Ideas really do have consequences....

For all the good wrought upon the world with the coming of the Enlightenment, there also came much harm. While we gained many wonderful advances in various fields of science, we also gave up much in the areas of ethics, epistemology, and theology. We began starting with nature instead of God, and in so doing, changed the way we looked at the world and the people who inhabit the world. After World War I, there was a group of writers known as the Lost Generation. This group includes such writers as Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats. It is interesting to see the effects of the massive shift in worldview. This poem is but a small help in understanding what was happening to the world at the turn of the 20th century. Try to answer this question after you read the poem: What is this that is coming to change the world in the next 20 centuries like Christ had affected the previous 20 centuries? I am afraid that the answer is not a pleasant one.

The Second Coming - W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center 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.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of the Spiritus Mundi (Universal Spirit)
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?