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In case you haven’t had enough doom recently, this week’s long read pick comes from The Point, where Agnes Callard considers the philosophical challenges of imagining the end of humanity.

Between new tech-driven threats, climate change, the coronavirus pandemic and other nameless future threats, “We may not have arrived at the end,” she says, “but we have certainly arrived at the thought of it.” Eventually, she points out, one way or another, the human species will stop existing:

We can tell ourselves soothing stories, such as the one about escaping to another planet, but we are embodied creatures, which is to say, we are the sorts of things that, on a geological time scale, simply do not last. Death looms for the species just as surely as it looms for each and every one of us.
- Agnes Callard, The Point

How are we not to collapse into despair if we cannot imagine even a human legacy continuing, via our descendants or those of our friends? Philosophers, artists and humanists, she argues, should set down the dream of making ‘advances’ as scientists do and engage instead with the question of meaning:

The humanist was never really in the business of making progress. Her job is to acquire and transmit a grasp of the intrinsic value of the human experience; this is a job whose difficulty and importance rises in proportion to the awareness that all of it will be lost. 
- Agnes Callard, The Point

As we grapple worldwide to cope with a deadly pandemic, Callard suggests that while scientists and engineers seek to defer our inevitable end for as long as possible, it is the job of humanists to face that end without abandoning all capacity to find value in life, or courage to face its loss:

It is the humanist’s task to ensure that, if and when the infertility scenario should arise, things will not stop mattering to people. […] At times like this, when a window opens, and all of humanity sees the End rushing at us from the future, it behooves the humanists to be the ones who refuse to shut our eyes.
- Agnes Callard, The Point

Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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