Are Things Falling Apart?

In some places, the falcon can still hear the falconer.

Photo by RW

Note: Tomorrow—Saturday, Nov 15—at 1 pm US Eastern Time, the first session of the NonZero Reading Club will be called to order. For details see last week’s Earthling—though the only details you really need are that clicking this Zoom link will take you to the meeting room and that the subject of the meeting (chapter five of Norbert Wiener’s 1964 book Gods & Golem, Inc.) can be found here.

I’m in Doha, Qatar, in the final stages of a slow recovery from eight-time-zone jet lag, so this will be an abbreviated version of the Earthling. But what it lacks in length it makes up for in heft: I’m going to address the world-spinning-out-of-control question—not the question of whether the world is spinning out of control but the question of whether there’s a widespread sense that the world is spinning out of control.

There’s something about Doha that has turned my thoughts to this question. But that something isn’t Doha itself, which is a picture of calm and order. That something is the “falcon souq,” the part of the original Doha market where falcons are sold.

If you’re wondering who would buy a falcon, the answer is a falconer—someone who trains or hunts falcons or other raptors. In Qatar, apparently, falconing is a big sport. One American who has spent a lot of time here compared it to golf—a form of competition that men use to fill their leisure time. They get together and dispatch their birds, and the owner of the bird that is the first to subdue the prey wins. It’s kind of like British fox hunting except with remote control.

Having spent almost all my life in a country where the ratio of golfers to falconers is roughly infinity, I almost never encounter the word “falconer.” Maybe that’s why, on those rare occasions when I do encounter the word, I think of what may be its most famous appearance in all of English-language literature—in the first stanza of W. B. Yeats’s poem 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.

Yeats had reasons to think things were falling apart. He was writing at the end of World War I, and amid a flu epidemic that killed millions and almost killed his wife. I think today there are a lot of people who would say that they, too, have reasons to think things are falling apart.

One reason they might cite is that President Trump is more openly contemptuous of the rule of law—and the preservation of norms—than any president in recent memory, and in demonstrating this he’s created a lot of disarray. Meanwhile, some of Trump’s supporters would say that what some see as creating disarray—like declaring dubious emergencies and sending troops into cities against the wishes of municipal governments—they see as a welcome response to disarray, to things falling apart.

On the international scene, too, disorder seems to be the order of the day. Trump has joined other recent presidents in deploying violence abroad in blatant disregard for international law, helping to bury early post-Cold-War hopes of a “new world order” that would make the rule of law global. And other powerful countries, most notably Russia and Israel, have also been flagrant in their disrespect for the sovereignty of neighboring nations.

As I was preparing to record a podcast with Nikita Petrov this week, I ran this “things fall apart” theme by him as a possible focus for our conversation. In his reply email he added some additional categories of evidence, such as deep fakes and the attendant sense that it’s getting harder to tell what’s real. So we had our conversation, which was posted late yesterday, and at the end of it I felt we’d made the case—we were right to have suggested that a sense of growing disarray and disorientation is pretty widespread.

But after that conversation I had coffee with an American resident of Doha who made me wonder whether I’d been overestimating the number of people who are having that Yeats feeling. This American has been working in Doha for years and, by virtue of his job, is in contact with people in the Qatari national security establishment and with public-sector elites in the region and world more broadly. I tossed out my thesis—that there’s a palpable sense of things spinning out of control—in the expectation that he would validate it.

This Doha falconer seems to have things under control. Photo by RW

After all, only two months ago, Doha was on the receiving end of what may be the most shocking of Israel’s recent attacks on neighboring countries—shocking, in particular, because Qatar hosts a big American military base. What’s more, this guy lives around a mile from the target and heard the explosions—roughly ten of them, he said—and rushed his family to a safe location.

Still, he suggested, the ensuing sense of vulnerability had now faded. President Trump responded to the Israeli attack by giving Qatar formal security guarantees that turn the country from a de facto ally into something more like a de jure ally (even if the guarantees came via executive order, not a treaty). And Trump had forced Bibi Netanyahu to endure the humiliation of apologizing for the attack. Plus, Trump pushed Netanyahu into a ceasefire in Gaza that, though tenuous at best, has still made things in this region feel a bit more stable.

So, no, the Israeli air strike hadn’t left this American resident of Doha feeling that things are falling apart. Moreover, he said, in some parts of the world—such as Qatar, some other countries in this region, and much of Asia—he senses a lot of optimism about the future, even if that optimism isn’t common in the US and much of Europe.

So maybe, in sensing a widespread sense that things are spinning out of control, I had been overgeneralizing. Maybe things feel more untethered in the “western” world than elsewhere.

Yeats, in his famous jeremiad, had been writing very much as a westerner. In other writings, he expressed the fear that the “Christian era” was coming to a close and the values associated with it would give way to something worse. The final lines of The Second Coming make it clear that the title, far from anticipating the second coming of Christ, is a darkly ironic play on that expectation:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

So maybe, if that American I had coffee with was right to suggest that the sense of growing disarray is stronger in Europe and the US than in many parts of the world, then Yeats, too, was right: The part of civilization historically rooted in Christianity is the part that increasingly doubts its underpinnings.

And if the center doesn’t hold, and things fall apart, what new order will replace the old one? The obvious candidate is some sort of authoritarianism—whether the kind represented by Trump and some of his allies on the European nationalist right or the kind represented by countries elsewhere in the world that are feeling their oats.

Yeats himself at times evinced authoritarian leanings, even showing sympathy for Benito Mussolini. Fear of disorder can bring out the authoritarian in a person. (Or is it the other way around?) But as the 1930s wore on, and European authoritarianism assumed more and more ominous form, Yeats showed less and less enthusiasm for fascism.

Ok, so those are my reflections from Doha. If you have a view on this question of whether there’s a widespread sense that things are falling apart—or a view on whether things are falling apart—feel free to leave a comment below—and/or leave that comment in the NonZero Discord.

Correction: In the original version of this piece (regrettably, the version mailed out to subscribers), I referred to W.B. Yeats as Richard Yeats. Presumably some part of my still-slightly-jet-lagged brain was conflating William Yeats with the writer Richard Yates (Yeats is pronounced ‘Yates’).