My gran'dad...

My grandfather, Hugh Townshend Boscawen,with my mother,
Kathleen Patricia, shortly before the First World War

 A COUPLE of years ago, I got to see my grandfather’s grave for the first time. It was the closest I’d ever been to him.

On the night of Wednesday, 3 October, 1917, four New Zealand battalions moved to assembly points in trenches at the front of the Ypres Salient in Belgium. My grandfather, Hugh Townshend Boscawen, was among them.

At 6 a.m., a thunderous British artillery barrage was unleashed on the German positions and the infantry began moving forward. Ahead, a thousand yards of sucking mire away, lay their heavily defended objective: a slight rise called the “Gravenstafel Spur”. My grandfather didn’t make it. His remains now lie in the military cemetery at Tyne Cot.

The first thing you notice about Tyne Cot, apart from the sepulchral architecture and meticulous maintenance, is the staggering scale of this chilling ghost-scape of tragedy: nearly 12,000 white stone markers, each representing a young life lost, a family broken. It took me a good half hour to find my grandfather’s “IV.E.20” cemetery address. He lay beside four other New Zealanders from the same regiment; from places I knew “back home”. They’d been killed on the same day, 4 October: W. D. Tunks, whose parents lived in Shortland Street, Auckland, was 22 when he died; beside him was Charles Ratcliffe, killed at 35. His widowed mother was in England. Albert Olson, from Hikurangi, was 36; John Alexander Ferguson from Dannevirke was just 20. At 38, my grandfather was the oldest.

The graves of (from left) Charles Ratcliffe, my grandfather
and John Ferguson at Tyne Cot, Belgium.

My mother’s bitterness became a part of my experience as a child. Her father’s death had orphaned her, an only child, when she was six years old. It destroyed her mother’s capacity for happiness. It condemned both to survival on a meagre widow’s pension and the kindness of a few relatives.

The account I’d heard of my grandfather’s death was that he’d not gone far when was wounded in the leg and fell. Stretcher-bearers pulled him from the mud and were carrying him back to a dressing station when a shrapnel shell burst overhead, killing all five. It seemed likely to me that my grandfather’s immediate “neighbours” at Tyne Cot were the heroes who died trying to save his life.

I later met a local businessman who made his living isolating and identifying unexploded munitions from the First World War. Apparently tonnes of them are dug up — very carefully — every year: shrapnel shells, mustard gas shells, high explosives… the lot. No-one lights bonfires around Ypres, he told me, in case they detonate something.

Peace… we long for it. It’s not a foolish hope: sane, contented people don’t get up in the morning, go out and risk death to devastate as much as they can; no-one wants to half-sleep through the night fearing bombs, gunfire or the sound of troops on the move.

So, war aside, what stirred in the mind of the young Nova Scotian recently imprisoned for burning a cross on the lawn of the mixed-race couple who’d been his near neighbours? What possessed whoever it was who, one dark night recently, set fire to the home of an inoffensive gay couple in rural Prince Edward Island? What was in the mind of 33 year-old Mohamed Atta as he drove an airliner into the World Trade Centre in New York? Atta was a strange, obsessive and angry individual… but, even allowing for the addition of some fiery fundamentalist rhetoric, does that explain his actions?

What triggers children in the free, wealthy, educated West to mob, beat and even to murder or rape another child, record it on cell phones and post it on online? What was in the minds of George Bush and Tony Blair, knowing what they must have known, as they unleashed overwhelming military force against a former ally: Saddam Hussein and the people of Iraq, a decision that’s killed thousands? What keeps the two Koreas so passionately, so venomously apart? What drives the resolution of a Taliban fighter in the fastnesses of Afghanistan? Or the zeal of that young NATO soldier who has gone there to face him? Is each death understood, yet still intended? How do things get this far?

Why did my grandfather leave his home in New Zealand, his wife and little daughter to find a grave at Tyne Cot? I know what he said. It was for “king and country”…  but what kind of king or country sends young people to die wholesale and indiscriminately in such squalid, pointless horror?

When I was 10-11 years old, I keenly wanted to learn the bagpipes. My Scottish-born dad was a good player who’d kept a pipe band going in his infantry battalion during the Italian Campaign of the Second World War. He was awarded the Military Cross, commissioned in the field, wounded and returned to the front line: a hero. He had nightmares I was too young to understand. He sometimes played his pipes at night and, woken by the sound, I one night peeked: he had tears streaming down his face. I quietly went back to my bed.

He wouldn’t let me learn the pipes, far less teach me: the sight a practice chanter in my hands brought back too many shattered memories of young men he’d taught who’d too soon afterwards died: shot, bayoneted or chopped to pieces by Spandau bullets, blown apart by a mine, a bomb or an artillery shell, often not far from his side. At the end of his book, Cassino to Trieste: a soldier’s story (published shortly before his death at the age of 95), he wrote: “war is insanity personified… we should be working as never before for peace, friendship and love.”

Worldwide, military spending is running at more than $1.5 trillion a year. Actual conflict is not limited to just the “war on terror” that preoccupies North Americans. Dozens of squalid little gunfights, wars and insurgencies continue day by day. Last year, there were more than 50 international peacekeeping operations. Casualties of the Somalian civil war are approaching half a million; the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency in India, which began in 1967, has cost more than 11,000 lives; no peace is yet in sight in Nagorno-Karabakh’s conflict with Azerbaijan, a bitter hostility that originated in an insensitive choice of a Governor-General by the British after the First World War. And eight countries have nuclear weapons: the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan and Israel.

I see worrying levels of fascination with depictions of violence as entertainment and, for real, in sports. Climbing into hockey gear in Canada is tacit consent to being assaulted by anyone on the ice who’s mean and quick enough to get a hit in. It’s as though all of this is being represented as sane human behaviour.

There are clever evolutionary and genetic and sociological rationalisations of human violence but none that assert that it’s essential or inevitable. Our brains are bigger than peanuts and our emotional capacities are more subtle than “on-off”. We have imaginations, we have energies and sensitivities. We have technological skills. We should be able to shape violence out of our lives just as we’ve come very close to shaping cannibalism, human sacrifice and slavery out of our lives… genocide, capital punishment and torture are on the skids too, as far as civilisation’s progress is concerned. We could surely add wanton bloodshed to the list.

We seem to need a new form of “warfare”: something less hazardous and globally threatening than balances of military power or the militarization of space, and more cost-effective than “conventional” warfare — a pre-emptive kind of warfare: “peacefare”, in fact. Human survival depends on it.

Were some sizeable share of the vast investment that’s currently consumed by war to be redirected to peace, surely the savings in suffering and degradation would be worth it? Perhaps going so far as to sacrifice some of our disproportionate wealth would gain us greater personal security? There’s no reason why peacefare shouldn’t generate as much business and innovation as warfare, while delivering far happier opportunities for our children and their children.

One of the first obstacles is a widespread but mistaken notion that warfare’s inevitable. To accept that is to dumbly embrace humanity’s collapse. Others are the fallacies of moral, cultural or religious superiority and the idea that violence ever proves a point or delivers “better” times.

Behind violence we always find a will towards some form of domination. It’s pushing that comes to “shove”.

Dominance is bound to be present — valued as a driver of progress — in a competitive, wealth-generating society, and sustained by an unmeasured background level of aggressive impulse. And, self-assertion is necessary: everyone needs to be visible. So it’s not simple self-assertiveness that’s the problem: it’s our hubristic, cocksure, overbearing pushiness that damns us.

It exists in most societies and cultures, I think. It’s been identified as mostly a male thing. It’s also an individualistic thing: the elevation of “me” and my values over those of others. It’s a fear and insecurity thing: the idea that if I don’t look after me and mine, something will “get” us all. And it’s a fear of otherness thing. And it can get out of hand.

We must stop making sweeping judgements. Where incompatible cultural priorities crowd into conflict, economics cannot continue to be the over-riding determinant of survival. Peacefare would require us to foster the mutual interests of nations, rather than deepen their conflicting ones. We don’t need to push each other to the edges of our capacities to survive.

Best practice guidelines for checking aggressive behaviour among children boil down to setting clear boundaries and addressing social skill deficits. Maybe we grown-ups should give ourselves some clear guidelines and polish our social skills.

To me, two little things do seem readily available:

• The first “can do” is curiosity. Curiosity about other people, other cultures, other ways of seeing and understanding, is a social skill… an art. In this year’s LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture, the Aga Khan promoted pluralism, putting it this way: “Pluralism is a process and not a product… a mentality, a way of looking at a diverse and changing world.” The image he suggested was eloquent, adding to harmony the idea of musical counterpoint: “In counterpoint, each voice follows a separate musical line, but always as part of a single work of art, with a sense both of independence and belonging.”

• The other is “satiation”. Fish live in a predator-prey world, yet you’ll see prey fish swim unconcerned past a shark that’s already eaten. Zebra will graze near a pride of lions that have made a kill already. Fear is abated by satiation (getting full). But we’ve found ways to stay in hunting mode, making consumption endless: with money we can postpone consumption while we continue to hoard the potential to consume. Debt lets us have now what we can’t pay for until later. Our money (or debt) can gobble up (or be eroded by) interest even as we sleep, while economists tell us a lack of growth — stability — is failure. This is a tragic human failing: it puts society in an edgy state of constant volatility and, excused satiation, we’ve become accustomed to near toxic levels of ambient fear: genetically sociable creatures living in vulnerably solitary ways. We need to “lighten up”, delight in what we have and let go a little.

Curiosity invites us to explore the full beauty of the rich and complicated composition that is humanity.

Letting go lets us enjoy it.


Aga Khan - 1                Aga Khan - 2

It's a voyage...

FEW people get to navigate at sea these days… not the old way, with chronometer and sextant, compass, sight reduction tables, the Nautical Almanac, dividers, slide rules and Admiralty charts. It was complicated: part art, mostly science and a lot of experience, judgment and finesse. And the weather has a bit to do with it. But the satisfactions could be wonderful.

Then there's a more intuitive approach, called “dead reckoning”. One of the fascinating things about dead reckoning is the accuracy that’s achieved when enough random errors get added together. The more estimates there are and the more genuinely random they are, the greater the overall accuracy.

Increasingly, I’ve come to see life as a lesson in dead reckoning. We will none of us be in the same place tomorrow as we are today, no matter how much we might want to avoid the future. We’re all adrift in the light-filled boundlessnesses of mystery. Certainties are more apparent than real, and the currents of life carry us endlessly towards the horizon.

For a long time, I've been fascinated by non-Western navigational methods, and enthralled by the Polynesian story.

There are accounts in the logs of early whaling ships of captains being surprised that, without looking at a compass or chart, Polynesian crewmen could reliably indicate the direction in which their home island lay. They were not just the inheritors of a skill but, in very important ways, the creations of it.

In what was really a fairly short time, while Jason and his Argonauts were timidly coast-hugging their way around the Anatolian shore, Polynesian navigators were embarked on long, deep-ocean voyages of deliberate two-way exploration, discovery and settlement, founding successful new communities on every habitable island in the eastern Pacific: an area amounting to one sixth of the earth’s surface.

It’s humanity’s most awe-inspiring feat of discovery. The summing of random errors, the re-visiting of homelands, the allure of the far horizon, the vagaries of winds and sea, the constant voyaging, the wrecks and storms and catastrophes, the hero figures and the courage, the infinity of possibilities, the discernment of what was necessary to carry with them on migration canoes and the need to be able to constantly maintain and repair their vessels at sea… all of these things had play in the grand accomplishment.

The distinctive “crab claw” sail and rig of Polynesia, for example, made the canoes exceptionally manoeuvrable. The voyagers used cordage of varying strengths in lashings and stitchings to hold sail panels together so that, though a sudden gust might snap the weaker bindings, the matting of the sails could be re-stitched and irreplaceable spars would be saved from snapping. Their shallow-draft canoes meant that the coral reefs surrounding most tropical Polynesian islands were either visible to them or negotiable; deep-draft European ships, on the other hand, were forever grounding on deeper reefs unseen from the surface.

The journey to each new landfall could have begun only with the heroic act of launching a big, double-hulled canoe — representing a considerable community investment — into the vast expanse of the planet’s largest body of water… a perfect, dangerous, unknowable metaphor for the absolute mystery of existence. It entailed a search for land where there was no certainty of finding any, and where no other human had previously ventured. The first heroes into space had far more information, safety systems, back-up and comfort, security and all-round support than these guys. Neil Armstrong was pretty sure there was a Moon up there. And astronauts have always had the consolation of being in fairly constant communication with “home”. But, when the Polynesian explorers left shore, they became utterly reliant on their own skills, decisions, conduct and wisdom.

They explored then found their way home to a low-lying little island in a vast expanse of ocean. Then — if new habitable land had been found — they’d settlers back to the new landfall. There, the settlers had to establish a functioning society from their own resources and with the tools and equipment and limited number of hand-picked colonists they could take with them. And this was achieved, time and time and time again.

Their secrets lay not in databanks or high technology but in wisdom, co-operation and courage. Courage has always been decisive in human affairs: the commitment to place coolly chosen values above one’s own comfort, convenience and life. Wisdom is more complicated.

The navigators recorded their sailing directions as stories that made them easier to recall. Basing their courses on zenith (overhead) star positions and “star paths” (following one rising star after the next), and supplementing this knowledge with an array of other experience-based cues — swell and wind directions, the characteristics of different winds, interference patterns in the swells, currents, bird species and the directions of their flight, fish behaviour, sea wrack, the motion of the canoe, the temperature and even the saltiness of the water on the tongue, hints of colour reflected on the underside of clouds — they voyaged.

They picked up the sweet potato from South America and saw it cultivated as a staple crop throughout tropical and subtropical Polynesia; they took coconuts from Southeast Asia where they themselves had originated and spread them across the Pacific (research has shown that coconuts could not have propagated across the Pacific by drifting: they don’t survive in salt water long enough to cover the distances). Dozens of useful plants and animals were shipped about the Pacific on big, seaworthy, ocean-going canoes. And the great navigators became the founding hero-demigods of the cultural outposts they established.

These people did not learn a set of skills to use when they were at sea. Rather, chosen individuals became navigators. Most youngsters were taught the basics: they routinely fished out of sight of their island homes and had to be able to find their way back, in much the same way as children in the modern urban West are taught basic road safety.

But a selected few who showed exceptional flair, specialised. Their every breathing moment would then be devoted, not to learning how to navigate, but how to be a navigator… in-dwelling the character and sensitivities, the awareness, the values and ways of thinking of a navigator. There are stories of their having been woken in the night and quizzed about the positions of various stars so they learned to keep track of the star paths even as they hovered in sleep. They memorised the star path stories. They would be dropped from canoes to spend long hours in the night treading water, watching the stars, feeling the wind, coming to know the ocean and overcoming their last fears of it.

Something that was always carried by the great migration canoes was a body of stories and cultural tradition. It was these poetic narratives as much as the utilitarian technology that empowered the success of the new, independent settlements. The stories and ancient lore imparted “wisdom” rather than “knowledge”. The difference is that wisdom is about discernment; knowledge is all about data. Wisdom freed the great explorers of the Pacific Ocean from needs to keep meticulous charts or develop critically precise chronometers, for want of which European knowledge-based exploration stalled in the Pacific. Wisdom was there first.

So, if we’re going to apply some of these lessons to life, we’ll need to be less concerned with always needing information and intensely analytic skill sets and become more practised in discernment: we have no need of false islands; we don’t need cumbersome, deep-draft vessels that run us onto unseen reefs.

We cannot possibly foresee all of the circumstances to which we’ll have to respond, nor will we be able to control them. Our lives are our unknown oceans, awaiting discovery. Life requires of us the courage to venture and to the resilient, dynamic fluidity of discernment. Making the most of life is a step-by-step engagement with all of life, day by day, year by year, as life’s journey proceeds… and with no turning back.

Discernment grows deep within us, beneath the layerings of our experience, tastes, desires, intelligence, spirit, capacities, interests… wisdom’s foundations lie in the ongoing synthesis that we test day by day through living.

It’s helpful to recognise that there are one or two problems with data. We usually have no choice but to assume, for example, that one “fact” is as good as another provided it’s “true”. A fact can be true in one circumstance but not another, or at one time but not at another. One fact may have been collected by a bulldozer, another using a scalpel. Facts are the fruit of questions and a stupid question can generate as many facts as a good question… they just won’t be of much use. And we can never be sure we’ve got enough facts: one missing fact can overturn a lot of apple carts.

Then there’s the sheer potential volume of facts. We know that a 1:1 road map is useless. A useful road map leaves an enormous amount of detail out, and a scale of 1:10,000 can be quite handy. When we deal with facts, we can very easily end up with a mountain range of facts mined from a molehill of reality.

We inhabit a data-junky world. Technology-based memory capacities are soaring with the storage densities of hard drives… but their life expectancy is falling: from millennia (in the case of engravings on stone and text on vellum and papyrus) and centuries (in the case of print on paper) to decades. And, as new memory platforms and operating systems are developed, older systems become less readily accessible. We could find our decision-making systems mired in vast quantities of ephemeral information and ourselves living in a new age of naïveté. Facts are okay only if you have enough of the right ones and a system for dealing with them.

But they are certainly better than blind belief… obstinately-held blind belief is pretty much bound to be flawed. “Belief that” —accepting the actual-factual truth of an unproven statement — is what you do if you’re too lazy to acquire wisdom and too unfocused to assemble the facts. In that “here’s something I can absolutely count on” sort of a way, “belief” is a cop-out. It takes an “assumption”, freezes it as solid as a comfort zone, and resists every attempt to think about a “best before” date. It stalls the story that is yours to drive. And, in time, like dead fish, it turns toxic.

“Belief that” sets us against and apart from mystery. When a “belief that” reveals its inevitable flaw, it will drop us in the middle of bother we’ll have no means of understanding. It denies our capacities and responsibilities to think and, most importantly, to let the challenge of mystery stand.

“Belief in”, on the other hand, can mean “trust in” — and trust can lead us onwards. But it doesn’t mean we don’t need to pay attention. Trusting and learning from the mystery of life together reveal the path of wisdom.

Wisdom winnows data away to a few empowering principles that let us steer our way through the information, emotions and coercions that constantly rush at us without a lot of aggravating doubt, fear or anxiety. It feels intuitive. It’s an expression of who we are because it arises from what we have become.

And, when we become fully ourselves, I think we’ll recognise the answers to all of the questions we’ve been longing to ask along the way, and stand securely on the horizon’s edge.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FglNdqHRUY&feature=related