How We Live Now: Ece Temelkuran on the politics of emotion
Hello,
I sometimes think that we live in an era overtaken by fear. We are afraid of each other, we’re afraid of the current state of the world, and we’re afraid of the future. We’re afraid of our food and our drink, we’re afraid of our medicine, we’re afraid of our media, and we’re afraid of our own behaviour. I wrote about it in Enchantment: ‘For years now we’ve been running like rabbits. We glimpse a flash of white tail, read the danger signal, and run, flashing our own white tail behind us. It’s a chain reaction, a river or terror surging incoherently onwards, gathering up other wild, alert bodies who in turn signal their own danger. There is no one predator from which to escape; there are many. We are in the business of running now. It is all so urgent. Every year, it seems we must run harder. There is no other solution. We can only run, and panic, and chatter out our fears to others, who will mirror them back to us.’
Playing on those fears - manipulating and aggrandising them - is a highly profitable enterprise, and one that’s been gleefully deployed by a new generation of politicians who are less interested in creating better societies than in maintaining their own wealth and power. Fear has become our cage.
Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran understands this problem better than most: she lives as an exile after her criticism of the Erdogan regime threatened her liberty. But despite the very personal toll that our current politics has taken, Ece remains optimistic. The seeds of a new society, she says, lie in communities, and the ways they find to come together. And she argues that a crucial skill, if we are to move forward, will be to make friends with our fear.
Ece’s writing has been instrumental in the way that my thinking has been developing over the last couple of years. Not only have I been learning to see the deep individualism of my own way of life, but I’ve also been thinking about how to communicate in a way that brings about change, rather than puts up more walls. It seems to me that this fear-driven discourse - who is bad, and how, and why - is part of the problem. As Ece suggests, we need a change of focus. That involves carefully interrogating our fears and trying to see the ways in which they’re being heightened and manipulated by people always seeking to pass on the blame. And it also means that I look out for joy. When people show me their joy, I can begin to believe that their way of life is worth following. When they only show me their hatred, I’m learning to walk away.
In this episode of How We Live Now, Ece and I discuss the big topics that we once had the luxury of finding old-fashioned: courage, truth and resistance. We also touch on the power of Twitter in the days before Elon Musk took over - so maybe a little of our optimism was misplaced! But Ece has a unique ability to put our current political conflicts into a global context, and her faith in grassroots action is redemptive. If you haven’t caught this episode already, I hope it will bring you joy.
Links from the episode:
How We Live Now is recorded using RiversideFM and hosted by Acast.
From the transcript
Ece Temelhuran:
Well, hope is a very fragile word for these times and it's inconsequential because it doesn't matter if you're hopeless or hopeful, it doesn't change your political actions on daily basis.
And also hope has become a commodity for the system to sustain itself I think because whenever you go on a commercial street in Europe, any street in Europe, you see all these advertisements, hopeful advertisements, "Buy a t-shirt, be the hope," "Buy more paperbacks, be the change," and so on.
So there is several things wrong with hope I guess, the concept of hope. That's why we have to make a deliberate moral and political choice of believing in ourselves and in other people because faith is irrefutable and faith does not care about hope. If it's a hopeful situation or hopeless one, it just does what it does.
And I think as a human skill, faith should be taken seriously by politics although I am aware that it's a dangerous word. I think we shouldn't underestimate people's capacity to believe in something and their limitlessness when they believe in something. And this is a time we have to believe in a future because it is not actually there maybe. But if we believe, we can make it happen.
Katherine May:
And it's almost like hope is too fragile to hold that. We lose hope all the time.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
Faith is more stable.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. It would take me five minutes to kill all your hopes and the audience's hopes about future. But then if you have faith, you are unbeatable.
Katherine May:
I would like to think so.
And also, I would love to ask you about the thing that you say about befriending fears. It's quite hard to say that. The idea that we can befriend our fear, that seems to me to be a much more dangerous concept in your former national society than it is in ours at the moment. Can people really befriend their fear when fear now means incarceration, torture, loss of life?
Ece Temelhuran:
You're right. But there are many fears and they have been manipulated by the right wing populism. It's the fear of the enemy, the stranger, the other. It is the fear of other nations invading your country. It is fear of refugees coming, Turkish refugees coming to London, and that's why Brexit happened. And these fears have been played with for quite a long time.
So in order to make them less dangerous, I think we progressives might propose befriending our fears because fear is a very precious emotion. We can do many things with it. We can be hostile because of our fears. We can be vicious and mean, but also we can accept our fear, befriend our fear, and then be in solidarity with the others who are also in fear.
So we have many fears at this moment in time from climate change to gas bills this winter. If we can accept these fears like human beings should and then come together to talk about them in a more sane and serene way, then we can create a more constructive politics around our fears.
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Disagree with perspective but agree with what was said. So we can come together. 😏
Yes to the line “If people show me their joy, I can begin to believe their way of life is worth following”