E.M. Forster on the Personal and Political Power of Empaths and the Relationship Between Creativity and Democracy – The Marginalian

“In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her exquisite statement of belief, having lived through two World Wars and stood with the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War and used her own art as an instrument of cohesion and translation between selves. In times of political crisis, we seem to forget that societies are made of selves, are made at all — that they are collaborative acts of the imagination, works of the creative spirit emanating from the collective conscience of this relational constellation of individuals. As such, they require of us a deep and imaginative sensitivity to other selves, to what it is like to be someone else — that hallmark of our humanity we call empathy.

The English novelist, essayist, and broadcaster E.M Forster (January 1, 1879–June 7, 1970) takes up these questions in an essay titled “What I Believe,” originally written just before the outbreak of WWII and later included in the out-of-print treasure Two Cheers for Democracy (public library) — his 1951 collection of essays based on and building upon his wartime anti-Nazi broadcasts.

A decade after D.H. Lawrence extolled the strength of sensitivity and a decade before James Baldwin observed in his timeless essay on the creative process that “society must accept some things as real; but [the creative person] must always know that visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen,” Forster writes:

The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power, and such people get more of a chance under a democracy than elsewhere. They found religions, great or small, or they produce literature and art, or they do disinterested scientific research (or they may be what is called “ordinary people,” who are creative in their private lives, bring up their children decently, for instance, or help their neighbors.) All these people need to express themselves; they cannot do so unless society allows them liberty to do so, and the society which allows them most liberty is a democracy.

But more than thriving in democracy, creative people — who are people of deep sensitivity to the world outside and the world within and the worlds others carry — make democracy thrive. Half a century before the word “empath” entered popular use, Forster upholds just that kind of person as the pillar of a harmonious society that serves and is served by the highest human potential of its citizens. In a passage of staggering pertinence to our own time, to this world once again teetering on the event horizon of totalitarianism in countless countries, he writes:

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too… I believe in aristocracy, though… Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke… Their temple… is the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.

With this type of person knocking about, and constantly crossing one’s path if one has eyes to see or hands to feel, the experiment of earthly life cannot be dismissed as a failure.

Because democracy starts “from the assumption that the individual is important, and that all types are needed to make a civilization,” the relationships between individuals — that living reliquary of the Heart’s affections — are the golden threads that give the whole tapestry its shape and vibrancy. (This is why, as Hannah Arendt so incisively observed, dictators prey on loneliness.) With so little left to believe in when the world falls apart, Forster argues that what we can still and always have faith in is one another. With an eye to our personal relationships as “something comparatively solid in a world full of violence and cruelty” despite how opaque we remain to ourselves and each other, he writes:

Psychology has split and shattered the idea of a ‘Person,’ and has shown that there is something incalculable in each of us, which may at any moment rise to the surface and destroy our normal balance. We don’t know what we are like. We can’t know what other people are like. How, then, can we put any trust in personal relationships, or cling to them in the gathering political storm? In theory we cannot. But in practice we can and do. Though A is not unchangeably A, or B unchangeably B, there can still be love and loyalty between the two.

Redoubling his insistence on the power of personal loyalties — which, in their contrast to political loyalties, embody Bertrand Russell’s poignant distinction between “love-knowledge” and “power-knowledge” — Forster adds:

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

A country — a civilization — is only possible if we don’t betray each other. In consonance with his visionary contemporary Donald Winnicott, who listed reliability among the key qualities of a healthy mind, Forster writes:

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down. They often do. The moral of which is that I must, myself, be as reliable as possible, and this I try to be. But reliability is not a matter of contract… It is a matter of the heart, which signs no documents. In other words, reliability is impossible unless there is natural warmth… One can, at all events, show one’s own little light here, one’s own poor little trembling flame, with the knowledge that it is not the only light that is shining in the darkness, and not the only one which the darkness does not comprehend.

Complement with Winnicott on the psychology of democracy and Jenn Shapland on the power of a thin skin, then consider the radical act of choosing to love anyway.