The School of Life's recreation of Plato's Symposium at the Latitude festival

I don’t wear a mauve toga very often. But it was my fashion item of choice at this year’s Latitude Festival, the annual extravaganza of music, theatre, comedy and literature held deep in the Suffolk countryside. On behalf of The School of Life, I hosted one of the more unusual events on the programme – a recreation of Plato’s Symposium, the first great conversation in the history of the art of living.

In the fourth century BC, Plato wrote a dialogue recording the conversation that was alleged to have taken place at a famous banquet attended by the philosopher Socrates and a smattering of ancient Greek playwrights, playboys and aristocrats. The subject of their discussion was nothing less than love, but it also strayed into ambition, truth, friendship and other potential ingredients of what the Greeks called ‘the good life’. There was plenty of booze to accompany the fine words – ‘symposium’ was their term for a drinking party – and Socrates managed to out-drink and out-talk the lot of them.

The forty honoured guests at our re-enactment of Plato’s Symposium were naturally greeted by slave attendants wearing white togas who, in typical ancient Greek style, helped them remove their shoes, anointed their hands with perfumed oils, and placed garlands of ivy on their heads. They were seated at long tables in a beautiful wood, surrounded by towering trees and enclosed by a forest of ferns, far away from the blaring speakers of the main festival arena. Ancient Greek flute music wafted around them.

My official title was ‘symposiarchos’, the King of the Feast, which gave me the right to determine the mixture of wine and water in the ‘krate’, the communal bowl. It also permitted me to impose forfeits on anybody who didn’t obey my instructions, although I refrained from inflicting the favourite penalty at ancient Greek banquets, which was to make the person strip naked and run around the other guests three times. Following ceremonial rules, everyone was asked to stand, sprinkle a libation of wine on the ground, and then chant a hymn to Dionysus, god of wine and fertility. And at that moment, the feasting began.

Chanting a hymn to Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine, at the Latitude Festival

As well as a feast of food, there was a feast of conversation. The guests were seated with strangers, and between them lay a conversational menu to simulate their discussions. There were quotes from the Symposium to chew over, like this comment from the playwright Aristophanes:

‘Each of us is a mere fragment of a man; we’ve been split in two, like filleted plaice. We’re all looking for our other halves.’

The guests were also offered other conversational questions that helped them delve into the dilemmas of the art of living, such as: Do you live more in the past or in the future? Has money expanded or diminished your sense of personal freedom? What do you think is the best approach to growing old?

What was the point of all this conversational adventuring? It was more than an excuse to wear a bunch of leaves in your hair and be served wine by slaves. Modern society is suffering from a plague of superficial talk. Not only do we trot out the same old clichéd questions – How was your weekend? What was the weather like? – but new technologies are failing the improve the quality of our conversations. How many of the 100 billion text messages sent last year involved profound discussions? And what about all those one-line emails?

We need to find ways of creating conversations that allow us to take off our masks and talk openly about the issues that really matter in life. We also need to break out of the straitjacket of our own worldviews, and enter the minds of people who have different backgrounds, experiences and beliefs than our own. It is time we all learned from the ancient Greeks, and made the conversational symposium a part of everyday life.

Yes, I really did wear a mauve toga in my role as symposiarchos, King of the Feast

Sir Richard Francis Burton, who travelled to Mecca in 1853 disguised as a Muslim pilgrim

Who was the greatest traveller of the Victorian era? Amongst the usual top contenders you will find the name of Sir Richard Francis Burton. Best known for translating The Thousand and One Nights from Arabic and for visiting Mecca in 1853 disguised as a Muslim pilgrim, Burton wandered for years throughout the Middle East, Far East and Africa. He had an extraordinary talent for languages – he could speak twenty-nine of them – and was a master of assimilating himself into local cultures. Just after his death in 1890 he was described as ‘a Mohammedan among Mohammedans, a Mormon among Mormons, a Sufi among the Shazlis, and a Catholic among the Catholics.’

But for all Burton’s camel rides through the desert and exposure to different customs, he never shook off the racial prejudices of an upper-class Victorian gentleman. In an account of a trip to West Africa, he writes of the ‘pollution’ of Medeiran blood by ‘extensive miscegenation with the negro’. When he needs people to carry his luggage into the jungle, he buys himself some slaves without a second thought. Burton’s experiential adventuring failed to turn him into an empathist.

That is the problem with travel. There is no guarantee that it will result in an outrospective awakening in which you come to see the world through the eyes of others. Too often we venture abroad, guide books in hand, without learning much about the lives of the locals, who we stare at from the outside as if they were exotic animals behind a glass pane. This is precisely what occurs in the case of ‘poverty tourism’ today, where you might visit Soweto or Rio looking briefly at the slums from the comfort of an air-conditioned jeep.

My vote for the top Victorian traveller would not go to Richard Burton. Instead I would award it to Mary Kingsley, niece of the writer Charles Kingsley. Born in London in 1862, Kingsley received no formal education, yet by raiding her father’s library managed to teach herself chemistry, mechanics and ethnography. She also immersed herself in the memoirs of explorers, and in 1893, filled with enthusiasm for foreign travel, embarked on her first trip to West Africa.

She was a rare woman in a man’s world, travelling alone most of the time, climbing the mountain peak of Great Cameroon and canoeing down the rapids of the Ogowé River. She is remembered by ichthyologists for discovering three species of small fish, which are duly named after her, and for being one of the most intrepid early female explorers, happy to stare a leopard in the eye. ‘Being human, she must have been afraid of something,’ Rudyard Kipling wrote of her, ‘but one never found out what it was’. What made her truly remarkable, however, was her attitude to the so-called ‘African races’.

Mary Kingsley, of whom Rudyard Kipling wrote, ‘Being human, she must have been afraid of something, but one never found out what it was’.

A notorious letter Kingsley wrote to the Spectator newspaper in 1895 began with the accepted Victorian belief that ‘the African races are inferior to the English, French, German, and Latin races’. But following this admission, she broke the taboos of her age by arguing that the natives were far from being immoral savages. ‘I have lived among and attempted to understand the Africans,’ she pointed out, and in mental and moral affairs ‘he has both a sense of justice and honour’, while ‘in rhetoric he excels, and for good temper and patience compares favourably with any set of human beings’. Africans are no more cruel than any other race, and although their funeral rites might appear strange, they are little different from those of the ancient Greeks. Unlike Burton, Kingsley was ahead of her time in realising there was no such thing as the ‘negro’, noting that ‘there is as much difference in the manners of life between say, an Ingalwa and a Bubi of Fernando Po, as there is between a Londoner and a Laplander’. While the gentlemen readers of the Spectator considered her views a shameless defence of barbarians and cannibals, she caused further uproar by comparing Africans favourably to Protestant missionaries, suggesting that the natives’ good qualities ‘are very easily eliminated by a course of Christian teaching’.

The example of Mary Kingsley suggests we should rethink the meaning of being an explorer. The greatest explorers have not been those who pushed back the geographic frontiers, but rather those who have travelled beyond the frontiers of their own prejudices and assumptions – whether those are based on race, class, gender, religion or some other category. A successful expedition is one which challenges and alters our worldview, liberating us from the narrowness of deeply ingrained beliefs that we have often unconsciously inherited from culture, education and family. Mary Kingsley’s experiences of travel did just this, exploding the racial prejudices about Africans that were the stuff of the Victorian drawing room.

Thomas Cook, a lay Baptist preacher who was the founder of package holidays in the nineteenth century, wrote that the ultimate purpose of travel was ‘to dispel the mists of fable and clear the mind of prejudice taught from babyhood, and facilitate perfectness of seeing eye to eye.’ Mary Kingsley succeeded in this endeavour. Richard Burton did not.

You can read Mary Kingsley’s letter to the Spectator here. Her views on race are discussed in Sven Lindqvist’s The Skull Measurer’s Mistake, a great book of mini biographies of  historical figures who spoke out against racism.

Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, whose birthday is on February 5, would be a star player in the Aquarius zodiac team.

As football fever envelops the planet, with all eyes turned towards South Africa, I want you to imagine a different World Cup. Each country sends their national team as usual, but then all the players are pooled together and divided into teams based on their astrological star sign. So Virgos play Leos, and Aquarians are pitted against Aries, with each team having players from a mix of countries. Who would win overall? Perhaps the power of Taurus, the bull, would be no match for the sharp sting of Scorpio. We might imagine other World Cups, where teams are based on shoe size – the clodhopping size elevens against the nimble-toed eights – or maybe the favourite colour of each player.

If this sounds ridiculous, it is no more absurd than dividing teams on the basis of something as arbitrary as the nationality of the players. This strange practice involves determining team members by where they happen to have been born on a particular land mass, which citizenship document they have managed to get hold of, and where the national frontier is at the time of play.

We should remember that nation-states are historical inventions, mainly emerging since the eighteenth century. Only one hundred and fifty years ago, there was no such thing as Germany or Italy; these states were an agglomeration of principalities. Up until World War One, Europe was dominated by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose frontiers enclosed Slovenia and Slovakia, both of which countries are now playing in South Africa. Serbia would not be battling for supremacy in Group D if had not been for the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The artificiality goes further, in the sense that every country has relied on a barrage of invented traditions and other propaganda devices to generate its national identity. The Scots – who failed to qualify for South Africa – take pride in their apparently ancient Highland dress, but according to the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, the wearing of ‘traditional’ kilts and tartans was an invention of the mid-eighteenth century, partly as a protest against the Union with England. The English are so proud of their red-on-white St George’s Cross, which I see fluttering out of windows and tied to car aerials in the town where I live. But few people realise that St George himself was born in Palestine in the third century, and that the flag was already in use in the fifth century by the Georgian King Vakhtang Gorgasali. Children in the United States have national pride injected into them in school every morning when they swear allegiance to the country’s flag. No community is more deeply imagined than the nation-state.

None of this would really matter if nations were innocent actors on the world stage, but we know that this is not the case. There have been no major wars between armies representing different signs of the zodiac. When it comes to warfare in the past century, nationalism reigns as the supreme culprit. From the two world wars to the conflicts in Yugoslavia and the ethnic violence that flared up this week in Kyrgyzstan, nationalism has been one of the most destructive forces in modern human affairs.

How does this all relate to football? In some ways football tournaments like the World Cup – and sport more generally – can encourage a healthy form of nationalism that forges unity in countries with significant social divides. Brazil may be plagued by horrendous wealth inequality and racism, but its disparate citizens rally together to support their national team. South Africa itself found that holding the Rugby World Cup in 1995 helped create a unified national consciousness and heal the wounds of apartheid, generating empathy between black and white.

But football also plays a role of legitimising and exacerbating divisions between nations. This is not simply visible in the extreme form of hooliganism, but in the more everyday way that people generally support their national team, rather than those of rival nations. Football, like national flags, is part of the ideology that generates the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, which ultimately cause so much violent conflict and human suffering. As the sociologist Richard Sennett has written, ‘we’ is a dangerous pronoun, since it necessarily involves the ideas both of inclusion and exclusion. Shouting for your own team also means not shouting for the opposition.

I can appreciate that football is much more about skill and beauty than about creating dangerous forms of nationalism (in fact, the beauty of sport is a central theme in my book The First Beautiful Game). Football also has the capacity to replace violence with a more gentle ‘war by other means’ – kicking a ball around on some grass. But nationalism has a history of being a dark force, and we should make our best efforts to erode its power and presence. So if you are about to watch your national team play in South Africa, at least consider giving your support to the opposition. In the end, however, we would be much better off with a World Cup that was based on star signs rather than nation-states.

Rifkin highlights the mysterious entities known as ‘mirror neurons’, which were first discovered in macaque monkeys by Italian researchers in the early 1990s. These are neurons that fire up both when we experience something (such as pain) and also when we see somebody else going through the same experience. People with lots of mirror cells tend to be more empathic, especially in terms of sharing emotions. According to Giacomo Rizzolatti, one of the researchers, ‘mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation’. Rifkin’s conclusion is that, ‘we are soft-wired not for aggression, violence, self-interest and utilitarianism’ but rather ‘for sociability, attachment, affection and companionship’. In other words, we are Homo Empathicus.

The RSA have created a superb animated version of Rifkin’s talk, which begins with his summary of the mirror neuron research, complete with drawings of monkeys. You can watch it here:

What Rifkin doesn’t mention is some of the other research which muddies the picture about the empathic brain. For instance, neuroscientists at the University of Washington have identified core brain areas that seem to be responsible for perspective-taking empathy, which has been shown to stimulate activity in areas known as the posterior cingulate/precuneus and the right temporo-parietal junction. In practice this means, for example, that one part of the brain is active when we think about getting one of our fingers pinched in a door, but different parts of the brain – the empathic spots – are switched on when we think about the same thing happening to another person. This all sounds rather different from mirror neurons.

Other research is based on cases of brain injury. In his book, Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology, Paul Broks describes a  man whose left frontal lobe was damaged in a motorway accident and suffered from a complete loss of his ability to empathise. Following the crash he would regularly say to his wife, in a matter-of-fact way, ‘I don’t love you any more, do I, love?’

Neither of these instances of neurological research into empathy necessarily contradicts the mirror neuron story. But I simply wish to urge caution about how confident we should be with our conclusions. MRI scanners and other new technologies have shown us that empathy is happening in our brains in complex ways. Yet at this stage we have little idea about how it all really functions and links to everyday behaviour. We are like the early astronomers who were able to see new stars with their powerful telescopes, but understood little about what they were made of, or how and why they moved.

Despite all the scientific research, we are still waiting to make the real breakthroughs, such as how to restore empathy when it is lost or how to enhance it.  I, for one, am not yet ready to volunteer to have a brain operation that will transform me into an empathic superhero.

Paul Tibbets, the man who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

Earlier this week I went to an entertaining talk by the writer Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink and other bestsellers. Midway through he made a throwaway comment about the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945. ‘Imagine how it felt to be the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima – how do we feel about that kind of moral responsibility?’ The implication of this rhetorical question was that the pilot must have been desperately wrestling with the ethical consequences and dilemmas of releasing the world’s first atomic weapon on the unsuspecting city.

Malcolm Gladwell is mistaken. In actual fact, the US Air Force pilot, Paul Tibbets, experienced no profound moral quandaries about his actions, either before or after dropping the bomb that killed an estimated 140,000 people. In a revealing interview with the oral historian Studs Terkel in 2002, when aged 87, Tibbets described exactly what happened on the historic mission in the Enola Gay.

It was absolutely perfect. After we got the airplanes in formation I crawled into the tunnel and went back to tell the men, I said, “You know what we’re doing today?” They said, “Well, yeah, we’re going on a bombing mission.” I said, “Yeah, we’re going on a bombing mission, but it’s a little bit special.” My tailgunner, Bob Caron, was pretty alert. He said, “Colonel, we wouldn’t be playing with atoms today, would we?” I said, “Bob, you’ve got it just exactly right.” So I went back up in the front end and I told the navigator, bombardier, flight engineer, in turn. I said, “OK, this is an atom bomb we’re dropping.” They listened intently but I didn’t see any change in their faces or anything else. Those guys were no idiots. We’d been fiddling round with the most peculiar-shaped things we’d ever seen.

So we’re coming down. We get to that point where I say “one second” and by the time I’d got that second out of my mouth the airplane had lurched, because 10,000lbs had come out of the front. I’m in this turn now, tight as I can get it, that helps me hold my altitude and helps me hold my airspeed and everything else all the way round. When I level out, the nose is a little bit high and as I look up there the whole sky is lit up in the prettiest blues and pinks I’ve ever seen in my life. It was just great.

Tibbets tells the tale as if it were an exciting action movie. The tension builds, everyone’s on alert, the timing is crucial – and the execution is perfect. A job well done. Terkel gave his interviewee the opportunity to explore the ethics of his actions, but received little response:

Studs Terkel: Do you ever have any second thoughts about the bomb?
Paul Tibbets: Second thoughts? No. Studs, look. Number one, I got into the air corps to defend the United States to the best of my ability. That’s what I believe in and that’s what I work for.

Ultimately Tibbets justified his action with the age-old reason that he was just following orders: ‘I did what I was told’.

Terkel then asked him about his thoughts on the September 11 bombings, and how the US should respond to the threat of terrorism. His emphatic reply displayed the simplistic topography of his moral beliefs:

Paul Tibbets: We’ve got to get into a position where we can kill the bastards. None of this business of taking them to court, the hell with that. I wouldn’t waste five seconds on them…
Studs Terkel: One last thing, when you hear people say, “Let’s nuke ‘em,” “Let’s nuke these people,” what do you think?
Paul Tibbets: Oh, I wouldn’t hesitate if I had the choice. I’d wipe ‘em out. You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn’t kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: “You’ve killed so many civilians.” That’s their tough luck for being there.

It is certainly worth reading the whole interview, which first appeared in The Guardian. I think the most remarkable aspect is that Tibbets seemed to display no empathy for the victims of the Hiroshima bombing. Flying up high in the sky, he never came into contact with the people he killed, or with the survivors. He never saw the burned skin, the charred bodies, the faces of the children wandering alone looking for their parents. His distance from the victims was essential to his empathetic denial.

I wonder if Tibbets, who died in 2007, ever allowed himself to see some of the rare original film footage taken immediately after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including shots inside emergency hospitals where people were being treated for the effects of the radiation. It is so harrowing and horrifying that the US government denied its existence for two decades, and only publicly released it in the late 1960s. In 1970 Erik Barnouw produced a 16-minute film using the footage called Hiroshima Nagasaki August, 1945. You can watch it here (in two parts). I warn you that you will not like what you see, that you may have to turn away from the reality of what human beings can do to one another. I have never seen anything so disturbing.

Jamaican immigrants to Britain in 1948 arriving off the ship Empire Windrush, which carried the first large group of West Indian immigrants following World War Two.

The upcoming British general election on May 6 raises the possibility for a new dawn in empathy-based politics. Or not. My review of the election manifestos of the major parties – Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green – reveals that the word ‘empathy’ is not mentioned a single time in any of them (out of a total 356 pages of text). This is rather different from the last US presidential election, when Barack Obama mentioned ‘empathy’ in almost every speech he made.

Of course, you can’t judge politicians or parties on the basis of how often they use a particular word. So let’s turn to a concrete policy area and see what the parties have to say. The one I’m choosing is immigration. This is because it is a litmus test of an empathetic approach to politics. National borders are dangerous because they frequently act as the boundaries of our moral universes; it is easy to care more about our fellow citizens than about people who live in far away places of which we know little (which is why we sometimes drop bombs on them or let them starve to death). But empathy is not a matter of what passport you hold; it must extend beyond borders to all human beings. A compassionate immigration policy demonstrates empathetic values in political practice.

Unsurprisingly, the two major parties reproduce the clichéd and scare-mongering image of immigrants stealing local jobs, bleeding the welfare system dry and causing crime. The Labour party doesn’t start well by combining ‘Crime and Immigration’ together in a single section in their manifesto. They then say they will adopt a new points-based system to control the menace of ‘rising immigration’. The Conservatives take a similar line, stating ‘immigration is too high and needs to be reduced’, and that ‘we do not need to attract people to do jobs that could be carried out by British citizens’.

Both the Liberal Democrats and Greens have a more empathetic position. They say they will end the detention of children in immigration detention centres, and will offer an amnesty for immigrants who have been living illegally in Britain for several years with a clean record, with the prospect of gaining the legal right of citizenship. The Greens also note that 5 million British people live abroad, so it would be hypocritical to make the country a complete fortress.

Nick Griffin, leader of the neo-fascist British National Party: 'I want to help stop the immigration which is destroying this and every other white nation in the world'.

The neo-fascist British National Party has the most extreme policy position, calling for ‘a halt to the immigration invasion’. Immigrants, they believe, ‘totally swamp the existing people…destroying their communities.’ This is consistent their wider stance on international development issues: ‘Let them sort it out for themselves, it’s got nothing to do with us’. The BNP claim that the major reason people support them is due to their vociferous opposition to immigration. But a recent report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), Exploring the Roots of BNP Support,  shows this to be a falsehood:

‘The British National Party (BNP) frequently suggests that it attracts support because it is the only party to take into account communities’ ‘real’ experiences of immigration. IPPR has explored whether or not this is the case by looking at the roots of BNP support across 149 local authorities. We conducted regression-based analysis to see whether or not high levels of immigration do raise communities’ support for the BNP, or if other variables – such as political disengagement – are important.

Our findings suggest that areas that have higher levels of recent immigration than others are not more likely to vote for the BNP. In fact, the more immigration an area has experienced, the lower its support for the far right. It seems that direct contact with migrants dissuades people from supporting the BNP. For example, of the 10 local authorities in which the BNP gained most support in the 2009 European elections, nine had lower than average immigration.’

This tells us something important about empathy. The report suggests, in effect, that having ‘direct contact’ with immigrants makes us more empathetic towards them. This contact might come through talking to them at the local shops, discovering that your six-year-old’s best friend is an asylum seeker, or simply seeing new immigrants trying to get on with their lives just as you are doing. The broad political implication may be that banging the anti-immigration drum is not as much of a vote winner as the political parties think.

Even an empathetic immigration policy is not, however, enough for any party to win my vote. Empathetic politics requires a radical decentralisation of power to close the gap between governors and governed, creating a level of citizen participation in decision-making that no mainstream party is ready to contemplate.

For some of my more general thinking on what is wrong with modern democracy, see my essay Mortgaged Democracy, originally published in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Democratic Thought.

Roman Krznaric: You’ve written a whole book about hedgehogs, and were described in a recent review as having an ‘endearingly batty’ obsession with them. Why do you personally care about these creatures so much?

Hugh Warwick: I started studying the ecology of hedgehogs nearly 25 years ago. To begin with I was just fascinated by how little we knew about this charismatic animal. But the more time I spent with hedgehogs, the more I came to realise that they have a wonderful quality. They endear themselves to people, they are attractive, quirky and eccentric. But my epiphany came on a night out with Nigel – when I ended up nose-to-nose with this hedgehog I was radio-tracking. As he looked up at me and our eyes met I became aware that there is no other wild creature we can do this with. I had a glimpse of his essential wildness, while at the same time he was obviously looking at me. He went back to eating, I was left feeling slightly altered. So at the heart of the whimsically titled book I have written (A Prickly Affair: The Charm of the Hedgehog) is something a little deeper about our connection with the natural world.

RK: There is a lot of debate in empathy circles about whether it is possible for human beings to empathise with animals. The suggestion is that we are so different from bats, dolphins, elephants and most other animals that we are incapable of understanding their feelings and thoughts, and stepping empathetically into their skins. Their experiences are, ultimately, alien to us. As someone who has become intimate with hedgehogs and spoken to hedgehog aficionados worldwide, do you think it is possible for us to empathise with animals in general, and hedgehogs in particular? Can we really step into their spiny skins?

HW: I completely agree that it is impossible to know exactly what it feels like to be a hedgehog, we do not have the vocabulary. But that does not prevent a degree of empathy – and what I ask people to do is to change their perspective. Literally. Get down at hedgehog level, get nose-to-nose with a hedgehog and then look at their world from this position. This will give you an insight into the complications we have thrown in the path of hedgehogs.

But on the whole, and despite the contradiction with my night out with Nigel, I am not that keen on the idea of empathising with a hedgehog – but with hedgehogs. I believe there is a risk of getting mired in sentimentality if you focus your attentions on an individual. But there is freedom to be had when allowing this to spread to the species as a whole – and then on to the ecosystem that supports it. The individual hedgehog is a gatekeeper of a deeper love of the natural world. The risk I believe is in getting stuck in the gate. Don’t stop, keep moving.

Hugh Warwick goes nose-to-nose with a hedgehog

RK: You refer to the evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson’s idea of biophilia, which he describes as ‘the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms’. It has always struck me that empathy and biophilia are very closely related. What do you think?

HW: I am not sure whether we are empathising with nature – it would be as if we were empathising with the air we breath and the water we drink. It is more than empathy – it is a deeply seated physical need. There is plenty of evidence that shows we humans suffer when removed from contact with nature.

But certainly the idea is closely related – and I use our empathetic relationship with the hedgehog as a way of altering our perspective on the world around.

As an aside, I wanted to call my book The Hedgehog’s Dilemma (it has that title in the US). It refers to the Schopenhauer idea – two hedgehogs / people want to be close to each other, but if they get too close, they get hurt, yet if they are too far apart, they become bereft. And I believe we have that relationship with the planet – we cannot all go and do a Thoreau and live in the woods, we would destroy it. But if we are totally removed from it, we get sick.

RK: Even if we are able to empathise with hedgehogs and other animals, does it really matter? How can it help us nurture our bonds with the natural world, especially in a way that inspires us to take action to preserve it?

After what I have just said this seems a little prosaic. By sharing a hedgehog’s perspective we can see what problems it faces. Whether it is the cars on the roads that not only threaten extinction, but also fragment the environment, preventing movement – to the litter that collars and kills hedgehogs to the gardens given over to car-ports, decking and patios and the borders cleaned of life with agro-toxins – we get to see those anthropogenic threats all the more clearly.

But for me the most important thing is the contact of the eyes – looking at a hedgehog looking at me – eyes meeting and there being this almost intangible spark of wildness. We cannot get that connection with wildness easily. Maybe hiking up a mountain or along a forest trail, there may be that sense of wildness. But here, in my own back garden, I have a doorway into the wild, one that many people can share without corrupting what we so need to survive. Which is a long way round of saying, gaze at a hedgehog and let yourself fall in love with nature. Once you have fallen in love you are all the more likely to change yourself to enable the relationship to continue. So, go love a hedgehog and help save the world. Or as I put it in the book – ‘Save the hedgehog, Save the world’ (thanks to Heroes for that one).

Get yourself a copy of A Prickly Affair from Amazon or your local independent bookseller. And if you want to find our more about Hugh’s hedgehoggy ideas, visit his great blog or website.

Like all ranking charts, the choices are bound to be controversial. But I can assure you that a very careful formula has been used to make the selection. To find themselves on this exclusive list, a person has to display a unique combination of traits: they must have a highly developed capacity to step into the shoes of other people; their empathising must have had a major social impact; it should have required acts of personal courage; and finally, it must provide inspiration for others.

So, let’s meet our empathetic wunderkids, in reverse order:

#5. Hilary Swank

Hilary Swank playing Brandon Teena in the 1999 film Boys Don't Cry.

Coming in at number five is Hollywood actress Hilary Swank. She gains her coveted place for her Oscar-winning role in the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry, which is based on the real-life story of Brandon Teena, a transgendered man who was raped and murdered by his male friends after they found out that he had female genitalia. In preparing for the part, Swank cut off her hair, dressed up in her husband’s clothes, put on a cowboy hat, and ventured out onto the streets of New York for a month to see if she could pass for a young man, just as Brandon Teena had done. Describing her adventure, she said, ‘I got to see what it’s like for a transgender person, or a person with a sexual identity crisis, or a lesbian or a gay person, and the daily harassment you can get…it’s a scary place to be, to feel not understood’. Swank’s brilliant portrayal of Brandon Teena helped raise the political profile of the struggles faced by transgendered people, and also inspired her to become a campaigner on gay, lesbian and transgender issues, and a spokesperson for the Harvey Milk School in New York.

Find out more: Watch the film Boys Don’t Cry and visit the website of the Harvey Milk School.

#4. George Orwell

George Orwell in 1946, pushing his adopted son Richard through the streets of Islington, North London.

How could you have an Empathy Top Five without putting George Orwell on the list? He earned his empathy spurs in the 1920s while working as a colonial police officer in Burma. Orwell was disgusted at the brutality of colonialism which he witnessed first-hand, and vowed on his return to Britain to step into the shoes of everyday working people and discover what their lives were really like. ‘I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over other man’, he said. ‘I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants.’ That’s when he decided to dress up as a tramp and live amongst beggars and vagabonds on the streets of East London, a time of his life described in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). With this book, together with his political reportage, Orwell shone the spotlight on neglected and marginalised communities in British society like almost no other writer in the twentieth century.

Find out more: Read Down and Out in Paris and London, and Orwell’s short essay ‘Down the Mine’.

#3. Harriet Beecher Stowe

Charley, killed by cholera in 1849.

The American novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe may be history’s most forgotten empathist. The great issue of her age was slavery, and the brutal treatment of slaves on the cotton plantations in the south of the United States. In 1852 she published her story Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was effectively a political tract against slavery. It was a publishing sensation, selling four million copies within a decade. The book helped transform the worldview of a whole generation, showing them the horrors of slavery up close, and thereby encouraging the rebellion against slavery and its proponents that eventually played itself out in the American Civil War. Beecher Stowe was inspired to write the book following the tragic death of her eighteen-month-old son Charley in the Cincinnati cholera epidemic of 1849. This event ripped her open into empathy for black women whose children were being sold into slavery: ‘It was at his bed, and at his grave, that I learnt what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.’

Find out more: Read the fascinating biography Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life by Joan Hedrick.

#2. Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi taking a rest from spinning cloth in 1946. He is one of the few political figures in history able to make his own underwear.

I realise this may create gasps of incredulity, but the great master of empathy Mahatma Gandhi only comes in at second place. After his return to India from South Africa in 1915, Gandhi decided that if he was going to campaign for Indian independence from British rule, he would need to experience what life was really like for the poorest people in the country. So he threw away his fancy barrister’s suit and collar, wrapped himself in a dhoti or loincloth, and established the Sabamarti Ashram, where he lived from 1917 to 1930. Ashram life was about stepping into the shoes of peasant farmers. He and his followers grew their own food, spun their own cloth, and cleaned out the latrines – a job usually relegated to the Untouchable (Dalit) caste. Gandhi’s deep empathetic instinct also took him across religious boundaries. He was appalled by the violence between Hindus and Muslims, and fervently opposed the creation of a separate Muslim state. A devout Hindu himself, he once declared to a group of Hindu nationalists: ‘I am a Muslim! And a Hindu, and a Christian and a Jew – and so are all of you.’ These words, which still resonate today, rank amongst the greatest empathetic statements of all time.

Find out more: There’s no better starting place than Richard Attenborough’s epic film Gandhi. Also try Gandhi’s An Autobiography – or The Story of My Experiments with Truth.

#1. Claiborne Paul Ellis

C.P. Ellis, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, with his friend Ann Atwater.

Top of our empathy poll is…C.P. Ellis. ‘Who?’, you are bound to ask. C.P. Ellis was born into a poor white family in Durham, North Carolina, in 1927. Finding it hard to make ends meet working in a garage and believing blacks were the cause of all his troubles, he followed his father’s footsteps and joined the Ku Klux Klan, eventually rising to the top position of Exalted Cyclops of the Durham chapter of the KKK. The turning point in his life came in 1971, when he was invited to a ten-day community meeting to help solve racial tensions in schools. C.P.Ellis was chosen to head the race committee jointly with a local black activist who he hated, named Ann Atwater. But working with her completely exploded his prejudices about African Americans. He saw that she shared the same problems of poverty as his own and that their real enemies were white businessmen and politicians who kept their wages low and pitted poor blacks and whites against one another. ‘I was beginning to look at a black person, shake hands with him, and see him as a human being,’ he recalled of his experience on the committee. ‘Somethin’ was happening to me. It was almost like bein’ born again.’ On the final night of the community meeting, he stood at the microphone in front of a thousand people and tore up his Klan membership card. C.P. Ellis later became a famed civil rights campaigner and labour organiser for a union whose membership was seventy per cent black. He and Ann remained friends for the rest of their lives.

Find out more: Read the moving interview with C.P. Ellis by the oral historian Studs Terkel in his book, American Dreams: Lost and Found. You can also find an extract here.

I imagine you have your own empathetic heroines and heroes, so I invite you to leave a comment revealing to the world your personal choices of people who deserve a place in the Empathy Hall of Fame.

You might think it near impossible to imagine the reality of his experience, to make an empathetic leap into his mind’s eye. Yet Bauby – who died two years after his stroke aged forty-five – conveys his frustrations and despair, as well as his limited pleasures and dreams, with a succinct simplicity and acuteness. He describes the agony of living inside ‘something like a giant invisible diving-bell’ that holds his whole body prisoner, while also relating small moments of irritation, like when a hospital attendant unthinkingly turns off the television when he is halfway through watching a football match with his single good eye. His only real relief is through his imagination, when his mind ‘takes flight like a butterfly’. This is his sole freedom: ‘You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face.’

In 2007 Julian Schnabel turned Bauby’s book into a film, also called The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly. Its opening sequence is a masterpiece of empathetic cinematography. We are inside Bauby’s head, looking through his left eye as he wakes up in the hospital for the first time after his stroke. His vision is distorted and fragmented. He is surrounded by doctors asking him questions, but he is unable to reply. Yet we hear all Bauby’s confused thoughts through his inner voice as he confronts his utterly changed world.

You can watch the first ten minutes here:

One reason both the book and film are so compelling is that Bauby helps us recognise the abundance most of us have in our lives. In one imaginative journey he savours his favourite foods, like a plate of sausages and a soft-boiled egg. But fed by a tube, he can no longer partake in such basic culinary pleasures. He describes the joy of a visit from his ten-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter on Father’s Day. Yet it is filled with tragedy: he cannot bear the thought of being unable to touch his children, and he breaks down with grief as they play hangman on the beach. Bauby never, however, asks us to feel sorry for him. He remains a whole person, full of emotional complexity, ambition, desire and dignity despite his physical incapacities. This is what allows his story to be so life-affirming.

The force of the book also lies in what it reveals about Bauby’s character. Reading the publicity quotes, you would think he was a gentle and humane person. One critic describes the author’s ‘gallantry’, and another sees the book as ‘an almost inconceivable act of generosity’. Yet my impression is that, before his stroke, Bauby was not a particularly pleasant individual to be around. I don’t think I would have liked him. He comes across as self-centred and vain. He was a playboy who appeared to have little time for his kids. He was so driven by his career ambitions and desire to live the high-life that he allowed his relationships – especially his marriage – to fall apart.

Despite these traits, I still found myself empathising with him – both in the sense of looking through his eyes and feeling the emotional bond of caring for his welfare. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly shows that it is possible to empathise with people whose lives are not only very different from your own, but whose core values and beliefs you do not share.