Wonder Space

I was recently interviewed by a friend Steve Cole on his podcast about wonder spaces. A great podcast series exploring wonder.

I'd love to hear any comments... let me know!

I hate charity adverts

A couple of months ago Charlotte Whittaker wrote a guest blog entry... She's been helping me at Empathy Action a little bit and she wrote another great piece that I edited.

Confession: I hate charity adverts

by Charlotte Whittaker (Empathy Action volunteer)

I know I shouldn’t, but I do. 

I hate watching them as they bring the suffering of those affected by war, poverty and disease into my comfortable cream living room. 

I hate my impulse to turn them off or distract myself on my phone, because I know that ignoring them doesn't make the situations in Syria, or Nepal, or Libya any less real. 

I hate the pictures of starving children who belong to a nameless number beyond my help even if I text £2 a month to the number flashing on the screen. 

I hate the jarring contrast of the Loreal model’s sleek waves with the wispy hair of the old lady rocking back and forth in grief, a juxtaposition which seems like an insult to her suffering and yet is part of the crazy world we live in. 

I hate that organisations which I believe in and support are driven to use manipulative music and images because we are all so deadened to advertising that nothing cuts through. 

I hate the one-sided picture of the world that adverts give; Africa reduced to cracked earth and crying children and people with hopes and loves and individual quirks transformed into a sea of pitiful faces. 

I hate that even when charities see the more nuanced picture they feel they have to tug on our heartstrings to raise the money they need.

I hate charity adverts even though I think they’re necessary and all the more because I believe that those who live comfortable lives like me should be reminded of the suffering of the world and spurred to act. 

I suspect I’m not alone too. I’m sure others would join me when I own up to wishing I could empathise more sincerely with the people who appear so fleetingly on my TV screen, newsfeed and google sidebar. The problem is: it’s very difficult to empathise with someone you’re being encouraged to pity. 

I’m not really relating to them through conversations, sharing of stories, taking time to do things and building up that shared-ness that empathy so powerfully helps deep connection with one another. But I am pitying them and settling to relate to the next best thing, a charity or even the TV, tablet or phone. 

This suggests that seeing the positive aspects of the lives of those living in even the most horrendous conditions is essential for relating to them as people rather than as symbols. 

I was recently impressed with the call for seeing 3 year old Aylan to be remembered as a happy boy rather than the refugee boy who was washed up upon a beach last week. This seeing and taking a new vantage point, however, is not easy. And that’s the thing: pitying is easy and empathising, perspective taking, understanding others, is hard. Convenience is winning all around us. 

We are not winning the war against convenient judgements that reinforce our stereotypes.. 

Rather the battle is much harder. We need to seek out the hope, creativity, fun, laughter, bravery, sacrifice and beauty that exist alongside the pain and tragedy. We need more modern films and novels about the experience of poverty to give depth to the people in the adverts and more direct interaction, particularly over the internet, to help create the real human bond on which empathy depends.

Inevitably this deep human connection is missing from most charity adverts that have barely 90 seconds to convey a deep message, despite the real efforts many do make to put a name and face to their appeals. Different styles of advertising that go beyond pathetic appeal may be part of the solution, but the onus should not rest solely with the charities. After all, their first duty is to the communities they seek to help and where the need is so great who am I to suggest they change the way they advertise because it makes me feel uncomfortable and guilty? 

On the contrary, I think the responsibility rests with people like me, watching the suffering of war torn countries flash onscreen between men selling deodorant and PPI claims. At very least I think we have a duty to educate ourselves. We cannot let a minute of emotionally evocative images be our only guide to complex political situations, awful conflicts or even whole countries. 

I think it is almost impossible for most of us to instantly empathise with the little girl we see drinking dirty water on a poster, rather than pity her. I wonder whether one way to start to empathise, and in doing this unlock a more genuine response to her suffering, is to try imagining her as she is - a whole person, with a best friend, a favourite song, talents and dreams. I hope that maybe empathy might be a way to break through the impenetrable barrier of the TV screen and a better motivator for me and others to take action through giving and working to combat the atrocious injustice of global poverty. After all, I may not like charity adverts, but they remind me that I need to understand others.

Three Months On

(this thought provoking article that I edited is written by a friend who took part in one of the simulations we ran and has come back to do some research on empathy. She's a guest contributor!) 

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Three Months On

by Charlotte Whittaker

‘NO, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad….

Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit ‘Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984’, but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors.’

Do these words ring any bells?

On the 17th April Katie Hopkins published them in her column in the Sun under the headline,

‘Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants’.

The following night on the 18th April, a ship carrying fleeing migrants sank during a storm off the coast of Libya. Over 800 people lost their lives.

The combination produced a perfect social media storm.

Katie’s comments went viral alongside news of the disaster and the country gave a collective shudder. The story lingered on for a couple of weeks while election focussed immigration rhetoric flooded the media. Then, as quickly as it had come, the issue disappeared beneath the tide of the unrelenting news cycle.

In trying to examine Katie’s massive failure in empathy as symptomatic of the larger empathy deficit in society I have discovered something else in myself and others- our lack in venturing from an indignant reaction to bailing ourselves out of the pandemic empathy bankruptcy.  

Like so many others, my immediate and instinctive response to Katie’s comments was one of disgust.  An overriding tone of many of the criticisms I read too. This response isn’t wrong. What she said was in severe bad taste and this is where I, and so many others’, knees jerked to react. We all found ourselves thinking: “where was her empathy and compassion for the least of these” or “where was her compassion for people choosing to make a perilous journey with their children across a sea”. Our fingers were pointing and wagging. Unfortunately the response, however, was not one of empathy with migrants. Sympathy yes. But not empathy.

There is a temptation to be indignant at her lack of empathy but miss the fact that our response also frequently lacks compassion for the 800 who died and the millions whose future in Europe is uncertain.

Why should I bother removing myself from my screen to place myself in the shoes of terrified, drowning migrants as a truly human and natural response. The mere thought of it is massive. Clearly indignation is much easier than empathy making our empathy debt that much deeper.

So how can we tackle it? There’s certainly no easy answer. All we can hope for is small steps; one person-at-a-time expanding their capacity for empathy and making the painful choice of investing emotionally in others.

Roman Krznaric, one of the influential thinkers of the empathy movement, believes it is possible to learn to empathise more and gives some ideas in his article ‘6 habits of highly empathic people’.

Empathy begins with contact, connection and company. It begins with the migrants, whose suffering most of us cannot begin to imagine but whose experiences we should nevertheless make an effort to understand. One place to start is with Hakim Bello’s personal account of the journey in the Guardian. Another resource is the BBC’s ‘Syrian journey’ simulation which lets you make the decisions of someone fleeing their home as a result of the war. Collective empathy is an essential motivator of policy in this situation, with potentially huge consequences such as the decision to reinstate search and rescue teams in the Mediterranean since the sinking.

Empathy is so desperately needed here with Katie and her thousands of supporters and elsewhere. It is possibly even hard to empathise here because we don’t want to admit that we share some of Katie’s lack of empathy for the migrants. Uncomfortable as it may be, it is important, because empathy might just help us understand, and even possibly influence, the point of view of this politically powerful group. Similarly, empathy with EU decision makers will show us that the migrant crisis is a terrifyingly complicated situation, so that we can understand and support those who are honestly searching for good long term solutions. Looking back to the debate around this story 3 months on reminds us how desperately we need to learn radical empathy.