To the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, to hear the writer Elif Shafak deliver the Counterpoint lecture on ‘Courage’. It’s part of Refugee Week, and the first of what is intended to be a series of keynote talks marking the event.

Hers explores themes of dispacement and belonging, and there there is something just a little ironic that we are hearing her in a concert hall named after a British monarch of German descent. It’s a reminder, perhaps, that the English have their own complicated and not always consistent relationship with the idea of home.

Shafak, Istanbul-born, Madrid-educated, now settled in London, spoke to a full house and was impressively patient, layered, and knowledgable. And all of this was even more apparent in the Q&A session where her thoughtfulness and fluency shone.

Pivot from numbers

She opened with statistics: 117 million people forcibly displaced worldwide, 42 million classified as refugees, more than 40 per cent of them children. And then she immediately pivoted away from them.

Because her argument is that numbers standing alone can be the enemy of understanding. We need to know the human dramas behind the statistics.

“Without stories, people are only numbers,” she said. “Quantitative data, cold statistics, human beings are turned into aloof, abstract generalizations.”

The result is that we cannot, for instance, meaningfully distinguish between 5,000 dead and 500,000. We truly respond only when we know someone’s story.

At the heart of her argument was the claim that literature is not a democratic luxury but central to democratic life. Without stories, she said, we do not see each other, we do not connect, (she used Hannah Arendt’s word “atomised” and drew heavily on Arendt’s work throughout) leaving a society which populists and demagogues can easily break apart.

Dualities

Shafak traced a clear line from the deliberate cultivation of social fracture to the rise of far-right, demagogic politics. “The deeper the polarization within a society, the happier the autocrat”.

Populism, authoritarianism, and isolationism all depend upon “establishing dualities”: you are either a patriot or you support open borders; it’s either “us” or “them.”

Her challenge to this was philosophical as well as rhetorical. She invoked Immanuel Kant’s argument that civic cosmopolitanism and patriotism are not in opposition, that, “patriotism is a cosmopolitan duty.”

Caring about your own country and caring about humanity, she argued, are not mutually exclusive positions, however strenuously populist agitators might insist otherwise.

Emotional intelligence

She focussed particularly on one thing that makes populism electorally effective: its emotional intelligence.

“Populist agitators are unfortunately much better in terms of connecting with people’s emotions than their democratic counterparts.”

Yet she was careful to insist this doesn’t mean the grievances driving populist votes are manufactured; the inequalities are real, the anxieties are real, but progressive politics, she argued, has ceded the emotional register to its opponents and not yet worked out how to take it back.

Turning to social media and its echo chambers, she drew an uncomfortable portrait of a society retreating into what she called “epistemological tribes”, communities that no longer even agree on what is true. “If we can’t even agree on what truth is, how can we have coexistence?”

This is aggravated rather than mitigated by social media, where tech platforms profit from anger, fear, and the algorithmic amplification of conflict.

Brexit, she suggested, was a case in point, an important moment, but one which was an accelerant rather than a cause. Many of the underlying fissures already existed, but the referendum tore them open, fracturing friendships and families, and social media did the rest, driving people into bunkers from which they now struggle to escape.

Families who pre-Brexit could happiliy discuss political differences, now find such conversations so painful that the solution is to avoid them altogether. The same applies to many friendship groups. Some did not even survive the vote.

Bridge-building

Her prescription – invest in libraries, arts centres, youth clubs, physical spaces where people from different backgrounds actually encounter one another – may sound modest against the scale of the problem, but she made the case with force and it was met with huge applause.

She noted that close to 800 libraries and cultural centres have closed in the UK over the past twenty years, and that literature receives less than three per cent of private cultural funding, a figure that has been falling.

These closures remove the spaces in which working-class children encounter lives unlike their own, and in which bridge-building becomes possible.

Unexpected memoir

The most unexpected passage came early, in a personal memoir about her schooldays in Madrid. She was ten years old when the Grey Wolves hitman Mehmet Ali Ağca shot and seriously wounded Pope John Paul II in St Peter’s Square.

This was a story that Searchlight investigated at length in the early 1980s, tracing Ağca’s ties to the Turkish ultra-nationalist far right and the murky question of who was ultimately behind it.

Shafak arrived at school the next morning to find classmates glaring at her. “You lot don’t even have respect for a holy man. You’re all criminals.” It was, she said, the moment she first understood what it meant to be reduced to a collective noun, to be “you lot” rather than just herself.

The experience summed up a thought she returned to throughout the evening: the unfairness of being assigned to a monolithic category, stripped of individuality and forced into being a representative of your ethnicity, nationality or religion.

“I didn’t know I was part of a collective noun until someone called me ‘you lot.’”

This is what populism does to people, she was saying. And she met it in a school classrooom, at the age of ten.

Sustaining hope

The difficulty, which she ackowledged, with her moral vision, her call to hold on to complexity, resist tribalism, cultivate civic life, is that it can feel daunting against the crude, brutal efficiency of the forces she’s describing.

The temptation, she acknowledged, is to look at problems of this magnitude and conclude that the individual is too small to matter. Her answer was a flat rejection of that conclusion: what we do, and whether we choose to engage, makes a massive difference.

“I sometimes jokingly think I’m not the best person to talk about optimism because I’m Turkish. Pessimism is in my DNA. I find it so easy to be pessimistic. Hope is much harder, to be honest.”

So how is hope is actually sustained in practice? Shafak quoted Toni Morrison, saying that when she feels angry, and overwhelmed by everything happening in the world, she goes and sits down at her desk and writes.

Hope is not a feeling you wait for. It is fashioned in the process of playing your part, no matter how modest, in your own way.

It’s down to you.