The World Is Not as Awful as Your Phone Would Have You Believe
by David Palethorpe
I spent 23 years in the Royal Navy and, during that time, was fortunate enough to travel to more parts of the world than I can now remember without the assistance of an atlas, a ship’s log or possibly a very patient former navigator.
I visited countries that were rich and poor, peaceful and troubled, democratic and decidedly less so.
I saw great cities, tiny villages, magnificent harbours and a fair number of bars whose magnificent views sometimes depended largely on how long we had been at sea, (and how thick the bottom of the beer glass was).
And after all those years of travelling, meeting people of different religions, colours, cultures and political persuasions, I came away with one overwhelming impression.
Most people are actually rather nice.
This will come as disappointing news to anyone – and there are plenty of them – who spend several hours a day on social media espousing distrust and even hate of anyone who is different or disagree with them.
According to the small rectangular device in our pockets, humanity is apparently engaged in a permanent civil war with itself.
Everyone is furious.
Countries are collapsing.
Neighbours hate each other.
Generations are at war.
Men hate women,
Women hate men,
The young despise the old, the old think the young are feckless, and somewhere somebody has expressed an incorrect opinion about a television programme and must therefore be destroyed.
It is extraordinary that a technology designed to connect humanity has become so accomplished at convincing us that we cannot stand one another.
The reason is not particularly mysterious.
Anger gets attention – and how desperate are some for attention?
Outrage gets clicks.
Fear keeps us scrolling.
A headline saying,
“Millions of people went to work today, helped their neighbours, collected their children from school and generally behaved decently”
is unlikely to trouble the servers at Facebook, X or any number of social media platforms.
“YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT THIS MAN SAID” is rather more promising.
Bad news has always sold newspapers, but social media has industrialised the process.
It does not merely report the fire; it pours petrol on it, films the flames, invites two strangers to argue about who started it and then sends us a notification informing us that we are missing out.
The difficulty is that, after enough exposure, we begin to confuse the feed with the world.
My experience of the world was rather different.
One small tradition from my Navy years stays with me.
Wherever I travelled, I would try to send a postcard to the primary school attended by Louisa, Liz’s goddaughter.
There was one rule: the postcard had to feature a smiling child from that country.
The teacher would attach each postcard to a map of the world in the classroom.
Gradually, dots and cards appeared across that map: different countries, different faces, different clothes, different languages and different cultures.
But always a smiling child.
The message I hoped those pupils might absorb was very simple.
We are all human beings.
Before somebody becomes a nationality, a religion, a political category or one of those convenient labels we now throw at each other online, they are a person.
And children make that particularly difficult to forget.
A smiling child in Singapore does not look politically dangerous.
A laughing child in Africa does not seem interested in the geopolitical tensions of the region.
A child in the Caribbean, Europe, Asia or the Middle East usually wants much the same things as a child in Britain:
food, safety, family, friends, laughter and preferably considerably less school.
Adults are not terribly different.
During my travels I discovered that most people want to raise their families, earn a living, have somewhere safe to live, enjoy the company of friends and complain about whichever government happens to be in office.
Complaining about politicians may, in fact, be humanity’s most successful international language.
This does not mean the world has no serious problems.
Clearly it does.
Wars are real.
Poverty is real.
Crime is real.
Political oppression is real.
Religious and ethnic conflicts are real.
But politics itself is simply one of the mechanisms we humans have invented to try to deal with such problems.
Increasingly, however, we seem to treat politics not as a practical method of solving problems but as membership of a football club.
Pick your side.
Wear the shirt.
Boo the opposition.
Once politics becomes tribal, the merits of an idea become almost irrelevant.
If our side proposes it, brilliant.
If their side proposes precisely the same thing six months later, civilisation is clearly ending.
The Royal Navy taught me many things, but travelling taught me something equally important: context matters.
Things that appear strange from Portsmouth may seem entirely sensible in Muscat, Mumbai or Manila.
Customs that initially look peculiar begin to make sense when somebody explains their history.
People who appear very different become much less different once you sit down with them.
Social media is spectacularly bad at providing that context.
It specialises instead in the 20-second video clip.
We see the punch but not the argument that preceded it.
We hear the outrageous sentence but not the conversation surrounding it.
We see the photograph but not what happened five minutes before or five minutes afterwards.
Within seconds we are expected to have an opinion.
Preferably a furious one.
Perhaps one of the most rebellious things we can now do is say:
“I don’t know enough about this yet.”
Imagine the consequences?
Entire sections of the internet might collapse.
I sometimes wonder what those schoolchildren looking at our map make of today’s online world.
Their wall showed dozens of countries connected by postcards and smiling faces.
Our phones increasingly show the same countries connected by conflict, disaster and argument.
Both pictures contain truth.
But only one of them is constantly being refreshed by an algorithm whose commercial success depends on keeping us agitated.
That distinction matters.
After 23 years of travelling, I do not believe humanity is naturally divided into the neat, hostile camps social media prefers.
I met too many decent people in too many places to accept that.
People helped us.
People welcomed us.
People laughed with us.
They talked about their children, their homes, their hopes and their frustrations.
Sometimes we disagreed profoundly.
Somehow civilisation survived.
Perhaps that is what we are losing online: the ability to disagree while still recognising the human being standing on the other side.
So occasionally I think we should put down the phone and remember the postcards.
Remember the map.
Remember those smiling children scattered across the world.
The world has problems.
We should confront them seriously.
But the world is not one enormous angry comments section.
And humanity, thankfully, is considerably better than its social-media profile.
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