BC Cook
“THINGS fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood-dimmed tide 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…./ And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
William Butler Yeats was right in 1919, but could he imagine the urgency of his words over one hundred years later? Yeats wrote the above poem in the dystopian aftermath of the First World War and during the worst of the Spanish flu pandemic. Things had truly fallen apart and that generation understood something new had begun. The pre-war world order could never be resumed, something new was coming, and most thinkers were not optimistic. Russia lay gripped by the communist revolution, Yeats’ own Ireland was occupied by British forces, the dead and wounded from the Great War reached staggering proportions, his wife contracted the dreaded Spanish flu.
A century later, the world experienced another pandemic, but the parallels do not end there. Once again, things have fallen apart, the center cannot hold, and anarchy is loosed upon the world. Systems and institutions we have come to trust and believe have failed, political parties are at extreme ends with each other. People in the middle, moderates, who traditionally have kept the more extreme and violent social-media-fueled actors at the fringes of national discourse, have vanished or been silenced into impotence. One need only watch video of Los Angeles or the random murder of a Ukrainian refugee by a piece of human filth in North Carolina to see that anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity. Good people are either powerless or too scared to do something, echoing the words of a popular quote: “All evil needs to win is for good people to do nothing.” Yeats said the worst are filled with passionate intensity. Hotheads, fire-eaters, and mentally unstable haters take to the streets and proclaim their anger through violence and destruction. They never propose to build anything, only tear down what others have built.
When Yeats asked what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, he was not hopeful. He saw the end of an era. For him, the epoch that began when Christ prioritized love and grace over all else was being replaced. He did not know what the future would look like, but he knew it would not be better.
How about now? Who among us thinks we stand on the precipice of greatness and peace? Who believes that our political, commercial and cultural leaders are moving society in the right direction, or that anyone is listening if they are? People who oppose guns cheer when Charlie Kirk is shot. People who oppose the death penalty rejoice when a man is assassinated for his opinions. Disgusting hypocrites, you are the “worst” who are “filled with passionate intensity,” and decent people saw you coming.
Is this the end of an era and the beginning of something much worse? Truly, we are slouching toward something, but it isn’t Bethlehem. We are slouching towards Gomorrah.
Dr. BC Cook taught history for 30 years and is a director and Pacific historian at Sealark Exploration (sealarkexploration.org). He currently lives in Hawaii.
