How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

by Elif Shafak

The moment we stop listening to diverse opinions is also when we stop learning. Because the truth is we don’t learn much from sameness and monotony. We usually learn from differences.

In life most of what we have come to understand throughout the years we have acquired by interacting with dissimilar, and often challenging views, and by encountering information, criticism and knowledge hitherto unfamiliar to us, and then processing these internally by growing insight from seeds of discussions, readings and observations.

The thing about groupthink or social media bubbles is that they aggressively feed and amplify repetition. And repetition, however familiar and comforting, will never challenge us mentally, emotionally or behaviourally. Echoes simply reiterate what has already been said at some point in time, long gone. Like dead stars, they might seem to have a presence from a distance, but in truth, they are completely devoid of life and light. Echo chambers, therefore, severely limit the breadth and depth of the views we subject ourselves to, they ration knowledge. And, at the same time, they limit wisdom: wisdom, which connects the mind and the heart, activates emotional intelligence, expands empathy and understanding, allows us to reach beyond the lonely confines of our own minds and engage with the rest of humanity, to listen to them and learn from them. To leave one echo chamber for another is no solution either. We must...

Motherlands are castles made of glass. In order to leave them, you have to break something – a wall, a social convention, a cultural norm, a psychological barrier, a heart. What you have broken will haunt you. To be an emigré, therefore, means to forever bear shards of glass in your pockets. It is easy to forget they are there, light and minuscule as they are, and go on with your life, your little ambitions and important plans, but at the slightest contact the shards will remind you of their presence. They will cut you deep.

There is more overlap, there is always a greater possibility of finding common ground between people of multiple belongings than between people of mutually exclusive identities. And yet, why is it that, at school, in the family, and in society, we seldom teach our children that they have multiple belongings and can dearly love both their countries and communities while at the same time remembering they are citizens of humanity.

It is a problem, the endless barrage of information – let alone, misinformation. We cannot process this much, and the truth is, we don’t. In reality, we only skim through the news, scroll up and down our screens, without contemplating, and more importantly, without feeling. After a while, numbers don’t mean much any more, whether it is 5,000 refugees who have died or 10,000, the difference doesn’t and won’t register unless we know the personal stories behind the statistics. Information flows amid our fingers like dry sand. It also gives us the illusion that we know the subject (and if we don’t, we just ‘google’ it) when, in truth, we know so little. Paradoxically, too much information is an obstacle in front of true knowledge.

Knowledge requires reading. Books. In-depth analyses. Investigative journalism. Then there is wisdom, which connects the mind and the heart, activates emotional intelligence, expands empathy. For that we need stories and storytelling.