The world watched innocent Parisian’s slaughtered, in a land of refuge, liberty and equality. Bombs rained down in Syria, UK politicians applauded passionate calls for joining the war, and the United States again refused to agree stricter gun laws despite violent shootings in schools and cinemas. The US also unearthed one of the least kind, most violent presidential candidates ever – a man who believes women are inferior to men, and shows it at every opportunity.

Our media focused on these events in the countries where we feel akin. However, the Sudan, Iraq, Somalia and various other less Western places suffered attack after attack from enemies of civil discourse.

Let’s be honest, 2015 has been a tough year; an unending reminder of why people switch off to politics and world affairs. It’s almost too painful not to. And ethicists have few, if any, solutions. We generally tell people the best they can do is to offer 10% of their salaries to good causes, or some other desperate plea for charity. I don’t agree that’s what we should do. 2016 can be a better year, and it’s about more than funding good causes. Here are 6 things you can do that will help to change things:

 

1. Differentiate between people and ideas.

As we wallowed in the aftermath of one of France’s worst ever terrorist attacks, people, bereft of ideas, allowed themselves to be drawn into a game of demonising innocent people. Muslims within Europe and the US suffered the backlash, despite having nothing to do with the attacks. The right-wing Front National in France, and Trump’s presidential candidacy in the US, have both prompted and implicitly supported such attacks. They’ve also both benefited from it.

My suggestion isn’t just as simple as ‘oppose bigots’, though. People turn to these bigots for answers when they see none in mainstream politics. Leftists, moderates and centrists alike refused to criticise the religious ideals of ISIS, instead simply pretending they “weren’t real Muslims”. These are sincere people (mainly men) who will kill themselves for what they believe Allah wants. Of course they are Muslims, in the same way that Catholics who denounce birth control and raise rates of HIV in Africa are Christians. We need to accept this, accept it is different to the Islam that most Muslims in our country believe in, and begin opposing it.

Bigots refuse to differentiate between people and ideas, and oppress all people who are remotely similar in look, skin colour or faith. But the rest of us are also to blame by refusing to differentiate, stating these people basically have no religious ideas. Both sides are wrong and playing a dangerous game of propaganda. The solution is finding the truthful middle ground that everyone can understand and get behind.
2. Don’t always follow the crowd.

We’re human. We like to fit in. But to change things, we also have to keep our calm and disagree. Providing rational reasons why, when others are wrong.

Our tolerance of people – as mentioned in the first point – often becomes a tolerance of bad ideas, and that should never be the case. With terrorism, we should protect Muslims whilst attacking the illiberal ideology of Jihad. To avoid war, we should use democratic process to protect civilians of the dictatorships, whilst arguing against violence.

But disagreeing when people are wrong goes much deeper than that. We should disagree with people who are promoting anti-vaccination campaigns, or pseudo-scientific medicine like homeopathy. These might seem harmless, but when practiced on a sincere level, bad medicine can persuade people to ignore life-saving treatment, and failing to vaccinate your child can endanger everyone who can’t get the vaccine (as well as your own children). If we allow this kind of suffering, we are doing no better than allowing for terrorist ideas to flourish. Suffering is suffering.

This is the most difficult thing of all to do. The people who promote these latter kinds of ideas tend to be caring, genuine people, and disagreeing with their core beliefs will likely change nothing. But to know you respectfully and strongly believe otherwise can change their minds. It can also change the minds of others in society, who might otherwise have followed their path. A strong movement for truth is often separated from the fight for justice, but the two are likely intimately connected.

 

3. Avoid discontinuous beliefs.

Disagreement means having the bravery to stand up for what’s right or what’s true, no matter how insignificant. That’s important, as a world of people who speak the truth is a better world than one where people go along with what everyone else says. But for that world to have value, you also have to challenge yourself.

That belief you have in feminism, does it translate to respect for Trans people? The will you have to protect the innocent, does it apply also to people who don’t share your beliefs? And that strong belief in fairness and ending suffering, does it transfer to animals? Before you disagree with anything, make sure your own beliefs are right. Taking a stand for your own personal bias isn’t going to help anyone; that’s just imposing your own beliefs on other people. Make sure they are right first.

 

4. Remove the invisible line you draw between the suffering of humans and other animals.

Save that last paragraph in point 3, I’ve mentioned little about animals so far. Why would I? This year we’ve seen war, heartless terrorism encroaching on our doorstep in a way which chills the spine, and bigotry of worrying proportions. For me to mention animals at all might seem to be misjudging the feelings of my reader.

Whilst I too have a deep-seated belief that human suffering is more important to eliminate than animal suffering, there are two reasons why I disagree with myself. Firstly, because drawing invisible lines between different individuals based on physical or mental characteristics is rationally bankrupt. It’s old fashioned, it’s out of date, and the lack of ability that animals have to voice their opinion about our use of them shouldn’t make us silent about it.

Secondly, to see a dog being tossed into a dustbin lorry, or to take in a shelter cat who has never known a human touch other than a kick, is to experience an emotional journey that unearths your own hypocrisy. We eat pigs, cows, and recently probably a turkey, that suffer in a way which is just as real as dogs and cats. We justify our actions with all kinds of ridiculous excuses – ranging from comparing ourselves to Lions, to arguing on behalf of human ‘culture’. And, when we run out of excuses, we simply say “I couldn’t stop”.

Forget terrorism, forget war, if we have become a culture of humans who “can’t” buy different things in the supermarket in order to stop mass torture, I truly despair for what we have become. We surely aren’t the same species as Emily Davidson or Frederick Douglas, are we? The struggle for justice used to be a lot harder, and people back then not only “could“, they “did”.

Every year, without fail, we see celebrities – be they chefs or Hollywood actresses – conducting a campaign on behalf of farmed animals. They do little, because they think little of us, their audience. They think we need to eat animals, or that we have to eat all animals. As a result they promote questionable uses of those animals like ‘free range’ (which in 99% of cases doesn’t provide much of an improvement for the chicken, who knows nothing but the huge suffering she still experiences), telling us they are definitely better than how we currently kill and eat them.

I don’t honestly think most of us even buy this kind of reasoning. But we go along with it, as it’s a social excuse to continue doing what we do. We’ll give 50p to an animal charity on the street, another £20 at xmas maybe. That’s the moral equivalent of running foxes over all year, then donating to a fox sanctuary once a year. It’s not the actions of an honest, rationally capable person.

 

5. Act.

All of which brings us nicely to the final suggestion: do something!

Of course it’s important what you do. Those celebrities who promote ‘free range’ methods of farming are like the other republican candidates, being partially bigoted in order to win over more moderate Trump supporters. It does nothing to buy free range, just like it does little to support Carson rather than Trump. Acting itself is not enough, it has to be rational.

But you do have to act. Giving money isn’t enough. Charities do good, but they can’t do much if you don’t. They exist against a constant barrage of opposition, because our apathy allows their opposition to thrive. Vote for political parties that actually do good things, rather than paying for food banks to undo some of the Tories evil. Those are the same Tories you voted for in the first place, or the same Tories which you refused to debate your friends about, or refused to campaign or even write Facebook posts against, last May! Stopping causing problems is the key to a better world.

When we’ve lived through a year like 2015, there is of course a feeling of apathy. It’s painful to keep watching what is going on. There’s also a culture of fear, and as a result we vote for unscrupulous, unkind politicians to protect us from our enemies. But we must remember that doing this is how we got to where we are.

We must also remember that things aren’t actually that bad. They could be a lot better, but things have gradually improved over the last few centuries. As the wonderful Better Angels of our Nature, by Steven Pinker, points out, there has never been a safer time to be alive around the world, despite how it feels.

That’s thanks to reason. People being less violent, more rational, valuing reason over prejudice, and valuing conversation over war. The media wants to tell us all of the bad things that are happening – and they should – but they should put them in the context of hope, rather than hopelessness. Things are getting better, but that won’t happen if you stop trying to make it better and instead settle back into a medieval feeling of hate, fear or bigotry. Similarly, the real path to progress is not in a tolerant pacifism alone, but a persuasive and passionate promotion of reason as well. A protection of all innocents, and the creation of a global culture of tolerant, secular politics.

I don’t think that if you go out and do the 5 things that I have written above, then the world will be a peaceful utopia this next time year. But I do believe that a year is a long time, and things can get an awful lot better in that time. This is how you make it happen.

Rarely do votes in parliament get covered in such detail – and with such an informed public – as the debate on whether the UK should bomb IS targets in Syria.

The education for us largely began when terrorists struck Paris, with horrific consequences, in early November. From that moment, many of us began a steep learning curve on the politics and geography of the situation, especially of Syria.

This kind of politics is not my speciality, so the comments which follow are not those of a veteran political writer or analyst. Rather my expertise is on arguments – the logic and evidence of the situation which has been presented – and who is right and wrong. I spend my time delving into topics that often have right answers but are genuinely debateable: animal ethics, economics or religion, for instance. But the issue on whether it is a good idea to bomb Syria, when all is considered, is one of the easiest I have ever analysed, due to the weight of evidence which flows primarily only in one direction.

I am certainly no pacifist, I have had reservations about military intervention in the past, but have never attended marches or held strong views either way. I have seesawed from a balanced view, to a pro-peace view, to one of understanding the need for war (occasionally). But the bombing of Syria makes absolutely no sense to me.

First, some facts. These are regularly debated, but almost concrete.

ISIS – just like Al Qaeda before them – are a global terror threat, whose main danger is in its ideas. It can and does motivate sympathetic Muslims in the West to support it, and these are the real danger. Indeed, it is a modern propaganda machine. It uses networking effectively online, and it utilises the idea that it has a stronger, aggressive enemy in order to solicit sympathy from those who share its views. And, whether we like it or not, it definitely is a Muslim group, and the beliefs it holds do not appeal to non- Muslims on the whole. Most moderate Muslim’s disagree with it, in the same way that most moderate Christians disagree with the bombing of abortion clinics, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is a faith-based organisation with religious ideals.

So if you want to defeat IS – whose strengths are not in military resources, or man power, but in persuasive, fundamentally Islamic ideas – then you have to oppose it with ideas of your own. Ideas of progress, peace, humility, reason and above all tolerance. Bombs and bullets don’t kill ideas, and they never have. Defeating IS will not happen through bombing or any military action.

But will it weaken IS, as many MPs – including David Cameron – believe? Possibly, but what happened when we weakened Al Qaeda with our militaries? IS appeared, arguably more determined that what came before. That’s because there is a gap for these fundamental Islamic ideas of Jihad within wider Islam, and our refusal to close it down in favour of physical revenge means any other Jihadist group can fill it within months. Perhaps springing from IS, perhaps with a different name, possibly under the same one.

There is no evidence that military action will defeat IS, and none that it will necessarily weaken them – at least not to the degree where we are safer from terrorist attacks, as the real danger is in their persuading our own nationals against us. That threat grows, surely, when you use violence against them, as the sympathisers will feel even more aggrieved with every bomb reported on the news. Remember that most domestic terror here occurs from natives who have been radicalised. So you don’t make it safer by using violence, you arguably make it much worse. That’s not a difficult conclusion to come to when you weigh up the reason and evidence, and take off the rose-coloured glasses.

So what other arguments do members of parliament give. Well, they say we would let France down by not engaging in bombing strikes in Syria. I can’t see that we have an obligation to suspend all reason when allies knock on our door, but I also don’t think it will help France in the long run either. They have suffered tremendously over the course of the last two months, and their decision is heavily based in this idea of vengeance and desperation to do something. This doesn’t make it a good decision for them either – it isn’t – but it does explain why they were pulled into this action, and why we shouldn’t.

Which brings us to the other reason we have given for bombing Syria: what else can we do? Well, first of all let’s remember that ‘bomb them’ is not a good idea just because we don’t have another option. If I find myself hungry late at night, wanting to order a pizza, but then find out I have no option to, my default backup is not ‘bomb them’. It doesn’t make any sense. To repeat our historical decisions, because we can’t find any other responses is poor reasoning. Doing nothing is better than spending time doing something which will be counter-productive. Indeed, if it does turn out to be counter-productive, the right decision in that situation would have been to do absolutely nothing. Doing nothing is an option – a choice we must take – and only our poor human psychology/bias media would tell us otherwise. “We must do something” is not a meaningful sentence if “something” is defined as “anything, regardless of it’s effect”. So let’s stop pretending that’s an argument.

But, more to the point, there is something we can do, we just refuse to acknowledge it. Those more liberally minded individuals combine with Conservatives in ignoring that IS is a religious organisation. They read from holy books, quote passages, and chant in the name of their deity when committing their attacks. It is pure ignorance on our part to ignore this – all be it, perhaps, well-intentioned ignorance, by wanting to protect moderate, more sensible Muslims. But once you admit it, you admit that they have truly engaged us in a battle of ideas. No one seems to have realised…

We are losing that battle – the real battle – because we are creating imaginary solutions to distract ourselves with. Today, that imaginary solution is bombing. Yet we are a country, like France and our other neighbours, which benefited from the Enlightenment, and are better armed than almost any countries in the world to counter the kind of ridiculous religious dogma that can’t be reasoned with. In a war of ideas, we are stocked with ideas that should see us win hands down. We just refuse to fight it out of a misplaced ‘respect’ for moderate Muslims. Yet as they suffer on the streets at the hands of xenophobes and fascists – in what should be a reason-loving, peaceful country – it is them we are failing most severely of all.

We are the nations of Voltaire, of Adam Smith and David Hume. Of Mary Wollstonecraft, Kant and Rousseau.  We are the countries that allowed Charles Darwin to light the blue touch paper of reason that arguably disproved the fundamentals of major religions everywhere. And it was here that the suffragettes helped cast further that chain of dogma which allowed us to see women as second class citizens.

Yet, for some reason, we seem desperate to ignore this history of standing up for reason, and keen instead to focus our minds on replying with violence. Conservatives do it because it’s all they know, leftists do it out of a desire not to be considered racist, so pursuing an unwavering support of exotic sounding religion. Both are failing to even recognise what kind of battle we are in. We will lose over and over again until they do.