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

One of the empathy tests we discussed is called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, created by the Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, an expert on autism and author of a controversial book called The Essential Difference, which argues that women are more naturally empathetic than men. The test effectively gauges how good you are at judging someone’s emotional state through looking at their eyes. You are presented with 36 sets of eyes, and for each of them you are instructed to choose which one of four words best describes what the person in the picture is thinking or feeling. Have a go at the initial three pairs of eyes in the test (the correct answers are at the end of this blog). The first offers a choice between ‘playful’, ‘comforting’, ‘irritated’ and ‘bored’:

It takes under five minutes to complete the whole test, which you can do here.

Most people are surprisingly good at this test, and a typical score ranges from 22 to 30 correct answers out of 36. Women, as Baron-Cohen has shown in several studies, score better than men on average, while those with the autism disorder Asperger’s syndrome tend to score lower than the typical man or woman.

But the real question is, how well does Reading the Mind in the Eyes measure empathy? I have to admit that I am fairly sceptical about the huge number of empathy tests that have been developed by psychologists over the past half century. The art of empathising seems far too complex to me to be easily reducible to a survey or lab experiment, no matter how ingeniously designed. Yet it is clear that some tests are better than others, and the virtue of Reading the Mind in the Eyes is that it gets away from the rather crass self-rating surveys which compile your answers to questions like, ‘On a scale of one to five, how good do you think you are at understanding when another person is upset’.

I do, however, have doubts about an empathy test based on interpreting what you can see in people’s eyes. I might, for instance, be able to identify that somebody is upset by the expression around their eyes, but this does not mean I necessarily understanding anything about why they are upset – I haven’t really stepped into their shoes (which is an essential feature of what is known as ‘cognitive empathy’). Nor does my visual recognition imply that I have made any emotional connection with them or formed any kind of human bond (which are characteristics of ‘affective empathy’). I also wonder about the extent to which Reading the Mind in the Eyes is effective across cultures. When I lived for a time with indigenous Mayan refugees in the Guatemalan jungle, I found it incredibly difficult to read their facial expressions. One moment their eyes seemed impassive, even sad, then a second later – to my complete surprise – the person would burst out laughing. As far as I can see, Baron-Cohen’s test contains mostly Caucasian eyes – but a wider cultural variety might yield very different results. A final thought is that it is not obvious to me what really constitutes a ‘correct’ answer. Who has determined if the first set of eyes above are, say, ‘playful’ rather than ‘comforting’? And do our eyes only display one emotional trait at a time?

Despite my scepticism, I believe it can be useful to do such tests. In my view, they should not be taken to reveal any definitive truths about the kind of person you are, but should be simply seen as a way to raise interesting hypotheses about your character. If you happen to achieve a perfect score of 36, this does not mean you are an empathetic mastermind, but it might make you contemplate – and possibly doubt – whether you really are as empathetic as the test indicates. The numerical results of any test concerning the human condition must be taken not as a final conclusion, but as the beginning of a deeper inquiry.

Answers to Reading the Mind in the Eyes test: 1. playful; 2. upset; 3. desire.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘The images developed from the late medieval period with the express function of inspiring devotion were not simply the “Bible of the unlettered” in the sense of translating words into images. Rather, they conveyed the essence of Christ’s sacrifice, the meaning of suffering, by promoting and facilitating an empathetic imitation of Christ.’

The idea of the imitation of Christ’s suffering had its most memorable form in the practice of flagellation which emerged in thirteenth-century Europe. This involved methodically flogging or whipping your own body using specialised implements such as rods, switches and cat-o-nine-tales, in the hope that you were experiencing the pain that Christ went through and were therefore bringing yourself closer into communion with him. Flagellation took off in the mid-fourteenth century during the Black Death. The plague was believed by many Christians to express the wrath of an angry God, and the rather sadomasochistic activity of flagellation was considered an effective way of appeasing him through a form of self-punishment.

Flagellants in the Netherlands during the Black Death, 1349. They carry the image of Christ before them to aid their empathetic ‘imitatio’.

Standing before a painting or sculpture of the crucifixion can only be an empathetic second best to a serious session of flagellant self-harm. So just how successful has Christian art been at creating an empathetic response in the viewer? Early depictions of the crucifixion were quite genteel, and did little to convey the suffering involved. But in the sixteenth century artistic depictions became far more gory. The classic example may be the German artist Matthias Grünewald’s ‘Crucifixion’ from 1515, the central panel on the Isenheim altarpiece. The upturned fingers at the end of Christ’s torturously extended arms makes the experience look genuinely painful. It is as if he has been stretched out on an inquisitor’s rack before being nailed to the cross.

Matthias Grünewald, ‘Crucifixion’ (1515)

The current exhibition at the National Gallery in London, The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting & Sculpture 1600-1700, offers several works that rival Grünewald’s effort to arouse our empathy. The most successful, in my view, is Gregorio Fernández’s painted wood sculpture ‘Dead Christ’ (c.1630). Christ has been taken off the cross and is lying completely naked apart from a loincloth. The corpse is still unwashed and awaiting burial. His half-lidded eyes look absolutely dead, his head tipped to the side like a car-accident victim. My own eyes were drawn to the blood – drooling from his gaping mouth, pouring out of the gash below his right nipple, caked on his knees and left shoulder. And then there were the gruesome holes in the feet and hands where the nails had been extracted.

Detail from Gregorio Fernández, 'Dead Christ' (c.1630)

Gregorio Fernández, 'Dead Christ' (c.1630)

I tend not to have a strong bodily empathetic reaction to these visual representations of Christ’s suffering (although I do occasionally get a few goose bumps). This may partly be because I don’t have the appropriate religious beliefs that might connect me to what I’m looking at. But it is also because the works do not draw me far enough into Christ’s perspective on the event – I can see what is happening to him but don’t feel I am really looking through his eyes or have entered into his skin. I remain outside the event as a spectator.

The one work that catapults me into Christ’s experience is Salvador Dali’s 1951 painting of the crucifixion, known as ‘Christ of Saint John of the Cross’. Although devoid of nails, blood or crown of thorns, by lifting me to the heights of Christ’s perspective, it has a greater empathetic effect than even the most blood-strewn of the Spanish works at the National Gallery.

Salvador Dali, 'Christ of Saint John of the Cross' (1951)

I do, however, recommend a visit to the exhibition. Perhaps the artworks will make your body twitch more than mine, and give you a tiny taste of the realities of flagellation.