Slouching towards Bethlehem

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?

The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats, 1919

The crises of our time are reminiscent of when Yeats first introduced his cosmology over a century ago. Our world is consumed with war, as it had recently been then. We’re still recovering from a global pandemic, only precedented by the one that immediately preceded this poem’s writing. New technology and physics were disrupting Yeats’s status quo, just as they do today. And the specter of fascism once again looms large in most of the world’s democracies. It’s hard not to draw parallels and conclusions about the end of our current epoch, the cyclical dissolution of our widening gyre.

There are lights in the sky. Unidentified objects float around our cities, hover over homes, harass fighter pilots. Officials from the United States government have publicly, under oath, acknowledged their possession of non-human biological material and observation of technologies we don’t understand, and yet we’re desensitized. We apply the symbols of our prevailing worldview, even those at the very fringes of our understanding of possibility—surely these are drones, or space aliens, or inter-dimensional visitors. But none of these are adequate to describe what we’re seeing, and most strangely, feeling.

Our institutions are rotting from within, infected with corruption and staffed with cartoon villains. Our opposition party is complying in advance with fascism and accepting the inevitability of dystopia, tasking “oversight” to baby boomers literally dying of cancer rather than entrusting democracy to a youthful and inspiring new voice. Civilizations collapse in cycles, and Pax Americana has seemingly reached its limits in governing our planet and exerting hegemony over world affairs. Capitalism’s disregard of human dignity and perverse centralization of astronomical wealth have finally come to roost, and the soulless violence seen through decades of class war has finally become bilateral.

Mega-corporations assert that their quantum computers demonstrate the existence of an infinite multiverse. Others insist that their tremendously complex models of human language—their glorified autocorrect engines—are on the precipice of self-awareness, and this is breathlessly accepted by venture capitalists and the tech press alike, despite there being no obvious through-line. Society looks to these technological oligarchs to save us, despite all evidence that our current political climate and psychological crises are direct consequences of their excess and monetization of our attention and rage.

Popular science continues to circle the drain on the quantum nature of consciousness; philosophy, physics, and psychology increasingly collide in their language and conclusions. An emerging understanding of the mental nature of reality, the ubiquity of “conscious” behaviors and psychic elements endemic to reality, once relegated to podcasts and fringe science, are more widely accepted as descriptive of our subjective experience.

These events and phenomena are unrelated, have disparate origins and histories, but in recent years feel correlated. Our world is increasingly chaotic and unknowable. These headlines wash over us, our brains unable to reframe their fundamental worldviews across multiple axes simultaneously, unable to absorb and make sense of these contradictory, yet equally valid, paradigm shifts. We’ve known for a hundred years that uncertainty is fundamental to the smallest particles in reality, but only recently have we experimentally proven that the universe is not locally real.

The universe, our reality, is not real. That’s a peer-reviewed scientific conclusion. Strong objectivity is dead.

Our current understanding of reality, and specifically the very language we use to describe it, is incomplete and unable to adequately describe the uncharted frontier before us. We’re finding these limitations in physics, computer science, philosophy and epistemology, our own subjective lived experiences. We apply the language of technology to these revelations, a well-worn dialect our imaginations are comfortable with—surely we’re living in a computer simulation, as the thought exercise suggests. But simulacra and computation are mental constructs, crystallized and limited by our own language and symbology. Reality doesn’t care about our mental models.

Depth psychology holds some clues, as we apply these symbols and visions from Spiritus Mundi to reason about our reality and engage in sense-making. But I’m increasingly convinced that the paradigm shifts necessary to live through this next revolution will stretch us to our limits.

The world is resisting our definitions and fighting against our penchant for categorization. I truly believe there’s something lurking beneath our reality, or inherent to it, or coming from beyond it, that is seeking to be known. Our current explanations hold little merit and only serve to distract and confuse us.

Things are falling apart. The center is not holding. And the falcon, last dispatched at the dawn of the age of reason, can no longer hear the falconer. The time has come for us to shed those tenuous constructs that no longer serve us—the rationalism that led to eugenics, the capital that begot wage slavery, the technocracy that borne false idols and mechanical turks.

I’ve now become one who lacks all conviction, in the face of those oligarchs and technocrats who fill themselves with passionate intensity. Something new is coming, after twenty centuries of stony sleep, its hour come round at last. We must ready ourselves to accept it.

This is cause for hope. A better world, a more empathetic world, a more egalitarian world, is possible. A world that better absorbs and incorporates the mysteries of reality can be built from this one. But the labor of its coming won’t be painless. This ceremony of innocence is at its end, drowned in new data and the crisis of our patriarchal society’s strangulation of the psyche.

But thankfully, the world doesn’t care about our prevailing consensus view of it. Reality is impatient in the face of our myopic ontology. Surely some revelation is at hand. And I, for one, am eager to experience its mystery.