Will the centre "hold"?

 

William Butler Yeats…The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed ride is loosed and

          Everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the

       Desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blanks and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again: but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, is hour come round at

     last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Written in the aftermath of WW I, as well as the beginning of the Irish War of Independence, following the Easter Rising of `1916, the poem also reflects upon the 1918-19 flu pandemic.

The social ills of modernity: the breakdown of the traditional family, the loss of shared religious faith, the collapse of collective purpose are all evoked, echoed and highlighted here.

Nick Taylor, in The Paris Review, April 7 2015, writes:

As for the slouching beast, the best explanation is that it’s not a particular political regime, or even fascism itself, but a broader historical force, comprising the technological, the ideological and the political. A century later, we see the beast in the atomic bomb, the holocaust, the regimes of Stalin and Mao, and all manner of systematized atrocity.

The poem has been referenced in many other pieces of writing, including Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which inverts the poem: ‘here African civilization is the one under threat, and the rough beast is the West. Achebe’s Nigerian warrior faces exile from his village and pressure from Christina missionaries who threaten the tribal way of life; he commits suicide. … (Joan) Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (poses) Didion stand(ing) in the same position as Yeat’s narrator, describing a social disaster, feeling the centre start to give out. Didion reported the piece from San Francisco ‘where the social haemorrhaging was showing up,’ ‘where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves hippies’. /She tells of the disoriented youth she met there, including a five-year-old named Susan whose mother feeds her acid and peyote*. She muses that the hippies are dealing with ‘society’s atomization’ for which their parents are responsible. ‘At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing,’ she writes….Elyn Sak’s 2008 Memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, concerning her bout with schizophrenia. Though these four words from Yeats surely resonate with Saks’s feelings, the ‘centre’ in question here isn’t the moral authority of the Western world, it’s one person’s sense of stability, (Taylor)

Today, if we were to adopt Yeat’s stance as narrator, we can see so many feasible, even existential threats to the centre:

the geopolitical universe including the nuclear sabre-rattling in Europe and South East Asia,

                 the climactic warming of the planet

                                                      the biological spectre of additional pandemics,

pharmacological umbrella and both legitimate/legal and illicit…with street drugs, gangs and warlords, as well as a plethora of pharmaceuticals for which minimal clinical trials have been conducted…

                                 the religious/racial divide and the open aggression of various individual and ‘cell’ terrorists seeking to wreak havoc, revenge and contempt for the ‘other’…whomever that may be

Whatever centre we might wish to reference, one of the more cliché is the “world order” of the last three-quarters of a century, since the end of the Second World War. However we might like to think about “the centre”, it implies a core, a focal point, a point in and through and by which some kind of ‘order’ and ‘balance’ and ‘stability’ and ‘security’ and ‘reliability’ and ‘predictability’ and ‘trust’ might be discerned, ascertained and sustained. The “sun” for example, as the centre of the universe, around which other universes circle, including the earth; we also speak and think of a “leader” as a centre-point in any group, classroom, board-room, lecture hall, sanctuary, Vatican, as well as Kremlin, White House, 10 Downing, or even a national capital, symbolizing the centre of that specific nation.

When these ‘centres’ are considered to be stable in what has been their normal configuration, patterns, language, and attitude, the world considers such a situation to be relatively ‘secure’. Whenever some or all of these ‘focal points’ (often positioned in the public mind as ‘polar opposites’ or ‘enemies’) start to shift and those shifts are documented in the most minute detail in real time, ordinary people, as well as poets and prophets and writers, tend to think that things are “spinning out of control”.

Meriam-Webster.com defines “centrifugal force” as ‘what keeps a string with a ball on the end taut when you whirl it around. A centrifuge is a machine that uses centrifugal force. At the end of a washing machine’s cycle, it becomes a weak and simple centrifuge as it whirls the water out of your clothes. Centrifuges hundreds of thousands of times as powerful are essential to nuclear technology and drug manufacturing. Part of an astronaut’s training occurs in a centrifuge that generates force equal to several times the force of gravity (about like a washing machine) to get them used to the forces they’ll encounter in a real space mission. M-W then goes on to reference Yugoslavia, then a county of six separate ethnicities, threatened by centrifugal ethnic forces (which ultimately resulted in six separate nationalities.

There is a case to be made that many nations are beginning (some have already entered a deeper phase) to see their ‘nation’s’ ethnicity challenged by the addition of thousands of refugees, and immigrants and asylum-seekers, from various regions and multiple tragedies. Similarly, the people of the world have been threatened by the onslaught of a pandemic virus for more than two years, that saw some two million deaths, and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, as well as many ‘long-haul’ cases that still linger, with research still learning about their prognosis. Fires, draughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, tropical storms, storm surges, record-rainfalls, floods and human devastation have all been visited on people on every continent and their number and intensity have grown in the last decade. The world faces daily, hourly news reports of nuclear ambitions in Iran, North Korea, as well as Russian attempts to blackmail the world into giving up on its support for Ukraine in this latest horrendous military massacre.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations declared on September 14, 2022,

“The solidarity envisioned in the United Nations Charter is being devoured by the acids of nationalism and self-interest. As fractures deepen and trust evaporates, we need to come together around solutions. People need to see results in their everyday lives, or they will lose faith in their governments and institutions, and they will lose hope in the future. This year’s General Debate must be about providing hope and overcoming the divisions that are dramatically impacting the world.

Unity, co-operation, collaboration, compromise, working for something ‘bigger than self-interest’….these are euphemisms juxtaposed beside the realpolitik of ultra-nationalism, white supremacy, stolen elections, closed borders, and the new leaders who are adamantly advocating such positions, and then winning more votes in many countries. In the U.S., for example, the Washington Post reported that some 277 Republican candidates for election to the House and Senate in November are “election-deniers” in that they believe the 2020 election of President Biden was fraudulently won, and of this number some 173 are running in Republican-leaning districts. These people are propagating the lie that elections, if they are not victorious, are inevitably fraudulent and must be overturned. Voter suppression laws have been passed in some 45 states, and outright bans on abortion have been passed in several states, immediately following the overturn of Roe v Wade by the Supreme Court, in their decision to turn the issue over to the states.

In Canada, a right-wing candidate has just been elected as leader of the United Conservative Party, and thereby the next premier of Alberta, who has committed to passing an Alberta Sovereignty Act, declaring the provinces right to ignore any law passed by the federal government in Ottawa. One political opinion writer in Canada, Althia Raj, is asking the rhetorical question (in a new podcost, “It’s Political”) about whether we (Canadians) are having a constitutional crisis while no one notices.

Today, it can be argued that we are unable to reference only one or two dramatic and centrifugal forces that might be spinning the centre to the point where it ‘cannot hold’. Indeed, the number and the relatively high score on any metaphoric Richter scale that measure earthquakes, is somewhat indeterminate. Each day, we learn of new dimensions of threats, new frequencies, while the “old” familiar geopolitical foes continue to jabber in the headlines about their own ambitions:  Putin in Ukraine and against NATO, the beast incarnate in his head; Xi Jin Ping, over Taiwan, indisputably part of mainland China, and under military threat for annexation by Beijing; Kim Jung Un, in North Korea, whose insatiable need for attention on the world stage is prompting his firing of missiles not only into the China Sea but actually over Japan prompting Japan, South Korea and the United States to upgrade their military manoeuvres in the region; Iran, where a woman was recently shot and killed for wearing her head scarf improperly and where the nation’s leaders determination to develop nuclear weapons continues unabated after the U.S. withdrew from the Iranian Accord under trump.

Thousand of lives, buildings including schools, hospitals, child-care centres, homes and infrastructure have all been destroyed, and the one of the largest nuclear stations in Europe is under constant threat from Russian missiles and rockets, while the IAEA declares the facility to be the property of Ukraine, and must not be turned over to the Russians. The Western media is fixated on whether or not Putin will carry out his rhetorical threat of deploying tactical nuclear warheads, or chemical or biological weapons on the people of Ukraine.

Biden says yesterday, the world is as close to the nuclear cliff as it was at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Only this time, instead of Kennedy and Kruschev, it is Biden and Putin who are facing off.

On tenterhooks, that state of uneasiness or suspense, is where we are today, and have been for many months, if not years. Our shared trust, and the loyalty that can only come with trust, is in tatters, as if it were a quilt patched together over decades of diplomacy, sewed together by various world leaders and their nations who, at the time of the inauguration of the United Nations following World War II, recognised the absolute need to work together for peace.

That need seems to have given way to a new narcissistic nationalism, narrow, frightened, cynical, selfish and short-sighted, embodied by many national leaders, some of them elected, others self-or-serf-appointed. And while we are all linked digitally in real time and thereby exposed to the granularity of world news, including many faux-pseudo-psycho-analyses of the “mind” of world leaders who threaten the ‘stability and security’ of world order.

Truth be told, nature herself, is far from stable, in the sense that ‘she’ is in a constant state of change, seasonally, and that change exhibits some predictable memes, not all of which are as relevant to the human world as others.

Size, for example, in nature, usually suggests dominance, power, and the need for smaller creatures to learn stealth and escape. In the human world, masculinity, as a symbol of and embodiment of size and physical power, is not assurance of equanimity, nor of the absence of its own fear. Indeed, some would argue that many of the most frightened among us are those with the most “hard power”…especially in terms of nuclear weapons.

The myth of size and dominance as a moral ethical and thereby national “value” will have to give way to a much more challenging modality of soft power, of the deeper need to collaborate, and to “get along” in order to survive. The stakes, now, are no longer boundaried by borders, fences, moats, and wire communications. All of the stakes, for everyone, cross all of the traditional boundaries between and among nations, Even cyber-tactics need no physical wires, pipelines, or physical weapons for their deployment.

We are already living in a ‘new space’ generated right here on this planet; and our will and our capacity to work through our fears and our imaginary superiorities, and our imagined inferiorities, in some shared and safe space, in a manner exemplified by the Haudenosaunee people in The Great Law of Peace, will determine how this act of the history of the human race ends.

For the sake of our grandchildren we can only hope and pray that the end is peaceful and effectively shared….we may have to generate a new “centre” that will hold, in order to survive.