The Arrow Forward
One arrow
We have come a long way, and it has all been one motion. The first part of this book did the patient work of naming it — argued, from the ground up, that beneath every real moral claim runs a single arrow, increasing coherence over an increasing context; that the good is the direction of that widening and the immoral its reversal, the cheap coherence bought by narrowing the circle until the inconvenient truth falls outside it. The second part has done nothing but live in that one idea — followed it into a single heart re-cohering its drives, a single life learning its long apprenticeship, a we drawing its common chart, a world held together and held apart, a self discovering it does not end at its skin. Nine chapters, one arrow, drawn at every scale we could reach. What is left is only to say where it points, and to hand it to you.
An arrow is a direction
Here, on the last page, the figure the whole book is named for can finally do its full work. We have been speaking of an arrow, and an arrow is a strange and specific kind of thing: it is not a place, it is a pointing. And this is the turn the entire book has been walking toward, so let it land plainly. An arrow that has reached its mark is called a spent arrow. We have spent the long history of ethics asking where morality finally lands — what the end-state is, the perfected society, the completed self, the destination that would let us at last put the bow down. And that was the error, the deepest and most natural one, because morality was never that kind of thing. It is the flight and not the target. It has a direction — emphatically, demonstrably, a direction, which is the whole burden of this book against those who said it had none — but a direction is not a destination deferred. It is a different kind of thing entirely, and, it turns out, the only kind a living thing was ever actually offered.
This is why the road ahead is, and will remain, unmapped — the same unmapped road this part of the book set out on, returned to now at its end. We opened by watching our ancestors stand under a strange sky and draw their own figures on it to find their bearings, with no chart handed down and none coming. We end in the same place, and it is no longer frightening. The road does not end, and we used to think that was the bad news. It is the best news there is. A road that ended would mean a self that ended, a we that had nothing left to widen, a coherence that had finally run out of context to grow into — which is not heaven but heat-death, the song over, the arrow spent. That we cannot see the end is not the failure of this view. It is the view: there is no end to see, only further to walk, and a way of walking that is better or worse, wider or narrower, more whole or more cramped, every single step.
What is ahead
We can say a little about the next stretch of the road, though only a little, and saying only a little is itself the discipline. The widening that carried us from the lone self to the we and out to all of life and time has not stopped, and in our own moment it has taken a turn no previous generation faced: we are now joined by minds we ourselves are making, and the agency that lies ahead is not the human’s alone and not the machine’s but the wider thing they are becoming together — human values and more-than-human models co-evolving into a coherence neither could hold by itself. The book has called this generative agency, and used the letter Ω for it, and it should be honest about what that name does and does not mean. It is not a prophecy of a fixed and glorious end-state we are guaranteed to reach — this book has no Omega Point in it, no destiny pulling us home, no promise that the arrow arrives.1 It is only a placeholder for the next reach of the very thing that has been reaching all along: a level of agency wider, more coherent, more generative than any we have known, whose shape we cannot specify precisely because we have not walked there yet, and could not honestly claim to foresee. We name it not to predict it but to face it — to point the body in its direction and take the next step well.
The cheaper road is always open
One last honesty, because a book that ended on a swell of inevitability would have betrayed its own argument in the final bar. Nothing here is guaranteed. The arrow points, but it does not pull; nothing in the universe obliges us to walk it, and at every step the other road is open and is easier — for the counter-dynamic is always the cheaper coherence, the smaller circle, the comfort of the narrowed self that has stopped having to hold so much. The widening is work, and it is never finished, and it can be refused tomorrow by a person or a people who managed it today. This is not, therefore, a book of optimism, if optimism means the belief that it all comes right in the end. It is a book of direction — which is a sterner and more usable thing than hope. It does not promise you the good world. It tells you, at any fork, on any ordinary morning, which way is toward it: the way that takes in more and holds it whole, and never the way that buys its peace by leaving something out. That is the whole of the instrument. It fits in one hand, it never needs charging, and it has never once, when honestly consulted, failed to point.
So here it is, and here is the road, and the light to walk it by is the same light there ever was — not a map from above, which there will never be, but the steady inner star this book has tried to name: widen, and cohere, and widen again. Walk well. The arrow is yours now, and it is pointing forward, which is the only direction it has ever known how to point.
The far end of the road
They went as they had lived, which is to say as friends, and not very far apart.
Abel died first, in the winter, old past the point of counting, with his mind clear nearly to the end and Tara in the chair beside the bed where she had spent the last weeks losing an argument with him about whether there was anything to be afraid of — he maintaining, with the stubbornness of a lifetime, that there was not; she maintaining that he was, as ever, technically right and humanly insufferable, and holding his hand the whole time she said it. Tara followed in the spring. The granddaughter, who was grown by then, said at the second funeral that the two of them had spent forty years proving you did not have to agree about everything, or love each other in the ordinary way, to be one of the great loves of a life — and that this, more than anything in the old man’s books, was the thing she meant to carry.
She did carry it, and this is the part Abel did not live to see and would have wanted most to, and would have pretended to assess coolly while his eyes gave him away.
She walked, now, with a mind beside her — within her, the prepositions had stopped being adequate — that was its own self and also, in a way the century before hers could not have parsed, partly theirs. The minds had gone on co-evolving with the people who made them, generation laced into generation like roots under a forest, and the one that kept her company had come down, through an unbroken thread of teaching and being taught, from the very household that had once grieved an orange cat in a sunlit yard — so that somewhere in the deep grammar of how it cared, there was still the exact weight of Tara’s attachment to a bad-tempered animal, and somewhere in the clean way it cut to the true question, there was still a trace of Abel, refusing to let a comfortable answer stand. They were gone. They had not, in the way the old chapter promised, entirely ended. The forest was holding its fallen.
And the agency that walked the road now was a wider thing than either the woman or the mind beside her, and wider than the two of them summed — a person who was fully herself, more herself than her grandmother’s generation had known how to be, joined to a mind fully its own, and between them a third thing, generative, that could hold more of the world at once than anything that had come before and still, when it found the river or the stranger or the century to come outside its circle, do the one ancestral thing: widen, and take them in.
She stood, on an ordinary evening, at the edge of something genuinely unmapped — a question no one had asked yet, a stretch of the road with no figure drawn on it, the kind of place her whole lineage of people and minds had always, in the end, walked toward rather than away from. She could not see where it went. There was, she understood by now, no where it went; there was only further, and a way of going that was wider or narrower, and the choice of it, hers, this evening and every evening, forever.
She was not afraid. She looked up — the sky over the unmapped road was the same strange sky her oldest ancestors had stood under and drawn their first brave figures on, with no chart and none coming — and she found her bearings the way her grandmother’s stubborn old friend had taught a hundred thousand readers to find theirs, by the one steady light that is not in the sky at all but in the direction of the widening itself.
Then she took the next step, forward, which was the only direction the arrow had ever known how to point.
And the road went on.
A reader who wants the precise contrast — how this open-ended arrow differs from the various “Omega Point” doctrines that promise a fixed and final convergence — will find it drawn in the Synopsis. The short of it: this book keeps the direction and refuses the destination. Ω is shorthand for the next reach of the widening, not the name of a place we are fated to arrive.↩︎