An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I know that I shall meet my fate   
Somewhere among the clouds above;   
Those that I fight I do not hate   
Those that I guard I do not love;   
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,   
No likely end could bring them loss   
Or leave them happier than before.   
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,   
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight   
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;   
I balanced all, brought all to mind,   
The years to come seemed waste of breath,   
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

(W. B. Yeats, 1918)

Many seem to have trouble fathoming the cause of the widespread indifference that appears to sustain our terrible status quo in this era of nihilism and opiates; of reductive identities and pervasive escapism. In the early 20th century, the great Irish poet W. B. Yeats articulated one probable cause in his incredibly poignant and patently reasonable poem, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.

Written in 1918, exactly a century ago, Yeats’s poem imagined the thoughts of a young Irish fighter pilot — flying for Britain, his legal sovereign, but certainly not an object of sentimental loyalty — during the bloodbath that was World War I. He fought not for patriotism but for the simple, personal reason that he loved the thrill of flying; and because, even with the near certainty of death, his service offered him a daily, enthralling escape from the hopeless drudgery that the status quo guaranteed him at home, in Ireland.

It is not hard to imagine that many working-class Americans and Europeans — not to mention the billions living in crushing third-world poverty — would now register a similar indifference toward the well-being of the so-called global order, even as it looks increasingly imperiled. Just as a poor Irish boy during WWI might have jumped at a chance to fly an airplane, while remaining indifferent to the fortunes of the British Empire, people today may be roused to temporarily escape their misery, even through less inspiring endeavors: narcotics, pornography, the dazzling-but-vapid pop culture, and the fantasies of demagogues. But people cannot be roused to defend a soulless system (on its merits, no less!) that has made the thought of escape so persistently seductive.

Indifference may always be with us, to an extent. Most people are apolitical in ordinary times. But in the face of existential threats to a once-viable order, the manifestation of a critical mass of indifference is not normal. It is a dividend returned to a glib and legalistic system for having scorned the meaningful interests and loyalties of so many, for so long.