Ece Temelkuran on the politics of emotion
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Ece Temelkuran on the politics of emotion
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Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran understands the problems of rightwing populism 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.
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Listen to the Episode
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Katherine May:
Hi. I'm Katherine May. Welcome to How We Live Now, the podcast that explores the post everything world.
It's a sunny day. I always feel like I'm drinking in the last dregs of the vitamin D at this time of year before sunlight becomes in short supply.
I'm loving the sound of crunchy leaves underfoot though. It's the best, isn't it? There's no better sound. I thought I'd just share that with you for a while.
So I'm excited today to share a conversation with you with Ece Temelkuran who said she'd be sympathetic if I couldn't pronounce her name properly because British people can't make the right mouth shape. I'm going to take that with the kindness it's intended.
Ece is so well known in her native Turkey where she gained a dangerous reputation for challenging the government.
Tripped over. Not for the first time.
And now because of the risk that would mean for her personal security, the risk of imprisonment, the risk of personal persecution, she lives away from her family, currently in Germany, but previously in Croatia. But whenever I speak to her, she's always somewhere in the world. She's a true global citizen. I don't know how she gets the energy, but there's some fire there.
And I thought she would be an incredible early guest for How We Live Now but also for this question of how we can come back together because her latest book is called Together and it's a true and treaty for us to abandon some of the hardening that we've undertaken as a collective consciousness, if you like, and to soften into a world in which we can expect to have enough rather than too much, in which we can listen and observe rather than shout back, in which we can make lasting friendships that nurture us rather than enmities, and in which we can have something greater than hope, something more solid, which is faith.
I think she's an extraordinary writer but she's also a courageous speaker and she's funny and earthy and curious and all kinds of wonderful. I hope you enjoy the conversation and I'll be back later to tell you how you can take part in it.
Well, I am really excited to be back for a new season with a new name. So we are now How We Live Now which is allowing me to answer some bigger questions or at least to ask them. I'm not sure if we'll come to answer them fully but we'll give it a go.
And I'm here today with my very first guest, Ece Temelkuran, who is a Turkish journalist and author most recently known for her book, How to Lose a Country and Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now.
Her work centers on a concern about the rise of right wing populism and also the looming threat of dictatorship that comes from that. But I think most of all, her work turns to asking how we can fight this encroachment.
And I'm thrilled to talk to you today. Welcome. Welcome to the first episode. I'm really nervous.
Ece Temelhuran:
Oh, wow.
Katherine May:
Is that ridiculous to be nervous on my own podcast? It's so strange.
Ece Temelhuran:
Katherine, first of all, thank you for inviting me and I am also thrilled. So don't worry about being thrilled. And yeah, it's so nice to be on this program and it's very nice to speak to you actually about these massive questions.
Katherine May:
I just feel like those huge questions are the ones that I am desperate to ask now. I can't think of anything else. We are in this period of such immense change and I feel a little lost, I guess, and I want to talk to people that feel less lost than I do.
Ece Temelhuran:
Well, good luck to you about that.
Well, I think on several levels, many people feel the same thing.
I was in Barcelona a few days ago for Atlas Future Festival and the theme of the festival was fixing the future. I met these incredible people doing incredible work, very hard work. They are trying to reinvent the future, so to speak, in these end times, in these apocalyptic times. And I thought, "Wow." First of all, I was truly impressed and thrilled, but secondly, I saw how everyone is exhausted in a deeper level and also how everybody's incredibly concerned about what is to come especially for this winter. So we are not alone, at least in being concerned part.
Katherine May:
It's maybe something that unites us in fact, that sense of exhaustion, jadedness, like ongoing frustration and anomie with how the world seems to be turning and how we can't seem to pull it back together again.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. Well, when I was writing Together, I thought this book is too early for Western audiences. I thought it was early. It was during the pandemic I wrote that book because I wrote Together for those people who feel like we lost everything. There are no more triangulation points. We have no more bearings neither on moral, philosophical, nor political level.
But then now I'm seeing that people are coming to that state of mind, so to speak. Where do we go from here? Or do we at all go from here anywhere? That is the general sense I think.
Katherine May:
I think we're definitely there.
And actually, let's begin with telling your story a little bit because I think that puts a load of this into context really and I always get the sense with you that you are a true global citizen but that's for some very dark reasons actually. So you began as a journalist in your native Turkey. Tell us what happened from there.
Ece Temelhuran:
Well, that is literally last century. That is 1993, I was 20 years old or 19 even. I started journalism and I was mostly concerned about those bloody issues such as Armenian-Kurdish issue, women's rights. I did a lot of political journalism. And then when I was 27, I was already a political columnist. Everybody thought that I was using my picture from years ago although that was me. I was almost a child when I was a prominent columnist in a prominent newspaper. And then me, I published books in different genres from poetry to political documentary, journalism, books, novels, and so on.
After AKP came to power, after Mr. Erdoğan came to power, things got really problematic. And it was 2016 when the military coup attempt happened in Turkey. It became almost unlivable.
The country became quite unbearable for me on several levels. It wasn't only the fear, but also being controversial, being in the opposition. Became not only fearful but it became primitive as well because somehow the level of oppression determines the intellectual level of opposition as well.
So anyway, I found myself not only terrified but also intellectually paralyzed. So I decided to move to Zagreb. I had an apartment there, a studio apartment, so it wasn't a premeditated decision. I went there for a weekend with two T-shirts and one pair of pants and then I decided to stay.
Katherine May:
Wow, that's a-
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah, exactly.
Katherine May:
That's a [inaudible 00:10:01].
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I always been on the road but that was of course different.
And then starting from 2016, I began writing in English. How to Lose a Country and Together were written in English. So I had the torture of translating them to my own language, not them only Together actually to my own language which was... Oh, God.
Katherine May:
I am full of admiration for you that you do that at all.
Ece Temelhuran:
Well, yeah, there was a translator of course, [inaudible 00:10:35], but I had to go through it and it's so weird to see your words in your own language but not your tone. Anyway.
Katherine May:
Yeah, yeah.
Ece Temelhuran:
So, yeah, since 2016, my main job has become talking about authoritarianism, fascism, right wing populism, especially to the Western audiences because when I came to Zagreb, I realized that they have no idea what is to come. They never thought that Boris Johnson would be a prime minister, they never thought that Trump would last more than a year. All these things were supposed to disappear suddenly in their point of view and the Western audiences were absolutely angry when I was telling them that what we live through in Turkey is coming towards you and you're going to experience exactly the same things.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Ece Temelhuran:
So, yeah, a woman with curly hair coming from Turkey telling the Brits that you are no better than Turks is something. It's a challenge.
Katherine May:
Yeah. We don't believe it can happen to us. I think you're exactly right. And actually, because we are so naïve about this stuff, tell us, spell it out to us what it means to be politically active in Turkey today. What would the risks be for you if you were still there? What is happening?
Ece Temelhuran:
First, the word about naiveté, I don't think it's being naïve. It is more like, I wouldn't even say exceptionalism, but I think it is more like one cannot easily digest the fact that this madness is happening in one's country.
When it was happening in Turkey, when it started happening in Turkey 20 years ago, we didn't want to acknowledge it. We didn't want to admit and accept the fact and that's why maybe Turkey is in this situation, in this mess at the moment.
Turkey now is a place where all the political bearings are too fragile to hold onto. So there is a one-man rule, Mr. Erdoğan single handedly ruling the entire system, economic, judiciary, political system. And the rest of the people are classified into two. First class citizens who are either members of the party or sympathizers of the party or they just are obedient to the system, to the regime, and the others who are mostly fearing for their lives. Many of them had to leave Turkey already, especially academics and well-educated people. The big capital in Turkey pretty much moved their quarters to either London, New York, or several other places in Europe.
So the country is drying up on so many levels but most importantly, I'm never sure how to say this, but the joy of life is not there anymore. Turkey has always been a crazy country, more or less, but we had this joy of life and it's not there anymore. The depressed mood in Turkey is so solid. You can touch it.
And I would call it the grand retreat, the grand regression, because nobody wants to take the chances and risk their lives to say anything.
So there is this deep and widespread silence in the country and they're all waiting for the elections to come which is supposed to happen in June 2023. And until then, everybody's literally holding their breath.
And on top of all this oppression and suppression, there is a dire economic crisis. Inflation rate is over the roof and it's record numbers. And the cost of living is unbearable even for upper middle class. So yeah, this is it. Yeah.
Katherine May:
And it's so interesting that you said that you are ahead of us on that and I think, again, that is the thing that we, Brits, find it quite hard to believe that other people are ahead of us rather than behind us. And that's the problem. You feel very strongly that we've got this coming, right?
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. Well, I was...
Katherine May:
Maybe.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. Well, I was almost beginning to write How to Lose a Country in 2017. No, '16, Brexit was happening and it was the shock of Brexit in London. People were barely understanding that this is serious, it is happening, it's not a joke.
And then Boris Johnson was not Prime Minister yet and I was telling the audience is that you are going to have Boris Johnson and he will drive you mad not because he's going to be an oppressive leader overnight but because he's going to do so many interesting and strange things that you won't know how to respond to them and what to do about them.
But then of course, British Democracy is one of the most mature democracies and somehow the establishment managed to sack him from his job.
But then I told this with Trump as well. When the Americans got rid of Trump, they were so happy. But then I always want to remind them that the entire establishment had to come together to do that, to get rid of a clown. So it is not much different for Boris Johnson. And he didn't disappear, I think he's...
Katherine May:
No. He doesn't feel truly gone. I'd have to say I'm not sure.
Ece Temelhuran:
I know, I know. I was in London and his ghost was haunting everyone still.
And one more observation, and this happened in Turkey as well, when the domestic political situation is become so maddening and so... Everybody's occupied with this domestic conundrum that they don't really know what's going on in the rest of the world. And Turkey closed in on herself just like this after Erdoğan came to power.
And I saw the same thing happening in London which was interesting to me because even the progressive circles, we're not talking about Chile where exciting things are happening or they were not talking about European Union and this and that, but they were talking about still Boris Johnson and cost of living and how are we going to get over this winter.
Katherine May:
It's so interesting, isn't it?
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. So it's another symptom I think.
Katherine May:
Well, it obsesses us with ourselves. And-
Ece Temelhuran:
Absolutely.
Katherine May:
... here is the first division that we can identify because actually, even though to you and I it seems self-evident that it's a good thing that Boris has gone, 50% of conservative party members still think he should be there. And therein lies the problem, doesn't it? That I cannot even think my way into the mindset that would believe that he could be a good thing for the country. And it's that sense of that fundamental separation of views there that I think is the thing that we're grappling with.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. This is the thing. You can get rid of these guys but then millions of minions are there. So... Well, I don't want to be condescending, but obviously-
Katherine May:
[inaudible 00:18:19].
Ece Temelhuran:
Well, I just did, I think. But anyway.
The thing is how do we survive in such a polarized environment because it is not only supporting a party, it's a deeper division on a moral level, on a philosophical level, on the perception of the truth level. So neither Western world nor the entire globe has witnessed such a division before. We could have different political views, we could have fought each other over those views but then we never had different grounds to exist. Now it's as if we are living on different grounds. So we are not even in the same ground to discuss or fight or whatever. We just exist separately.
So that is simply why I actually wrote Together because we need to go back to the basics, so to speak, basics of philosophy, basics of politics, basics of our understanding of life to find a way to cohabit in these countries and in the world together.
Katherine May:
And what I think came across really strongly for me from Together was the idea that to do that, we need to find something joyful and pleasurable and to use a really weak word, happy rather than, I don't know, the sour anger that we've got used to living with.
For me, I think that's part of the compelling nature of people like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump is that they make it look fun. And maybe we on the left of the spectrum don't manage to make our vision of the world look quite so jolly. They look like it's a laugh, don't they?
Ece Temelhuran:
Well, that's the other reason I wrote Together because right wing populism, all these leaders with fascist inclinations, they are masters when it comes to managing politics of emotions.
And in hindsight, it might be more clear for people to notice that both Trump, Boris Johnson, Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, all these leaders have come to power through their mastery in politics of emotions. They didn't really promise anything. They didn't come up with a program, political program or anything. They just managed politics of emotions. They played with the emotions of the masses. And first and foremost, it was fear and anger that they played with.
So when it comes to emotions, and I don't know if you'd agree with me on this, we progressives, we people who are pro-democracy, we look down upon the word emotion and how emotions of the masses are shaped. We don't want to say anything about that almost but this is life, this is reality, this is how politics on a global level is shaped at the moment.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yes, we have to have something to say about politics, politics of emotions. Yes, we have to say something about anger, fear... What else? Lack of attention, the sense of broken dignity and so on and so forth. All these emotions are going to be shaping our politics in the coming decades.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Ece Temelhuran:
So, yeah, we can complain and whine about the fact that rationale is not there, that people do not care about facts and so on and so forth. But this is the reality. And politics resides in reality. It doesn't reside in some imaginary rainbow land, whatever. So we have to deal with this. And progressives have to have a consensus about their politics of emotions, how are they going to deal with these massive current and very determining emotions.
Katherine May:
That's such an interesting way to see the divide, isn't it? Because the frustration, I think, that comes from both sides is this almost complete inability to communicate with each other, this total different language of what it is to be a political human being and how we might envision society.
And, yeah, I don't know if the progressive side is bringing the vision enough. It's almost we've got to return to the idea of something being stirring and the right wing populists have got these really big concepts like nation and-
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah, yeah.
Katherine May:
And whereas we are uncomfortable often with those concepts and we're uncomfortable even with talking about morality when at the same time we are deeply morally offended by what's going on. And it's such a gulf that we've got to bridge.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yes, exactly. And yes, I know these words are absolutely dangerous like morality, emotions, and my favorite word, faith, faith in humankind and so on. But then we have to take these words back from the realm of religion, back from the realm of social madness, whatever, and we have to politicize them in a different way now because these words actually belong to politics if you ask me. This is one thing.
And the second thing is if we can go back to basics, if we are brave enough to talk about fear, for instance, then we can even convince those people that have been supporting right wing populism that they do not have to act on their fear in such a way that we can actually share that fear and we can steer the wrong political choices, and I say it very confidently, wrong political choices towards something more constructive and more, I don't know, sane to say it simply.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah, that is why politics of emotions is important because it somehow is the way to connect us to those people whom we think unrecognizable or impossible to live with.
Katherine May:
Yeah. We've got to bring the emotion back.
So my question for this miniseries of the podcast that I'm making is how do we come back together again?
And what I observe from your work, and please correct me if this is wrong, but you are focusing on the softer approaches to this. You say, "Let's not get tempted by revolution because that brings chaos and it's destructive and it throws along a load of young people on the fire essentially." So you are thinking about these very constructive soft skill ways that we can come back together again. Can you talk me around the way that you thought about those 10 methods, if you like, when you were coming up with them?
Ece Temelhuran:
Oh, well, Katherine, personally, I love the word revolution. It stirs me up obviously. It's the most sexy-
Katherine May:
It's stirring.
Ece Temelhuran:
It's the sexiest word ever. But I've been doing journalism since I was 19 and I have been the most hellish places on earth like wars, war zones, the poorest countries, and so on. And I saw many people talking about revolution and I saw many people sacrificing themselves for their own revolution because that word is used by so many different people-
Katherine May:
Different way.
Ece Temelhuran:
... in a very contradicting ways even. Although I love the word, although I would love a revolution, I also know that it includes blood. Period. That is it. That is reality. It doesn't happen just while we are chanting we shall overcome.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Ece Temelhuran:
It is blood and it's lives and mostly young lives.
I think at this point of human history we can be a little bit more smarter than the previous generations and we can maybe convince people that this system, this neoliberal system is not good for any of us, one, even for the wealthiest, it's not even good for them, they're not even happy and that we can actually transform it because there is enough ideas to transform the system. What we lack is the political will of people and political imagination of the people.
So my problem in life in general is how we create that political will for a peaceful and as you said, constructive transformation.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Yeah.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. Maybe I'm getting old as well because I feel for these young people who would sacrifice their lives for such a word and then be completely disappointed when the new status quo is built as they will see that nothing really changes when the way you change the system is the same.
Katherine May:
Maybe I'm naïve to want this all to happen without bloodshed but I can't get behind, as you say, this vision, this glorious macho vision of how we might overcome because actually that's not consensual either and it would just lead to more violence, more conflict. It just doesn't seem to be the way.
And I think the alternative is much harder and much less decisive and it involves us all digging much deeper and having to keep going back to these horrible debates that we hate having and this horrible sense of conflict and uncertainty. But it seems to me that that's the right way to do it.
Ece Temelhuran:
Well, while we are talking right now and we are recording this, Iranian women are dancing on streets without their head scarves.
Katherine May:
Yes. Yeah.
Ece Temelhuran:
So how did this happen? We never know. Of course, there was a young girl, 22-year-old girl who was killed by police violence because her hijab was not correct, whatever. And there have been many women since 1979 who lost their lives to this cause while trying to get their freedom and many had to leave their country. So it's not like suddenly one night everybody decided to rebel.
But still, I see... I was watching the footage from Iran and I saw the police retreating when women were together and they weren't wearing hijab. And it was so incredibly touching and invigorating to see that.
So we need to have a majority, how do we build that majority to transform a system is a technical and tactical question. We can deal with that later.
But I think civil disobedience will be the answer in coming years because my observation, especially in the Western countries, in United States as well is that young generation is removing their consent from the system. They do not want to work, they do not want to have a home, or they do not have the hope of having a home of their own. They do not want to live the happy life of the capitalist system and they do not believe in this theatrics of democracy anymore, this representative democracy, and its crumbling mechanism. So they are removing their consent. And there are millions of people like this.
I think one of the most important problems in coming years or in this coming year will be to connect these people and articulate their demands because they're not talking at all, not as much as they want to or not as much as they think, but this removal of consent en masse will be a political reality that we will have to deal with and how do we steer that mass of people into a civil disobedience movement. I think this will be one of the interesting questions of current politics, especially this winter.
Katherine May:
One of the questions that I keep asking myself, I suppose, not that I have the answer, but is why haven't we seen rioting yet. And I think there's some really interesting reasons for that. One of them being that the kind of bloodshed that's happening in our social media discourse feels to me like it's actually doing more work than we believe it's doing. It feels... We talk about it as so pointless and so indulgent. But I begin to wonder if that isn't actually patronizing to think that and I wonder if it isn't doing much more work than we think it's doing.
Ece Temelhuran:
It is too early for us to know this because how many years has it been Twitter or Facebook especially the-
Katherine May:
Like 15 maybe, yeah.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. But they're political... These tools being put into political use is since from Tahrir I would say or Greece mostly, but mostly Tahrir was the milestone. And then we started using Twitter and Facebook more actively in terms of politics.
What we know from history is that whenever there is a new communication medium, politics is transformed. We are going through that change now.
And maybe you are right, maybe we are underestimating it. Maybe it is doing something. But then we cannot know it because there is an incompatibility between our democratic mechanisms and the social media.
We can talk through social media but we can represent ourselves on social media. But we are still bound with the representative democracy in the conventional democratic mechanism. So our communication tools is not in accordance with-
Katherine May:
It's not matched up to the actual mechanisms of change.
Ece Temelhuran:
Exactly. Exactly.
Katherine May:
So in many ways, we can be fooling ourselves that we are having an effect when actually we are just being occupied in that space while other people go out and vote.
Ece Temelhuran:
Well, that is true on one level, but then we are creating an atmosphere there, a political atmosphere. And yes, Tahrir is, thanks to Twitter, actually not all of it, but big part of it was thanks to Twitter and Gezi as well in Turkey.
And today many ideas are developed in that sphere. And people connect to each other. I personally connect to many people on Twitter and I found my even literary agent on Twitter at some point in the beginning. Yeah, yeah. I'm on Instagram as well.
So yes, people do connect to each other but what will become of all this web of connections is still not clear. But then lately, especially in last few years during the pandemic and after the pandemic, I see many small initiatives all around the world trying to reinvent every big concept like economy, politics, and so on. And all these people naturally connect to each other through social media.
And in that sense, I think new politics is determined by social media. It actually takes its human resources from social media and it will keep on being like this and we are going to see some things, beautiful new things coming out of these connections. And we will have to get back and thank Jack on Twitter for doing this.
Katherine May:
Oh, we're going to have to show him some gratitude eventually. Damn it.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
But I feel like we are learning so much about each other and I think it's really the first opportunity we've ever had to know each other on this global scale and that is as hard and as maddening and as complex and confusing as you might expect it to be. We've never processed information on this scale before. And our sense of justice is being expanded in a way that we haven't got a structure for coping with yet I think. We are in the middle of this big bang.
Ece Temelhuran:
Oh, Katherine, I'm like, "This is my personal problem as well," because I'm not a very social person. Although I look like an extrovert, I am at heart a very, very, very introvert person. So I cannot connect to too many people, although my life is full of people and I cannot process all these things, all this input coming from people.
Yes, that is a problem and I see it happening in younger generation as well, because they know so many people. They have so many connections, they are overwhelmed. And for the first time, I think I understand why they feel so tired, not tired, exhausted actually, yes, because they are processing far more than we did in their age.
Katherine May:
Yeah. It's huge.
Ece Temelhuran:
It is.
Katherine May:
And it comes-
Ece Temelhuran:
It is massive.
Katherine May:
It comes with such a sense of responsibility actually.
Ece Temelhuran:
Exactly.
Katherine May:
Which is correct. We should feel that sense of responsibility when we see injustice happening. But that doesn't mean to say that we can do anything about it. Those two things don't match. That massive sense of injustice and our complete helplessness are so painful for us to live with right now.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. That is why I think there are two contradicting or maybe completing trends at the moment. One is connecting to more and more people but also at the same time building smaller communities.
And I keep hearing this word a lot lately. Community, community. And with the pandemic, it became more visible and significant. People are tending towards small communities, be it a knitting club or a political party.
But although they are connected to the rest of the world, they want to live in their own reality which is actually healthy because there's only so many people we can connect to, we can socialize with. And as you said, this is the first time in human history we are trying something beyond our limits in a way in terms of socialization capacity.
Katherine May:
I think the thing we are living through a revolutionary time rather than a revolution is that it's not clear that we are in it. I think we'll look back on this and realize the constant change that we were enduring and maybe forgive ourselves a bit for not being able to change the world all in one go.
But while we are here, there's a horror to it. There's a sense of seeing everything all at once and feeling so abjectly hopeless in the face of that. And we haven't got an answer for that yet. And in lots of ways, I feel like the progressives are trying to answer that for all the world at once.
Whereas the populist right is much more comfortable with saying, "No, no, no, no. Let's focus on our country and our..." And then you get those really quite horrifying definitions of ethnic groups coming in that closes down towards a very narrow definition of whiteness or of nationality.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. Their job is easy because-
Katherine May:
Yeah. It's really simple. Yeah.
Ece Temelhuran:
... there's only one paragraph they have to memorize and keep on repeating. But whereas we are truly concerned about the situation and we are thinking about it, genuinely thinking about it.
But then you are right. This is a terrifying time because it's a revolutionary time and revolutions do not happen overnight and it became a different kind of revolution.
I'm remembering Tahrir and I'm remembering now Black Lives Matter or Metoo. They didn't maybe change something in particular but they change the fabric of who we are and fabric of our relation to each other and to the world. So it was a revolutionizing thing. It was a revolution in a way.
And I think many revolutions in the coming decades will happen like this maybe. It will just become embarrassing to be fascist. It will just become embarrassing to be wealthy just like you cannot harass women anymore because you're embarrassed, because you're terrified. It will become embarrassing to be xenophobic. Maybe it will on this moral level in a way, all this revolutionary thing. But then these contradicting trends or inclinations are pulling us apart.
I have a friend. He's a prepper. He's a secret prepper.
Katherine May:
Oh, wow.
Ece Temelhuran:
Exactly. But then he's working on the future of democracy as an academic.
Katherine May:
Maybe explain what a prepper is in this context-
Ece Temelhuran:
Oh, yeah.
Katherine May:
... because maybe not everyone's come across the term.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. He's preparing for apocalypse and the end times and so on. But he's also genuinely working, doing some amazing work on future of democracy. So who is he now? Is he a person who gave up or is he a person who believes in the future? I think it is both. And it's both for every one of us.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Yeah. I just think the dividing lines between what once would've been very defined political views have moved. And so you can now be a prepper and also someone who is deeply invested in improving society. It's not necessarily contradictory but those shifts are very hard for us to process in short amounts of time.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah, yeah. But then that's why I propose the concept of faith against hope-
Katherine May:
Yes.
Ece Temelhuran:
... in Together.
Katherine May:
I want you to talk about this.
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.
Katherine May:
Right.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. And as for Turkey, yeah, the fear has been dominating the country for quite a long time now and it just muted almost all the voices in the country there.
Of course, I have fellow citizens with whom I'm absolutely proud of who are still out there in Turkey speaking their minds and I have the utmost respect for them and I stand with them.
But then fear should not be underestimated. All those who are silent cannot be counted as complacent. We shouldn't do that. It would be too merciless for people... Against people I mean. It would be-
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Ece Temelhuran:
It would be too much.
Katherine May:
Because the fear is real. The fear is irrational and the-
Ece Temelhuran:
Exactly.
Katherine May:
... [inaudible 00:47:39] capacity. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
And so should we be looking for center ground between these factions or should we be looking to persuade?
Ece Temelhuran:
One thing, I cannot be friends with hardcore fascist person so I wouldn't go that far proposing that.
But then many people I see around who's clapping, who is applauding these leaders are not exactly fascists. Some of them, they do not know what they're doing. And some of them do not have any other political options, choices, and so on. They weren't offered.
And we have been through decades of depolitization so it's only natural that we have these infantilized masses to work with.
Katherine May:
Who don't have the critical skills to unpick-
Ece Temelhuran:
Exactly.
Katherine May:
... what they're being told and to analyze it. And to... Yeah.
Ece Temelhuran:
Also, for decades, especially since 1980s, this idea has been imposed on us. The idea of politics is dirty. You shouldn't be doing politics. That's why all these people have voted for these leaders who claim to be above and beyond politics therefore clean figures.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Ece Temelhuran:
So yeah-
Katherine May:
Untainted.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. We are trying to reverse a current that has been there for several decades now. It's not going to be easy.
But I think we are in a quite good spot especially this winter because this winter it will become clear that all those words, those big words you mentioned, nation, us, making the country great again, they will see that they're all in vain. They have no consequence in real life. So maybe this winter is a good starting point for progressives to be more engaged and more faithful, I should say.
Katherine May:
Yeah. And I was thinking about you the other day when I was on a train and got talking to a man who, first of all, very nice, just chatty, and then he suddenly started spouting conspiracy theories about world being a simulation.
And I think we've all had those moments now where we think the conversation is once would've been normal and it suddenly veers off into an entirely other direction and in those moments, I'm always at a loss of what to do because arguing with that person would've been pointless. There was no rationalizing what he was saying.
I did try to a little. He was claiming that Joe Biden's a robot and I was giving it a go but actually it didn't work. It wasn't effective because our terms of argument were so different. And very quickly I felt angry and frustrated and almost hurt by it, almost like it was personal. His lack of rationality was a personal affront to me that I had to tackle.
And I was thinking about what you say about attention over anger and the power of that in dealing with those kind of conversations. Is that a way forward the next time there's a guy on a train who thinks Joe Biden's a robot?
Ece Temelhuran:
Well, my propositions might not be easy to practice on the spot, on a train ride, but yes, I think yes, attention should replace anger because especially in that situation which of course I experienced as well with the anti-vaccine people, with several other things, that is why I said we are now on different grounds. We are not even fighting on the same ground. You are meeting this person who has a completely different perception of life in every level.
Katherine May:
Literally a different understanding of reality.
Ece Temelhuran:
Exactly.
Katherine May:
That's where it is. That's how extreme it is.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. This is the consequence of our new communication medium. We have many truths now. It's the open buffet of truth. So people pick what they want.
But then I think this is a passing by phenomenon. It will pass in a few more years and it won't be as strong as it is today, the separation between the realms of different realities, so to speak.
But attention is good for us in terms of not to lose it, one, and also it is exhausting to be angry at these things. So attention would lead us to a place where we can understand that this guy on the train is actually so afraid of things so he cannot come with a proper explanation so he just takes shelter in these conspiracy theories.
So if we are patient and mature enough to talk to this guy about our own fears, about fear in general, maybe then we can come to, not a consensus per se, but at least those grounds, those separate grounds of realities can come closer to each other.
Katherine May:
A reassertion of mutual humanity, I think, is almost what we need to do.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. It's not easy to love humans. No, seriously.
Katherine May:
They don't make it easy. No, you're absolutely right.
Ece Temelhuran:
No. No, no, no, no. They don't make it easy.
And also, it is not easy to believe in humans either but humanity is a bigger concept. And also to love them, to love humanity, to believe in humanity is a moral choice. So that I made that moral choice because that was the only way to go if I don't want to kill myself, that's it. Otherwise, we are lost in our own depressions and that's it.
We need to believe in humankind not because humanity needs us but rather more for ourselves. And this is how people believe in God as well. It's not for God, it's for themselves. So that's why I believe in humanity just to survive these times actually.
Katherine May:
And you talk a lot about choice, don't you?
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
Are we always able to choose? Are these really choices and do we have that level of constraint and control that we'd need to make these very big lifelong choices towards our behavior?
Ece Temelhuran:
No. I don't think so. I'm not that existentialist. I am too old to be existentialist. But yeah, I'm 49 now. If you asked me this question 10 years ago, I would've said, "Yes, we do have the power, la, la, la." But then, no.
No, actually we don't. And we are just a push and pull between our choices and our obligations. And we are all products of ideological project in our own countries. I'm an ideological project of Turkish Republic, the secular democratic Turkish Republic that's why I cannot live in that country anymore because that production line has been stopped. That is canceled out.
But yeah, we are so many things but we also have to choose to be our choices as well. Otherwise, why would we live anyway? Why would we think?
Katherine May:
Yeah. We can't afford to be passive in this anymore.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. At least, we can think that we are not completely... We can imagine ourselves as powerful beings, powerful enough to make choices.
Katherine May:
Yeah. And have a go at it.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
This has been such an incredible conversation.
Ece Temelhuran:
Thank you, Katherine.
Katherine May:
Yeah, it's just been lovely. And it's really nice to ramble through these thoughts and to unearth the complexity of them.
I want to ask you one final thing, really, which is, do you see yourself ever moving back to Turkey? And if you did, would you ever be able to reconcile yourself with the people that have driven this political movement that's turned you away?
Ece Temelhuran:
That is the biggest question that I even don't ask myself yet because I left Turkey when I was 44 and I started writing in another language, I wanted to survive, and I still am surviving. So such big questions, such emotional, deeply emotional questions weakens me and it takes away my strength which I need very much to survive. So I'm not thinking about that.
But of course, I want to be able to go back to Turkey. And also I want to be able to sit down with my friends, have raki and fish on Bosphorus and laugh a lot. Because humor, Turkish humor is a very particular one and it's massive. And I miss that. I missed it a lot.
This language of yours, Katherine.
Katherine May:
We do our best what can I say.
Ece Temelhuran:
I know, I know, I know.
But Middle East, since we suffered a lot, we have I think a better sense of humor with Egyptians and Lebanese, we are amazing. So yeah, I expect-
Katherine May:
Gallows humor, I bet.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah, a lot of gallows humor. Yes, that is true.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Always the best kind. Yeah.
Ece Temelhuran:
Exactly.
Katherine May:
Well, I do hope you can return one day and-
Ece Temelhuran:
Thank you. Thank you.
Katherine May:
You have a home amongst your enormous community which must at least be some kind of comfort I think they-
Ece Temelhuran:
Absolutely.
Katherine May:
They adore you and hold you up a lot.
Ece Temelhuran:
Yeah. I'm planning to write a book now about home and what is home in 21st century. I think home is other people for every one of us in this century, it will become so I think.
Katherine May:
Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much.
Ece Temelhuran:
Thank you, Katherine.
Katherine May:
I don't know if you can hear that but I was just listening to a woodpecker then he's flown away. Such a distinctive sound. It sounds just like the cartoons honestly. I think he's behind me now. He's busy tapping holes in those trees.
As you know, if you've listened to the wintering sessions, I like to walk and think at the same time. And I was just reflecting on that conversation with Ece which I think for me really made me more conscious than ever of how Western and specifically British my perspective is.
It's so fascinating to talk to someone who is situated in a very different part of the world towards the east of Europe and the west of Asia who thinks in terms of Turkey and Iran and the Islamic world in a way that only comes into the periphery of my vision when I read the news. I think it's amazing to hear those different perspectives.
And also hard. It's hard because as we talked about Together, we as a species are almost unable to process the sheer amount of news that comes at us.
And I actually think news is a bad word for it now because I think what's happening for us is a deeper process of understanding that we've never been called on to undertake before.
A process of not just knowing what happened in the briefest possible way on a news program that we've watched while we're having our supper or making our breakfast in the morning but knowing on a deeper, more human level.
Perhaps having contact with the people who are the news, we can't deindividuate them anymore. We can't see them as a baying crowd because the way that we are living, how we are living is putting us in contact with their actual voices, their actual humanity. We are reading their tweets, we're seeing their Instagrams, and that's transforming this idea of news into something that becomes much more about events happening to a community of which we are a distant part.
And I do think we should acknowledge how hard that is for us, what a difficult thing it is for us to process this level of compassion, this level of shared fear which I know is not direct but which transfers over to us, this sheer bulk of understanding, of social understanding. It's bigger than we are and I think it really helps to be able to talk to somebody who knows it firsthand who can make sense of it for us to have a guide. I'm so grateful for that.
And I couldn't help but think as I was talking about TikTok actually, of all things, which I know that women of my age are supposed to sneer at. But actually I've been dipping into it a lot lately. It took me ages to train the algorithm.
First of all, it just gave me young white girls doing their makeup and their nails and I really, really couldn't be less interested in that. But I started to follow book talkers. Feel free to follow anyone that I follow on there. They're all great.
And I started to follow the people that TikTok threw up at me who were just curious to me, just interesting, just outside of my own experience. And pretty quickly, I trained the algorithm to spit out things at me that are really genuinely unpredictable that I wouldn't be able to find myself. And I'm now following people across the globe who are writing humorously and who are talking seriously about the issues that affect them and about what they know and how they know it.
And it's actually given me deeper insight into that big complex world than any social media app I've ever been on before. And it's become a real pleasure.
I don't find it addictive in the way that Twitter can be but I'm happy to sometimes give it 30 minutes on a Sunday morning and to watch a Māori woman tell me about what it is to have people encroaching on her land and a young Indian dancer show me the different expressive moves she's trained to make and what they signify. And to watch an Ethiopian woman explain how she cooks and why she doesn't feel like she's missing out on a single thing for not having electricity.
And that for me is the gift of this, that I can dive deeply into the huge wide world and challenge myself to know it better, to know it more empathetically, to know it in a way that isn't hierarchical, that isn't patronizing.
It's actually a pretty good thing, honestly, once you get past the girls with the nails and the hair and the makeup and endless stuff about royal family which TikTok assumes I must be interested in.
Anyway. Thank you for listening. I hope you get outside soon. It helps. And I'd love to hear what you are thinking in response to this. So in a moment, we will share some links for you to get in touch and I look forward to sharing your views and your questions and your thoughts very soon. Thanks for listening.
Show Notes
There’s a guiding question of each mini-season of How We Live Now, and this time around it’s ‘How can we come back together again?’ I posed this question to some of the world’s most important thinkers in this field: political journalist Ece Temelkuran, radical Buddhist Lama Rod Owens, digital native Emma Gannon, gathering expert Priya Parker, spiritual teacher Simran Jeet Singh and ecological writer Jay Griffiths. Each of them offered something thoughtful and fresh, and each of them changed the way I think about this current - often divided - life.
Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran understands the problems of rightwing populism 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.
In this episode, Katherine and Ece discuss courage, truth and learning to befriend our fear. 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.
Join the conversation! We’re also inviting your thoughts on each episode from now on click here to join the conversation. Answers, challenges, ideas and further questions are all welcome - there will be a further episode in a couple of months focusing on your voices.
Links from the episode:
Other episodes you might enjoy:
Season 2: Kerri ni Dochartaigh on healing the trauma of the Troubles
Season 3: Gemma Cairney on conducting energy with balance and motion
Please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing to my Patreon where you’ll get episodes a day early (and always ad free) along with bonus episodes and more!
To keep up to date with How We Live Now, follow Katherine on Instagram and Substack
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Enchantment - Released March 2023
“Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we’ve now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.”
New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
