Sir Peter Bazalgette in conversation with VP Comms, Peter Barron. Sir Peter was instrumental in creating the independent TV production sector in the United Kingdom. He was Chief Creative Officer at Endemol, President of the Royal Television Society, Deputy Chairman of the National Film School, Chair of Arts Council England, and is now Chair of the UK broadcaster ITV. He’s spent his career arguing for the role and importance of the arts and creative expression.
He joined us at Google to talk about his new book,The Empathy Instinct: How to Create a More Civil Society, which seeks to address the essential question of how we create a more civil society when so many of us are divided.
Video and more on the book below
How the art and science of compassion can build a better society.
Empathy is the power of understanding others, imaginatively entering into their feelings. It is a fundamental human attribute, without which mutually cooperative societies cannot function. In a revolutionary development, we now know who has it, who lacks it and why. Via the MRI scanner, we are mapping the human brain. This is a new frontier that reveals a host of beneficial ideas for childcare, teens challenged by the Internet, the justice system, decent health care, tackling racism and resolving conflicts.
In this wide-ranging and accessible audiobook full of entertaining stories that are underlined by the latest scientific research, Peter Bazalgette also mounts a passionate defence of arts and popular culture as a means of bridging the empathy gap. As the world’s population expands, consuming the planet’s finite resources, as people haunted by poverty and war are on the move and as digital communications infinitely complicate our social interactions, we find our patience and our sympathy constantly challenged. Here is the antidote.
Culminating in a passionate manifesto on empathy, The Empathy Instinct is what makes us human and what can make us better humans.
This audiobook includes a bonus interview with the author.
The Empathy Instinct: How to Create a More Civil Society
