How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division

by Elif Shafak

If all my friends and acquaintances think like me, vote like me, speak like me, if I only read the kind of books, newspapers and magazines that are in line with what I have read before, if I only follow online sites that sympathise with my preconceived verdicts, if I only watch videos or programmes that essentially validate my worldview, and if nearly all of my information comes from the same limited sources, day in, day out, it means that, deep within, I want to be surrounded with my mirror image 24/7. That is not only a suffocatingly claustrophobic setting, it is also a profoundly narcissistic existence.

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.

That is why, even long after our migrations and relocations, if you listen carefully, you can still detect traces of our motherlands in our broken accents, half-smiles, uncomfortable silences.

But I am also deeply attached to the Balkans. Bring me together with an author of Greek, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Albanian or Romanian background, you would be amazed to see how much we have in common. Equally, I carry many elements in my soul from the Middle East. So this time put me next to an author of Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Egyptian, Israeli, Palestinian or Tunisian background. Once again, you’d be surprised to see how similar we are.

I have multiple belongings.

True, not everyone can travel across cultures but not everyone who does is necessarily ‘elite’.

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.

They would read and discuss Althusser, Guy Debord and Jean-Paul Sartre, though less so Simone de Beauvoir

For my parents and their friends, back then, revolution was not a noun. It was a verb.

was fascinated by this new world that I was thrust into, a world where women were clearly not treated equally but neither were they weak or timid.

In Ankara’s only amusement park, next to an artificial lagoon around which families strolled, cracking sunflower seeds,

‘Don’t thank me,’ Grandma said. ‘You focus on improving your daughter’s life. We inherit our circumstances, we improve them for the next generation. I had little education, I wanted you to do better. Now you need to make sure your daughter has more than you had. Isn’t this the natural way of the world?’

Today the faith that tomorrow will be better than yesterday is simply no more.

This is what the great political sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described as ‘the parents’ point of arrival’ being imagined as ‘the children’s starting point – and a point with yet more roads stretching ahead, all leading upwards’.

downward. A March 2020 Pew Research Center survey showed that the oldest of Generation Z have been particularly hard hit by the coronavirus crisis. Much more than Baby Boomers, Generation Xers or Millennials.

Angst, it can be argued, resembles fear. But whereas fear tends to revolve around a threat, an opponent or an enemy, angst is far more subtle, diffused, pervasive. It is, in the words of Heidegger, about ‘being-in-the-world as such’.

We are experiencing the loss of the self. ‘The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world as if it were nothing at all. No other loss occurs so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. – is sure to be noticed.’*

If truth be told, if from time to time you do not catch yourself overwhelmed with worry and indecision, demoralised and exhausted, or even incandescent, maybe you are not really following what is going on – here, there and everywhere. We have legitimate reasons to be despondent.

In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath there is a moment when a character describes her suffering with the following words: ‘I am just pain covered with skin.’ It seems to me, more and more, we are pain, and hurt, and loneliness covered with skin.

Anger in the face of injustice and oppression is not only a dignified human response but often the antithesis of indifference. Anger is also the emotion with the longest memory.

‘I get angry about things, then go on and work’, said the novelist, essayist, scholar Toni Morrison.

Mass destruction doesn’t start with concentration camps or gas chambers. It doesn’t start with putting marks on neighbours’ doors, just because they are ‘different’ – or imposing laws for minorities to carry particular signs or wear certain clothes. Discrimination always starts with words.

One of the greatest paradoxes of our times is that hardliners are more passionate, engaged and involved than many moderates. When we do not engage in civic discourse and public space, we become increasingly isolated and disconnected, thereby breeding apathy.

How do we simultaneously remain engaged and manage to remain sane?

We live in an age in which there is too much information, less knowledge and even less wisdom. That ratio needs to be reversed. We definitely need less information, more knowledge, and much more wisdom.

Perhaps in an era when everything is in constant flux, in order to be more sane, we need a blend of conscious optimism and creative pessimism. In the words of Gramsci, ‘the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will’.

Until we open our ears to the vast, the endless, the multiple belongings and multiple stories the world has for us, we will find only a false version of sanity, a hall of mirrors that reflects ourselves but never offers us a way out. Do not be afraid of complexity. Be afraid of people who promise an easy shortcut to simplicity.

‘What we call the beginning is often the end … The end is where we start from.’