The Best And The Worst

Perhaps the most-quoted poem in the English language is “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats. For nearly a century different writers have cited one or more of its 22 lines written ninety-nine years ago which begins with:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

The second and third lines resonate most for me:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

Maybe it was world-wide demonstrations last week on Mayday, which has for more than a century been a day for the left to rally against capitalism. Masked, black-clad, anarchist ANTIFA demonstrators rioted once again in Europe, Canada, and America. In Paris where they burned cars and businesses and clashed with police and over 200 masked thugs were arrested. The left and the right in America are increasingly polarized since the 2016 election prompting renewed fears that maybe “the centre cannot hold” here.

Begun by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) sometime in the 1880s, Mayday demonstrations often turned into riots and became a worldwide phenomenon after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. That event, among others, shook Yeats and catalyzed his famous poem. Others included the “Great War,” or what we now call World War I, and Ireland’s “Easter Rebellion” which, after many unsuccessful attempts to gain Irish independence from Great Britain, did eventually result in liberating most of the island, but only after a long, brutal struggle.

Despite the religious tone implied by the poem’s title, Yeats was for the most part agnostic. Though born into what Irish historians call the wealthy “Protestant Ascendancy” in 1865, Christianity meant little to Yeats. He dabbled in mysticism and the occult and worked against the influence of Catholic Church in his native Ireland. 

Despite the overwhelming prevalence of Catholic Irish peasantry in the independence movement, Yeats became a leader of sorts and a senator in the new Irish government around the time he won the Nobel Prize for literature. He wrote The Second Coming in 1919 when it seemed, as he described in the next four lines:

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. 

Yeats grew up comfortably and could dabble in poetry without worrying about supporting himself, but he could see that, were anarchists to topple everything in their passionate intensity and things really did fall apart, his family money and his leisurely life could disappear also. But it didn’t; the centre held until his death in January, 1939, just before the blood-dimmed tide was loosed again across Europe and the world.

Literary analysts claim Yeats was referring to clergy when he claimed: “The best lack all conviction,” as if they didn’t really believe what they preached, “while the worst” — anarchists, socialists, and Bolsheviks — looked as if they might well take over western civilization.

Western pundits today call Europe “post Christian” as churches are abandoned across the continent — or converted into mosques for another religion “full of passionate intensity.” To end the poem, Yeats seems to describe the Sphinx:

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 

Finally, he asks:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

Judge Robert Bork edited the last line as title for his 1998 book Slouching Toward Gomorrah which I’ve been reading for the past three months. At the same time I was reading Jordan Peterson’s 2018 book 12 Rules For Life; An Antidote for Chaos which has been a bestseller across the English-speaking world. Both authors analyze Yeats’ poem at some length.

The subtitle for Bork’s book is: Modern liberalism and American Decline. It’s more direct and hard-hitting than Peterson’s. Writing twenty years apart, both men perceived that: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Bork’s nomination to the US Supreme Court was famously sabotaged with passionate intensity by leftist Democrats including Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy.

Today Peterson is pursued wherever he speaks by passionate (some would say crazy) leftists and anarchists who literally pound on the windows and doors outside venues to which he’s invited — and shout him down before being removed from the halls.

Some claim President Trump caused the increased polarization in today’s America. Others claim his victory was a result of pre-existing polarization. Trump’s blunt talk and scrappy style endear him to his base and enrage his opposition, but which side is the best and which is the worst depends on your perspective.