Dr Elaine Kasket is a psychologist, speaker, and writer. Below is a transcript of her recording for our Humanism At Home series on ‘Humanist values and coronavirus.’
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I’m Elaine Kasket. I’m a counselling psychologist, a cyber psychologist, and the author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of your Personal Data. I’m also a humanist, and I want to talk about how the period of coronavirus and lockdown, and COVID-19 presents us all with opportunities to align ourselves even more strongly with our humanist values, to enable us to survive and thrive throughout this extraordinary period of time and beyond.
One of the values we hold as humanists is engaging in open debate and dialogue, and with attention to evidence. And during coronavirus, I think a lot of us have been engaging in a kind of dialogue with the assumptions that we formerly held about what was the case and what was true. For example, a lot of us carry the assumption which we barely question that online, technologically mediated interactions are inherently inferior, and less than, less valid, less good than physical face to face interactions. So when we face the prospect and the reality of physical isolation, many of us feared that this would be the same as social isolation. What’s interesting is the body of literature that exists in cyber psychology to indicate that online interaction has many of the same affordances as face to face physical interaction, when it comes to the giving and the receiving of social support. The feeling of intimacy emotionally, the feeling of being able to relate at a particular relational depth with another human being. What largely makes the difference between having a positive and negative experience of online interaction is not some inherent quality of the technology itself. All other things being equal – access to the technology, of course, being important there – the main thing that makes the difference is internal factors: openness to experience, whether you’re high or low on perceiving online interactions as real and valid; creativity – willingness to push past and questioned assumptions that you’ve held about the inferiority of online interactions. By paying attention to the research from cyber psychology, that questions and challenges our ideas about the inferiority of online interaction, we will find much to comfort and inspire us about the continued potential for meaningful social interaction and connection during a time when we can’t be physically together.
Another value we hold as humanists, is treating the individual with dignity and fairness and respect. And I translate this as always putting people before arbitrary rules or traditions, always taking account of individual context. Coronavirus is all about disruption of context. And to me as a humanist, this is hugely generative in a moment when we cannot follow time honoured traditions, when we cannot enact rituals that may have been imposed by religious beliefs or religious tradition. There is great adaptability and great willingness to flex with circumstance that is coming about. I have been hugely heartened to hear about religious leaders from all over the world encouraging flexibility in interpretation of the rules, encouraging individual rituals and observances that are appropriate to the context. My hope is that long after the coronavirus dust has settled, that we will retain this respect into this honouring of what is right and what is appropriate, and what is meaningful on an individual level, and that all sorts of automatic adherence to rules and beliefs, and tenets are going to continue to be relaxed, promoting a greater appreciation and respect for individual contexts and meanings in all the kinds of transitions and rituals that we observe in our lives.
One final thought. As humanists we are committed to respecting and protecting human freedom and rights, and democracy. At the same time, we are concerned with the common good, where privacy and our online environment are concerned, we sit at a moment that represents a potential tension between these two things. As governments around the world consider the idea of more far reaching electronic surveillance and tracking to attend to contain the spread of coronavirus for the common good. As humanists, we have a voice and a role to play in doing everything we can to encourage reasoned, evidence-driven debate, over how to get this balance right, to arrive at a solution that best protects our individual dignity and autonomy, and privacy while also doing everything we can to pursue the common good. Thank you so much for listening, maybe happy, maybe well, and may you be guided and sustained by your humanist values throughout this extraordinary time.