On Whitman, Solidarity, and Climate

Whitman calls forth a prospect for collective action ripe for our time. No other moment has been quite so starkly literal in demanding intergenerational solidarity on a societal scale as this moment of pandemic on the precipice of climate disaster.

By Benedict Wright

The twilight of the year 2020 in America may be uniquely suited to arouse one’s sense of the tragic. In a time when maximal cooperation is needed, even the bare minimum feels a ways off. As I write, over 11 million people in the U.S. have contracted COVID-19, and a quarter of a million have died. I admit that at the beginning of the pandemic I had hoped that perhaps a silver lining of the destruction and suffering would be an outpouring—or at least an increase—of sympathy and compassion for our vulnerable neighbors whose health and safety now so vividly required our personal responsibility.

Yet for the most part, that hope has yet been unrealized. It seemed all too quickly that any notions of common social obligations passed through the totalizing filters of polarization, selfishness, and social tribalism. Today we confront a virus more widespread than ever, a people as divided as ever, and a national government quite possibly divided and impotent for at least the next two years. What feels to me a cause for despair is that all of this has taken place against the backdrop of looming climate catastrophe—an impending strain on liberal institutions and a catalyst for strife that will almost certainly hurt most those poor and vulnerable who are least responsible for causing it. If the immediate destruction of a pandemic cannot coax social action for the common good, what hope is there for climate change whose destruction will be (and already is) much less immediate and yet demands so much of us?

It is in times like these—when despair at the improbabilities of a bright future feels immanent—that a momentary turn away from the present world can be not only useful but indeed necessary. I found such a moment the other day when reading Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” A gleaming diamond amongst other gems, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” showcases Whitman at his best and most ecstatic. His poetry in general, and this poem in particular, offers a place to dwell with the kinds of emotions, ineffable longings, and stark vulnerabilities we seldom even encounter in other media. There are moments in Whitman’s poetry, Irving Howe writes, “in which the struggle of the self to locate a principle of movement, or a place of rest, comes to a momentary stop. A quietness begins; the language becomes hushed and completely controlled; the poet, not Walt the kosmos but Whitman the solitary, exposes himself in all his vulnerability. It is the moment after the struggle between the self and everything that resists and hurts and destroys the self, the blessed moment when anxiety has not been suppressed or dispelled but brought to its proper subordination.” Howe goes on to mention “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by name as one such moment, and I would certainly concur.

What is immediately striking in the poem is Whitman’s reflection on human interconnectedness. Whitman views with clear, recognizing eyes, “face to face,” the human objects of his meditation—himself and his reader included. He considers the experience looking out from a New York ferry—the appearance of the waves, the movement of the gulls, the glimmering of distant foundries, and the presence of the ordinary yet utterly fascinating people around him. He considers their experience of the scene—infinitely distinct yet surely familiar—and the similar experiences of generations of onlookers to come:

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all

hours of the day,

The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disinte-

grated, every one disintegrated yet part of the

scheme,

The similitudes of those of the past and those of the future,

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and

hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage

over the river,

The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far

away,

The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and

them,

The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of oth-

ers.

These “ties between” ourselves and others, between the reader and the author, between one ferry passenger and another, between past generations and ours, and between our generation and future ones, these are what we are talking about when we talk about the basis of solidarity. We are talking about recognizing that the other, regardless of their location in time or space, experiences a condition within the world profoundly like our own. Whitman continues,

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from

shore to shore,

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and

west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and

east,

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty year hence, others will see them as they cross, the

sun half an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or even many hundred years

hence, others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the

falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

For Whitman, the other is indeed a disintegrated individual, yet they are disintegrated in the same way that we are disintegrated. We—ourselves and the other—are not only bound by analogous experiences of viewing the physical world but bound too by a common frailty and struggle in that world:

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,

The dark threw its patches down upon me also,

The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,

My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in

reality meagre?

Nor is it you alone who know what it was to be evil,

I am he who knew what it was it is to be evil,

I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,

Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole grudg’d

Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,

Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly,

malignant,

This too is what it is to talk of solidarity. To see in our shared capacities for shame, impotence, failure, and wickedness a kinship like no other. The proper response to the other then is not simple awe at the similitude of our complex experiences but also compassion for their struggles and honest appraisal of their capacities for evil.

Whitman calls forth a prospect for collective action ripe for our time. No other moment, I think, has been quite so starkly literal in demanding intergenerational solidarity on a societal scale as this moment of pandemic on the precipice of climate disaster. At no other time has the meaning of our moment been so caught up in the world we are going to leave behind for those yet unborn. The experience of the author today, Whitman writes, “pours my meaning into you [the reader].” How important, relevant, and beautiful is this? It is in the existence of those whom we will never meet that our existence takes on more meaning, just as our existence pours meaning into theirs. Let this moment mean something good to them.

Whitman’s reflections on radical solidarity (at least that is what I would call them) are of the profoundest degree. I hope they can nourish those who are justifiably dismayed by the kind of barbarism that seems to be winning the day in the world right now. It may be that Whitman—a man of great hope and great liberal temperament—is a radical for our moment. His aspiration for a better world offers no guarantees and relieves no responsibility. For Whitman, there is no iron law of history destined for egalitarianism, no arc of history bending towards justice. Yet there is a profound and unquenchable hope in the possibility of human cooperation in harmony with nature. This hope is grounded in a belief—one I find compelling—in a radical and undeniable interconnectedness amongst persons. However, we and only we have the power to recognize that unfathomable bond and potential for collective action. As an American patriot, Whitman saw a unique opportunity for such recognition in the democratic experiment of the United States. As Richard Rorty wrote of Whitman along with John Dewey in Achieving Our Country, “both Dewey and Whitman viewed the United States as an opportunity to see ultimate significance in a finite, human, historical, project, rather than something eternal and nonhuman….They wanted the struggle for social justice to be the country’s animating principle, the nation’s soul.” As our present moment coldly shows, success in achieving such a goal in this life is not guaranteed, yet, as Whitman reminds us, nor can the hope for it ever be obliterated.