Moderation as Pursuit of Justice

There are perhaps no more cited words of poetry, at least poetry of a genuinely high order, than the opening stanza of W. B. Yeats’s haunting 1919 poem “The Second Coming.” There the Irish poet evokes a true apocalypse where “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . .” The “centre” that Yeats refers to is less the political center between two partisan extremes than the center that is civilization itself. In modern times, writes Yeats, “The ceremony of innocence is drowned”: mercy and decency are under assault as never before as “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”