The widening gyre

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats' The Second Coming is, quite simply, one of the greatest and most important poems composed in the 20th century. If you've never read it, get thee here and take it in. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

A large part of my job is to sit in my manager's office, along with the Chicano resources librarian, and talk about *waves hands at everything*. We are a salon of three. And what we were discussing yesterday is that the truly good and the truly evil are fractions of fractions of humanity. Most of us are varying degrees of fair to middling, some worse, some better, but all just trying to get along, and often repeating the same mistakes that those who came before us made. (Really, being a librarian is a fucking great job.)

We often think we're better than we are, or worse than we are. We rarely assess ourselves accurately. And that is merely the human condition. Our minds mire in confusion. We are not the Buddha, or Socrates. And even the philosophies of the sages leave huge gaps, because they are made by humans, with flaws and blind spots they do not see.

I was thinking about that conversation as I sat down to write this piece. I mentioned to them the "80 year rule": that eighty years after some great cataclysm, the memory of it fades as those who experienced it and survived it die, and the event is remembered only in the historical record, which is not the same thing. My manager had a great rejoinder: he said that, while he understood the intent, it was lacking in precision. After the Shoah there were other genocides: Mao's famine, the Khmer Rouge, Suharto's murder of almost a million Indonesian communists or suspected communists. Not much was learned from the extermination of European Jews; the same crimes were repeated soon after, with different victims but the same rationales. 

What Yeats wrote about was just that; human beings repeat the same mistakes, over and over. The rough beast always slouches towards Bethlehem, and always will. As J.R.R. Tolkien believed, the Shadow is never fully defeated; it always returns, in different forms, but with the same blandishments.

We are again in a time where antisemitism is once more fashionable. A mere fifteen years after the Holocaust, when Israel captured Adolf Eichmann and put him on trial for crimes against humanity, much of the reaction from the very nations and peoples who fought in the Second World War was one of weary disdain. "Can't you get over it?" The United States is often criticized for having historical amnesia hard coded into its national DNA; but this is by far not solely an American failing. It is a core human feature. Forget about the past. Bury it. Walk away from it. Don't drag it up. This applies to both private and public spheres. "Why are you dredging up your childhood? Can't you let it go?"

We are again in a time when ancient states which once ruled the world want to reclaim their places in the sun. China again declares that it is the Middle Kingdom. Iran wants to recapture the glories of the Sassanids. Russia insists it is the successor to Rome. The same discordant music, with different arrangements.

And what they offer speaks to people. People, sadly, are easily led. They are easily cowed into fear of the outside. They are easily suppressed to go along with the regime. Or they suffer a terminal fate. But many are more than willing accomplices. They benefit in some way from the prevailing power. We've seen this time and again in authoritarian states which transition to democracies. We see this right now in Germany, where a neo-Nazi party would win a general election. Fear, resentment, revanchism: all are powerful lures to people who feel as if they have been left behind, as if they are the losers in a world which is speeding past them.

Is that rough beast's hour come at last? Well, yes, I think it has. But it doesn't have to be the end of all ends. It is not its first visit. We have always had it in our midst. Its arrival also promises a revelation. A revelation that all this, all this materiality to which we cling, is merely an illusion. It is merely an anti-human illusion, meant to keep us in subjugation to the shadows cast upon the cave wall. 

We are humans. We choose our own fates. It is fashionable—there! that word again!—to say that free will is an illusion. That quantum science has proven it so. And that is simply balderdash. Inexorable fate would have consigned Black Americans to servitude. Inexorable modalities would have led to human extinction in 1962 in Cuba and environs. And yet here we are. Surviving. Thriving. Advancing however fitfully.

We simply—a word which has much weight—have to seize the reality that we are our own saviors. That we are the ones who can set the world to rights, a world we have wronged. That struggles of ethnicity and class and race and ideology are not only pointless, but threaten our continued existence. 

A Roman ambassador sent by the Senate to Carthage when war threatened stood before the assembled leaders. In one hand he held peace; in the other war. It was up to the Carthaginians to decide which to choose. That is our choice now. We can choose the rough beast. Or we can choose differently. And it is always our choice. It always has been, and always will be.