The times face us with questions that we may struggle to answer.

– Have these questions been answered in our past, can we turn there for an answer? Or is there something in our time that makes these questions newly difficult (leaving the old key no keyhole to work in)?

While I struggle to characterize our situation today one writer describes it this way: destabilizing forces are breaking up the ground on which, in the past, we made lives together with fellow citizens. We have the sense, moreover, that the unravelling is not over; to see strange and unexpected things welcomed by neighbours as proper and human surely promises more that we do not see coming. Nothing better captures the feeling of “these past several years” than the description, “an accelerating anti-cultural vortex.” We are in the midst of a serious undoing. The lines of Yeats that fit our times are already in your head:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;….

Indeed, it was in 2018 that the journalist Fintan O’Toole proposed “the Yeats Test. The proposition is simple: the more quotable Yeats seems to commentators and politicians, the worse things are.” He means these and other lines from “The Second Coming”, often relied on in recent years.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats wrote his poem in 1919, when a world war had just ended, civil wars were underway in Russia and Ireland, and a deadly influenza still raged, and yet he wrote,

Surely some revelation is at hand;….

The image that line prompts is of an anxious and uncertain people not knowing what exactly is unfolding – which seems to make the present day an even better match with the poem. Yeats was responding to cataclysmic events that were in the open, which he then explained (a centre, losing centrality); we, however, are directly aware of that loss of centre, yet are plunged even more deeply into the unknown, nervous about events. At this point of history, something has to happen.

The primary question is, clearly, What, but it is unanswerable. That is the dark horizon itself, the fog that we cannot see into. The real question is posed instead by the thing we can and do see: if what we are undergoing is a collapse of common ground then … what is it that we should do?

The author I opened with writes,

“These initial decades of the 21st C are times of … growing anxiety…. The cement of society – the beliefs, customs, and institutions upon which old and new generations can together stand – has been cracking…. What will it take to combat the forces of decadence in our midst? This is the difficult question we face, and one that does not have an easy answer.”

But he then made a proposal. If this is our trouble then we need “renewal” via education, specifically that kind of education most “critical in the cultivation of flourishing human beings”: he proposed the recovery of liberal arts education, the sort that “passes down a knowledge of what it means to be human and a glimpse into how to live a fulfilling human life.” Truly, how could an education designed simply to start a career do anything about the dissolving centre?

One answer to the question (What are we to do?) is surely glaringly obvious. If our trouble is the dissolving of a life-sustaining tradition then we should deal with this in just the way we were taught to do by that tradition – which traditional education re-acquaints us with.

Simply, if our tradition were a tradition of wisdom then it will have warned us of the darkness we are now in. To think it possesses no such power is just to share the opinion of the people calling this tradition obsolete: blind to the unfathomed potential of history. But no; if there is wisdom then – this is elementary – there is just what wisdom is: “a treasure unto men that never faileth” (Wisdom of Solomon 7:14).

The people in the painting I have chosen as an illustration are 20th-C people, transfixed by a darkness they cannot see into, which means either that they are looking into the strictly unknowable (what is going to happen?!), and feeling the anxiety joined with that futility, or that they are expecting from history (the weather of human behaviour) what history never delivers. Whichever it is: darkness.

“They will look to the earth, but behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish.” (Isaiah 8:22)

To escape the miasma already engulfing them the people in the painting had to take their eyes off the sky, turn around, remembering their inheritance of wisdom. “Wisdom,” writes Solomon, “I do not hide her riches” (Wisdom of Solomon 7:13), but it is because they were hidden (stripped out of education and removed to the attic, like the grandparents’ unfashionable furniture) that we are now in fearful times.

Those who think the thoughts of our tradition possess instruments fit to free people from this trouble. Strip the riches from education and you take radiance from people’s eyes, you weaken them, you create the passive and restless crowd. Recover the riches and “you will not fear the terror of the night, … nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.” (Psalm 91:5–6)

In the further parts of this essay we will look at four works of art – from the Western tradition, the tradition of wisdom – that offer parts of the answer to our present uncertainty. What are we to do? Knowing our own tradition, we will know.

Edward Tingley