Empathy and Ecology
It's time to vote!
In the two previous posts, we considered, respectively, the urgency of this election with regard to women's health and rights and the dangers of allowing a malignant narcissist unbridled power. Today, we will examine the need for empathy and an ecological sensibility, both of which the "blubbering baby man" lack to an astonishing degree. (Thanks to
for this borrowed phrase.)These two ideas are linked, as our writer for today demonstrates. Indeed, they are the two themes that pervade William Wordsworth's early poetry, collected in Lyrical Ballads, and his magnum opus, The Prelude. He explicitly ties these two themes together as necessary qualities for a poet, but also for humanity and the world writ large.
Before we address Wordsworth's verse on these topics, let's review the ideologies of our two presidential candidates in relation to them.
First, ecology:
Trump and his surrogates have called for the end of the Environmental Protection Agency. Their proposed policies, outlined in the notorious Project 2025, would gut the Clean Air Act as well as the Endangered Species Act. They would move to privatize federal land and national parks. They would cut regulations that prevent power companies from dumping waste directly into our rivers and lakes, endangering our ground water. They would withdraw the US from international climate agreements. And remember, Trump has called climate change "a hoax."
Harris, on the other hand, was an early sponsor of the Green New Deal and has promoted green energy, and has expressed urgently that the US needs to be a global leader in combating climate change. While her expressed support of fracking is problematic, Harris has promised to protect clean air and water and has explicitly referred to climate change as a crisis that must be addressed. Electing her would give her the opportunity to continue our national transition to clean energy and a sustainable future.
Empathy:
Trump clearly is incapable of empathy of any kind. He has, over the past decade, conveyed his contempt for, in turn, those who serve in our military (whom he has called "suckers"), immigrants of all kinds (except for, apparently, the ones he marries), Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, women, the disabled, the poor, educators, journalists, scientists, African Americans, Jews, Muslims, the African continent ("shit-hole countries"), and everyone who opposes him. A Trump campaign flag in my neighborhood includes the rousing slogan "Fuck Your Feelings," which pretty much sums up the MAGA attitude. This is ironic, of course, since Trump is so thin-skinned and entirely motivated by grievance and resentment. He has so many hurt feelings. And his "closing argument" rally in New York over the weekend was filled with racism, misogyny, and hatred from speaker after speaker.
In contrast, here is what Harris had to say in her closing argument speech in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday:
Our democracy doesn’t require us to agree on everything. That’s not the American way. Just the opposite. We don’t shy away from robust debate. We like a good debate. And the fact that someone disagrees with us, does not make them “the enemy from within.”
They are family. Neighbors. Classmates. Coworkers. They are fellow Americans. And as Americans, we rise and fall together. America, for too long, we have been consumed with too much division, chaos, and mutual distrust. And it can be easy to forget a simple truth: it doesn’t have to be this way.
It is time to stop pointing fingers and start locking arms. It is time to turn the page on the drama and conflict, the fear and division. It is time for a new generation of leadership in America. And I am ready to offer that leadership as the next President of the United States.
How are empathy and ecology linked? Wordsworth shows us.
After Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge published their volume Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Coleridge convinced his fellow poet to write a preface to the second edition that would make more explicit his guiding poetic and philosophical principles. The result was the famous "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" of 1800, which would serve as a kind of manifesto for English Romantic Poetry in the new century.
In the Preface, Wordsworth expresses his reasons for using plain language, as opposed to the ornate diction of much poetry of the time. Not only does he want his poetry to be understood, but he also sees one of the primary tasks of the poet as using plain language to express the sufferings of others. He writes:
So that it will be the wish of the poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs; modifying only the language which is thus suggested to him, by a consideration that he describes for a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure.
We see this empathy, in particular for the rural poor, expressed in poems like "We Are Seven," "The Idiot Boy," "The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman," and the Lucy Gray poems, among many others. "The Female Vagrant" ends with these lines:
Three years a wanderer, often have I view'd,
In tears, the sun towards that country tend
Where my poor heart lost all its fortitude:
And now across this moor my steps I bend—
Oh! tell me whither—for no earthly friend
Have I. —She ceased, and weeping turned away,
As if because her tale was at an end
She wept;—because she had no more to say
Of that perpetual weight which on her spirit lay.
We see here a lone, suffering figure wandering in a landscape, and it is here that we begin to see the connection between empathy and ecology: we are not separate from "The Female Vagrant"; we are all part of the same environment, of the same world. And so her suffering is, by extension, our suffering—as is the suffering of the land itself. In "Lines Written in Early Spring," Wordsworth contemplates the beauty of a natural scene, and it leads him to a kind of universal empathy:
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.To her fair works did nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it griev'd my heart to think
What man has made of man.
The unity and beauty of nature make him remember the extent to which humans have alienated themselves from that unity, have sundered the connection to the world and to other people. The chief gift of the poet is to perceive this unity, as he expressed in "Tintern Abbey":
[. . .] that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by that power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Note the use of the word "things" here, as opposed to "people" or "creatures." Things is an all-encompassing choice that may even remind us of a Buddhist perspective: empathy for the Other means empathy for the whole. This idea pervades the entirety of his epic autobiographical poem, The Prelude, in which the most powerful experiences of his life connect his feelings for the natural world to a feeling of unity with the whole of creation—and of love for other beings.
These feelings and ideas are, despite what some escapists may claim, irresistibly political: they call urgently for humans to come together for the common good, to set aside pettiness and selfishness in favor of unity and the protection of the world that sustains us all.
The implications of such sentiments for the current election could not be more clear.
Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet wooded copse to yours.
Of course he has no empathy- his father and Roy Cohn both told him it didn't matter....