Ranjona Banerji | Can a moral elitist make friends on social media?

I have learnt over the years to disguise my lack of prejudice and ahem, that other thing, but it can be a struggle for me. In the workplace, I could never suffer fools gladly. Socially I have to swallow my annoyance to even look at bigots and conservatives with a semblance of politeness. I think I have a fake smile down pat, but who knows?

How many of my secrets have I given away just now?

It was intriguing, therefore, to hear a fascinating talk the other day by Satish Kumar, founder of Schumacher College, environmentalist, ecologist, and thinker. Sat by a lily pond, under the trees, he talked about the ever-growing barriers between Humans and Nature, our erroneous belief that we are in fact outside nature and the need for the world’s economic system to include ecology in its practice and theory. As we watch the destruction around us, thanks to greed and often stupidity, Kumar’s words resonated. In inspirational but also very sad ways.

One of Kumar’s pet subjects is a tough idea, which he wrote a book about in 2023. Radical Love, where you try and love beyond yourself, your likes and dislikes, your ideas and your core. Love for those who you do not agree with, who you find it difficult to accept, whom you just cannot abide. This is not of course a new idea. Kumar quotes Jesus Christ’s “love thine enemy as thyself”. But as we all know all too well, this notion finds no takers. Whether in the religion formed in Christ’s name or really in any other. As we know to our everyday misfortune, religions love division but let’s not wander into that black hole.

It might seem like an extremely simplistic idea — to love unconditionally. And most people will associate this sort of love in a cliched manner with a mother and child. The sad reality is that parents can do awful things to children and children to parents. Unconditional love is not our reality. Look around you. “Cow is our Mother”, says the politician. But looks away when cows wander around eating plastic bags. Wilful disassociation. Or do I mean hypocrisy? Now that’s a more realistic Mother for humankind.

Kumar is looking at our larger perspective — of the planet, the cosmos and the larger role we play in the world aside from our petty everyday wants and needs. Anyone who has any understanding of the environment and ecology knows that we stand on a precipice. Intelligence and awareness have not convinced us to step back. Who knows, maybe love can. We can but try.

And for us today at this point in time, we exist not just in the physical world, but also one that’s up in a metaphorical cloud, fed by cables under the sea and connected by satellites orbiting the earth. It’s a lot of work to look at cure cats and dogs or abuse each other’s politics, but it appears to be integral part of life.

In this cyber social media world, there’s been a bit of a churn after Donald Trump won the US presidential election again. Many social media users, including thinkers, academics, activists, writers, mainstream media, felt that a certain toxicity had controlled the discourse around the election. Part of the blame for this pervasive misinformation and hatred was thanks to Elon Musk, owner of the site X, formerly Twitter. Musk supported Trump, undoubtedly his right. But also used the platform to push Trump’s extreme right-wing and often illogical agenda.

Thus, there has been an exodus or "Xodus", if you want to use the "in" word, to another platform. Bluesky is a little different in the way it is run, not that I understand it fully. Whatever its shortcomings, as of now, there is no central dictatorship that runs it.

There is optimism on this platform, and joy that the people of X have not made it here. But like so much of human behaviour, this euphoria is all too ephemeral. At some point, the worst of us will most likely emerge. Can we manage our social media, our other presence, using the principles of radical love?

I foresee a certain amount of nostalgia will consume us at first, together with the excitement of something new. These are not at odds; far from it. We love as humans to dream of some golden age. Regardless of the reality of those times, and the horrors they presented. We are like that in the most superficial way. Hence the generational conflict, which is based largely on nostalgia playing tricks on all of us.

In the meanwhile, though, as I too make this shift to Bluesky, I feel I must work on myself. Mixing Kumar’s ideas with my own shortcomings. To not get angry with every idiot I meet. To try and love the idiot for being an idiot, because it can’t help being an idiot and whatever other reason I can come up with at the time. When I say “idiot”, I don’t mean to offend anyone in particular, especially in these over-sensitive times in which we live. I mean people that I find it difficult to stomach and those who fill me with horror. I know, tall ask. I shall just try and apply my friend’s definition of my character and be equal in my feelings to all humanity.

Tough it will be, and not just for me. So, if you meet me in either world, physical and cyber, when I smile sweetly at you, you might think “what a sweet person with a sweet smile”.

Or I might remind you of Louis Armstrong singing Mack the Knife: “O the shark has pretty teeth dear, and he shows them a pearly white…”

And you might never know which is the correct thought.