But not yet

“Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions

There’s a peculiar nobility to Saint Augustine’s plea from about 400 AD — a man torn between the flesh and the spirit, between what he wants and what he knows he should want. It’s the sound of conscience arguing with appetite, and appetite winning by a hair. And that hair, that slender thread of moral procrastination, has now been woven into the entire tapestry of civilization.

Because if Augustine was talking about lust, we — modern, rational, caffeinated humans — have turned that same logic into a total system of ethics. Ours is a culture of “not yet.” We’ll be good, sustainable, just, and kind — tomorrow. Today, we just need to burn a few more barrels of oil, move a few more units, lay off a few more employees, click “buy now” on a few more disposable things on Amazon.

It’s all in service of a better future, of course. The great, gleaming, green, equitable utopia just on the horizon. New Jerusalem without all the religious claptrap. We tell ourselves we must pollute a little longer so that we can be prosperous enough to stop polluting. We must frack our way to solar panels. We must flood the market with SUVs so we can later afford electric buses. We’ll save the world, but first, we need to ruin it efficiently.

This is the logic of the transitional sin — the idea that a small indulgence in vice is necessary to reach virtue later. Politicians, CEOs, tech founders and your son-in-law who’s all in on crypto all subscribe to it. We are told we must deregulate pollution so that innovation can thrive, because how else will we invent the technologies that might one day undo the pollution we just deregulated? It’s a perfect circular economy — of justification.

How is Canada going to reach its greenhouse gas reduction targets legally mandated by the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act (the stated intention being to wind up 40-45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, 45-50 per cent below 2005 levels by 2035, and at net-zero emissions by 2050)?

Well, if the armchair pep talk Prime Minister Mark Carney gave to an appreciative Bay Street audience on Friday is any indication, we’ll take a bold step into a saner future by first securing a new oil pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast, notwithstanding the objections of pesky coastal First Nations and unreasonably tall B.C. Premier David Eby.

The Canadian Press reported after the meeting that Carney told the audience not to worry because his government is on top of “the pipeline stuff. … Danielle’s on Line One,” he said, referring to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. “Don’t worry, it’s going to happen.”

The story in the weekend papers continues:

Speaking with reporters in Calgary on Friday, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said she hopes to make progress with Ottawa on the province's proposal for a new pipeline to bring oil to the B.C. coast, and on advancing the Pathways Alliance carbon capture and storage project.

“I’m still working with the federal government to see if we can come up with a memorandum of understanding so we can get a bitumen pipeline to Asian markets, as well as the Pathways project, as well as remove some of the bad laws that will allow for that investment to occur,” she said.

Once those bad laws are out of the way, our good intentions can be welcomed back to the fore ... somewhere down the road.

Carney is always affable and has tapped into the current mood of the country effectively, as last spring’s election proved, but this is pure Poilievrism with a smile instead of a snarky scowl. Patience is a virtue, so let’s be patient about being virtuous.

Turns out you can have it both ways. Or at least pretend you can before a sympathetic Bay Street audience.

And let’s not forget the social version of this form of progressive thinking: We must dismantle efforts like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs because they’ve “gone too far,” and we can only achieve true fairness once we stop actively trying to make things fair.

We are told that striving for equality is actually divisive — that to be truly equal, we must first ignore inequality altogether.

“We believe in fairness,” goes the refrain, “but not yet. Not while it’s uncomfortable.”

Bend that logic just a titch further, and the next thing you know a white supremacist outfit like America First Legal, the legal action group founded by White House adviser Stephen Miller, is bringing its fully funded, passionate intensity to a series of warped anti-white discrimination lawsuits. Next thing after that, the Trump administration announces plans to give priority to those downtrodden white South Africans among the 7,500 “refugees” it will admit next year.

You know. Just to level the playing field. Fair is fair. We got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand. And cheaters always prosper.

Internationally, the principle scales up beautifully. We fight wars to end wars, destabilize governments to promote stability, sell weapons to preserve peace. Every explosion is a down payment on tranquility. Every surveillance program is a necessary step toward protecting our freedom from too much freedom.

It’s a global choreography of contradictions — an interpretive dance called “Apocalypse Now, Ethical Later.”

Even our personal lives run on this fuel. We will absolutely start eating better — tomorrow. We’ll start exercising, meditating, reading serious novels instead of doom-scrolling Reddit, but only after one last stress-snack, one last Netflix episode, one last social-media death spiral.

We imagine the future as a clean, well-lit version of today — same person, just slightly improved posture and composting habits. We are each a tiny Augustine, clutching our vices like a weighted blanket and whispering, “Not yet. Just a little bit longer.”

The problem, of course, is that “just a little bit longer” has a way of becoming “never.” The road to moral maturity keeps getting extended due to unforeseen construction. Progress is perpetually postponed pending better conditions, which will never arrive because we’re too busy waiting for them. Warning: Sharp Curves Ahead.

We love to say that change is hard — which is true — but mostly we mean it’s inconvenient. Genuine transformation asks us to give something up now, in the present tense, and we’re allergic to that tense. We prefer the future conditional: We will have changed. It’s tidy. It allows us to keep doing everything the same way while congratulating ourselves for our imminent virtue.

Some days it feels like our entire species has evolved to live in a moral layaway program. We make a small deposit on decency and expect the universe to ship the finished product next season.

And yet, there’s something heartbreakingly human in this too. Augustine’s plea wasn’t cynical. It was honest. Unlike Speaker Mike Johnson and that legion of sanctimonious so-called Christians in the U.S. Congress, Augustine was ashamed of his own hypocrisy. Confessions is in essence the story of a person trying to reconcile his ideals with his inertia. And eventually succeeding.

But the world was simpler back then. Maybe the problem today isn’t that we contradict ourselves — maybe it’s that we’ve industrialized that contradiction. We’ve turned the gap between what we want to be and what we are into a trillion-dollar industry.

Ours is not a culture of repentance, but of moral scheduling — virtue on backorder, delivery in abeyance. So yes, give us chastity and continence, justice and equality, clean air and oceans. Give us sustainability, fairness, decency, mercy, grace. Express shipping if possible, but don’t make us actually change anything in the meantime.

We’re still working on our excuses.