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.

I think novelists, who spend so much time attempting to understand the mental worlds of their protagonists, have a peculiar ability to appreciate the meaning and significance of empathy. One of the best examples of this is an article that Ian McEwan wrote in The Guardian, published just a few days after the September 11 attacks. It is, in effect, a meditation on empathy. ‘Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity,’ he writes. ‘It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.‘ Here is the article in full.

ONLY LOVE AND THEN OBLIVION by Ian McEwan

First published in The Guardian, 15th September, 2001

Emotions have their narrative; after the shock we move inevitably to the grief, and the sense that we are doing it more or less together is one tiny scrap of consolation.

Initially, the visual impact of the scenes – those towers collapsing with malign majesty – extended our state of fevered astonishment. Even on Wednesday, fresh video footage froze us in this stupefied condition, and denied us our profounder feelings: the first plane disappearing into the side of the tower as cleanly as a posted letter; the couple jumping into the void, hand in hand; a solitary figure falling with a strangely extended arm (was it an umbrella serving as a hopeful parachute?); the rescue workers crawling about at the foot of a vast mountain of rubble.

In our delirium, most of us wanted to talk. We babbled, by email, on the phone, around kitchen tables. We knew there was a greater reckoning ahead, but we could not quite feel it yet. Sheer amazement kept getting in the way.

The reckoning, of course, was with the personal. By Thursday I noticed among friends, and in TV and radio commentaries, a new mood of exhaustion and despair. People spoke of being depressed. No other public event had cut so deeply. The spectacle was over. Now we were hearing from the bereaved. Each individual death is an explosion in itself, wrecking the lives of those nearest. We were beginning to grasp the human cost. This was what it was always really about.

The silent relatives grouped around the entrances to hospitals or wandering the streets with their photographs was a terrible sight. It reminded us of other tragedies, of wars and natural disasters around the world. But Manhattan is one of the most sophisticated cities in the world, and there were some uniquely modern elements to this nightmare that bound us closer to it.

The mobile phone has inserted itself into every crevice of our daily lives. Now, in catastrophe, if there is time enough, it is there in our dying moments. All through Thursday we heard from the bereaved how they took those last calls. Whatever the immediate circumstances, what was striking was what they had in common. A new technology has shown us an ancient, human universal.

A San Francisco husband slept through his wife’s call from the World Trade Centre. The tower was burning around her, and she was speaking on her mobile phone. She left her last message to him on the answering machine. A TV station played it to us, while it showed the husband standing there listening. Somehow, he was able to bear hearing it again.We heard her tell him through her sobbing that there was no escape for her. The building was on fire and there was no way down the stairs. She was calling to say goodbye. There was really only one thing for her to say, those three words that all the terrible art, the worst pop songs and movies, the most seductive lies, can somehow never cheapen. I love you.

She said it over and again before the line went dead. And that is what they were all saying down their phones, from the hijacked planes and the burning towers. There is only love, and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers.

Last words placed in the public domain were once the prerogative of the mighty and venerable – Henry James, Nelson, Goethe – recorded, and perhaps sometimes edited for posterity, by relatives at the bedside. The effect was often consolatory, showing acceptance, or even transcendence in the face of death. They set us an example. But these last words spoken down mobile phones, reported to us by the bereaved, are both more haunting and true.

They compel us to imagine ourselves into that moment. What would we say? Now we know.

Most of us have had no active role to play in these terrible events. We simply watch the television, read the papers, turn on the radio again. Listening to the analysts and pundits is soothing to some extent. Expertise is reassuring. And the derided profession of journalism can rise quite nobly, and with immense resource, to public tragedy.

However, I suspect that in between times, when we are not consuming news, the majority of us are not meditating on recent foreign policy failures, or geopolitical strategy, or the operational range of helicopter gunships.

Instead, we remember what we have seen, and we daydream helplessly. Lately, most of us have inhabited the space between the terrible actuality and these daydreams. Waking before dawn, going about our business during the day, we fantasize ourselves into the events. What if it was me?

This is the nature of empathy, to think oneself into the minds of others. These are the mechanics of compassion: you are under the bedclothes, unable to sleep, and you are crouching in the brushed-steel lavatory at the rear of the plane, whispering a final message to your loved one. There is only that one thing to say, and you say it. All else is pointless. You have very little time before some holy fool, who believes in his place in eternity, kicks in the door, slaps your head and orders you back to your seat. 23C. Here is your seat belt. There is the magazine you were reading before it all began.

The banality of these details might overwhelm you. If you are not already panicking, you are clinging to a shred of hope that the captain, who spoke with such authority as the plane pushed back from the stand, will rise from the floor, his throat uncut, to take the controls…

If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.

The hijackers used fanatical certainty, misplaced religious faith, and dehumanising hatred to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy. Among their crimes was a failure of the imagination. As for their victims in the planes and in the towers, in their terror they would not have felt it at the time, but those snatched and anguished assertions of love were their defiance.

© Ian McEwan, 2001