Precipice

(August 18, 2025) There’s nothing here. Walking through the undergrowth and long grass, all the buildings and roads are left behind. There’s no sound, other than the wind, shushing through the grass.

Then I come to the end. Straight ahead is only blue sky, then, lower down, fog. Creeping up to the edge where the Earth drops away, a sheer precipice of stone, straight down to where the fog is, then nothing to see but fog, the top of a cloud, solid. There’s nowhere to go.

How did I get here, so alone and at an end? There were so many options, I visited one after another, but each of them, the ways of civilization, required something, and giving that something denied the whole reason to devote myself to such a place.

They were thriving cities, full of social interaction. Friends, associates, music, toys, tastes. There was love, some kind of love in each one of them. In each, people spoke of hope, a chance of fulfillment. What happened?

The first had at its center a massive stone temple, the House of God. There were priests there, who would call the people together on holy days. The people would chant and sing, the music would reverberate off the hard marble walls. The teaching of the priests was that men would give obeisance to the Great God, and that the relations of men and women on earth would be modeled on this ideal, with those closest to God providing guidance and authority for those further away, and able to expect devotion in return.

But the image of a demanding being in the sky lost its power, at the same time that many people came to believe that freedom was what it meant to be human. Astronomers concluded that the Earth was not the center of everything, claiming in the process the authority to proclaim the nature of the Universe. Philosophers, too: they spoke of enlightenment. But people remained afraid of each other, so wanted freedom but assurance that their neighbors would not be free to impose on them. Wise men, working for those who had the most to lose, said that people would consent to give up some freedom in order to escape that dilemma. Without thinking too hard about it, great powers ruled the world and were satisfied with that justification.

But philosophers did think hard, and soon concluded that none of the moral justifications for hierarchy could be defended. We were left with practical reasons, that without the rulers and their ever-more-powerful weapons, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as much or perhaps more so now than in Hobbes’ 16th century. But that’s never going to be enough to get the people who value real freedom to stop looking, even if some of our neighbors are willing to settle for fake freedom put forward by someone like Trump. So we have kept looking, walking away from the failed justifications for hierarchy until we came to this cliff edge. As my law school professor Morton Horwitz said.

It’s getting cold now, here on the cliff edge. The sky above is clear, a deeper blue than when I started walking. The sun has dropped into the fog. Beneath my feet the rocks drop straight down, then they blur and then there’s nothing but the fog. The dampness, the wind, suck heat out of my body. Before long the cold will get worse, the first shivers are already happening, hypothermia, death from exposure is not just possible, it’s inevitable. The shelter, such as it is, is back there, but is going back there the end of anything worthwhile? I could try to climb down the cliff, holding on to rocks and scrub plants, but it would soon be dark, there’s only a sliver of a waxing moon that will provide next to no light and will soon follow the sun down into the fog.

So. Do all the options lead to death, literal or spiritual? What about running and leaping off, plummeting into the fog, accelerating at 32 feet per second per second? Eventually I’d hit something, wouldn’t I? I mean, you can’t see anything down there, is any safe possibility imaginable? An ocean where a dive is possible, before that rate of acceleration makes hitting the water bone-crushing? Some world where our rules of physics don’t apply, where a gentle deceleration could leave me in some other realm, not Hades but some land of heroes?

Not likely. I was never any good at diving.