Convergence of the Twain: Why American foreign policy is headed for disaster

By: American Decency Staff

Over the last several weeks, reading news of disorder and upheaval from Venezuela to the Levant to Ukraine to Iraq to Afghanistan, I have thought often of a poem written almost a century ago. Thomas Hardy composed “The Convergence of the Twain” in memory of the sinking of the Titanic. It was published in 1915, three years after the great ship made contact with the deadly iceberg, but reading it today one cannot help experiencing its timelessness, cannot help sharing in its tragic sense of fate.

Hardy’s theme is the vanity and fragility of progress, of technological achievement, of wealth and human power when compared with the immensity and amorality of nature. When I read the poem today however I am drawn to its final stanzas, where Hardy writes of the limits of human foresight, of sudden and unexpected changes in fortune, of the horrible things that can result from the collision of disparate elements. What seems disconnected, separate, foreign, distant, estranged can suddenly cohere in terrible and revelatory events: a Titanic, a Pearl Harbor, a 9/11, a Boston Marathon bombing. I worry that one of those events approaches us now.

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