Are Things Falling Apart?
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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.
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
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