The seasons totter in their walk

It will not require much further elaboration if I say that it feels as if our society—our world—were teetering on the edge. Our president is saying he may call in the military against people protesting police violence; he has threatened the use of "ominous weapons" against people gathered outside the White House; he has discouraged people from voting... We are slouching toward something; or perhaps we are still at the pivotal moment, when choices matter most. One way lie fascism, authoritarianism, genocide; the other—a deeply flawed yet surviving multiracial democracy, which maintains an internal capacity to critique and improve itself.

It is an apocalyptic summer, capstone to an apocalyptic spring. More than 100,000 people have died in this country from a raging pandemic with grossly unequal and structurally racist effects; millions have been thrown into unemployment. And we are only beginning to grapple with the impact this crisis will have on the Global South. What happens when economies that have been made dependent on food imports, tourism, or remittances by neoliberal policies suddenly have to reckon with something approaching involuntary autarky? There will be hunger, unemployment, suffering on a massive scale...

And in the midst of this global crisis, the president (him again) is trying to sever ties with the World Health Organization—the chief vehicle we have for coordinated international efforts to respond to a pandemic. What does it mean when our leaders turn away from the precious few institutions of global cooperation we have, purely in an effort to scapegoat, shift blame, and shield their paltry egos?

Without expecting to find in it anything of much relevance to our present moment, I happened a few weeks ago to be reading a collection of poems by the Pre-Raphaelites. The title of one particularly caught my attention: "On Refusal of Aid Between Nations." The poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is of course not especially known for his political sentiments, but it turns out he did have a few things to say about public affairs, particularly after the 1848 revolutions and subsequent triumph of reactionary powers across Europe. (The poem in question was written in 1849).

Rossetti begins by portraying the apocalyptic mood of the year in which he was writing: "the earth is changing," he observes; "the seasons totter in their walk." These and other signs of the times he presents as possible explanations for why the poet knows that some sort of divine reckoning or punishment is at hand, even as he dismisses each one in turn.

He remarks that God is certain to exact a penalty from humankind; he is ready to "smite [his] world," even though so many nations profess the Christian faith; "So many kings"—adds Rossetti, as an aside: a reference to the ascendent forces of reaction in the year of his writing. Ultimately, though, it is not because of any of these signs of change, Rossetti writes, that he knows the end of the world is almost upon us. Rather, it is:

because Man is parcelled out in men
To-day; because, for any wrongful blow,
No man not stricken asks, ‘I would be told
Why thou dost thus;’ but his heart whispers then,
‘He is he, I am I.’

It is for this reason, before all the others, the poet concludes, that "we know/[...] our earth falls asunder, being old."

It is hard not to see oneself and one's country in the poem. What is the administration's stated policy of putting "America First"—or its hostility to multilateral efforts to protect global health—but a "refusal of aid between nations" in the most malign sense? What do we see in the cynicism and threats of violence that have greeted protests against police brutality, from the president and so many others, but the heart whispering within us—those of us who are "not stricken" directly, that is, by structural racism—"He is he, I am I." Or, to put it in modern words: "Not my problem."

Are we nearing our day of reckoning? Some final judgment or penalty, when we will be called to account for these sins of indifference, callousness, cruelty? Rossetti evidently felt—or at least, rhetorically proclaimed—that he was, in his time. The "rod weighs heavily" in the hand of the deity in 1849, the poet says.

Yet...1849 passed. Humanity survived. The world did not end. And, somehow, the same will be true of 2020 as well.

It is well to be chastened in times like the present. To remember the horrors of which human beings are capable. To take seriously the dangers that our world and our human nature present to us. We should be called to repentance, in moments when we see the worst and most selfish traits in human beings seemingly in the ascendent.

But I remember too an insight that is grounded in my own humanist theology, and which is radically different from the view of the cosmos that Rossetti presents to us in his poem. In essence, it is a Feuerbachian move: I remember that, when we condemn ourselves for our failures of charity, it is the human within us that does the condemning. That is to say, it may be our human nature that prompts us to commit acts of violence or indifference; that makes us turn our backs on our neighbors. But it is also our human nature that cries against these things.

Whatever is, within us, is human. Whatever ideals we hold, whatever virtues we espouse and that prompt us to be ashamed of our hypocrisies, our acts of moral cowardice—these too are the creation of our human selves, and of human societies. If we feel ashamed, it is because it is our human nature that condemns our acts. If we long for a transformation of our world, it is because our human brains have enabled us to imagine how our reality might be different—and better.

To return to poetry again, I recently found this sentiment encapsulated in a poem by Stevie Smith; it is perhaps the most beautiful summary of the teaching of Feuerbach - that great progenitor of 19th century humanism - that has been penned, and I find it contains an important message for our moment:

Man aspires
To good,
To Love
Sighs;

Beaten, corrupted, dying
In his own blood lying
Yet heaves up an eye above
Cries, Love, love.
It is his virtue needs explaining, 
Not his failing.