Authority and Stupidity
W.B. Yeats was born 160 years ago on June 13, 2025. One hundred years ago, that “smiling public man” lived through and endorsed the rise of authoritarianism, whether in the guise of Mussolini’s Italian fascism or in that of the new right-wing Catholic Irish Free State, whose forces had triumphed over the left wing of the Republican movement in the bloody Civil War that followed the anti-colonial War of Independence. Yeats made no bones about his belief in a strong, authoritative, if not authoritarian state and praise the new Irish counter-revolutionary government for its willingness to take life, meaning its execution in reprisals for IRA actions of most of the leadership of the anti-treaty Republicanism who were committed to a more thorough-going decolonization of Ireland as a whole and on principle antagonistic to partition.
Yeats’ endorsed those reprisals, commenting later that “The Government of the Free State has been proved legitimate by the only effective test; it has been permitted to take life … They executed more than seventy and not a vote changed.” And he praised the Minister of Justice responsible for them, Kevin O’Higgins, calling him “the Irish Mussolini.” Mussolini, indeed, offered a model for a strong Irish state to Yeats, who, in 1924 remarked in an interview with the conservative Anglo-Irish paper, The Irish Times: “I see the same tendency here in Ireland [as in France and Italy] towards authoritative government. What else can chaos produce even though our chaos has been a very small thing compared with the chaos in Central Europe?”
To this consistent authoritarian, a eugenicist and a fascist sympathizer who would go on to write unsingable marching tunes for the Blueshirts, the somethat bathetic Irish version of Mussolini’s blackshirts and Hitler’s brownshirts, liberals regularly turn to lament the descent of democracies into social chaos, whether they see those responsible as the anarchist “infantile left” or the Hawaiian-shirted Proud Boys on the right. Over and over again, we hear cited “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” and then, inevitably, “What rough beast … Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”
Powerful lines, indeed, but what passes unnoticed is that Yeats is here celebrating, not decrying, the return of authoritarian rule after “twenty centuries” in which the advent of the Christian dispensation had led to the rise of democracy and what he would later dub “the filthy modern tide.” According to Yeats’s contemporaneously developed philosophy of history, A Vision, with its belief in the “antithetical image,” the “rough beast” is the archetype that will displace the “rocking cradle” of Christianity’s tendency towards the meekness, individualism and democracy that have led to chaos and things falling apart. It will substitute for it the firm and order-restoring rule of a new and authoritarian aristocracy. As the gentle rocking of the cradle spawns democratic chaos, so the rough beast of the poem inaugurates an “ordine nuovo” that is its opposite. The invocation of “The Second Coming” with such frequency, based on so misleading a reading of its political intent, is a discomfiting phenomenon, though perhaps it allows us to decipher the secretly authoritarian leanings betrayed in the rote invocation of “mere anarchy” by liberal ideologues. But casting around for an alternative image for the brutality and cruelty of our times, I did found one where I least expected it, in Yeats’s extraordinary poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” written in the very moment of Ireland’s war of decolonization and full of Yeats’s dismay with a violence that—in the equally notorious Easter 1916—he met with such ambivalence, given his own role in forging the nationalist movement. The poem ends with a peculiarly enigmatic stanza, even for Yeats, one that I have always found hard to interpret or to ground either in any clear schema or with reference to his contemporary moment. The stanza is worth citing at length, since it is not part of the usual quotable repertoire of Yeatsian gems:
VI
Violence upon the roads: violence of horses;
Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,
But wearied running round and round in their courses
All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:
Herodias’ daughters have returned again,
A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;
And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
According to the wind, for all are blind.
But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.
In these concluding lines, Yeats grasps with striking imagistic force the peculiar mix of charisma and insolence, stupidity and brutality that constitutes the authoritarian. Authoritarianism relies on stupidity, which is not ignorance or even miseducation but the often highly-educated incapacity for thought, for the analysis of material circumstances and tendencies that informs any imaginative and radical remaking of the world: it feeds nostalgia for dreamed-up pasts that never were and are merely the masks for what Marx called “the nightmare of history,” its panorama of destruction and injustice in the service of exploitation and dispossession; it brings out the cruel destructiveness of those who believe themselves despoiled of their former privileges and, as Yeats would have well known from the violence of his own settler class—the “bitter and violent men” of “Meditations in a Time of Civil War” whose bloody conquests founded the imposing material edifices of the colony—seek to eliminate those whose very presence hinders their arrogation of supremacy. The brutality of authoritarians, their blunt drive to create the reality that suits them, overriding “A law indifferent to blame or praise, To bribe or threat,” descends in their minions into an insolent and gleeful cruelty, the desire to hurt for its own sake that expresses itself in the most petty humiliations of their dehumanized victims and a casual and unchecked lethality:
a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free.
Yet Yeats is not oblivious to the peculiar fascination of the fiendish forms of brutality and cruelty that authoritarianism spawns: where the rough beast “slouches” with arrogant power, Artisson, with his thoughtless eyes and—in a wonderful and unwittingly prescient metonymy for motiveless evil—his “stupid straw-pale locks,” “lurches past” with louche, loose limbs and aimless saunter. Eyes empty of anything but his own immediate and ephemeral aims, the fiend exerts a peculiar attraction over the love-lorn and enthralled Lady Kyteler, an attraction captured by the very unseeing emptiness onto which any desire can be projected and unleashed. The authoritarian, self-absorbed in his own conviction of his charisma, does not even see his followers: they, too, are empty cyphers, counting only insofar as their thoughtless and brutal vacuity reflects his own. And stupidity knows no dialectic: out of its violence and cruelty stems only the blind will to destruction of all that resists or by its very existence shows up its vacuity. Its desire radically to transform the world into its own petty and hate-filled image is mere regression to an illusory prior state, an imaginary second childhood rather than a messianic second coming.