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9 min read

Finding the human amid the wreckage of migration

Personal objects recovered from ocean depths tell a story of modern and ancient migrations. Jonathan Evens reviews Shezad Dawood’s multimedia Leviathan exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A bronze sculpture of a small boat and sea monster tossed in the waves.
Where do we go now?, Shezad Dawood.
Photo: Finnbarr Webster.
Artistic banners are hung high above the nave of a cathedral between pillars and arches.
Labanoff Cycle banners hang in Salisbury Cathedral.
Artistic banners are hung high above the nave of a cathedral between pillars and arches.
Labanoff Cycle banners depict found objects from the sea bed.
a dark stone modern carved stone font reflects the banners and roof of a cathedral.
Salisbury Cathedral's font reflects the Labanoff Cycle banners.
A bronze scul
The obverse of the Where do we go now? sculpture.

Hung in the central aisle of Salisbury Cathedral and reflected in the still water of William Pye’s cruciform font are a series of textile paintings by Shezad Dawood depicting objects recovered from the seabed of the Mediterranean.  

Led by Professor Cristina Cattaneo, a team of forensic anthropologists from the Laboratory of Anthropological Forensics (LABANOF at the University of Milan go out with UN rescue teams when ships have sunk or capsized on the journey to Lampedusa and recover the objects and artifacts (as well as human remains). They do so, to create an archive whereby relatives can track missing family members. Unlike wars and natural disasters, there is no established protocol to deal with immigration deaths but, by its interventions, LABANOF is helping to potentially bring a protocol into being. 

As seen at Salisbury, Dawood’s Labanof Cycle ranges from a pinch of earth wrapped in a twist of cling film to a passport and a faded photograph. Each of these textile paintings document a life and a journey in tribute both to lives lost and those that were saved. 

Dawood became aware of the work of LABANOF through an article in the New York Times and reached out to them while preparing for an exhibition to coincide with the 57th Venice Biennale. As a result, he met with Cattaneo in Milan and she generously gave access to the archive. Dawood recalls:  

“It was a shock to actually be confronted with those objects and be in the room with them. I really wrestled with whether it was appropriate to make work in response to those materials. One of the things that decided it for me, when I went away and sat with it, those objects made all of those lives so apparent to me and that was the shock. It transformed refugees and migrants from a statistical basis to something very human. The fact that I was crying looking at the material was what was important in bringing the humanity back to our fellow humans. There’s something very sad, and almost industrial, about viewing our fellows through the prism of statistics and othering them or demonising them as somehow threatening.” 

Kenneth Padley, Canon Treasurer and Chair of the Cathedral’s Arts Advisory makes connections between these works and the themes and stories of Advent and Christmas, saying:  

“This exhibition is a timely reminder, amid the anticipation and excitement of Advent and Christmas, that Jesus and his family were refugees and were being persecuted.” In these seasons, we recall the vulnerability of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, forced by political order to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem and then by fear of King Herod from Bethlehem to Egypt."

“None of us straightforwardly belong anywhere, however long our forebears have sojourned there, and none of us abide long on this earth”.

Sam Wells

Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, has noted that we are all “strangers and pilgrims on earth”, and that “God is the one who comes to us like one unknown” being “in the world, but the world received him not”. He suggests that it is by the way we receive this challenge, that “the Christian community demonstrates who we realise we are and who we believe God is”. 

More than this, he argues that the Bible itself is founded on six journeys, all of which have a bearing on themes of migration: “Jacob and his entourage migrate to Egypt in the midst of famine. This is an economic migration, but really it’s a journey of survival. Moses and the children of Israel migrate from Egypt to the Promised Land. They leave as refugees to flee slavery. They take 40 years to reach their destination, and, when they get there, they face a very hostile environment indeed. Judah loses a battle and is displaced 500 miles to Babylon. There, as Daniel shows, exiles play a vibrant role in public life, and bring unique qualities, represented by the ability to interpret dreams. Jesus travels from Galilee to Jerusalem. He’s living during the occupation by an invading power, Rome. Finally, Paul migrates from Jerusalem to Rome. He’s searching for legal protection in an empire where citizenship transcends geography.” 

His conclusion is that “most of what we’d today call migration is in the Bible, and it’s through migration, not in spite of it, that revelation occurs”. As a result, we don’t get Judaism or Christianity without migration. He adds that “the greatest migration of all is of Christ from heaven to earth and back” and the statement that “Here we have no abiding city” “is an announcement that we should consider our whole lives as a season of migration, because we are transiting through earth to find our true home elsewhere”. As a result, “None of us straightforwardly belong anywhere, however long our forebears have sojourned there, and none of us abide long on this earth”. 

The exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral is a small part of a large body of work begun when Dawood was working on two separate projects; one which involved research about democracy, the other about the oceans. The title of the exhibition refers to Leviathan, a 1651 text by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes which takes the sea monster described in the Book of Job as a metaphor for the state.  

“What’s been quite shocking has been that things people told me we might witness in 10-15 years, I’ve seen happen in five”. 

Dawood’s Where do we go now? is a polychromatic painted sculpture, depicting sailors in a small boat encountering a whale, that is inspired by engravings and illustrations from Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, a 1704 pamphlet on the nature of legitimate government that was written in response to Hobbes. The whale represents the State, which threatens to destroy the vessel, prompting the sailors to throw a barrel (or ‘tub’) representing their labour (or ‘capital’) overboard to distract it. With figures representing refugees and a UN rescue worker in Dawood’s sculpture being placed within the Cathedral’s 1215 Magna Carta exhibition space, this work prompts visitors to consider the legacy of Magna Carta and the rights and freedoms of refugees.    

Dawood has said that the exhibition is “an exciting opportunity to bring some of the key questions I’ve been asking of climate, migration and our shared humanity … at a time when a renewed sense of sharing and purpose is urgently needed.” In the light of such thinking, Beth Hughes, Salisbury Cathedral’s Visual Arts Curator, suggests that,  

“Shezad’s exhibition is a powerful reminder of how we are all connected to each other, and to the natural world … [focusing] the mind to help us think about how we might be part of the solution, to make a better world for ourselves, our loved ones and all of humanity.”  

Much of Dawood’s work is concerned with “world-building” and “imagineering”, something that developed from a “youthful love of science fiction, speculative fiction” which he found to be “a really useful space for philosophical dialogue and imagination”. Then, as “confidence and practice grew, I found through conversations with other artists, writers, academics, that we could have these conversations and start to imagine possible or plausible futures as a way to reflect on some of the issues of our time”. 

One result has been the Leviathan Cycle, a ten-part film series exploring unexpected narratives that connect the most urgent issues of our times: climate change, migration, and mental health. When he began, he experienced surprise or disbelief at what he was trying to do “which was to imagine the world in 20-50 years’ time” in order to highlight the urgency, “because it felt like we didn’t have much time in which to change course”. He was primarily “thinking about what the immediate fault lines were and how they could deepen and darken in our lifetimes or just beyond”. As he started going out talking to scientists, particularly those working around climate, “there was something quite interesting about this 20-50 year’ timeframe, because their predictions were in that range”. However, “what’s been quite shocking has been that things people told me we might witness in 10-15 years, I’ve seen happen in five”.  

How can we find new reserves of empathy and understanding for the difficult circumstances we are going through in our world?” 

The Cycle follows the journeys of a cast of characters who are the survivors of a cataclysmic solar event in order to reflect on the systemic crises within our biosphere and imagine where we might end up if we fail to gain a deeper understanding of the intersections between fields of knowledge and ways of living, across and between human and more-than-human ecologies. The first five films imagine a dystopian future while the latter five - of which the latest, Seven and Eight, are on show here – explore “ways to navigate and negotiate this future with each other, with our government; ideally, a new social compact that’s not just human but extends beyond the human”.       

Episode 7: Africana, Ken Bugul & Nemo, in the North Transept, takes the viewer on a journey through the Mangroves of Senegal which speaks of our interconnectedness where both science and the imaginary dovetail into a possible, collective future. Episode 8: Cris, Sandra, Papa & Yasmine, in Trinity Chapel, charts an embodied, spiritual, and ecological journey along an age-old Guarani path linking the Brazilian Atlantic Forest to the sea. 

The wider Leviathan project from which the work on show in the Cathedral is taken, is the culmination of conversations Dawood has had with a wide range of marine biologists, oceanographers, political scientists, neurologists, and trauma specialists. This approach is typical of his practice, which often involves collaborations with groups and individuals from different disciplines that are transformed into expressive artworks. 

The Leviathan Cycle itself has become a large community of scientists and collaborators around the world. The collaborative experience has broadened Dawood’s horizons in terms of how he thinks of the subjects of his work: “It’s not just a protagonist in a film or an artefact, it’s each of these scientists’ individual area of study that they’ve devoted a huge part of life and time to, and so it creates this huge web of obligation. It’s part of empathy and reciprocity, it’s how we work with others and try to do our best.”  

As a result, he says: “There’s a debt to generations beyond us. They only stretch us just a little but we become better human beings by doing so. I think it’s also important to go beyond the human as well and stretch our empathy to include the non-human – animals, plants, algae – they’re all systems of which we are part and which we interconnect with in surprising ways. It’s something that I’ve become more actively aware of through this body of work. It just feels pivotal.”   

His hope “is that the exhibition encourages visitors to think about ourselves as one humanity”: “My engagement with the topics of climate change and migration are driven by wanting to see a new set of ethical standards established for the world. How can we find new reserves of empathy and understanding for the difficult circumstances we are going through in our world?”  

As we come to the end of 2023 and think about the coming new year and further into the future, the beauty of this exhibition and of Dawood’s work is that, as Beth Hughes notes, it “draws you in to explore some of the big questions facing humanity today”. World events in 2023 “have shown us how important it is to care for displaced people and the importance of looking after our natural world”. Kenneth Padley says, “The overriding message is a call to action before it is too late”, which is why the exhibition is prefaced with a verse from St Paul’s letter to the Romans that simply states, “Live in harmony with one another”. 

 

Leviathan, An exhibition by Shezad Dawood at Salisbury Cathedral, 28 November 2023 – 3 February 2024.

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Is empathy really a weapon?

Musk and Fonda disagree on whether empathy is a bug or a feature.
A montage shows Elon Musk wielding a chain saw, Jane Fonda flexing her muscles and Hannah Arendt smoking.
Wordd Wrestling Empathy.

You may have heard that you can kill a person with kindness, but in recent weeks have you also heard that you can bring about your own death through empathy? In an interview recorded with podcaster Joe Rogan in February, Elon Musk added his voice to a cohort of American neo-capitalists when he claimed, “We've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on” and went on to describe empathy as having been “weaponized” by activist groups.  

“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit… they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”  

In recent weeks empathy has become one of the hot topics of American politics, but this is not the first time that Musk has shared his thoughts about empathy, and it should be noted that on the whole he is not really against it. Musk identifies, rightly, that empathy is a fundamental component of what it means to be human, and in previous interviews has often spoken often about his vision to preserve “the light of human consciousness” – hence his ambition to set up a self-sustaining colony of humans on Mars.  

But he also believes that empathy is (to continue in Musk’s computer programming terminology) a vulnerability in the human code: a point of entry for viruses which have the capacity to manipulate human consciousness and take control of human behaviours. Empathy, Musk has begun to argue, makes us vulnerable to being infected:  

"The woke mind virus is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general. Empathy is a good thing, but when it is weaponized to push irrational or extreme agendas, it can become a dangerous tool." 

Strangely, on certain fundamentals, I find it easy to agree with Musk and his contemporaries about empathy. For example, I agree that empathy is essential to being human. Although, far from empathy leading us to “civilisational suicide”, I would say it is empathy that saves humanity from this fate. If consciousness is (as Musk would define it) the brain’s capacity to process complex information and make a rational and informed choices, then empathy, understood as the ability to anticipate the experiences, feelings, and even reactions of others, is a crucial source of that information. Without empathy, we cannot make good decisions that benefit wider society and not just ourselves. Without it, humanity becomes a collection of mere sociopaths. 

Another point on which Musk and I agree is that empathy is a human weak point, one that can be easily exploited. Ever since the term “empathy” was coined in the early twentieth century, philosophers and psychologists have shown a sustained fascination with the way that empathy causes us to have concern for the experiences of others (affective empathy), to think about the needs of others (cognitive empathy), and even to feel the feelings of others (emotional contagion). Any or all of these responses can be used for good or for ill – so yes, I agree with Musk that empathy has the potential to be exploited.  

But it is on this very question of who is exploiting empathy and why, that I find myself much more ready to disagree with Musk. Whilst he argues that “the woke mind virus” is using empathy to push “irrational and extreme agendas”, his solution is to propose that empathy must be combined with “knowledge”. On the basis of knowledge, he believes, sober judgement can be used to resist the impulse of empathy and rationally govern our conscious decision making. Musk states: 

“Empathy is important. It’s important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree—make sure you understand the fundamental principles, the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to." 

What I notice in this system is that Musk places knowledge before empathy, as if existing bits of information, “fundamental principles”, are the lenses through which one can interpret the experiences of another and then go on to make a conscious and rational judgement about what we perceive.  

There is a certain realism to this view, one that has not been ignored by philosophers. The phenomenologists of the early twentieth century, Husserl, Heidegger, Stein – those who first popularised the very idea of empathy – each described in their own way how all of us experience the world from the unique positionality of our own perspective. Our foreknowledge is very much like a set of lenses that strongly governs what we perceive and dictates what we can see about the world around us. The problem is: that feeling of foreknowledge can easily be manipulated. To put it another way – we ourselves don’t entirely decide what our own lenses are.  

To graft this on to Musk’s preferred semantic tree: empathy is a means by which the human brain can write brand new code. 

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, another great twentieth century thinker, Hannah Arendt, explored how totalitarian regimes seek to control not just the public lives but also the thought lives of individuals, flooding them with ideologies that manipulate precisely this: they tell people what to see. Ideologies are, in a sense, lenses – ones that make people blind to the unjust and violent actions of a regime:  

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." 

A big part of the manipulation of people’s sense of foreknowledge is the provision of simplistic explanations for complex issues. For example, providing a clearly identifiable scapegoat, a common enemy, as a receptacle of blame for complex social and economic problems. As we know all too painfully, in early twentieth century Europe, this scapegoat became the Jewish people. Arendt describes how, whilst latent antisemitism had long been a feature of European public life, the Nazi party harnessed this this low-level antipathy and weaponised it easily. People’s sense of foreknowledge about the “differentness” of this group of “outsiders” was all too manipulable, and it was further cultivated by the Nazis’ use of “disease”, “contagion” and “virus” metaphors when speaking about the Jews. This gave rise a belief that it was rational and sensible to keep one’s distance and have no form of dialogue with this ostracised group.  

But with such distance, how would a well-meaning German citizen ever identify that their sense of foreknowledge about what it meant to be Jewish had been manipulated? Arendt identified rightly that totalitarian systems seek to eliminate dialogue, because dialogue creates the possibility of empathy, the possibility of an exchange of perspectives that might lead to knowledge – or at least a more nuanced understanding of what is true about complex situations. 

When I look at Musk’s comments, I wonder if what I can see is a similar instinct for scapegoating, and for preventing dialogue with those who might provide the knowledge that comes from another person’s perspective. In his rhetoric, the “woke mind” has been declared a common enemy, a “dangerous virus” that can deceive us into becoming “anti-merit” and “anti-human.” In dialogue, those who claim to be suffering or speaking about the suffering of others might be enabled to deploy their weaponized empathy, trying to make us care about other, to the potential detriment of ourselves and even wider humanity’s best interests. Therefore, it is made to seem better to isolate oneself and make rational judgements on behalf of those in need, firmly based on one’s existing foreknowledge, rather than engage in dialogue that might expose us to the contagion of wokeness.  

Whilst this isolationist approach appears to wisely prioritise knowledge over empathy, it misses the crucial detail that empathy itself is a form of knowledge. The experience of empathising through paying attention to and dialoguing with the “other” is what expands our human consciousness and complexifies our human decision making by giving us access to new information. To graft this on to Musk’s preferred semantic tree: empathy is a means by which the human brain can write brand new code.  

In these divisive and divided times, there are, fortunately, those who are still bold enough to make the rallying cry back to empathy. At her recent acceptance speech for a Lifetime Achievement Award, actor and committed Christian Jane Fonda spoke warmly and compellingly in favour of empathy:  

“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way. And even if they are of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy, and not judge, but listen from our hearts, and welcome them into our tent, because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what's coming at us.”  

Fonda’s use of the tent metaphor, I’m sure, was quite deliberate. One of the most famous bible passages about the birth of Jesus describes how he “became flesh and dwelt among us.” The word “dwelt” can also be translated “tabernacled” or, even more literally, “occupied a tent” among us. The idea is that God did not sit back, judging from afar, despite having all the knowledge in the world at his disposal. Instead, God came to humanity through the birth of Jesus, and dwelt alongside us, in all our messy human complexity.  

Did Jesus then kill us with his kindness? No. But you might very well argue that his empathy led to his death. Perhaps this was Musk’s “suicidal empathy.” But in that case Musk and I have found another point about empathy on which we can agree – one that is summed up in the words of Jesus himself: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”   

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