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.

Expanding your empathy might offer just what you are looking for. Empathising is an avant-garde form of travel in which you step into the shoes of another person and see the world from their perspective.  It is the ultimate adventure holiday – far more challenging than a bungee jump off Victoria Falls or trekking solo across the Gobi desert.

Here are my five top tips for transforming yourself into an empathetic adventurer over the coming months.

1.CULTIVATE CURIOSITY ABOUT STRANGERS

Curiosity in action on the streets of London.

One of the best ways to develop your capacity to look through the eyes of others and escape the confines of your own worldview, is to have regular conversations with strangers, especially those outside your usual social circle. This doesn’t mean a brief chat about the weather. Rather, it involves a mutual exchange of thoughts on your most important beliefs and experiences, and – crucially – an attempt to understand the world inside the head of the other person. We are confronted by strangers every day – the heavily tattooed guy who delivers your post, the dignified elderly woman across the road who always wears a red beret, the new Thai employee who eats his lunch alone in the office canteen, the woman who sits in the underpass all day preening her dog. Set yourself the challenge of having a conversation with a stranger once a week. All it requires is courage.

2.LEARN FROM YOUR EXPERIENCES

Some bosses are not known for their empathetic sensitivity.

Ask yourself this question: When has somebody failed to empathise with me, and what difference has it made? Expanding your empathetic imagination requires recognising the impact that empathy – or its absence – has had on your own life. Perhaps you have a nasty boss who has criticised you for missing a deadline without considering that you are using every spare moment to care for your mother who has Alzheimer’s. Or maybe your partner enjoys spending each Sunday playing five-a-side football with friends, but just can’t see that it burdens you with yet another day of doing the childcare, just when you really need a break. Such experiences – when another person fails to take into account our feelings, beliefs, or daily realities – can upset us, make us angry and diminish our self-worth. Unless you happen to be a rare empathetic saint, you can also ask yourself a second question: When have I failed to empathise with other people, and why? And then a third: When have others empathised with me, and why did it matter? Exploring this triumvirate of questions is sure to help sensitise your empathetic soul.

3.TACKLE YOUR FAMILY EMPATHY DEFICIT

Take the initiative and call your sister.

The film The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy features an ingenious device called the Point-of-View Gun. When it is fired at someone, it causes them to see things from the perspective of the person who pulled the trigger. This singular weapon was designed at the request of the Intergalactic Consortium of Angry Housewives, who were tired of ending every discussion with their husbands with the statement, ‘You just don’t get it, do you!’ There is probably somebody in your family at whom you would dearly love to fire the Point-of-View Gun. But there is equally likely to be someone who would wish to fire it at you. The task before you is to identify a family member you have failed to empathise with and make an effort to do something about it. Give them a phone call or take them out for a meal and do your best to listen and understand where they are coming from. Try to get inside their skin, just like an actor attempts to inhabit their character, and grasp all the nuances of their thoughts and emotions. You might find that your irritating sister or heartless uncle do not deserve the harsh judgement you usually reserve for them.

4.TAKE AN IMAGINATIVE JOURNEY

What is Helen Keller thinking?

There is nothing wrong with a little armchair empathy – sitting down with a good book and letting it take you into the mental landscape and experiences of someone whose life is utterly different from your own. This is ideally done through first-person narratives, where you can hear the voice of the author or main character and let it become one with your own. These are five of my favourite empathy books, which will take you on unusual journeys into other minds:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby (1997): enter the world of a man who is completely paralysed and can only communicate by blinking his left eye.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (1933): find out how to become a tramp and what you can learn as a kitchen assistant in a fancy hotel.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (1970): a history of the American West as told from the perspective of Native Americans such as Sitting Bull and Geronimo.

May the Lord and His Mercy Be Kind to Belfast by Tony Parker (1993): interviews with ordinary and extraordinary people about the conflict in Northern Ireland, from bus-drivers to terrorists.

The Story of My Life by Helen Keller (1903): autobiography of the deaf-blind writer who reveals the beauties of the world by expanding our appreciation of the senses.

5.CHALLENGE YOUR PREJUDICES

Walk a mile in another man’s moccasins before you criticise him.

We all have prejudices or make false assumptions about others. These are frequently based on the collective labels we apply to people – like ‘single mothers’ or ‘Muslim extremists’ – without delving into their individuality and uniqueness. One of the most rewarding ways to expand your empathy is to gain direct experience of their lives, putting into practice the Native American proverb, ‘Walk a mile in another man’s moccasins before you criticise him’. How can we do this? It requires pinpointing the individual or social group who is the target of your strongest prejudices, and then inventing a way of stepping into their moccasins. So if you disdain people who live off the welfare state, spend a week trying to survive on Job Seeker’s Allowance, which currently stands at £64.30. If you detest wealthy bankers, see if you can shadow one of them at work for a day. If you are fervently religious, you might treat yourself to attending the services of religions different from your own. You get the picture. This experiential empathising is likely to be etched on your skin and memory forever.

These five ideas should provide a stimulating itinerary for your New Year’s Explorations. They may lead you to start new friendships, shift your values, rethink your ambitions and perhaps expand your moral universe. But there’s no need to let your travels stop there. Next time you are wondering where to go on holiday you might decide against a vacation in the sun and instead take the option of an escape into empathy.

The individuals behind the climate change headlines. Flooding in India, 2009.

We should view the problem of tackling climate change not as an environmental issue, or one concerning technology or social justice or markets, but primarily as a problem of empathy. We must learn to see the individuals behind the newspaper headlines about global warming, and imagine ourselves into the uniqueness of their lives, developing an empathetic understanding of their most important experiences, beliefs, fears and hopes. Sound far-fetched, wishy-washy or a little too sandals-and-carrot-juice for your liking? Let me explain myself.

The big question facing us is this: how can we close the gap between knowledge and action on climate change? Millions of people in rich countries know about the damaging effects of climate change and their own greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, yet relatively few are willing to make substantive changes to how they live. They might change a few light bulbs but they do not cut back on flying abroad for their holidays nor do they want to pay higher taxes to confront global warming. So far economic, moral or other arguments have not been enough to spur sufficient action. Could empathy help?

The difficulty is that individuals, governments and companies are currently displaying an extraordinary lack of empathy on the issue of climate change, in two different ways. First, we are ignoring the plight of those whose livelihoods are being destroyed today by the consequences of our high emission levels, particularly distant strangers in developing countries who are affected by floods, droughts and other extreme weather events, such as flood refugees in the Indian state of Orissa. How many of us have made an effort to put ourselves in the shoes of Annapurna Beheri, a woman from Orissa whose home and family shop selling biscuits and tobacco were washed away in 2007, and to imagine how her life has been affected by the realities of climate change? So, there is an absence of empathy across space.

Second, we are failing to take the perspective of future generations who will have to live with the detrimental effects of our continuing addiction to lifestyles that result in emissions beyond sustainable levels. Thus there is a lack of empathy through time. We would hardly treat our own family members with such callous disregard and continue acting in ways that we knew were harming them.

Generating empathy both across space and through time is one of the most powerful ways we have of closing the gap between knowledge and action, and for tackling the climate crisis. The problem is that, until now, empathy has been largely ignored by policymakers, non-governmental organisations and activists.

It is time to recognise that empathy is not only an ethical guide to how we should lead our lives and treat other people, but is also an essential strategic guide to how we can bring about the social action required to confront global warming.

I would like empathy to become the watchword of a new era of policies, social movements, cultural projects and individual action on climate change. How can we encourage this empathetic revolution of human relationships? What exactly might it look like? Here are a few of my ideas for cultivating empathy across space and through time:

Climate Comrades
The old-fashioned idea of pen pals could be revived for the age of climate change. People living in rich countries could engage in one-to-one conversations with those living in poor countries suffering from the effects of global warming, using cheap technologies such as Skype, Facebook, email and webcams. This might be organised through existing or newly forged links between schools, church groups or twin town programmes, with some coordinating help from development agencies like Oxfam or ActionAid. So a teenager in Edinburgh could have regular video conversations with another teenager in Uganda, whose rural community is being hit by drought. Your Climate Comrade would hopefully become a friend for life, opening you up to a new empathetic understanding of what climate change means for people’s livelihoods, and encouraging you to take political action.

How easily can you imagine stepping into the shoes of those suffering from the impacts of climate change? Photo from Mark Edwards's exhibition Hard Rain.

Climate Corps
The Peace Corps established as a federal agency in the US in the early 1960s has given hundreds of thousands of young people the opportunity to experience the realities of living in poverty in a developing country, especially in Latin America. I would like to see the European Union establish a similar programme called the Climate Corps. Young people would go on placements for a year to live with a community in a poor country hit by climate change. They would work on adaptation projects such as helping build flood defences and engage in other work of use to their hosts, such as teaching English to village children. In EU countries with military service, Climate Corps should be offered as an alternative option. With the right marketing, joining the Climate Corps could become a rite of passage for young people as popular as back-packing for a year before university. One of the rules of Climate Corps is that you must travel to and from your destination without exceeding a carbon emission limit, which would force you to avoid travel by plane. Climate Corps would be a major boost to generating empathy across space.

The Climate Futures Museum
Without a time machine, it is impossible to give people direct experience of the future. But we can find ways to simulate the projected realities of everyday life a century from today. That is why every major city in the world should establish a Climate Futures Museum. The purpose of a Climate Futures Museum would be to provide experiential learning designed to develop our empathy with future generations who will have to live with the impacts of climate change if we fail to take concerted action in the present. The museum would not contain standard informational displays behind glass cases or on computer screens. Instead, it would house experiential exhibitions that allow visitors to understand in reality what it would be like to have their homes flooded, to be faced by drought, or to experience a hurricane. You might have to put on a life jacket and be tossed around in a dinghy in a wave machine. Creative minds would be needed to design an empathetic experience that would be etched in your memory for ever. (In fact, I’ve already begun working on this project with the ecological artist Clare Patey and the sustainable designer Sophie Thomas.)

While I certainly believe that global political agreements like that being negotiated in Copenhagen are vital for tackling the uniquely cross-border issue of climate change, there is no doubt that raising empathetic awareness at the grass roots is equally necessary. This is not simply because there is still so much denial and scepticism about the realities of man-made climate change. It is also because empathy has the power to create the human bonds required to catapult us into social action.

Earlier today I was at a climate change demonstration in central London together with around 40,000 other people. An elderly woman next to me had a photograph of a tiny baby hanging around her neck, contained in a plastic sleeve. Underneath it said, ‘I’m here for Alice, aged one month’. That photograph, for me, was a small sign of hope that, deep within us, we all understand the importance of empathy.

This is an revised version of an article that first appeared on George Marshall’s brilliant Climate Denial blog. It is based on a research paper I wrote for the Future Ethics project at the University of Manchester called Empathy and Climate Change: Proposals for a Revolution of Human Relationships

To hear me talking about empathy and climate change, here is a six-minute video.

In a Roots of Empathy class, the teacher is a baby

So if you walk into a ROE class you might see something like this. A group of seven-year-olds are gathered around a gurgling baby boy lying on the floor. They are discussing why the baby seems so upset, trying to understand what he is thinking or feeling. Afterwards, they break into groups and explore their similarities or differences with one another about what makes them happy or upset. Before the baby leaves they may make him a gift to take home, and sing him a song.

ROE is a hugely successful example of a ‘social and emotional learning’ programme. It has reduced playground bullying, encouraged cooperative behaviour, improved pupils’ relationships with their parents and has also had a positive impact on academic performance.

Beyond this, what really impresses me is that Mary Gordon recognises that empathy development is a crucial element of social change. She sees it as a way of creating global citizens, and educating a new generation who will care about tackling the world’s social ills. ‘Empathy is integral to solving conflict in the family, schoolyard, boardroom and war room,’ she says in her book. ‘The ability to take the perspective of another person, to identify commonalities through our shared feelings, is the best peace pill we have.’

I recently wrote a report for Oxfam encouraging the UK government to introduce Roots of Empathy and other innovative forms of empathy education in the English school system. Though they have begun some empathy programmes such as Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL), they still haven’t seen the wisdom of bringing babies into the classroom as teachers. Let’s just hope a few government ministers read Mary Gordon’s inspiring book.