This is the summer of our discontent, and I am worrying a lot about what comes next.
To my mind the critical issues at this moment are:
- The Climate Crisis is an existential threat to human civilization, not to mention the birds and the bees.
- American fascism is an existential threat to our democracy and the other democracies around the world.
- People who not understand that time is astonishingly short intensify 1 and 2.
- War as a practice keeps the wheels of capitalism turning.
- A breakdown of social cohesion and fundamental supplies and services, including medical, transportation and the supply of absolute necessities.
- Anomie,1which is largely the result of capitalism, increases hatred while hatred decreases agape2.
- Racism, sexism, classism and all of their derivatives.
- Late capitalism has refined and intensified advertising to the point it is impossible to avoid subjecting oneself to the hypnotic pressure to buy, buy, buy.
- The extraordinary acceleration of advertising to the point that it is difficult to remain connected to society in the form of news sources, email and generally using electronic media without the continual and escalating bombardment of ads and resulting hypnotic pressure to buy, buy, buy.
- Rampant stupidity3 fosters all of the above.
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 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.
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 blank 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, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
As a student, I once worked in our university president’s office. I had near daily interaction with this man whose efforts to open a new state university campus had already dramatically influenced my life. He would often quote these lines:
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.
Something about those lines always perturbed me though the poem as a whole transfixed me whenever I read it. The notion that in a time of crisis the best would lack conviction and, as a result, hesitate to act, struck me as wrong. Indeed, enough conviction to act seemed critical to surviving a crisis. Our university president seemed to invoke these lines as a justification for a kind of moderation in our demands. Now, moderation may not have been what Yeats intended at all, but this is what the president seemed to be suggesting in context. Many others seem to quote these lines similarly. So when I encounter a justification for hesitancy during a time of crisis, these lines always come to mind.
Yeats wrote this just after WWI, a catastrophe which shook Western culture’s sense of inexorable progress. Yeats had developed from a sort of mystic poet into a figure enamoured of a fascist ethos. So, I remain quite unclear as to what he meant by his assertion that “The best lack all conviction.” Fascists do not seem to lack conviction.
But we have arrived at a point which makes the cultural disquiet of post WWI seem like a gentle dream.
What is more American than the belief that constant scientific/capitalist progress will create a utopia? But this belief seems to be collapsing all around us. Even so, my consciousness of progress is firmly rooted in the optimism of post WWII America. Marx made sense to my teenage self: why not believe that we were destined to evolve into a truly more perfect union, one in which we all moved towards a more just society?
Every week, I read more than one article about the restless cynicism of millenials who seemed to have woken up to the trap that late capitalism represents. Every day, I wonder how many more weeks, months, years can we coast along on the tatters of a system which increasingly enslaves us to a global billionaire elite impossible to imagined in early post WWII America, an elite more different from the average American than the average American is from our image of the Queen of England although her wealth certainly places her in the very same category as the billionaire rampagers.
Yeats’ mystical roots speak to me despite my small ‘m’ Marxism. I am not of the opinion that we need to be atheists in order to create a just world, and many of my Marxist friends agree.
So it is that the signs spoken about by many indigenous spiritual leaders compel my interest. And if you are not aware, many, many of these leaders insist we are on the edge of epochal change signalled by the intensity of this crisis and long expected in indigenous tradition.
I do not read the second coming in this poem to indicate a savior, but rather to indicate a disturbance in the force. Something is coming; we don’t need mysticism to tell us that, but I have to say that I feel it in my gut (You many define that as anything from an emotional response to the chaos tempered with what we can objectively know to a genuine premonition).
Hope is thin on the ground right now, but my real problem is dread and anticipation. As everything that holds us together as a civilization and a nation relentlessly unravels, I want to hold open the hope that the Sphinx as a potential force will open up a possibility long denied. This possibility might create fundamental change, a notion shared amongst many leftists that only when things fall apart sufficiently will fundamental change be possible.
The Sphinx is a talisman for a internationally known cadre of intellectuals to which I belong. It was chosen precisely because it cannot marked as this or that. It is neither male nor female, human nor animal, representative nor figural. It seems to represent that which cannot be represented in human language. Yeats’ fear of it bothers me and seems to parallel his sympathy towards fascism.
The Sphinx is that which we cannot identify but somehow imagine present in a liminal space. Yeats depicted it as slouching towards Bethlehem, but I think s/he waits for a time to move forward, not as a beast but as a liberating force, a manifestation of what we can and should be.
I want to advocate for an optimism borne of the realization that the purely rational and/or material is insufficient for our species, that intuition born of a recognition that some things are shrouded in mystery can provide the vision we need to survive this and many other crises. Given that these crises are existential in a way unlike any other age, recorded or prerecorded, we must reach out for every possibility, even the most intangible. We need more than facts, analysis and even insight: we need vision.
I have to admit that purely rational measures would not have been sufficient to have kept me alive and/or helped me to pull myself from the brink every decade or so. Faith in that which cannot be named in the way the Sphinx cannot be named, faith in something beyond the hamfisted notions of the rational versus the irrational or that which Marx has described as the opiate of the masses, is necessary for the strength hope imparts.4
I want to offer this realization that things are falling apart along with the idea that this existential crisis can awaken a consciousness which fosters a global economic and social revolution. But this will not come about without even more disintegration than we are experiencing right now, so I feel anticipation stretches into dread while this wait goes on endlessly. After I and many of you have been waiting all our adult lives for this transformation. The other side of this moment might mean annihilation of all I hold dear or enough discord in the gyre to spit out something new.
I cannot bear this struggle without this sort of touchstone, for to be frank, the facts on the ground suggest there is no way to survive all this without something more than perseverance. Perseverance needs an underpinning. It cannot be struggle for struggles sake although doing right for its own sake is part of my ethos, I need something more. All of us need hope. Hopelessness is what the extreme capitalists want us to feel for then they will have won the short and the long struggle. The billions cannot be sacrificed for a small minority of relentlessly vicious persons.
James Lovelock died in Dorset, England last week. His inventions and theories underpin much of today’s climate science and he is popularizer of the Gaia Hypothesis, often misunderstood by those who want to believe human rationality rules all (I have seen his ideas rejected on this site). Lovelock’s concept has been part of my philosophy since the late 1970s. Lovelock perceived Gaia to be Earth’s autonomic feedback loop which preserves the planet’s ability to foster life. Many people felt he was describing a spiritual consciousness. I don’t think his work denies such a possibility, but it does, without doubt, suggest that life on the planet transcends current conceptual frameworks.
Stanislaw Lem’s brilliant science fiction novel, which was made into an extraordinary 1972 Soviet film by Andrei Tarkovsky, my model for something completely material which was also otherworldly in both a literal and a spiritual sense, is my model for understanding The Gaia Hypothesis. We have to try to stretch ourselves to perceive the cosmos as more than we have dreamt of.
There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy
p.s. This did not go in the direction I expected, not at all, not one bit. What can that mean?
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1 A condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals
2 Brotherly concern for others.
3 Please allow this term to signify willful ignorance. What causes willful ignorance is a subject for another time.
4 The best elucidation of the relation between Marxism and spirituality (specifically Christianity) can be found in the extraordinary book, The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry. If you can get past the excruciating first part, you will be surprised and delighted beyond measure. If you have experienced severe and/or chronic pain, the book will help with some of your worst trauma.
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