Sure Of Losing

I usually find myself on the side of the underdog.

Even when I am reading history, even when I know the outcome, I am likely to be pulling for the side that historically lost.

Part of that, I suppose, is simply the fact that as a confirmed life-long loser of most things, my sympathies go out to the side being defeated.  Part of that as well is that some of the defeated sides actually have the better histories, the classic example of this always being everyone that is happy to claim the slightest bit of Celtic Heritage (myself included).

It easy enough to do in history or in fiction.  It is harder to do looking forward into life, when the outcome is not known and uncertain.

Writers I respect - Sarah J. Hoyt and Friend-Of-This-Blog (FOTB) John Wilder - are confident that the ultimately, reason and sensibility triumph (if perhaps not in our lifetimes) as the consequences of choices manifest themselves and economic realities demonstrate that no matter how much one can wish something to be so, it simply economically will not be so.  And on one hand - the fact that, as Ayn Rand said, you can choose your actions but not the consequences of actions - I believe this to firmly be so.  

On the other hand, there can be a long stretch between here and there.

This is where history is the rub:  it shows just as many times where the side which was perhaps more in the right or on the side of sensibility has been ground into the mud and lost.

Do things come back?  Not always; Republican Rome's continual civil unrest and short term dictators led to the Principate and The Roman Empire only to dissolve into fragments.  Within 100 years, the high point of Athenian culture and democracy had dissolved into being just another Greek city in larger alliances, never to be more than a historical point of interest.  Other societies may return, but in far different circumstances: it took Russia 70 years to become something other than the Soviet Union, after it had managed to consume so much of Russian culture and society.

But really, this uncertainly is precisely what Eliot's quote is getting at:  Give me the person who, believing there is no chance of victory, takes the right side anyway

Ultimately we live for eternity, not time.  Would that we were conscious of this always and in all our decisions, seeing them for the time bound item they are with eternal implications.