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What gifts hath Fate for all her chivalry? Even such as hearts heroic oftenest win; Honour, a friend, anguish, untimely death. Not sure I entirely agree with Homer. Anguish, yes, but we will endure. Not because we believe in an inevitably better future, but because we believe in living a better us.

I do not believe progress is inevitable. That there is some ever-perfectible future we are all heading inexorably towards. Instead, “life is just one damned thing after another.” There is no inevitability about anything.

As Hillel the Elder posited, what the devout can learn from the moral behaviour of an agnostic is that if the only reason you behave ethically is out of fear of the retribution of a deity, then you’re probably not a very moral person.

It’s plain that Trump and his millions of supporters have no fear of whatever deities they claim to believe in. If the only reason they never expressed violent bigotry was their fear of consequence, no amount of compromise was ever going to change their minds.

But what of the rest of us? If sacrificing ourselves to an unyielding moral purpose does not inevitably lead to a progressive future? What if our sacrifice is not a brick along that road, but simply a stone amongst other stones, randomly scattered to no greater end?