Consider this description of a recent NYT article:
"The white officer, Michael Brelo, climbed onto the hood of the car and fired repeatedly at an unarmed black couple. His trial played out amid broader questions about how the police interact with African-Americans."
Now this language, considering the circumstances, appears to me very odd. Here we have a scene of tremendous absurdity, both for its savagery and its injustice. A white officer leaps onto the hood of a car, like some twisted action hero, like a Dirty Harry without granting even the cartoonish categories of action movie good and evil, firing his weapon repeatedly into an unarmed couple.
And all we can cough out is: "Well this all played out amid broader questions about how police interact with African-Americans."
So we're just having a calm dialogue about how the police are supposed to interact with a group of people. And if you start shouting and waving your hands, well you're just not being very serious.
The tension here is exquisite. The people administrating the Center are completely mortified of betraying any sort of preference, at least which extends too far past its conditioned boundary lines. But these conditioned boundary lines of debate are specified by the very system that is producing these absurd events.
This is why - to paraphrase Yeats - the center cannot hold. Because there is nothing in the center. There is no moral content, no direction. The center is attempting to hold in place too many conflicting pressures, while refusing to cede control.
If the center refuses to reconstitute itself as a moral entity with purpose, to compensate for the evils that it has inflicted, then it will have to break apart.
This would lead to the establishment of multiple centers of decentralized power, which upon solving various existing problems, would produce other problems of its own, namely the coordination of complex activity, and the check on the expansion of groups with conflicting interests.
The powerful made their bed then, or feathered the nest, or what have you.
