The School of Life

Elke Lahousse Introduces Project In-Between

I am in-between. I'm living in-between cities (London vs Leuven). I'm in-between jobs (journalist vs student). And I've always been in-between haircuts.

I'm taking a career break from my job as a fashion editor, to cultivate the wondrous state of 'being in-between'. This may sound very Amélie Poulain meets Alice in Wonderland, living in an interstitial world where anything can happen at any time. But the truth is more, let's say, urgent. A eureka moment hit me, about a year ago. A moment that caused a snowball effect of epiphanies.

The trigger for my aha-experience was a book that I bought at The School of Life, Cognitive Surplus, written by Clay Shirky. In short, the book is about how the world has never been so connected before, how together we've always known more, and how we should start using new technologies like YouTube and Facebook in their most efficient way.

Meaning: don't just share Lady Gaga's latest video, but share better, collaborate smarter. Think the Arab Spring, or Occupy this and that, as recent examples of people gathering together online to change something profoundly offline.

The examples given in the book were exciting, because - strangely - I hadn't realised the power of social networks before, in the accumulating way Shriky describes them. On a personal and local level, yes, cavemen also shared information and goods. But this was about taking it to the next level, the global power of the crowd, and seeing patterns.

Then the snowball did its thing, leading me to a world where everyone was thinking in a new way. We Think, explained in this beautiful video. What’s mine is yours, explained here. Malcolm Gladwell’s books, Professor Manuel Castells' research, and a dozen of TED talks and real life examples. Was there a mind shift happening in how we work, consume, think?

In the wonderful Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson describes the history of great ideas, and how it can take twenty years for society to be ready for an idea - isn't it always about perfect timing. Putting all these symptoms together, what exactly were we getting ready for?

American economist Jeremy Rifkin came into the picture and spoiled the party. After watching his YouTube hit, there was no way back. "I’ve never seen a moment in history like this before. We’re really asleep, all across the world.” Rifkin explains  - terrifying clearly – the three crises that are threatening us today.

Then it hit me: the whole world is in-between. Banking crisis, Eurozone crisis, capitalism under attack, climate change, energy crisis, overpopulation, greying population. Old structures are crumbling, and new super structures are not clearly visible yet. No political or economic solution seems big enough. And yet, there is a communication revolution going on, and we never had more access to information. How will we name this period in history, looking back fifty years from now?

Not knowing what to do with all these urgent insights, I decided to move to London for a while, looking for perspective in the city that bursts with ideas and great universities. So I'm a visiting student here and there, reading more books, talking to very smart people, and having loads of coffee, in order to better understand *deep breath* the challenges of the 21st century. I call it 'Project In-Between'.

When The School of Life asked me to blog about my quest, I said yes, only in the name of research and because of the alarming bells that I could no longer ignore. Project In-Between will try to be a collage of projects and people illustrating the shift that's happening around us. Some people are doing really exciting things out there.

But I'm not a specialist. Little do I know, but I understand the power of networks. Together we know more. So let's play a game. This is how it works: free association. The following weeks I'll share symptoms of ‘being in-between’, and you can share related links or ideas to that topic. It’s what we call crowdsourcing in journalism, going from A to B. Testing hypothesis by trial and error, by wisdom of the crowd. It can be messy, but we'll take it from there.

Elke Lahousse is a journalist, currently living in London. She works for Knack Weekend, the leading lifestyle magazine in Belgium. Knack Weekend is part of the weekly magazine trilogy Knack + Knack Weekend + Knack Focus. www.knack.be, www.knackweekend.be, www.knackfocus.be

Illustration Sarah Vanbelle www.sarahvanbelle.be

Dear Bibliotherapist

 Dear Bibliotherapist,

An enormous drill shattered my peace last night, just outside my window. I looked out in dismay to see the town's Christmas lights being attached to my wall. Bah, humbug! With the advent of advent, I ask myself how will I survive the endless parties of next month. The coming of the lights reminds me how little I enjoy the desperate mirth of December. Do you have any ideas of how I can survive this period?

 

Dear Dismayed,

You need stories. You must tell stories, and collect them. When the cold is eating into your bones and the world outside is increasingly bleak, it is the time to come together and tell tales of every kind. The warmth of human contact is what we crave, and our restless minds need stimulation from all kinds of fable- true ones of terror, false ones of fantasy, seductive stories of utopian eras, dramatic descriptions of sacrifice and sweat. Embrace this time of year as an opportunity to gather friends and strangers with whom you can exchange, pass on, and celebrate the yarn.

Muster a group of cronies, preferably somewhere near a roaring fire and some fine malt whiskey. While the flames inquisitively lick the logs, shadows scuttling into  corners, pick random books from your shelves and fling them carelessly into piles around your friends feet. Strew newspapers artistically over the edges of armchairs - some tabloids, some broadsheets,  Have some blank paper to hand. Then be ready to make merry with the art of telling tales.

1. Turn to your neighbour and ask him or her about themselves. Delve into their history and discover something about them that you never knew, whether it is the story of their birth, something peculiar that happened to them today, or an extreme event in their life. Encourage them to embellish, exaggerate and use dialogue. They will soon be telling you a story. Everyone should do this at the same time, so that no-one feels self  conscious.

2. Each teller picks up two books at random. They write down the first line of one book and the last line of the other, on the same piece of paper. When everyone has done this, take it in turns for each of you to go on a verbal journey from the first line to the last. Thus if you have for instance the first line of Moby Dick ("Call me Ishmael") and the last line Jamrach's Menagerie, ("Very far away, still on my journey, very far away and more beautiful than you could ever imagine."), then you five minutes to fill the narrative gap in whatever way you like.

3. Separate out. Go to different rooms in the house (bathroom, bedroom, broom closet - even in the garden or front doorstep - a bit of freezing air whistling up your shirt could help your creative juices no end). Sit down with pen and paper and write automatically, whatever comes into your head for ten minutes.Start with the word "Once". Come back together and pass your paper onto someone else. Take it In turns to read aloud.

4.Each pick up a newspaper. Turn to page 6, column 3, line 22. Write down the sentence you find there. Do the same thing with page 8, column 1, line 45. And page 12, column 5,one 18. Now use these 3 sentences to create a 5 minute story that you tell the group. Don't spend time planning. Leap in.

Take this storytelling urge into everyday life. When you are at parties, bring out your inner fabulist. Draw upon your memories, imagination and observations to fascinate your friends and colleagues. Enjoy language, make deliberate repetitions, sprinkle your anecdotes with wit. Emulate the great bards. Check out Chaucer. Grab the Gawayne poet, and aspire to his alliterative powers. Read great writers of the present; David Mitchell, Jon Mcgregor, Ali Smith. Copy them shamelessly. Think like a writer. Jot down observations about your day, snatches of dialogue, moments of beauty glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. Weave them into your small talk.

You will soon be the star of the show, and no party will be worthy of the name without you.

You will be desperate to retire to an armchair for a nice quiet read. Put your feet up by the log fire and pick up a good book...

Ella Berthoud is a bibliotherapist for The School of Life.  For more information about the service, click here.  This Christmas, our bibliotherapists have created bespoke prescriptions for the ‘Christmas Fanatic’ or ‘Christmas Sceptic’ available as a beautifully designed card offering solace or cheer in equal quantities….  Available for £3.99 alongside other gift ideas at our Bloomsbury shop.

Interview with Tom Chatfield on Real-World Living

Please provide a brief introduction about yourself and tell us what you do...I’m the author of three books about digital culture, including one on games, and also do a lot of speaking, consulting and design around game and digital experiences. Perhaps my greatest interest is in how and why people use digital technologies, and what it means to improve their experience.

What is exciting about the gaming space right now?  I’m most excited by the fact that games are breaking out of the specialist mold of being something for “gamers” and becoming something for absolutely everyone, of all ages and aptitudes. This is overwhelmingly due to the spread of mobile and tablet devices, and social networks. In the last few years, digital play has become a part of hundreds of millions of people’s lives in a way that is genuinely open and accessible, and I think this is changing what it means to create a game, or indeed any kind of fun, sociable digital experience.

What are the interesting ways that you’re seeing games being used? Education, problem solving, skill building, health etc? Education is always the most exciting thing for me: good games are engines for learning, and I’ve seen them starting to be used in schools in the UK and elsewhere to engage pupils who it can be incredibly hard to reach through conventional educational approaches. Then there is the use of games in professional settings — from medicine to the military — to train people up for scenarios that are simply too serious to be done for real. And finally there’s using them to learn about ourselves, from economic behavior to thinking about how we behave towards each other in any kind of complex, task-oriented setting. These are young fields, but ones with immense potential.

What’s your feeling on the use of social games? What is their ability to create collaboration? When you have people playing together, they are fully themselves in a way that you don’t get in almost any other area: you get the whole person, willingly collaborating on a task with others, and alongside this you can get some wonderfully complex behaviors. From things like Guilds in massively multiplayer online games, I think we can learn a lot about what it means to collaborate with other people on a task through digital media; perhaps more importantly, I also think that playing with others like this can build interpersonal bonds, and help us experiment with ideas about how we work best in teams, and what it means to work effectively together, both as a leader and as a follower.

What are the compelling motivations for people to play/participate? Games are all about satisfaction, of various complex kinds: you can use the word “fun,” but it doesn’t necessarily get to the root of the deep sense of achievement and mastered obstacles that some games offer. Ultimately, though, all games can be thought of as mechanisms for generating emotional responses – they are their own justification, and if they are well-made, they are intensely satisfying because they offer many layers of emotional satisfaction, from the simple delight of being transported to another world to the rewards of working with others towards a common goal, and gaining skills and achieving mastery. Unlike the world, a good game is fair: you know that you can win, and get credit for your skills. This kind of fairness is a huge advantage that games have over life.

What are your thoughts on the role of sensors, tracking and data? I think we’re going to see a steady integration of some kinds of play into real-world living: games able to respond to where we are, who we are with, what we are doing. But I’m not sure that this is as big a deal as some people make out – because ultimately it asks an awful lot from people, and they may not be willing to share data or information in this way. Data in general is a much more exciting field — because the fact that you can measure absolutely everything that someone does within a game presents you with a staggering opportunity to learn new things about behaviour, or to answer questions of what people like and want very precisely indeed. The kind of calibration you can achieve already, in terms of getting things just right to keep people playing and engaged, is powerful and a little frightening.

What are the big opportunities within the space? What’s the future hold? As I said in the beginning, the biggest opportunities for me are the ones that involve the most people: games not as highly complex experiences, but as casual, mobile, social experiences that tens or hundreds of millions of people can do while they go about their daily lives. Smartphones are fast becoming the world’s most important gaming platform, and I think this is a field that has huge growth in it — while specialist gaming machines, like consoles, have their work cut out in surviving against this competition for attention.

The future, for me, is above all about engineering play experiences to be as pleasurable for ordinary users as possible – Angry Birds is an excellent example of something that stands out because of the emphasis it puts on ease and seamlessness of experience, and because of its universal appeal. Although we mustn’t forget that games are a fertile area for innovation, too. Look at Kinect: digital play is one of those areas in which, if it’s made pleasurable and delightful enough, people are willing to embrace novelty in a way they wouldn’t even consider in most other fields.

This interview was conducted by Timothy Ryan and featured on PSFK in preparation for their upcoming ‘Future of Gaming’ report.   Tom Chatfield is a faculty member of The School of Life, and has recently developed our new class ‘How to Thrive in the Digital Age’, which will be running again on the 20 February 2012. 

Click here to watch Tom Chatfield  at TED Global 2010 on the ‘Seven Ways Videogames Engage The Brain’.

We All Need Words on the Positives of Negativity

“Bah, humbug!” We All Need Words on how a can’t-do attitude will help your writing.

’Tis the season to be jolly. Good will, good cheer, good tidings to all men, women, children and pets. Pah. All this tinsel-wrapped positivity is tiring. We’re told time and time again to look on the bright side, but we’ve been looking and it’s all, well, a bit bland.

We like a bit of negative thinking. It has more oomph. It makes for interesting views, different angles and new perspectives. And it packs a punch. Imagine the Ten Commandments without the ‘thou shalt nots’. They’d boil down to ten different ways of saying ‘thou shalt be nice’. (Please.)

We’re conditioned to look for the silver linings in everything, to the point where it seems pretty clear cut: negativity = bad, positivity = good. A whole self-help industry peddles these myths, as US author (and School of Life sermon star) Barbara Ehrenreich sums up in the title of the book she wrote after she was diagnosed with cancer: “Smile or die”. Frustrated by the expectation that she should be relentlessly positive about her illness, she delved into America’s self-help industry and found that these reasons to be cheerful can do more harm than good. And as Richard Wiseman says in 59 Seconds: “Attempting to ‘think yourself happy’ by suppressing negative thoughts can make people obsess on the very thing that makes them unhappy.”

Negativity gets a bad rap. But it shouldn’t. It can also be practical, pragmatic and realistic. And funny. Imagine the British sense of humour without a healthy dose of cynicism. A whole guffaw of comedians would be out of work for a start. Victor Meldrew and Edmund Blackadder would be reduced to high-fiving, can-do team players and Charlie Brooker’s Guardian columns swapped for saccharine pills of sugar and spice. No fun. No fun at all. 

In our day jobs, we see the cult of positivity in the things we’re asked to write. Every company says they’re ‘open’, ‘honest’ and whatever, until they all blend into a big pile of soppy mush. Google’s ‘don’t be evil’ mantra loses all its oomph if you give it a positive spin. ‘Be good’? In fact it’s saying a different thing altogether.

We’ve become obsessed with hiding bad news (a blinkered optimism that Barbara Ehrenreich argues helped contribute to the collapse of the US banks). It’s why you read about ‘efficiencies’ or ‘restructures’ not ‘redundancies’. ‘New call plans’ not ‘your bill’s gone up’. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a smile through gritted teeth. Spoonfuls of sugar to help the medicine go down. And it doesn’t help anyone.

So don’t be afraid of warts-n-all writing. If you’re struggling to pen a dating ad, start with how you’re always late (and say sorry in advance). In amongst the admirable achievements on your CV, sprinkle a little bit of real life to show there really is a human being behind those polished words. We once interviewed someone who wrote “and I’m not as posh as you think I am” after she mentioned her well-to-do hobby. She got an interview for that line alone. No one wants to date or work with Mr/Ms Perfect really and your foibles will help you stand out. Try it.

We’re big fans of negativity. To put it another way, positive thinking sucks. Pass the humbugs.

We All Need Words are running the last 'Words for Life' class of 2011 this Saturday 3 December. A day of putting pen to paper for all those things people never tell you how to write: CVs, dating ads, complaint letters, tweets. There are a few places left if you're feeling wordy...please click here for more information.

 

Lynda Shaw on the Brain Benefits of Common Decency

Last year I had a meeting in Fulham, London.  I parked my car and walked through a small park to get to the street I needed.

As I hurried along in my high heels concentrating that I didn’t slip on the falling leaves, I noticed a rather dirty looking man lying on a bench asleep.  On the ground next to him were three carrier bags that looked as if they contained some old rags.

I kept walking.

I went out of the gate, had my meeting and went back through the park.

The man was still there, he hadn’t moved.

I kept walking.

I was just about to leave the park the other side when I stopped.  I turned round and walked back past the sleeping man, back out of the park and found a small supermarket.  I bought a sandwich and an orange juice.

Yet again I entered the park.  I very quietly approached the sleeping man.  The last thing I wanted was for him to awake startled, especially if he was sleeping off the effects of alcohol.  I gently put the food and drink by his head and carried on back to my car.

For sometime I said nothing about this.  But some months later I was giving a talk on altruism and kindness and decided this story would help illustrate a point.  This is why I’m typing these words now – to illustrate a point.

The point is, after this encounter, I felt good for several days.  I did what we teach our children to do, to care for one another.

I know a bit about brains.  So I know that one of the reasons I felt good after this was because all those wonderful, free neurotransmitters were working their magic in my head.  Because doing something for someone else without expecting anything in return is the best way to put our brain in the finest possible state.

It’s funny how science now ‘gives us permission’ to practice common decency.

Lynda Shaw is a cognitive neuroscientist specialising in consciousness and emotion. She will be leading an event around understanding depression at The School of Life in January.  For more details click here.  www.drlyndashaw.com

David Baker on Compassion and Oxytocin

With perfect timing, TED recently released Paul Zak’s talk on “Trust, morality - and oxytocin”, first given at TEDGlobal in July and now on the TED website. A “neuroeconomist” at Claremont Graduate University in southern California, Zak argues that values such as compassion, empathy, trust, respect, love and so on are hard wired in our brains because it makes good evolutionary sense for us to cooperate. And he says he has isolated the molecule - oxytocin - that makes them happen.

People with more oxytocin in their bloodstream appear to be more trusting, more empathic and more respectful than others. Most of us have it to a greater or lesser extent, depending on our mood and the situation (dancing and sex are good for oxytocin production, stress isn’t). Five per cent of us barely produce it at all, and they’re the people not to to business with. Testosterone dilutes its effect, which may be why many men have such a hard time “sharing”. And hugs make the body produce more (which sounds like good news for us oxytocin-depleted Y-chromosome carriers).

It’s not always comfortable to hear moral values, such as compassion, trust and empathy, described in chemical terms. Somehow it feels they should left to moral philosophers and saints. But, even as a non-scientist, I think we should welcome scientists’ investigations into the forces behind moral decisions. To discover a molecule that correlates with compassionate behaviour doesn’t mean that being compassionate is not a moral stance. We’re not slaves to the chemicals in our brains, we are the chemicals in our brains and we do plenty of things to raise or lower their levels at will. To make a decision to raise the level of oxytocin in our bodies - Zak’s prescription is “eight hugs a day” - and reduce, say, levels of the stress hormone cortisol, seems as conscious a moral choice as giving to charity or embracing a religious creed. And if the outcome is the same, then let’s get hugging now.

David Baker is a faculty member of The School of Life and former managing editor of Wired Magazine in the UK.  Head to www.davidbakeronline.com for some more. 

It's the final week of our 'Month of Reaching Out' - follow the campaign on via our facebook page here.

Melanie Challenger on Reaching Out to the Natural World

When we glance across the road at the faces of strangers in our vicinity, it is mirrored by looking out over a field or a stand of trees and having no knowledge of the other species living in our midst. Altruism in humans may have arisen through sexual selection as an attractive quality in mates or as part of a reciprocal process of favour-sharing in return for protection, sustenance, and so forth, we do not know. Certainly, neuroscientists have pinned down regions of the brain associated with altruistic acts, compassion, empathy, the mental seeds of moral conduct. Regardless of its innate biological existence, altruism is associated with knowledge. 

And so, in an age where many of us have little knowledge of the habits or even the identities of many of the plants and species that surround us, I recommend a daily effort to recognise something you have not noticed or understood before. Step outside and take a different path. Stop at the first bird, insect, blade of grass, flower, tree, bush, fruit, etc, you don't know, and watch it for as long as the creature or situation permits. Gather in the mind every detail to make it memorable - using metaphor, simile, anything to encourage its recall later. Then go home and try and identify it. You may have to make several trips to be absolutely sure, but once you know what you've seen, begin to notice it more and more. And begin to read about it from others of our generation who do have knowledge of this species. Is it endangered? How can you help it thrive? As the world comes more and more into lavish detail and focus, it will begin to speak back to you. It will whisper against some things you do and take for granted. It will call out for you to take different routes by different means - to think differently altogether. It will counsel you to care about more than the human world and to espouse new values and discard others. 

Melanie Challenger is a freelance writer. She is the author of ‘Galatea’, her award-winning first collection of poems, and co-author, with Zlata Filipovic, of ‘Stolen Voices’, a history of twentieth century conflict compiled through war diaries. During her research for ‘On Extinction’, she was a Fellow of the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity at University College London from 2007-2010 and International Fellow at the British Antarctic Survey for International Polar Year 2007-2008. Her work was also a recipient of the British Council Darwin Awards. 

Melanie will be speaking next Monday 28 Nov here at The School of Life on 'Reconnecting with Nature'. Click here for more information.

Mark Vernon on the Difficulty of Compassion

Compassion is like happiness. Obviously a great good. And yet, I think it is also like happiness in another way. Its realisation is far more tricky than perhaps first meets the eye. A number of thoughts came to mind as I tried to think it through.

Take the business of practicing compassion, as the month of reaching out encourages us to do. One can clearly will oneself to do a kindness here, offer a comforting word there. A fraction of the world would be a better place for it. But a concern came to my mind that reaching out might become like the injunction to eat five pieces of fruit’n’veg a day. It becomes a burden, one that you chastise yourself for not fulfilling. Your efforts to show compassion to others become a regular reprimand to yourself.

There is also the danger of tokenism. One act of compassion is used, perhaps unconsciously, to alleviate the guilt of the many quietly abusive acts that can fill an average working day. Or, do I visit my uncle in the care home because I care for him or because I feel secret remorse for his being there in the first place?

This is all counterproductive, if you follow Gandhi’s line of thought that you must be the change that you want to see in the world. So, I have the sense that being compassionate towards others requires being compassionate towards yourself too: serious intent, light touch.

To develop the thought further, you might say that the aficionados of compassion possess a certain freedom with themselves. I think this is shown in the well-known story of the Good Samaritan. A priest and a Levite pass by on the other side of the road from the man who has been beaten by robbers, though there is no suggestion in the story that they are not compassionate people. Rather, they are constrained by their fear of a half-dead man. And who can blame them? A half-dead toddler, Wang Yue, was recently passed by on the streets of Guangdong by over a dozen people. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15401055] What the Good Samaritan had was an inner freedom that trumped any fear. He wasn’t tied by convention, or fright, or lack of time. He was free to respond to another human being. Am I that free?

The risks associated with being kind are, in fact, multiple. Will an unexpected act be unwelcome or aggressive? Might it be thought an intrusion or demeaning? Can you judge accurately whether it’s appropriate? Am I free enough to take these risks? Also, there’s an art to receiving acts of compassion: you mustn’t read too much into a warm smile or the squeeze of a hand!

There are interesting parallels between these concerns and the research on empathy. Empathy too is often taken to be an unalloyed good thing. And yet, as Colin Frith, Emeritus Professor at UCL, London, recently told me, an empathic feeling might as easily lead to an unkind response of fight or flight as a good response of compassion. Feeling viscerally upset by someone else’s pain might make you turn your back. Alternatively, collective empathy for my in-group can lead to collective animosity towards those perceived as others. Such empathy powers war. The risk is that my compassion for some leads to self-righteous anger at others.

All that said, compassion has to start somewhere. And to a certain extent it seems possible to train oneself by attempting to form habits of reaching out. Perhaps the best advice is to aim high but start small. For it seems to me that compassion is really aimed at something big and difficult – nothing less than a transformation of your life and yourself. A good question to ask is whether you really want that to happen.

This piece was first published in The Guardian newspaper on Friday 18 November 2012.

Mark Vernon is a philosopher, author and faculty member of The School of Life. www.markvernon.com

Follow our compassion campaign ‘A Month of Reaching Out’ via our facebook page: www.facebook.com/theschooloflifelondon

Michael Landy on Acts of Kindness

In celebration of last Sunday’s World Kindness Day artist Michael Landy talks about his project Acts of Kindness with its curator Cathy Haynes.  Acts of Kindness is an Art on the Underground commission calling for stories of kindness on the Tube. Since the project began in June 2011 the public have sent in over 300 stories. Over the coming year Landy is placing his selection of stories as artworks in Central line stations and trains. To find out more and send in your own story of kindness on the Tube, visit the Art on the Underground website.

Cathy Haynes: On the Tube on the way here, I had this weird little shock of self-awareness. I’d settled into my seat a bit like I would at home and was vaguely watching all these strangers around me almost as if they were on TV. I was daydreaming and wondering about their lives, but making no real connection. Then my eye drifted onto a safety sign and it broke the spell. I suddenly became properly aware that I was surrounded by real people. And I remembered how at the beginning of this project you talked about the way we retreat into a bubble on the Tube. We’re in intimate proximity with strangers Underground but we do our very best to ignore each other, in an amplified version of the way we treat each other in the city above.

Michael Landy: Yes. You enter the Underground and suddenly the atmosphere is completely different: how much eye contact you can give, how close you can get. You become much more aware of people because you’re in such a condensed space. Perhaps because of that we close off and disappear into ourselves. And because of the way we act there, the Underground is the perfect platform (boom, boom) for this project to manifest itself.   

I’m interested in what makes us human in a basic sense apart from our economic identities, especially at this time when people have lots of financial worries and the world seems to be a very troubled place, and we don’t really know how to move forward. I want to find out what makes us human, and what connects us, beyond material things. For me the answer is compassion and kindness. And this project is a way of collectively exploring that idea. I mean I don’t know if it’s going to help create a kinder place on the Underground. I think that’s probably too big an ambition to have. But, in the way that it can make you feel uplifted when you see someone be kind on the Tube, I’d like to think that the artworks presenting the stories will also do that – that they’ll become life-enhancing for people. In other words, I hope the artworks are an act of kindness in themselves.

I’m trying to place the story artworks on platforms and in trains in ways that echo the unexpected ways you encounter acts of kindness in the flesh. They pop up when you least expect them. And I’m hoping the stories will have the same kind of effect on the reader as seeing an act of kindness. That’s what I’m hoping.

Click here to read the full interview. The School of Life's campaign: 'A Month of Reaching Out' continues for the rest of November, with Karen Armstrong delivering our next secular sermon this Sunday. Visit our facebook page to check for your daily task.

Sarah Bakewell on Montaigne, Cruelty and Conviviality

There is a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that attaches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it. There is some relationship between them and us, some mutual obligation. -- Michel de Montaigne (1533-92)

Michel de Montaigne was a Renaissance philosopher whose profound horror of cruelty was unusual in his own time – and perhaps it still is today.  This revulsion came from his belief that all humans share an element of their being, as do all other living things. ‘It is one and the same nature that rolls its course,’ he wrote.  We are similar to other animals – but even if we were not, we would still owe them a duty of fellow-feeling, simply because they are alive.

This obligation applies in trivial encounters as well as life-or-death ones. We owe other beings countless small acts of kindness and empathy. Montaigne followed the passage quoted above with this remark about his dog:

I am not afraid to admit that my nature is so tender, so childish, that I cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks of me outside the proper time.

He indulges his dog because he can imaginatively share the animal’s point of view: he can feel how desperate the dog is to banish boredom and get his human friend’s attention.

History has largely dismissed the significance of Montaigne’s thoughts on cruelty and kindness. But there are those who find in his essay ‘On Cruelty’ the signs that mark him out as the first completely modern thinker. Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia Woolf, wrote that Montaigne’s modernity resided precisely in his ‘intense awareness of and passionate interest in the individuality of himself and of all other human beings’ – as well as of non-human beings.

Even a pig or a mouse has, as Woolf wrote, a feeling of being an ‘I’ to itself. He went on to apply this insight to politics, reflecting especially on his memory of the 1930s, when the world seemed about to sink into a barbarism that made no room for small individual selves. On a global scale, he wrote, no single creature can be of much importance; yet in reality these ‘I’s are the only things of importance. And only a politics that recognises them can offer hope for the future.

For Montaigne as for Woolf, human beings do not live immured in our separate perspectives. We live porously and sociably. We can glide out of our own minds, if only for a few moments, in order to occupy another being’s point of view. This ability is the real meaning of Montaigne’s call to ‘be convivial’, one answer to the question of how to live, and the best hope for civilization.

 Sarah Bakewell is hosting Dinner with Montaigne on Wednesday 23 November 2011.  For further information about this and our other upcoming meals, click here.