After BBB: Don’t Let Disillusionment Lead to Surrender of the Center

It was 1919. Past decades celebrated countless technological inventions and hopes of great “progress.”  Then came the influenza epidemic, violent upheavals in Russia and Ireland, not to mention the total “obliteration” of World War I. 

In that year the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, wrote these lines in his work “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 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?

Here we have a vision of disillusionment that breeds the surrender of creative souls to the spirit of authoritarianism and of division. This same cycle of disillusion and surrender threatens America and the world today. And I believe only the Spirit of Christ has the power to call us back to committed use of prophetic imagination in the center of things today.

It is Yeats’ line, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” that frightens me most. In his day many of “the best” minds were stake holders in the explosion of revolutionary zeal and thirst for national glory that spawned the war. After that war and that plague many creative folk of his generation saw only wasteland and futility in trying to get people to clean up the mess. But the same sense of futility spawned “the worst” people, who had long resented being shut out by the empowered people, to a white hot passion. Those “worst” of people became the brown-shirts and black-shirts and their masters.

The best became no-committal to the public life and the public good. The worst, with their passionate intensity, took over the public square.

That is what I fear is happening today. But for us the calamity is not plague and war, but plague and political disruption. At the passionate vanguard of the “worst” among us are a disparate right wing intelligentsia behind “Project 2025,” who, in the wake of the plague of Covid-19, have cobbled together a blitzkrieg—a reversal of years of hope and progress under the rubric of MAGA.

In the face of the chaos of the first half year of this totally disruptive Trump administration the “best” among us have become disillusioned. Many of these have joined the circular firing squad of critique of the Democratic Party in America. Many have, like W B Yeats and others years ago, begun to wonder if democracy itself will ever work. Many fear commitment to any form of politics. They demure from the hard work of imagining a center that is strong enough to hold diverse peoples together. They are tempted to take their imaginations deep into private zones and far away from the public forum.

But all this does is surrender the center to the “worst” who have been convinced there is no historic or moral truth--who are fueled by resentment of those who they see as far too concerned with academic freedom, for the environment, for diversity, equity and inclusion—who have drunk fully of the stew of  bugaboos they have been served by the masters they have enthroned for the sake of some taste of  power.

Who will rescue us from this body of death?

Yeats foresaw the second coming, not of a Messiah who would hold the center together with mercy, but of a pitiless sphinx-like “rough beast.” He had little use for a merciful Christ. Till his dying day he hoped for a world dominated by authoritarian elites rather than one governed by messy democracies.

But only such a Savior as the Christ, a Reconciler, who ate with sinners, will save us. And only truly prophetic imagination can keep us hoping and working for such a divine democracy, held together by empathy.  Prophets like Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Jesus certainly were disillusioned by a steady stream of royals and religious elite. They wound up even disillusioned by Israel herself, and by the covenant with God that should have defined her. But they could not quench the fire of divine empathy that moved them. They could not channel their imagination in any other direction but that of moving toward a righteous and just society. They had to call people to repentance and to a reverent passion for justice for all.

We cannot let disillusionment cause us to surrender the public square. And at the heart of the public square lies all of the schools, colleges, universities, museums, news outlets, and centers of culture that Donald Trump is trying to stifle and reshape into a single mono-culture of a dying self-obsessed world. This is today’s cutting edge. We cannot allow one man or one political philosophy intimidate us, and stop us from thinking or expressing our thoughts of a society of the selfless--no matter how diverse that society must be.

Here another poet—one completely committed to liberating our thought—should be heeded. Today we reel from what Donald Trump succeeded in ramming through Congress—a bill that had to be rammed because anyone with a brain has dire misgivings about it—a bill that will accomplish nothing other than increase uniformity of thought, inequity of opportunity, and exclusion of tens of millions from the potential blessings of America.

We would all do well to listen now to what a real leader, Abraham Lincoln, said to his Congress on December 1, 1862. He was about to lead Congress to commit to justice for all, even the enslaved. He made a poetic appeal. He made an urgent appeal. He made an appeal to Congress to put aside their more petty differences and their desire to stay in power, for the sake of an unselfish, noble, and common endeavor for the noble and common good. He made a prophetic appeal for thinking anew!

Here is what he said:

Is it doubted, then, that the plan I propose, if adopted, would shorten the war, and thus lessen its expenditure of money and of blood? Is it doubted that it would restore the national authority and national prosperity, and perpetuate both indefinitely? Is it doubted that we here--Congress and Executive--can secure its adoption? Will not the good people respond to a united, and earnest appeal from us? Can we, can they, by any other means, so certainly, or so speedily, assure these vital objects? We can succeed only by concert. It is not "can any of us imagine better?" but, "can we all do better?" The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.  

Who can save us? Come Lord Jesus, and free us to think!  Free us to use such passion and imagination to call the nation together. Help people channel their frustration into fidelity. Help us channel our struggles into fresh solutions. Help good people, with the good of all at heart, to return to the public forum and be passionate and intense for the common good!