Abstract
Digital communication has created a world where we have evolved to hate our enemies. We need to stop building a “you are either with us or against us” society, argues
Empathy can be simply defined as putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, seeing things from their point of view. It connects to freedom of expression because when citizens can openly articulate their perspectives, and get listened to, a vital interchange occurs through which we understand those who think differently to us. It’s how we rub along in a heterogeneous society. It’s how we make peace. It’s how we discover that beneath these differences we share a common humanity. Put that way the exercise of empathy sounds like the solution to strife. But it can also be the cause.
“We’ve evolved to hate our enemies, to ignore people we barely know and to distrust anybody who doesn’t look like us. Even if we are largely cooperative within our communities, we become almost a different animal in our treatment of strangers.” That’s how the primatologist, Frans de Waal, explains that the empathy instinct can make us loyal to the members of our own tribe (our country, our race, our religion, even a football fan base) and hostile to others.
In 2017 Taimoor Raza is sentenced to death in Pakistan for allegedly insulting the Prophet Mohammed on social media. In 1696 Thomas Aikenhead was hanged in Edinburgh for saying theology was “ill-invented nonsense - poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras”. The crime of blasphemy has been one of our purest expressions of tribalism. We can see how it trumps freedom of speech. Should we insult the cherished beliefs of other tribes? We should endeavour not to offend for offence’s sake.
But we should always have the right to do so. I like the statement on the Oxford University website, attempting to tackle the campus curse of safe spaces, no-platforming and trigger warnings: “Free speech is the lifeblood of a university inevitably this will mean that members of the university are confronted with views that some find unsettling, extreme or offensive. The university must therefore foster freedom of expression within a framework of robust civility.” Robust civility, I’m attracted to that idea, combining as it does, the principle of respect with debate, an exchange of views that requires listening as well as broadcasting.
CREDIT: Thomas Kuhlenbeck/Ikon
In my time chairing Arts Council England I came to understand that arts and popular culture have always performed a vital role in getting us to understand the predicament of those who are different to us. In the 19th century Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies helped lead to the legislation outlawing child labour. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin paved the way for Abraham Lincoln’s abolition of slavery. More recently the BBC’s Kathy Come Home changed our view of homelessness. And our current soap operas continue, day in day out, to help us appreciate the lives of others. Indeed, in Rwanda a radio soap opera is credited with powerfully promoting harmony between Hutu and Tutsi.
This telling of stories engages us with people and groups we might otherwise ignore. It’s what I call pro-social empathy, in that it goes beyond the tribe. Such a free flow of narratives is not just freedom of expression, it’s a necessary exercise of what it is to be human. This is why we choose to fund the BBC and the arts councils. Censor the arts, as many countries do, and you curtail not just rights, but also a functioning society (in the true meaning of society).
Today we find ourselves at the beginning of what will be a digital millennium. We’re more than 20 years into the internet age and its effect on our society is already profound, even though we barely understand it. Benefits are already widely heralded: infinite search and learning, new sectors of industry, worldwide instant communications, dating and social media. But with this connectivity come darker phenomena: cyberbullying, revenge porn, radicalisation and fake news. We were told in the 1990s that this new territory was free, open, unmediated and could not be regulated. But the internet is now part of our society and we regulate societies for the common good. So laws govern freedom of expression online, as they do offline, in matters of privacy, piracy, libel and hate crime. But they’re often ineffective in this extensive, complex, latter-day Tower of Babel.
As we lead more and more of our lives online several concerning trends are emerging. The first is that such communication can be highly unempathetic. The textual abuse without face-to-face contact means the perpetrator never sees the hurt their words cause. The instant nature of the exchange means that our baser sentiments get put out there without a second thought, unlike the letters we might have written more carefully in the past.
Ease of access also means that we have far more interchanges than we could ever have imagined 20 years ago. And although we discover much that is new to us, many now use the internet to link up with those who merely share their existing prejudices.
My own belief is that Holocaust denial, for instance, will increase dramatically in the coming decades as fellow travellers find each other and confirm their mutual prejudices. The onus this puts on education and impartial news sources to redress the balance is huge. When we read that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief are involved in a child sex abuse ring at a Washington caf-eteria, we laugh at the implausibility of it. But not all of us. Edgar Welch went down there with a firearm to investigate after the fake news had been shared and promoted by thousands online.
Whatever laws we have, abuses of freedom of expression on the internet are going to grow. They’re profoundly anti-social and constitute a major threat. The exercise of the empathy instinct is part of the problem, but it’s also part of the solution.
