This powerful and thought-provoking book was published during the relaxation between the first and second Covid 19 lockdowns in England in 2020. Heightened emotions arising from decades of information overload, increasingly freighted with disinformation and misinformation, deepened worldwide fears and divisions. Wise words were in short supply.
Unusually for a polemic, its analysis and remedies are nuanced and perceptive. She has faith in human nature, flawed though she admits it to be, but not in utopian solutions borne of nostalgia for an idealised past order. She argues that the best way to dissolve over-reliance upon information, reliable or not, is to make the effort to develop dependable knowledge as a good in itself, and that the pursuit of wisdom is the end goal – a life of wise actions, known by fruits of tolerance, kindness and good relationships.
Compressed into fewer than 100 pages, she pithily outlines the perilous condition of most twenty-first century societies, how our freedoms and our democracies are under attack from populists and demagogues. She offers the transformative power of stories as a reliable source for individuals who want to resist these trends, who want to live wisely.
In its first pages she offers two stories drawn from her own life, one showing how she failed, and the other how she succeeded, in maintaining a connection with suffering humanity. Both were assaults upon a person’s sense of identity – another’s and her own.
As a stranger newly arrived in Istanbul, she missed an opportunity to show fellow feeling and kindness to another outsider, a transgender woman beaten down by life, whom she overheard sobbing in the street below her flat one dark night.
The other comes from Shafak’s early schooling: teachers subjected her to harsh treatment for her left-handedness, a taboo in Turkey at the time. Instinctively, she felt her identity was under threat but she found an unlikely ally in the soft letter ğ in the Turkish alphabet. It too had no voice; it was silent other than in lengthening a preceding vowel.
Fascinated by the intuited connection, at home she repeatedly practiced forming this overlooked alphabetical outcast, first with her “sinful and unwanted” left-hand, then with the right-hand. This evolved into adding the silent ğ to the beginning of words, gaining the desired dexterity all the while with her right-hand, channelling her self-assertion in an alliance with another outcast.
These examples illustrate a core theme: championing our kinship with life’s outsiders: the ostracised, the othered, immigrants, exiles, the downtrodden, those taken for granted.
“A human being, every human being, is boundless and contains multitudes,” she writes in a loose paraphrase of Walt Whitman’s famous line: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Our bodies, emotions and thoughts are multitudinous too. If we distance ourselves from the multitudes around and within us, we have misunderstood and undervalued vital connections and our innate energies, and have impoverished our social and individual life in the process.
Her view is that the freedom to be ourselves within society is the context in which such relationships should be allowed and deepened. Democracy – though flawed – is humanity’s best attempt yet to foster such tolerance and unity, she avers. But there are those who wish to rule us who see this as a threat to their power and authority, and offer simple solutions to complex situations instead – populists and demagogues promising much but delivering only for the self-interest of a privileged few.
And her key solution? Shafak writes: “It is mostly through stories that we learn to think, perceive, feel and remember the world in a more nuanced and reflective way… and start to imagine lives beyond the one we are living, recognising the complexity and richness of identities and the damage we do to ourselves and to others when we seek to reduce them to a single defining characteristic.”
In 2020 Shafak noticed many people changing their life priorities. The Covid lockdowns had allowed time for self-reflection. She hoped many such changes would stick but anticipated societal and political pushback. The pushback has happened; not all (perhaps few) reappraisals of working and family lives have been sustained.
We need only note the conflicts since 2020 to see more freedoms and more democracies under threat, the slide into a much more dangerous world.
But do the core messages of this book still stand up? Reading it at the start of every year could prove a welcome opportunity for regular self-reflection upon what is most important in life.
How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division, Elif Shafak, Wellcome Collection, UK, 2020
© Kit Pearce