Infinite Responsibility - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 125

this case, the usual contrast between selfishness and altruism disappears.
As it turns out, if we take our own interest seriously, we will fight to pre-
serve a future for a whole range of others as well. Protecting ourselves,
we would also save the prospects for Earth's living systems. Our single
decision, then, would operate on several levels, saving the future for our-
selves, humanity, and the biosphere, all at once.
One way to imagine the full dimensions of the present choice is to
incorporate into our present activity the possible experience of those to
come, ultimately making them into the guardians of our own future as
well. We would see the present through their eyes, judging it as we imag-
ine they will judge it. We might even fancifully imagine ourselves to be
the emissaries of the ruined future, its embodiment in the present. We
might see ourselves as people out of time, terribly inconvenient to our
contemporaries—ambassadors charged with interrupting our moment
with bad news, cracking open today's complacencies with a dire mes-
sage from coming generations. We would warn our compatriots of the
disaster to come.
If we saw ourselves in this light, some might suggest that we would
be the secular counterparts of the biblical prophets, who warned their
hearers of what would follow in the absence of repentance. But we would
also have to extend that scenario to contemplate the failure of our warn-
ings. In the biblical world, when prophecy failed, the hope for apocalypse
followed; the redemption that did not come to pass in history could
only take place through a divine decision to bring history to an end,
pass judgment on the living and the dead, separate the elect from the
damned, and create a new heaven and earth. (Apocalypse in the biblical
sense does not refer to a cataclysmic, final event, but to a final redemptive
event, one that liberates the redeemed from the horrors of history. The
topic of Revelation, or of Apocalypse, is ater all full of good news for true
believers.)
In our time, however, we face the possibility that redemption will not
come in any form, neither from within history nor from its end, leaving
us without divine guarantees, without a judgment day that could impose
a moral significance on all time. In that case, we endure in a post-bibli-
cal landscape, abandoned to a history that provides no ultimate justice,
no final consolation. Our willingness to serve as emissaries of the future