Creating a "Richer, Deeper" Politics
Novelist Richard Powers and Columnist Ezra Klein on empathy and enchantment
Speaking about our current political pickle, Ezra Klein points to a “chasm between what we should do and what we will.” For instance, we know we must act to slow global warming, but we don’t do it. Political pickles are nothing new to civilization, but the current one does seem more vinegary than some others.
Klein, a columnist for the New York Times, made the comment in a podcast with novelist Richard Powers, whose most recent book is Bewilderment. I read the novel after listening to the podcast on the advice of some close friends. It’s a revelatory work of magic, of art for empathy’s sake.
The Klein-Powers podcast helped me get a better handle on what I should have been doing for a long while now and what I’m hoping to do here at A Billion Worlds. Like many in politics and public life, I’ve spent decades gazing across the gap Klein mentions, trying to tell people what we should do to bridge it. But, as Klein says, “Telling people that what they’re doing right now is wrong or not enough, that they need to make sacrifice or change, that can lead to tremendous political backlash.” Something different is required if we are to change others’ minds.
The picture that may come to mind when we think about the divide that Klein and Powers discuss is that we stand on one side of it while our opponents or antagonists stand on the other. But that’s not right. We stand together on the same side, arguing with one another about what should be done.
If the chasm doesn’t divide antagonists, what does it divide? The divide is between us and the rest of the natural world, between us and not-us, between us and Nature. So divided, we find it more difficult to communicate with those standing with us at the cliff’s edge. Our isolation diminishes our capacity for empathy with others.
We’ve been taught to think of ourselves as separate from and superior to other creatures. Mountains and rivers are nice, but we are so disconnected from them that when we feel the need to poison them or carve them up for our own short term interests, we do so and then deny culpability because we’re above all that. Climate denial is made possible by a view of reality that holds us apart from Nature. We think we leave no fingerprints behind on the world because, in our grotesque narcissism, we touch nothing but ourselves. There’s nothing else of importance to touch.
Richard Powers believes we have fallen into a dangerous “consensual understanding” of human exceptionalism that is continually reinforced by culture. By assuming our exceptional status, we disenchant ourselves and the world around us. Enchantment is found in our interdependence with all of Nature, an interdependence we deny or ignore. We become Disenchanted Homo Economicus, with all its acquisitive habits and disregard for the consequences of its plundering.
Klein asks, “How do we change the way we see each other and the world? How do we create a richer, deeper soil for our politics?” I think we have to help folks experience that “richer, deeper soil” rather than just tell them about it. And, that is what Powers does in Bewilderment.
His story involves a father, Theo, struggling with his brilliant but troubled nine-year-old son, Robin. A neuroscientist the father knows is experimenting with a new “empathy machine.” It records core emotional states of people, then introduces those states to “trainees” or patients, who learn to experience similar emotions. In his interview with Klein, Powers makes a key point:
I don’t think it’s giving away any great reveal in the book to say that a reader who gets far enough into the story probably has this moment of recursive awareness where they, he or she comes to understand that what Robin is doing in this gradual training on the cast of mind of some other person is precisely what they’re doing in the act of reading the novel “Bewilderment” — by living this act of active empathy for these two characters, they are undergoing their own kind of neurofeedback.
See what he did there? Books are empathy machines. They give us experiences—not just explanations or arguments, but experiences—that can change our minds. It’s a step toward changing our politics and bridging the chasm between what we know should be done and the will to do it. We need to help others experience the “richer, deeper soil.” We face urgent crises that require us to advocate in straightforward terms what we believe should be done. We can’t abandon the public sphere. But, we also need experiences that bring us closer together and help us bridge the chasm.
Can we overcome our culture’s “consensual understanding” of our alienation from the rest of the world? I don’t know, but every little instance of escape from it matters.
I read Bewilderment as well. The writing was phenomenal but I was a tad confused with the storyline. Especially in the end when the aliens came and ate everyone. #spoiler
Space aliens will do that! First they confuse our storylines, then they eat us. It's a problem.