Morality? ...ummm...

ONCE upon a time, the word “moral” simply meant acting in “customary” ways, as opposed to ways that were “just” (which meant ‘lawful”)… or “legal” (which meant “laid down”: compelled or prescribed by the ruler).

The terms drew contrasts between what everybody does, what’s okay to do and what the state insists that you to do. In terms a medieval peasant could understand, these contrasts told you how to keep your nose clean and stay out of trouble.

“Morality” particularly involved community consensus; in a community where there was no consensus, there could really be no “morality”: merely choices between conflict or mutual toleration. And, for centuries, tolerance was not an option… and we still wage wars for want of it.

Historically, consensus has usually been enforced by the ruthless and the powerful. They were the architects and enforcers of moral codes: codes that justified heresy trials, the “divine right” of kings and privileges of class, military conscription, gibbets, firing squads, dungeons, exiles and appropriations, harassments and marginalisation. Husbands owned their wives… it was in keeping with the moral order. Masters could flog their slaves… it was in keeping with the moral order.

In our own culture, in the shamefully recent past, moral codes based on “consensus” have favoured slavery and abusive labour practices, racism, sexism, homophobia, militarism, imperialism, witch burnings and the persecution, even genocide and the murder, of various “undesirables” …in Canada and other former colonial regions, for example, it drove energetic programmes of ethnocide against native peoples. We look back and are appalled, but are tempted to complacency about our “new, improved”, more “liberal” moral principals despite the presence of more injustice-inflicted misery in the world that we dare to imagine. Consensus doesn’t guarantee great ways to live. Morals can suck.

There are biologists who locate the origins of altruistic behaviour and, by implication, the antecedents of morality, in the evolutionary narrative by demonstrating that other species are not slaves to immediate, apparent self-interest.

There’s something a bit anthropomorphic in this view, especially when it’s taken out of the context of the wide ranging interdependencies that characterise all forms of life — a truth that’s often under-recognised. It’s at least “species-ist”: the idea that somehow we humans have, by virtue of our genes, regularised monkey survival tactics into the higher accomplishment of formalised ethical systems. In purely behavioural terms there are fascinating and informative similarities, but the contexts are too different for direct parallels to hold. Social behaviour among members of various species is not uncommon and, in each, it has its own parameters.

As Karl von Frisch showed us, honeybees communicate symbolically, co-operate compulsively and even act self-sacrificially. If we cast what we know of them in human terms, they look the very models of consensus morality and altruism. But there is no evidence that their communications are debates about the ethics of their situation. As a more loosely socialised species with divergent and sometimes contradictory needs for different co-operative strategies, we should not be amazed that the forms of co-operation we practise are more varied and, from the perspective of a bee, would look shamefully haphazard… more like monkeys, responding to “unfairness” with sulks or aggression. In fact, of course, we all do our own thing, and “altruism” is not necessarily indicative of nobility of spirit. It is as much an indication of our readiness to add value to a collective survival strategy by talking it up… medals to soldiers comes to mind. It helps us to prime others to act in similar ways on our behalf.

If, as some say, morality’s source is necessarily religious, one might expect the American Christian right to be calling for the forgiveness of terrorists, clamouring to restrain us from judging others, and urging greater outpourings of largesse as international aid. It would disdain war and militarism. Rather, I suspect the strength of movements like these derives from unsophisticated desires to draw clearer boundaries between “right” and “wrong”, “us” and “them”, “good” and “evil”… a cry for consensus with all of its simplicities… hunger for set of values that are perceived to be empowering.

The idea that anyone is privy to a universal or superior, god-gifted morality is naïve: it really shouldn’t takes the Ten Commandments to persuade us that there’s no good to be had from go around killing people, stealing from them, slandering them, seducing their partners and coveting their asses, slaves, oxen and houses. That was divine advice to a rough bunch of brutalised, wandering troublemakers who seem to have been remarkably reticent when it came to bonhomie. And, sure, some of that advice works for us because we’re people too, and not always that bright either.

Waving these insights about as having special significance on the grounds that god said so, masks some very selective thinking about god’s instructions as they’re spelled out on nearby pages of the Old Testament. It’s bad, god said, to vex strangers or curse deaf people, and you mustn’t gossip. A lot of those who say they take god’s word at face value seem to have got slack with the burnt offerings, “marring the corners” of men’ beards, having the local priest check out skin blemishes and running sores, or leaving a part of the harvest lying about for the poor to glean. God “said” you’re not supposed to wear wool and linen together, and you’re supposed to put fringes on your clothes. Then there are matters like having insubordinate sons stoned to death. Nowadays, the best we seem able to do in the West is try to get the car keys off them. There’s morality on the skids for you.

At some level, asserting the universality of even the best-intended moral principle is, by virtue of that claim, an expression of intolerance that’s bound to lead to conflict in a pluralistic community that has no consensus. And pluralism pretty much characterises modern societies… pluralism, and its lack of consensus. So, for peaceability’s sake, tolerance tends to be preached even where it’s not necessarily practised but that, undoubtedly, is better than a forced consensus.

I’ve often heard professions of attachment to the “Golden Rule” — treat others as you’d want them to treat you — as a foundation for possible consensus. It’s rather speciously claimed that the “Golden Rule” synchronises, harmonises and summarises the ethical teachings of all the great religions. But, as well as failing to understand what religions are about, this little rule of thumb assumes that everyone wants to be treated similarly… and that’s simply not the case, nor is it the case that many proselytisers of the “Golden Rule” spend vast amounts of their time in detailed studies of human social, cultural and political diversity to find out how others would like to be treated; cross-culturally it has been found that even evaluations of “fairness” vary.

The communications revolution (particularly if we date it from the launching of the printing press) has been responsible for a still-limited and widely resisted but naggingly persistent and growing awareness of global diversity. For many, this carries with it with a fear of moral dissolution. What it has in fact done is that it’s stretched illusions of intimacy beyond the reasonable boundaries of consensus, leaving us with much stronger perceptions of morality as a personal responsibility.

Instead of proclaiming consensus, we’re inclined to declare an attitude of broad relativism — “everyone has a right to his or her own opinion” (which we then studiously try to ignore) — whilst reserving for ourselves a place of personally satisfying of moral superiority. Without consensus to affirm us, we’re inclined to draw affirmation from the apparent chaos around us. And that too easily becomes the smugness of the “moral high ground”, every bit as dangerous in its own way as the clamour for consensus.

The hope, as I see it, lies in a fostering the emergence of a kind of social, philosophical and moral environmentalism that accepts the rootedness of humanity in biology but its beauty and worth in expressions of diversity and creativity: it is “human” to seek and establish harmonies because harmonies are sustaining; it is human to develop cultures that feed hearts, minds and spirits as well as bellies; it is human to express insights, excitements, dismays and anxieties in language and in art; it is human to wonder, to laugh and to weep. It is human to produce an array of knowledge systems. It is not necessary to uphold any one way, any one particular path of awareness, as the only possible way. In fact, it is almost certainly impossible to sustain one single way of being human. Humanity is far greater than any one person’s or culture’s repertoire of thoughts, meanings, intentions or actions.

Exploring an ethos centred on harmonies could certainly take us into new dimensions of sustainability, beyond naked competition or coerced centralisation. We’d need to find and practice a morality that recognises preconceptions as misconceptions, and is expressed in efforts to contain enmities and conflicts in ways that cushion and check their capacities to inflect fear, devastation and violence on bystanders.

Somehow, we need to find security and peace of mind in knowing that there is enough to go around if we set our hearts on it; if we’re willing to curb waste, find ceilings to greed and surrender to compassion, we could do it. There’s room on the planet for us all to discover who we are and find ways of becoming fully ourselves. There is enough love in the world for everyone to be cherished. Humanity is enormously varied, brimming with far greater treasuries of insight and expression than any of us can hope to glimpse, even in the most experiences-rich lifetime. That we do not devote ourselves to appreciating so much as a glimmer of this wealth is our own failing. That we too readily allow it to be suppressed, broken or obliterated is far worse than failure: in its vandalising of human hope it’s on a par with handing over an insubordinate son for stoning.

All of this is, of course, expecting a lot. But there are signs that it’s already on the way. There are places of growing dialog. There are movements, minority movements to be sure, to protect minority cultures, languages and livelihoods; to press for peace; to relieve poverty; to stop torture and capital punishment; to control disease; to feed and clothe the destitute; to provide clean water where water is absent or contaminated; to protect the environment; to live more simply; to prevent extinctions; to free and intervene on behalf of political prisoners; to combat racism, homophobia, sexism and ageism; to promote freedoms and discourage unfettered consumption; to widen the distribution of life-saving vaccines. There are dialogues between East and West, between the great faiths, between science and art and religion. More and more, academic work has become interdisciplinary; experiences of diversity are, for many, closer to hand. There are thousands upon thousands of small group initiatives and, together, they are heading towards a sort of consensus that could usher in a morality worthy of humanity, one capable of supporting humanity’s survival. It could happen… it really could.

I believe it will.

The way we are...

IT was a peculiar feeling. Once I learned that a nod means “no”, and a shake of the head means “yes”, trying to carry on a conversation in Bulgaria — even with English speakers — became a bad attack of mental stumbling.

To run into reversed understandings of gestures I’d grown up with made me feel far more awkward than my confusions with the Cyrillic script on signposts or my efforts to intelligibly pronounce the few words I’d tried to learn.

 Someone would comment on, say, the splendid weather. I’d clench my neck muscles to suppress any reaction until I’d thought the gesture thing through. By the time I had a warm, agreement-emphasising shake of the head ready to go, it would be too late. I found it difficult to pair a happy face with a shaking of my head, or a “no way” face with a vigorous nod. I must have looked as socially engaged as a traumatised turtle.Things like this are difficult for us.


So the eye contact we unthinkingly make as a show of recognition and interest in our Anglo-European way is offensive to some people, not least to those of most native North American and Pacific cultures. Such things are difficult to remember on the spot and in the flow of conversation, but they can turn the words we utter upside down in the hearing of the other person.

We’re each born into a culture, even more decisively than into a family. For better or for worse, whatever we have by way of a “family” is also embedded into the culture… even the notion of “family” is defined by the culture.

Culture began for us as we learned to speak our “native language” and began to respond to circumstances around us. Culture was the ghostly, ever-present interface between our startled newborn souls and all of the uncertainties that stretched beyond us. As our patterns-seeking infant minds found order in the regularities, imagery, consequences, emotions, harmonies and disharmonies around us, our culture took root. It swaddled us into the highly nuanced order that was being asserted by all those who inhabited our interactions, and each of us became one of them.

Our values, absorbed in infancy, steer us and provide filters through which we interpret our ongoing experience. We fall back on them out of habit and when we’re confused, usually unconsciously. To speak a language is to express culture, to know what and how to eat and how to deal with our bodily functions are expressions of culture; to interact with another human being or to claim privacy, these are expressions of culture. Our culture is the social air we breathe. Without it, we’d be alone, we’d know nothing, and we’d have nothing to say.

Culture animates and sustains us; it invigorates and informs our experience of life and sets our trajectory into the future with a precision few other influences achieve. It is necessary to us.

Culture is our social universe. It primes us to accept sets of  “certainties”, “truths” and basic premises. If our “hard drive” is physiology, culture is the “operating system and software”. Experience is the “data”. And, by the time we start thinking about tinkering with the software, it has already shaped us: the way we think, the things we tend to think about and the way we see and understand ourselves.

Anthropology — the academic study of cultures — began as a search for universals of human social behaviour. Pervaded by evolutionary thinking, it looked towards a fallacious hierarchical model that, had it been proven, would have vindicated the “rise” of (our) rational “civilisation”. It was a very polite, scholarly form of white supremacism.

It proved to be one of the unluckier disciplines and, of course, anthropology was itself the creation of culturally-formed curiosity. But something anthropologists did find was a thrilling variety of ways to approach and understand the complexities of human existence and survival. At that point, anthropology seemed to lose confidence, faced as it was with the impossibility of collapsing the wisdom of entire cultures into succinct functionalist summaries and nitpicking theoretical critiques for academic journals. All cultures are too complicated, internally co-ordinated, responsive and ductile for that.

It isn’t simple. Within a culture, there are roles and subcultures that produce displays of diversity, conflict and conformity… but even the conflict is recognised and addressed in terms the culture has established. To get what this really means, we can only reflect on cultures in which, for example, it has never seemed necessary to measure time so much as seasons, count above three or four, own land, create “money” or have a public transit system. Or we might try to understand highly complex and nuanced cultures in which people routinely consult long-dead ancestors, take dreams seriously or start explaining their extensive and effective pharmacopoeia in terms of plant songs.

It goes without saying that our first impulse will be to rate other cultures unfavourably in comparisons with our own: we all like to use our own toothbrushes. We assume our lives are enviable to those who aren’t part of them, and that what pleases us should please everyone. We consider ourselves rational, reasonable, objective, successful, clever, effective and moral… in a word, “right”. But these are all culturally established values, defined and given their worth by the culture that gave us the stuff of our consciousness.

It’s only when we start drawing up a hard-headed list of the shortcomings we see in our “civilisation” that we start seeing that other cultures might have some helpful insights to offer us, should we take the time and trouble to pay attention.

“True” cultures sustain a social order and sensations of meaning and significance — and we still have access to these — but what we know as Westernisation is something different. A fluid conflation of individualism, materialism, technocracy, capitalism, opportunism, pragmatism and militarism, it has some crucial moral, aesthetic, emotional and philosophical blindspots. Its ethos is to attempt whatever society will let it get away with (which is at once liberating and predatory), and turn to advantage anything that’s not screwed down. It is not a culture so much as an engine of cultural destabilisation and change. It’s what Margaret Thatcher meant when she declared “there’s no such thing as society.”

“Progress” — and what has been called “postmodernism” — has, for example, seen Westernised “celebrity” supplant cultural “heroism” as a desideratum, and Westernised “image” supplant cultural “content”… and so on. “Opinion” replaces “conclusion”, “technique” replaces “method”, “popularity” replaces “virtue”, “entertainment” replaces “art”, “success” replaces “respect”; “information” replaces “wisdom”… the fast, the dirtily direct, the easy, the immediate — feeling good rather that doing good — moves very much to the fore. A generation or two ago in the West, all of this was scarcely foreseeable and, in many ways, “culture” is finding itself stretched to screaming point as dynamic Westernisation tries to tow “society” along… like a speedboat burying its stern as it high-throttles to haul a barge. Between the two, there may be plenty of options but the choices are not easily made.

So it does seem to hold some lessons for us, this business of cultural critique. But it’s difficult to see one’s own culture with a whole lot of clarity. How does a goldfish see its bowl? What does it know of things beyond? That is where we are: bumping at our bowl, like goldfish, not to break the glass and plunge into some different cultural universe but to give clearer definition to our own.

We need to reach the horizon and look beyond. It may be disorienting at first but it is fundamentally liberating to encounter in other cultures new, clearer insights into the world that’s closest to us.

The horizon’s a tricky place to be. To look beyond it, we need a different set of eyes: eyes more forgiving, almost forgetful. We need to remember that early reactions are bound to be misleading. All cultures have a “dark” side and a benign side. Stressed, they generally show the snarl of their dark side; unstressed and feeling successful, goodness is more likely to shine forth.

Migration is such a feature of modern life that it’s not overly hard to start meeting people who are from, and familiar with, other cultures. In North America there are ethnic festivals, pow-wows and other gatherings that can orient strangers to an unfamiliar culture. In Europe, whole cultures lie cheek to jowl with each other. We can learn from indigenous cultures and new immigrants… and there are language classes and books that can help a stranger prepare for a visit. And purposeful travel is the best option.

Developing a particular interest that’s relevant to a culture, a genuine curiosity, is bound to open all sorts of doors. Learning a little of the language, seeking to understand its religion, its art, its history and philosophy, tasting the food, hearing the music, observing the etiquette, respecting the protocols, discovering its deeper values and, most of all, entering into a genuine interest in the adventure of it all, can be a liberating, friends-making and thoroughly enlarging experience.

Learning to understand another culture is an exercise in uncritical watching and sympathetic seeing. The first things we notice are the details of often-superficial difference. Foods often seem odd but it’s rare for any culture to make a staple of meals that are not nourishing, enjoyable and healthy. Food, and ideas about food, can be one of the great rewards of travel.

So, too, can the arts. Music that strikes us at first as strange or unintelligible, listened to patiently and with an open mind will suddenly fall into coherence and excite us.

But it’s only as the details and first impressions start connecting that we start to sense what it is all about. There are ways in which a culture can be counted on to make sense of life and generate genuine satisfactions for its members. And these can stir us to insights into our own values and encourage us to live more freely, more satisfyingly, more fully.

It is to our hazard that “culture” so little preoccupies us… and that is where our danger lies. Few societies have been totally overwhelmed by conquering enemies: invasions, occupations and even attempted genocides have tended, rather, to provoke resistance and subsequent cultural revival. Rather, most of history’s fallen nations and empires, died first at the centre and collapsed around it. They outgrew, over-stretched or outran the sustaining capacities of their culture.

There is nothing but gain to be had from discovering some other culture and charting it for ourselves — doing so helps to clear our eyes and see more clearly the values and culture we live by; it enhances our ability to understand who we are; it gives us a more secure place from which to chart our own narratives and culture and take our places in them…

And we need to talk about our values: they lie at the heart of whatever it is that we will become. They are the denoninators of our humanity. We need to make them clear to ourselves, and stand them in the sunlight to flourish.

Without some sort of clarity, our purposes will be vague, our intentions fickle, and we are likely to see their being colonised by interests that will try very hard to turn them to their own ends.

The risk is not that we’re likely to be forced to serve the designs of others; it’s that we may too easily be persuaded to.

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