one thing to erase yourself from time, but another to disappear someone else along with you. What happens to injustice when nobody ever knows of it?

All these questions are at stake when we address ourselves to the idea of the end times. Does anything matter if we’re done for? We are not the first to wonder. Contemporary fictions are preoccupied with apocalypse, human extinction and cataclysm, but as Dorian Lynskey makes clear in Everything Must Go: Why We Are Obsessed with the End of the World, this is nothing new. Secular eschatology is young compared to its millennial Christian variations, but it still has a history two centuries long, beginning, Lynskey says, when Byron ‘killed the whole world’ in his poem ‘Darkness’:

       The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless –
A lump of death – a chaos of hard clay.

But what was inaugurated by ‘Darkness’, along with Mary Shelley’s Last Man, another work about the end of humanity written in the grey and frigid wake of 1816, the ‘year without a summer’, wasn’t just the spectre of a non-redemptive, St Peter-less and faith-free apocalypse, but the question of what kind of meaning life has in a future with nobody in it. Today’s narratives of climate change and pandemic – which have themselves displaced previous generations’ anxieties about the Bomb – are just as caught up with this question, a version of ‘How should we live with the knowledge or expectation that the end is coming?’ It would be one thing if we thought that heaven or hell, or anything at all, awaited us on the other side. But if we don’t, what then?

It is true, of course, that the world is eventually going to end. At some point in the future, the Sun will explode and incinerate the Earth. But that far-off finality isn’t enough to keep us up at night. What might do that is the knowledge that humanity – or some portion of it – has the capacity to determine its own fate. And what if humanity – or some portion of it – creates, or has already created, a situation in which its survival, even in the relatively short term, is impossible? What if all that’s left is just a few Bartlebooths and a lot of Wincklers, our lives and legacies meaningless as soon as we’re gone, in a world with nobody in it, no one to know, let alone care, that we ever existed? How should we live now if that is a real possibility?

In The Sense of an Ending (1967), Frank Kermode argued that one of the things eschatologies of all kinds do is to provide people with narrative closure. We are uncomfortable, he suggested, with the idea that we are all of us mere players in the middle of history. Apocalypses and other endings give us a sense that we can be there for the climax, to see how it all turns out. The two hundred years of writings about the end times that Lynskey has collected in the seven themed sections of Everything Must Go – Last Man, Impact, Bomb, Machines, Collapse, Pandemic and Climate – present a range of possible responses to the end of the world: abandon all hope and commit suicide; descend into unbridled brutality; rush to avert approaching doom; party till the last minute then cosy up with a glass of wine to watch the meteor come in.

Yet beyond providing a stern warning of the potentially cataclysmic paths we tread (the closest thing to real-life heroes in Everything Must Go are scientists like Leo Szilard, who fought tirelessly and fruitlessly to prevent the use of the atomic bomb he helped develop), none of these end-times narratives gives us any sense of what we should – as distinct from would – do if we find ourselves on such a path. Lynskey tells us that ‘secular eschatology is the history of deciding what to worry about, and what to do about it,’ but that isn’t quite right: there is actually very little ‘what to do about it’. When the end of the world comes, it seems that all we’ll be able to do is watch.

For all the wit, energy and impressive research that animates Everything Must Go, something about the book puts me in mind of Lowell George’s ‘Apolitical Blues’ – ‘the meanest blues of all’. ‘None of us,’ Lynskey writes, ‘has yet been forced to confront universal annihilation, but stories about such situations tell us that individuals, too, think about the fact that, in the end, all we are is the sum of our choices.’ He says his ‘goal is not complacency but sanity – freedom from unjustified dread’, because ‘the higher the stakes, the less tenable fear is, and the more likely it is to breed disassociation or hopelessness. The doomers have overdosed on dread.’ Perhaps. But it’s a long way from there to ‘in the end, all we are is the sum of our choices.’ If anything, the stories in Everything Must Go suggest that when it comes to the end of the world, the choices most of us have made don’t much matter. As responses to ‘unjustified dread’, neither scepticism nor the retreat to individual paths seems politically adequate.

Bartlebooth wanted no place in the future, which is an attitude that also seems incompatible with politics. Politics is deeply engaged with the past and present, certainly, but it is ineluctably oriented towards the future. Politics and political life require not only a future, but a future in which what we do today can matter. Questions of meaning and mattering are unavoidable in a life lived in the shadow of end times. It isn’t significant whether or not they really are the end times; living with the sense of an ending doesn’t require confirmation that the feeling is justified any more than anticipation today is diminished by its disappointment tomorrow. If we believe we are on the road to cataclysm, what happens to politics?

Anyone who has been involved in climate politics will have run up against these questions many times over. In the wealthier parts of the world, those involved believe that doom or any form of negativity is demobilising. Every article, every book, every speech has to at least end with hope, optimism: ‘Yes we can.’ The only way to build a movement is to tell people it can or even will succeed – otherwise they will give up. However, anyone who has been involved in climate politics and who has any knowledge of current climate science assessments, or grasps just how tiny an impact is made by most of our ‘wins’, also knows that hope and optimism can be hard to muster. Nevertheless, the general sense is that we must not ‘give in’ to despair or doubt, indeed that it would be a moral failure to do so.

Mara van der Lugt’s Hopeful Pessimism is an extended dismantling of this common sense. It is a book of political philosophy addressed, maybe more narrowly than she intends, to self-identified climate activists. Van der Lugt’s principal claim is that in a ‘breaking world’ like ours, pessimism is completely justifiable and not the obstacle to action the climate movement believes it to be. Pessimism is not fatalism, and ‘from the pessimistic premise the defeatist conclusion does not follow.’ On the contrary, she says, one of the biggest problems with the ‘fatalistic optimism’ of mainstream climate politics is that when the ‘win’ fails to arrive – which so far has been most of the time – what adds to the disappointment is ‘the burden of being responsible for it’. Worse still, ‘the repression of negative, pessimistic, even desperate counter-narratives is truly dangerous, as it charges the already burdened with the duty of optimism.’

Van der Lugt bases her claim on a range of historical experiences (Jewish resistance during the Holocaust; Indigenous peoples devastated by colonialism; the campaigns of climate activists such as Greta Thunberg) and on the thinking of Albert Camus, Václav Havel and Cornel West, among others. In each case she finds support for her argument that to be a pessimist is not to be without hope. It is to sustain a sense of hope different from the simple ‘positivity’ we are usually prescribed. Taking her cue from the two versions of the painting on her book’s cover – George Frederic Watts’s Hope (1885-86), the first with a green background, the second with a blue – she gives the name ‘green hope’ to the ‘crude optimism’ of Camus’s ‘realists’, who are ‘willing to undertake only the tasks that succeed’. What we need instead, she says, is ‘blue hope’, a ‘restless hope’ that acknowledges the radical uncertainty of our moment and ‘draws its strength precisely from what we don’t know’. It is ‘not oriented on outcomes in the way that green hope is but finds value in commitment regardless of effect’. Her goal is to uncouple hope from impossible guarantees of success, and to propose an ethical basis for action in a world that might not have a future: to make political commitment meaningful, in other words, no matter what is on the horizon.

Though she herself​ doesn’t go in this direction, van der Lugt’s book can help us think not only about the future of social movements, but about their pasts too. It is especially helpful when it comes to the endless post facto indictments of this or that effort’s ‘failure’: the failure to prevent the rise of the far right, the failure to prevent ecological destruction, the failure to win over the electorate to social democracy. As with the insistence on hope, these judgments are directed at those who are bothered enough to care in the first place. If you want to demoralise a movement, it seems to me, insisting that the past is cluttered with failures is a good way of going about it. It is plainly untrue that victory or success is always there to be had, as if ‘the people’ are naturally progressive and every lost election is proof of the left’s failure to convince them. Why do progressives, who justifiably insist on the power of money, media, history and structural forces, often seem to believe it should be easy to overcome these things?

Most of the time, politics is a long, slow scramble up the scree slope of history. As the climate crisis deepens, we don’t have time for that, which is one reason it makes sense to be pessimistic. But there is enormous political potential – and hope as well, though I am not sure which colour – in the fact that it can take a very long time for some things to matter, and even then it’s often in unexpected ways. It is almost impossible to know what will or won’t make a difference in the end, what seemingly failed efforts will be built on in the future. We need to experiment with new ways of thinking and doing, some of which won’t work out. Will these too be deemed failures? Or will they be welcomed as contributions to the work of building a different future, helping us learn what to do and what not to do?

I expect van der Lugt would agree with my elaboration on her argument. But it doesn’t sit easily with her emphasis throughout Hopeful Pessimism on politically motivated ‘duty’ and ‘right conduct’ rather than consequences. In an ‘age of sorrow’, pessimism, she says, is a virtue. Those who demonstrate a ‘hopeful, activistic pessimism’ – Thunberg, West, Rebecca Solnit, Naomi Klein and Jane Goodall all feature prominently in the book – are ‘moral exemplars’. This is old-school virtue ethics: she uses the Aristotelian term phronimos, referring to those skilled in the exercise of the virtues. These charismatic activists – who ‘know what we have to do’ and do it ‘because it is the right thing to do’ – are heroic figures who light the way.

The contributions of these people to the fight for social and climate justice are enormous. But Thunberg, West and Klein can be put on pedestals only because they are not representative of climate activists generally, let alone the public. Hopeful Pessimism reads like a book for and about such figures less than one for and about the public – the people who are most vulnerable to ‘green hope’. Is it possible to motivate a movement or political action that does not hinge on heroes?

‘If you do not have the courage to be where the crisis is, where the catastrophe is,’ van der Lugt quotes West, ‘you will never be changed.’ I have no idea whether that is true. Either way, it gives you a sense of the ‘costly’ virtue of hopeful pessimism. Most people do not take themselves to be activists. According to van der Lugt, that is a dereliction of duty. In the face of climate catastrophe, she asks, ‘how can we not grieve?’ But only the already grieving will hear that cry. Would you join a movement if its pitch was that it is a moral failing not to be part of it already? It would be too glib to say that pessimism, however hopeful, needs to be more fun. Van der Lugt’s phronimoi are doing essential work, and in the absence of a non-heroic transformative mass politics, they might well be the best we can hope for. But if hopeful pessimism requires that we self-identify as activists, that we act as moral exemplars with ‘the courage to be where the crisis is’, I’m not sure that it can provide a sound basis for the politics of the future.

Van der Lugt makes a persuasive case for hopeful pessimism, but I wonder if the mood most appropriate to the current moment isn’t something closer to hopeful cynicism. That isn’t necessarily the paradox it may seem. The impression I have after years of teaching is that cynicism is the defining characteristic of many sharp-eyed young people. Pessimism is not fatalism, and neither is cynicism. Cynicism doesn’t mean ‘I don’t care’ or ‘It’s pointless.’ Instead, it is van der Lugt’s pessimism wrapped in a suspicion of claims to duty, virtue and the ‘right thing to do’ – especially when those claims are uttered by people from previous generations who have little to crow about. It may be that at this conjuncture, rallying to right conduct, duty and virtue won’t have a chance if it doesn’t also include some ‘fuck you’ and ‘whatever, dude.’

Perhaps this is what Lynskey is getting at when he writes: ‘We have to live in the space between “Everything is going to be okay” and “Everything is fucked,” between denial and despair.’ But this still suggests that history isn’t ours to make so much as something that happens to us. We have still to figure out the politics of a posture that rejects both Bartleboothian self-erasure and passive Wincklerian victimhood. Lynskey closes by reminding us that ‘everybody dies, everything ends – but not yet.’ However, for millions of people all over the world, ‘yet’ has already arrived. Right now, a posture of cynicism seems more than reasonable.