How to Cure A Fanatic

"I absolutely love this book, firstly because it’s a beautifully written and very funny short book, and secondly because I think humour is unbelievably important as a way we use free speech to live with diversity. The Today programme, on BBC Radio 4, is full of mild ethnic joshing between the English, the Welsh, and the Scots. That’s the sign of a really healthy society, when you’ve got to the point that you can joke about it. In my book I quote something terribly interesting, which is that in Senegal, which is a very diverse society, there are actually rituals of inter-ethnic joking. Everybody does jokes, and then, when they’re asked, ‘Why is it that people get on quite well with their neighbours?’ a large proportion of them say, ‘Because of these joking rituals.’ What Amoz Oz says is, ‘I have never met a fanatic who has a sense of humour, or someone with a sense of humour who is a fanatic.’ And therefore, he says, he wants to manufacture humour pills and have them distributed free around the Middle East. I think that’s just such a great insight. Yes, but what’s so wonderful about the book, is it’s showing how dialogue, debate, free interaction, is one of the best ways of dealing with that. I quote in my book this wonderful song by Nina Simone, “I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free” with the key line, ‘I wish you could know what it means to be me,’ and that’s it. There are two sides: you know what it means to be me , so it’s both the speaker and the listener. The way we live with difference is first of all by understanding where the other person is coming from. There’s a Quaker saying which is perhaps a little bit idealistic but nonetheless rather beautiful, which is, ‘An enemy is a friend whose story you haven’t heard.’ Now, obviously that’s not true everywhere in all circumstances. If you’re facing the SS, you have to reach for your gun. Nonetheless, there’s a deep truth in there. “There’s a Quaker saying: An enemy is a friend whose story you haven’t heard.” The idea that you can manage a multicultural society, a society with people from everywhere speaking all languages, all faiths, all belief systems, by telling everybody to shut up seems to me profoundly superficial and illusory. The way you do it is by getting people to speak about their differences, even very difficult subjects, but in a context of robust civility. And humour is a great lubricant. Oz has this wonderful passage where he quotes A Life of Brian , where the crowd chants, “We are all individuals, we are all individuals,” in unison, and then one person says, “I’m not, I’m not,” and they all try and shut him up. But he is one of those people, because he is this solitary voice. He’s one of those people holding out against an incredibly powerful consensus. He’s absolutely for a two-state solution, peace now, although I suspect now he thinks it’s probably a hopeless cause. I think there’s a more subtle point there. Free speech is not just about the laws you have, good or bad. It’s about the whole structure of communication. We’ve got into a situation now in the UK where it privileges the voices that shout. Partly that’s because we have the tabloids we have—the Eurosceptic press have been selling this really deceptive and mendacious narrative but selling it very powerfully. It’s also because of the echo chamber effect from the internet. Then you have the fact that the internet has simply cut the feet from under the business model of most newspapers. Therefore all newspapers are fighting for their life. They’re drowning. What do you do when you’re drowning? You wave and shout.So they’re all waving and shouting, ‘Come over here, give us your clicks!’ (and the advertising revenue that comes with those). So we have a media landscape which—apart from the BBC, which becomes even more important—privileges the shouting voice. If it bleeds, it leads, if it roars, it scores. Funnily enough, I have had this experience with my own Guardian column. I’ve been writing a Guardian column for 15 years or so. The clicks you get sometimes are just amazing. Guardian online has a monthly audience of 40 million, so a recent one I did had a quarter of a million views. It’s fantastic. “We’ve got into a situation now where it privileges the voices that shout” But over that time I’ve noticed—and the comment page editor was acknowledging this the other day—that because you have to get the clicks, the editor is always looking for the piece which is shouting, and the sub is always looking for the sensational headline. So I think it’s more a point about the media landscape and the unintended consequence of the internet than the ability of the fanatical voice to win out over the reasonable one."