e are living through a loud age. The noise comes not only of wars and weapons, but also from certainties shouted across screens; identities hardened into slogans; and leaders who thrive on division because division keeps them relevant. In a world supervised, in different ways, by people like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, politics has come to resemble a permanent state of combat. What quietly disappears in this din is not merely civility, but something far more precious: the affective mind — the capacity to feel one’s way into another person’s fear, history and hope; and to build a bridge where others see only a wall.

T S Eliot’s unsettling question echoes with renewed urgency: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” We are drowning in opinions and updates, yet starved of understanding. The ability to hold complexity, to listen without immediately preparing a rebuttal, to imagine a future that does not require the humiliation of the other, these qualities now appear weak in a culture that rewards outrage, speed and absolute certainty. Baruch Spinoza, writing in another age of religious and political fanaticism, understood this danger with striking clarity. For him, freedom was not the absence of restraint but the mastery of our passions through understanding. Hatred, fear and blind loyalty were not virtues but forms of bondage. A society driven by unexamined emotion, Spinoza warned in essence, cannot be free, because it is ruled not by reason or compassion, but by manipulation and impulse.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the world at least pretended to learn from catastrophe. In the aftermath of the World War II, amid all its contradictions, there existed a visible impulse toward collective ideals, international cooperation, human rights, justice and the rule of law. These were not perfect commitments, but they carried moral weight. Today, the same words are repeated with alarming ease, often emptied of meaning and pressed into the service of narrow self-interest. Ideologies that once invited people to transcend themselves have withered into platforms for personal ambition and national vanity.

Tolstoy once observed, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” Our moment distorts even this wisdom. The dominant desire is no longer ethical transformation but domination. The self is not examined; it is amplified. Power is not restrained by principles; principles are bent to justify power. Dissent is treated not as a democratic necessity but as a threat. To question is to be labeled disloyal, unpatriotic or dangerous. Shakespeare grasped this moral corrosion long before modern politics gave it a name. In his tragedies, rulers fall not simply because they are opposed, but because they are inwardly hollowed out by ambition, fear and the hunger for control. From Macbeth’s blood-soaked certainty to King Lear’s catastrophic pride, Shakespeare shows that tyranny begins as a failure of self-knowledge before it becomes a failure of governance.

Long before modern politics discovered polarisation, poets warned us against it. Saadi of Shiraz wrote, “Human beings are members of a whole, in creation of one essence and soul.” When one part is afflicted, he reminded us, the rest of the body cannot remain in comfort. Our refusal to feel another’s pain is not strength; it is moral amputation. Rumi, too, urged us to move beyond rigid identities, whispering across centuries, “Beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” That field — of shared vulnerability and humility — has been steadily abandoned in favour of battlefields of certainty.

Here, Ibn-i-Arabi’s vision feels almost subversive in its relevance. For him, reality itself was plural: truth appeared differently in different hearts, cultures and traditions, yet remained one at its source. “My heart has become capable of every form,” he wrote, “it is a pasture for gazelles and a monastery for monks.” This was not relativism, but a radical ethics of recognition — the idea that encountering the other is a way of encountering the divine. In a world obsessed with rigid borders — of nation, creed and identity — such a vision challenges the very logic of exclusion.

Rebuilding the world, therefore, cannot start only with constitutions, treaties or technologies. It must begin with the re-education of perception itself — re-learning how to see a human being before we see a category, a story before we see a stereotype.

Robert Frost warned, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Yet walls — physical, ideological, emotional — are what we keep building. We wall off nations, communities and histories; even facts. We retreat into echo chambers where our own beliefs return to us louder and more extreme. What we lose behind these walls is not only the other, but ourselves, because identity without dialogue becomes brittle, anxious and afraid.

Poet Ghalib understood this fragility well. He wrote of a heart so crowded with grief and contradiction that certainty itself becomes impossible. For Ghalib, doubt was not a weakness but a condition of being human. Today, doubt has no place in public life; it does not trend well. And yet, without doubt, there can be no empathy, no learning, no peace.

This is why the need of the hour is not merely new policies or new leaders, but also new kinds of individuals — people with the emotional intelligence and moral courage to stand between opposing camps and refuse the comfort of absolutes. Such individuals rarely emerge from the machinery of power. They come, more often, from the margins: from thinkers, artists, teachers and writers who speak across borders and refuse to reduce the world to slogans.

Literature has always traveled more freely than armies. It slips past uniforms and flags and speaks in the intimate language of human experience. Rabindranath Tagore imagined a world “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high… where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.” That vision feels less like idealism today and more like a manual for survival. Iqbal, too, warned against the paralysis of imitation and fear, urging the self to awaken, not for domination, but for responsibility, creativity and ethical action.

Writers do not offer solutions in bullet points. They offer something more radical: perspective. They remind us that behind every ideology lies a human story; and that no story is ever complete on its own. As Arundhati Roy insists, in defiance of despair, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.” The power of that sentence lies in its refusal to surrender to cynicism while also rejecting blind optimism. It calls for imagination disciplined by conscience.

In times of chaos, harmony does not come from denying difference. It comes from those rare minds willing to dwell in discomfort, to translate between worlds, to insist that freedom, justice and the rule of law are not obsolete ideals but unfinished tasks. The world does not lack intelligence; it lacks tenderness allied with courage.

If our age is defined by noise, then resistance must begin with a different kind of strength: the courage to be quiet, reflective and receptive in a culture of shouting. Spinoza reminds us that freedom begins with understanding the forces that move us; Ibn-i-Arabi teaches that the other is not a threat but a mirror; Shakespeare warns that unchecked power is first a spiritual collapse before it becomes a political one. Together, they point toward a single truth: societies do not decay only because institutions fail, but because inner life withers.

Rebuilding the world, therefore, cannot start only with constitutions, treaties or technologies. It must begin with the re-education of perception itself — learning again how to see a human being before we see a category, a story before we see a stereotype, a wound before we see an enemy. Bridge-building is not sentimental work; it is slow, disciplined and often lonely labour. It requires the patience to endure misunderstanding; the humility to revise one’s own beliefs; and the bravery to stand in the in-between spaces where no side offers applause.

The future will not be saved by louder voices, stronger borders or smarter weapons. It will be shaped by quieter virtues: empathy that does not collapse into weakness; reason that does not harden into cruelty; and courage that does not seek domination. Until we recover this ethical balance — this union of mind and heart, clarity and compassion — we will remain trapped in cycles of outrage and fear. If we do recover it, the loud age may yet give way to a listening one, where politics is less about conquest and more about care; and where the work of building bridges is honoured more than the work of building walls.

The writer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.