Imagine you had to invent a new kind of atlas which showed the extent of our planet’s economic and cultural globalization, and the interconnections between the world’s environmental crises. That’s the aim of the ATLAS of Interdependence, a project being masterminded by the new economics foundation, the Open University and Sheffield University. The ATLAS will be an evolving online resource containing entries from geologists, geographers, scientists, journalists, artists, campaigners and historians, each providing their personal vision of global interdependence. Here is a sneak preview of my own entry, called the Global Map of the Empathic Imagination. Do let me know if you think it needs any additional landmarks.

Traditional maps are comprised of divisions. National borders separate us from one another, as do oceans and mountain ranges. In an age of interdependence, we need maps that do the opposite. They must show the forces that bind humanity together, offering glimpses of the common ground that is the basis for tackling the planet’s most acute crises, from climate change and wealth inequality to the violent conflicts between countries and religions. The Global Map of the Empathic Imagination has been designed to serve this purpose. It is a gateway to ideas and practical actions around empathy that can create a revolution of human relationships.

Empathy is the greatest social force that bonds human beings to one another. But what is empathy, why does it matter, and how can you map it?

I define empathy as the art of stepping into the shoes of another person and seeing the world from their perspective. That means understanding the beliefs, experiences, hopes and fears that comprise their worldview. The imaginative act of looking through someone else’s eyes can help erode our assumptions and prejudices about them, enabling us to recognise their humanity, and spurring us to take action on their behalf. As I describe in this video clip, empathy has the potential to create meaningful ties across boundaries of nationality, culture, age, gender and other divides.

Below you will find the Global Map of the Empathic Imagination. It is an attempt to show the power of empathy to create social change and tackle the planet’s fundamental collective problems. Hover over Canada and you will be offered the headline, ‘How babies can teach empathy in schools’. A short text describes the world’s most innovative empathy teaching programme for school children, called Roots of Empathy, which began in Toronto. Follow the link further and you will be transported to a detailed article about the programme that appears on Outrospection, my blog dedicated to empathy. There are similar markers across the map that will draw you into an inspiring range of empathic topics, such as ‘Should you empathise with your father’s killer?’, ‘Why we need a Climate Futures Museum’ and ‘How a Victorian traveller broke racist taboos’. They explore empathy from every angle – history, neuroscience, psychology, biology, social policy, politics and religion. All of them link to articles on Outrospection.

Travelling across the earth using the Global Map of the Empathic Imagination will not only expand your curiosity about other people and challenge the way you see yourself, but show how you can become part of the empathy-based social movements that we so desperately need to confront climate change and other planetary crises. Join the empathic revolution and cry out its guiding ideal, ‘You are, therefore I am’.

GLOBAL MAP OF THE EMPATHIC IMAGINATION by Roman Krznaric.

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.

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.

Colin Ward (1924-2010), the gentlest anarchist of them all.

Colin Ward was one the greatest anarchist thinkers of the past half century and a pioneering social historian. He died earlier this month at the age of eighty-five, leaving a legacy of over thirty books and a huge following of activists, educators and writers – amongst them myself – who were inspired by his approach to radical social change, which always favoured practical, grass-roots action over utopian dreamings of revolution. The outpouring of obituaries in The Guardian and elsewhere are testimony to his influence.

I first came across his work in 1997 in the anarchist newspaper Freedom, which I had started reading as an antidote to the mainstream papers which were obsessed with the general election of that year. I quickly became addicted to his books, from the classic Anarchy in Action (1973) to more quirky titles like Goodnight Campers! The History of the British Holiday Camp (1986). Later I became friends with Colin and his wife Harriet (herself a formidable thinker and writer) and for a decade made regular trips to stay with them in Suffolk. Colin was a gentle man and a wonderful storyteller. He had a boyish chuckle, a mischievous glint in his eye, and would often break out into song while munching on a sausage, drawing on his astonishing memory – which unfortunately faded in his last years – to recollect lyrics from his 1930s Essex childhood. It is no wonder that his son and two step-sons all ended up as musicians.

Although he developed an international reputation and was invited to speak all over the world, Colin rarely took the opportunity to travel abroad. Instead one of the highlights of his week was a bus trip (he couldn’t drive) from his rural home to the town of Ipswich, where he would go to the cinema with Harriet and raid the local library, of which he must have been their most fanatical user. Back at home, when he wasn’t reading, he would spend most of his time clattering away on his old typewriter knocking out yet another Colin Ward book or diligently responding to correspondence from Korean anarchists, Norwegian allotment experts and others amongst his global following.

What I really loved about Colin was his capacity to see the good in people. He didn’t expend his energy attacking those whose views he did not share, and could usually find a kind word for them. Of the notoriously prickly American anarchist Murray Bookchin, he once said, ‘I am quite happy that we only meet every fifteen years or so, because we enquire about health and family rather than about those things which might unite or divide us’. That was about as far as Colin could go in terms of personal criticism, and he made a point of avoiding the infighting within the anarchist movement.

My favourite story about him – which I may have unconsciously embellished over the years – concerns his period as a teacher of the new-fangled subject of Liberal Studies at Wandsworth Technical College in South London during the 1960s. Most of his students were young apprentices in the building trade, and when he walked in to teach his first class he asked them what it was they wanted to learn – what difficulties did they face in their lives that he could really help them with? It turned out that their greatest concern was with lack of sleep. So Colin duly crammed his brain full of the scholarly literature on sleep and set about teaching a term of classes on the art of sleeping. It is a story that has always stayed with me as a teacher, the ultimate example of making an effort to meet your students’ needs.

For most people the typical image of an anarchist is a bomb-throwing Russian from the nineteenth century or a black-masked youth at one of today’s anti-capitalist demonstrations. Colin was neither. He came from a different anarchist tradition, one which saw social change emerging not from violence and revolution, but from expanding social cooperation and mutual aid in everyday life. His writings celebrated worker cooperatives, tenant housing associations, allotment holders, children’s adventure playgrounds, Friendly Societies and organisations like the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. This is where he saw ‘anarchy in action’ – people organising themselves on a voluntary, non-hierarchical and decentralised basis –  a social model reflecting the anarchism of one of Colin’s major influences, the Russian writer and geographer Peter Kropotkin. Colin believed that an anarchist society was not an imagined future state, but rather something that existed in the here and now, all around us. It was a latent force, ‘like a seed beneath the snow’ as he used to say, that had the power to push back the boundaries of the centralised state and the capitalist system.

Colin was fond of quoting the early-twentieth century German anarchist Gustav Landauer, who wrote:

‘The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.’

Here was the idea that social change was not about new laws, governments, or policies, but about creating a revolution of human relationships from the bottom up, and shifting the way individuals treated one another. It was an approach that had a profound impact on my own thinking, drawing me away from my early interest in traditional party politics and state power (I used to be a university politics lecturer) and towards developing my ideas about empathy as a force for social change. Colin’s writings on the social philosophy of Martin Buber in his book Influences (1991) introduced me to another thinker who has deeply shaped my beliefs about the power of empathy.

Outside anarchist circles, Colin had a major impact as a social and oral historian, taking his readers into unexpected landscapes to hear voices that mainstream historians generally ignored. His book The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (written with David Crouch, 1988) showed vegetable gardeners as ingenious improvisers, while The Child in the City (1978) revealed the extraordinary creativity of kids who played in urban slums. One of his last books, Cotters and Squatters (2002), which chronicled the history of squatting in Britain since the seventeenth century, was typical of his work, bringing to life a whole social subculture about which few people have any knowledge. Part of what made Colin’s books so compelling was not only the extraordinary range and originality of the subject matter, but also his conversational style and accessible prose: he was highly allergic to theoretical and academic jargon. Despite these virtues, he found it hard to persuade mainstream publishers to take interest in his books, making it difficult for him to eke out a living as a writer – although he managed to achieve an underground cult status, with his fans including the likes of George Monbiot, Richard Maybe and Roger Deakin.

Colin had an extreme distaste for nationalist, religious or political separatism. He rejected the ideologies and simplistic patriotisms that led people to kill one another. In 1942, as a sixteen-year-old during the darkest days of the Second World War, he made a point of copying out the following lines written by the columnist Bill Connor in the Daily Mirror:

‘Our children are guarded from diphtheria by what a Japanese and a German did. They are saved from smallpox by an Englishman’s work. They are saved from rabies because of a Frenchman. From birth to death they are surrounded by an invisible host – the spirits of men who never served a lesser loyalty than the welfare of mankind.’

While Colin cherished this humanising quote as central to his own vision of the world, he gradually came to inhabit its very lines himself. Colin Ward is now part of that invisible host surrounding our lives, whose work will keep quietly shaping human welfare and creating the revolution of human relationships that we so desperately need.

If you are new to Colin Ward’s writing and want to know where to start, you could begin with his explicitly anarchist works such as Anarchy in Action or Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (part of the Oxford University Press series). Alternatively you could try his more general books, such as The Allotment: It’s Landscape and Culture (with David Crouch) or The Child in the City. A more complete list of writings appears at Wikipedia, including Ken Worpole’s great edited book Richer Futures: Fashioning a New Politics, containing essays by people across a range of fields influenced by Colin Ward’s ideas.

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

Jo Berry (right) standing next to Pat Magee, the man who killed her father.

One of the greatest challenges of leading an empathetic life is trying to step into the shoes of people who we consider to be ‘enemies’ or whose views and values are very different from our own. If you’re on the receiving end of a racist comment from someone at the pub or a torrent of unfair verbal abuse from your boss, the idea of trying to empathise with them would probably be the last thing on your mind. If you came face to face with the person who had recently burgled your house, could you overcome your anger to see the crime from their perspective, and understand the circumstances that may have driven them to it?

Empathising in such instances might seem like wishful thinking. But consider the case of Jo Berry. In 1984 her father, Conservative MP Sir Anthony Berry, was killed by an IRA bomb at the Party Conference in Brighton. In 1999, one of the IRA members responsible, Pat Magee, was released from prison under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Jo’s response was a desire to meet him. She felt that trying to create a relationship with the man who had murdered her father was the best way of overcoming her anguish and anger. Since then they have met over fifty times, gradually – and often painstakingly – developing an understanding of one another’s perspectives on the bombing. Twenty-five years after the event, Jo has now launched a charity, Building Bridges for Peace, which aims to use dialogue and non-violence to promote peaceful resolutions to violent conflicts.

Jo is often asked whether she forgives Pat. Her answer is that forgiveness is not the right word or concept. What really matters, she says, is empathy. She has come to empathise with her father’s killer: ‘I’ve realised that no matter which side of the conflict you’re on, had we all lived each other’s lives, we could all have done what the other did.’

Their unlikely and remarkable friendship reveals that empathy is not only possible in the most extreme circumstances, but that it can transform individual lives and is a route towards social change. Below they tell their story in the own words. First in an interview broadcast on the BBC World Service, and then in a profile for The Forgiveness Project. If Jo Berry can find a way to empathise with Pat Magee, couldn’t we all discover new possibilities for empathy in our lives?

Jo Berry

An inner shift is required to hear the story of the enemy. For me the question is always about whether I can let go of my need to blame, and open my heart enough to hear Pat’s story and understand his motivations. The truth is that sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t. It’s a journey and it’s a choice, which means it’s not all sorted and put away in a box.

It felt as if a part of me died in that bomb. I was totally out of my depth but somehow I held on to a small hope that something positive would come out of the trauma. So I went to Ireland and listened to the stories of many remarkable and courageous people who’d been caught up in the violence. For the first time I felt that my pain was being heard.

In those early years I probably used the word ‘forgiveness’ too liberally – I didn’t really understand it. When I used the word on television, I was shocked to receive a death threat from a man who said I had betrayed both my father and my country.

Now I don’t talk about forgiveness. To say “I forgive you” is almost condescending – it locks you into an ‘us and them’ scenario keeping me right and you wrong. That attitude won’t change anything. But I can experience empathy, and in that moment there is no judgement. Sometimes when I’ve met with Pat, I’ve had such a clear understanding of his life that there’s nothing to forgive.

I wanted to meet Pat to put a face to the enemy, and see him as a real human being. At our first meeting I was terrified, but I wanted to acknowledge the courage it had taken him to meet me. We talked with an extraordinary intensity. I shared a lot about my father, while Pat told me some of his story.

Over the past two and a half years of getting to know Pat, I feel I’ve been recovering some of the humanity I lost when that bomb went off. Pat is also on a journey to recover his humanity. I know that he sometimes finds it hard to live with the knowledge that he cares for the daughter of someone he killed through his terrorist actions.

Perhaps more than anything I’ve realised that no matter which side of the conflict you’re on, had we all lived each others lives, we could all have done what the other did. In other words, had I come from a Republican background, I could easily have made the same choices Pat made.

Pat Magee

Some day I may be able to forgive myself. Although I still stand by my actions, I will always carry the burden that I harmed other human beings. But I’m not seeking forgiveness. If Jo could just understand why someone like me could get involved in the armed struggle then something has been achieved. The point is that Jo set out with that intent in mind – she wanted to know why.

I decided to meet Jo because, apart from addressing a personal obligation, I felt obligated as a Republican to explain what led someone like me to participate in the action. I told her that I’d got involved in the armed struggle at the age of 19, after witnessing how a small nationalist community were being mistreated by the British. Those people had to respond. For 28 years I was active in the Republican Movement. Even in jail I was still a volunteer.

Between Jo and I, the big issue is the use of violence. I can’t claim to have renounced violence, though I don’t believe I’m a violent person and have spoken out against it. I am 100% in favour of the peace process, but I am not a pacifist and I could never say to future generations, anywhere in the world, who felt themselves oppressed, “Take it, just lie down and take it.”

Jo told me that her daughter had said after one of our meetings, “Does that mean that Grandad Tony can come back now?” It stuck with me, because of course nothing has fundamentally changed. No matter what we can achieve as two human beings meeting after a terrible event, the loss remains and forgiveness can’t embrace that loss. The hope lies in the fact that we are prepared to carry on. The dialogue has continued.

It’s rare to meet someone as gracious and open as Jo. She’s come a long way in her journey to understanding; in fact, she’s come more than half way to meet me. That’s a very humbling experience.

A fascinating genre that can expand our empathetic imaginations is war movies depicting the perspective of enemies. Recent examples include a pair of films directed by Clint Eastwood in 2006 about the Battle for Iwo Jima in the Second World War, one from the viewpoint of US soldiers (Flags of Our Fathers), and the other seen through the eyes of Japanese soldiers (Letters from Iwo Jima), which is entirely in Japanese. The inverted lens challenges simplistic notions of nationalism, patriotism and triumphalism, and makes war seem far from glorious while at the same time breaking down the barriers between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

But if you are a purist, you will sit yourself down in front of the first – and greatest – film in the genre, the 1930 version of All Quiet on the Western Front. This classic is based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of the First World War. It is astonishing that an anti-war movie from the perspective of a German soldier was produced in Hollywood only a dozen years after the armistice. But, for me, an even greater achievement is that it contains the most moving empathetic episode in cinema history.

The main character, a German footsoldier named Paul, who has enlisted in the fervour of schoolboy patriotism, is now on the Western front facing the French. Surrounded by gunfire, he jumps into a trench for cover. An instant later, a French soldier drops into the trench with him. Without a moment of thought, Paul draws his dagger and stabs him in the chest.

To find out what happens next, either watch this clip (the first seven minutes), or read the description below.

The soldier is mortally wounded, but still breathing. Paul washes the blood off his hands and the soldier writhes before him, slowly dying. The gunfire continues and Paul, forced to stay in the trench overnight, cannot avoid the face of the soldier, whose eyes are still open. At first he is irritated by the Frenchman’s wheezing, final breaths, but with the passing hours he is overcome by remorse. ‘I want to help you,’ Paul pleads, offering his enemy a little water. But it is too late, the soldier is unmoving, which prompts an anguished soliloquy:

‘I tell you I didn’t want to kill you. I tried to keep you alive. If you jumped in here again, I wouldn’t do it. You see, when you jumped in here, you were my enemy – and I was afraid of you. But you’re just a man like me, and I killed you. Forgive me, comrade. Say that for me. Say you forgive me!…Oh, no, you’re dead! Only you’re better off than I am – you’re through – they can’t do any more to you now…Oh, God! why did they do this to us? We only wanted to live, you and I. Why should they send us out to fight each other? If they threw away these rifles and these uniforms, you could be my brother.’

Though Paul has come to see his adversary as a fellow human being who has similarly been used as a pawn by the generals and politicians, there is still a final moment of empathetic recognition to come. Paul reaches inside the soldier’s coatpocket and draws out his identification papers. He has a name, Gerald Duval, and inside is a photo of his wife and daughter. Paul now understands that he has killed not only a brother in arms, but a unique individual, with a family, with emotions, with a home to go to, just like him. ‘I’ll write to your wife,’ he tells the dead man. ‘I’ll write to her. I promise she’ll not want for anything. And I’ll help her, and your parents, too. Only forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me….’ He weeps, his head at the feet of the frozen body of Gerald Duval.

After this small taste of All Quiet on the Western Front, you may well feel able to give James Bond or Lord of the Rings a miss on Christmas Day, and instead opt for a film experience that reveals not just the horrors of war – both in the past and the present – but what it means to be human.

Paul, unable to look at the man he has killed, Gerald Duval. From All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

Sasha Abramsky: A standard biography is interested in the chronology of Obama’s life. My book, by contrast, is interested in exploring the contours of Obama’s mind: how he thinks; how he approaches problems; how he interacts with people both in public and private settings; how he understands the ebb and flow of history; what one can learn about Obama through exploring his hobbies – his competitive interest in sports, in particular. It’s far more of a classic profile-writ-large than it is a conventional biography, and I build it up, layer by layer, through talking to people who have interacted with Obama at all these different moments, or strata of his life. It is, in that sense, the ultimate Obama write-around (that being the term used by Gay Talese, who forty-three years ago, wrote the most famous profile of Frank Sinatra: he called it a “write-around” because he built up Sinatra’s persona and presence, through a multitude of different people’s impressions of Sinatra in a variety of situations). I hope, by the end of my book, readers will have a strong sense that they really do understand what makes Barack Obama tick.

Roman Krznaric: Obama has repeatedly said that empathy is his most important political value. He has stated, for instance: ‘We seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit – our ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, to see the world through those who are different from us – the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steel worker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room.’ Just how important do you think empathy is to his approach to politics? And what makes him care about it?

Sasha Abramsky: To me, Obama’s language of empathy is very powerful. Certainly, as he has risen up the political ladder, it is his ability to make people feel included or important that has, over the years, served him well. Without suggesting it’s fake in any way, because I don’t believe it is, I do think that, pragmatically, the art of empathy makes him a very strong candidate.

It comes, I believe, from the fact that personally he has a rather unique background; he’s a racial and cultural mix, and his mother moved him to Indonesia for several years when he was a small kid. He had to imbibe more of the world’s perspectives and experiences than do most young children. And I think those lessons stuck with him. His sister Maya teaches her students to play a ‘doubting game’ in which they learn to doubt their own preconceived ideas and try to think like other people. They put themselves in other peoples’ shoes. I’m sure that notion was inculcated in Barack and Maya by their mother when they were young children. It’s a humanistic equivalent to the game of scientific/philosophical doubt that Descartes played as he was stumbling toward his theory Cogito Ergo Sum.

When you hear Obama speak, or read his writings, this notion of being able to walk in other peoples’ shoes, being able to absorb other people’s voices, is central to his political vision. I think a lot of conservatives mocked this during the election, and a lot of progressives today sneer at it and say he’s a faux populist but doesn’t really mean what he says. Personally I don’t think that’s fair. It seems to me that, while he clearly isn’t as pure an idealist as many of his supporters hoped he would be, that he very much is, at his core, an empathetic politician.

The question of the moment for me is whether it’s possible to not just campaign empathetically but also to govern empathetically? In other words, do the needs of state, the messiness (the compromises, the input of secret information in decision-making etc) of governance in some ways inevitably dilute even Obama’s empathetic strengths? My sense is he has retained the ability to take advice from a tremendous number of different people and that he absorbs many different perspectives; but, at the end of the day, D.C. isn’t a particularly empathetic environment – and many of his policy goals will end up somewhat frayed simply by the rough back-and-forth of Congressional debate. I think we’ve seen that, to a point, with the healthcare reform agenda.

Roman Krznaric: Obama’s nomination earlier this year of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court sparked the first explicit political controversy about empathy that I’ve ever come across. Obama claimed that she would make an excellent judge because of her empathetic qualities, coming from an underprivileged Hispanic background, which triggered a backlash from Republicans and conservative thinkers, who argued that the law was a matter of cool rationality and following the rules, not touchy-feely empathy. Sotomayor seemed quickly to agree with them, keeping quiet about empathy and emphasising her legal impartiality. How significant was this episode, and what does it tell us about American politics?

Sasha Abramsky: The Sotomayor nomination was, on one level, an attempt to prioritize empathy within the higher echelons of the court system. On the other hand, one can over-emphasize that: in addition to her empathetic qualities, she’s a very skilled, knowledgeable judge, an expert in jurisprudence who is very qualified for a place on the Supreme Court.

My sense was the Republicans were on something of a fishing expedition when they went after Sotomayor for some of her statements about having a sense of empathy because of who she was and where she came from. After all, everyone, by definition, has their own peculiar life story and that life story will provide them with certain empathetic qualities vis-à-vis particular groups. The Republicans knew that; they also knew they could whip up some fear around race and gender by misconstruing her comments. It was, I think, something of a storm in a teacup, and I don’t think it’s carried over very far into the popular consciousness.

The more important issue here is the sorts of judicial values that will dominate the Supreme Court in the years to come. During the Bush years, the Supreme Court began tilting fairly far to the right. Sotomayor’s nomination began the process of tilting it back if not to progressivism then at least toward the center.

Clip from the press conference in which Obama said he considered empathy to be a vital quality for his new appointment to the Supreme Court.

Roman Krznaric: Obama has given priority to the domestic issue of health care reform over the international issue of climate change, pushing forward with legislation on the former while the world waits for serious US action on the latter. Notwithstanding his visit to Copenhagen this month, his empathy for those who are left out of the US health system appears – at least in practical terms – greater than his empathy for the present and future victims of climate change. Is this a fair depiction of his position? Or is this prioritizing simply a matter of Washington realpolitik?

Sasha Abramsky: On healthcare, I’d disagree somewhat with your premise. Yes, he’s focused on getting some version of healthcare reform passed by Congress – and in the short term that might mean other issues slide slightly on the administration’s priority list; on the other hand, without prioritizing, nothing would get done. That’s the tension between holistic, universal, rhetoric, and the D.C. world of realpolitik. In a sense my bigger concern is not that he’s spending too much time on healthcare but that he waited a few months too long before realizing just how much personal energy he would have to expend convincing a select handful of centrist Democratic representatives and senators to support meaningful reforms.

I think, when it comes to climate change, he’s actually moving the American political system about as fast as it can be moved. That still might not be fast enough, but it’s a whole lot faster than it would have moved on the issue under Bush or even under McCain, one of the few senior Republicans to take the issue seriously.

Roman Krznaric: You write in your book about the thematic importance of empathy in Obama’s famous ‘A More Perfect Union‘ speech, given in Philadelphia in March 2008, which tackled race issues. You discuss how his language convinced impoverished African Americans that he could step into their shoes, while also expressing his understanding of the frustrations of whites who felt that affirmative stood in the way of their own dreams. Yet in seemingly extending his empathy to everybody, how then does Obama make policy decisions that involve conflicts of interest between different groups (for instance on the issue of affirmative action or abortion)? You can’t empathise with everybody all of the time.

Sasha Abramsky: It’s certainly possible that there is a logical limit to any politics of empathy – that, at the end of the day, one can only compromise up to a point without diluting one’s core values to a point where they cease to hold sway; it’s also possible that in a toxicly partisan environment, in which scoring political points often outweighs long-term political calculi, Obama will ultimately lack partners with whom to sit down at the table. That’s when the empathist has to be joined by the hard-hitting politician, the person prepared to get partisan when he needs to get the job done.

For further details about Sasha Abramsky’s books and journalism, visit his website.