Heighton, Steven. Every Lost Country. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010

Every Lost Country contains a parable that illustrates the classic “what would you do if . . .” dilemma as it relates to the pacifist's stance. In the story, a Bodhisatva (Buddhist 'enlightened being') finds himself in a boat with a number of sleeping innocents and a serial killer. Fearing harm to the innocents, he engages in debate with the killer hoping to dissuade him from doing what he has been known to do. The killer, however, insists that his nature demands that he do what he does, and takes out a knife. The question is: What does the Bodhisatva do? Does he say, “If you must kill, take me,” which would leave the innocents both helpless and vulnerable, or does he think of another action, given his moral aversion to harming another life?

            We are high in the Himalayas in Every Lost Country, where a party including a “Doctor Without Borders” veteran is preparing to launch an historic assault on Kyatruk, the second highest peak in the range after Everest. Kyatruk happens to be in Nepal but adjacent to the border with Chinese-occupied Tibet. In part because of the doctor's insistence on helping a group of Tibetan refugees being pursued by Chinese militia as they attempt to escape into Nepal and another of the party's members foolish attempt to film the event, half of the party ends up arrested and in a jail deep in Chinese-occupied Tibet.

            There follow parallel subplots, one of an obsessive adventurer seeking to be the first to conquer Kyatruk, the other involving the doctor, his daughter, the photojournalist and a group of Tibetan nationalists trying to make their way back to Nepal after a break from prison in China. Both are harrowing ordeals: the mountains swirling with storms, the thin atmosphere that debilitates the body and scrambles the mind, the likelihood of imminent death and—probably the most poignant—the desires of the self in opposition to the hunger for the other.

            It's a dense novel and a gripping tale as stories of people struggling on the knife edge of survival often are. What Heighton achieves that many don't, however, is the delicate balance between plot and character that prevents the story line from overwhelming inner dynamics. If anything, there are too many characters with too many conflicting impulses for one story, the doctor's struggle between his Hippocratic obligations and his personal need for both physical and emotional survival being only one. It's hard to do justice to a dozen characters in one 300-page novel. I found as I read that there were just too many Tibetan and Nepalese names for me to keep track of who was who without back-checking. Like foreign faces, foreign names tend to look more similar to each other than we're accustomed to when close to home.

            (I'm having a problem writing this paragraph) I've sometimes said that for a creation to qualify as art it must meet two requirements: it must appeal dramatically to the sensory region of the viewer's consciousness (who needs to experience touch-taste-smell-visual-auditory sensations almost as if it were a first-person experience) and it must change the viewer forever, hopefully for the better.  Every Lost Country passes this test for me; I found myself, for instance, pulling an afghan over my knees when I accompanied the climbers up into the death zone near the summit of Kyatruk. As to the second criterion, I have brushed shoulders with a man who must answer the “what would you do if . . .?” dilemma and made the decision I never hope I have to make.

            The Bodhisatva in the boat disarms the serial killer, stabs him with his own knife and throws him overboard.

            What would I do . . . if ?

           

The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt

Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind; Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion: New York, Pantheon Books, 2012

Republicans, Democrats, Tea Party, Conservatives, New Democrats, Liberals, Anglicans, Mennonites, Mormons . . . the list of groups into which we’ve divided ourselves could fill this page, if not an entire book. Coexistence of unlike-minded groupings is—as a general rule—not a problem but a listen to question period in the Canadian House of Commons, news of the bloody uprising in Syria or rancorous politics in the USA, an historical survey of the splitting-up of church denominations over a variety of issues through the centuries all remind us that there are times and occasions when coexisting groups easily become conflicting groups.

Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. (A great introduction to Haidt’s thinking on the psychology of morality can be found by clicking here: Jonathan Haidt TED address)

In The Righteous Mind, Haidt concerns himself primarily with the liberal/conservative divide in our view of the world and are essential moral stances. His analysis rests on a number of assumptions, and I’d like to summarize the book by focusing on these:

1)      Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Based on a variety of (mostly university-based) studies, Haidt begins with the assumption that we don’t find our way to a particular moral stance through logic, but through a more intuitive route. He uses the imagery of an elephant and its rider, where the elephant is intuition and the rider is reason. In practice, the elephant is the first to lean this way or that, to choose a course left or right. The rider’s role is not so much to steer the elephant as it is to justify the elephant’s choices.

“Nobody is ever going to invent an ethics class that makes people behave ethically after they step out of the classroom. Classes are for riders, and riders are just going to use their new knowledge to serve their elephants more effectively (p. 90).”

2)      The human mind at birth is not a blank slate as regards moral thinking. Just as an infant seems prepared at birth to learn language, it comes prepared to learn to distinguish between harm and care, to recognize sanctity, to incorporate fairness principles, etc. A year-old bird builds a nest in the exact manner that her parents built the one in which the bird was hatched . . . without ever having been instructed in (let alone without ever having observed) nest-building technique.

3)      With time, the growing-up environment produces a “morality matrix” in us. Haidt’s central thesis revolves around the existence of liberal and conservative matrices, how they develop, how they differ and why both are legitimate, although different.

4)      There are at least five major components of any moral matrix: Harm/Care, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation. Individual morality results from the emphasis or de-emphasis of one or more of these components: liberal morality results from the emphasis of Harm/Care and Fairness/Cheating while conservative morality emphasises the other three above the first two.

This is simplified, but if it turns out to be a viable set of assumptions, the implications become obvious. Unless one insists that one matrix is wrong and the other right, they should help us to see members of other groups in a new light; they are what they are for very good reasons and in the end—because we have developed successful, multi-group societies—it may well be that like Yin and Yang, the differences are conducive to balance and progress. In other words, it’s right that the Conservatives under Stephen Harper exist, because without them, our culture would over-emphasize social welfare and neglect the appropriate emphases on loyalty and patriotism, respect for authority and the sacred aspects of being.

Haidt visualizes human moral behaviour as 90% chimp and 10% bee. Depending on our moral matrix, the independent, whatever-is-good-for-number-one part (the chimp; chimps demonstrate very little empathy or altruistic behaviour) or the all-for-one & one-for-all part will come to the fore in approximately the proportion of 9 to 1. Without putting too much faith in the proportions, it seems about right that we concern ourselves with our personal interests most of the time, but can be moved through circumstances to become hive dwellers. People who dedicate themselves to “green issues,” like Greenpeace, for instance, have “hived” in order to do together what can’t be done individually.

Hives are typically in competition with other hives. The application of this can lead us to a number of observations, including how one gets strangers to come together and form a “hive” in order to fight a war: marching and uniforms play a role for certain.

At the centre of The Righteous Mind is the persuasive argument that a conservative, libertarian or liberal outlook is neither wrong nor right, but that both are natural developments in individuals and in the cultures to which they belong. As a consequence of failing to credit this, we often do the exact wrong thing when conflict threatens a desired unity. Haidt closes his book with an admonition that seems a bit naïve, but may just sum up the “right” way to be with each other:

“We are deeply intuitive creatures whose gut feelings drive our strategic reasoning. This makes it difficult—but not impossible—to connect with those who live in other matrices, which are often built on different configurations of the available moral foundations.

“So the next time you find yourself seated beside someone from another matrix, give it a try. Don’t just jump right in. Don’t bring up morality until you’ve found a few points of commonality or in some other way established a bit of trust. And when you do bring up issues of morality, try to start with some praise, or with a sincere expression of interest (p. 318).”

For some of us, the calling in life may be to be vocally liberal, to stand ready to ensure that the poor are fed, the ill are given medical care, the rich made to pay their fair share, etc. For conservatives, the calling may be equally strong to ensure that individualism and the emphasis on individual human rights never reaches a degree that makes us unable to cooperate when cooperation is essential. And for libertarians, the calling may be to hold up the possibility that there may be times and situations in which governments should butt out and leave matters to unfold through the ebb and flow of independent initiative.

What is certain in Canada today is that we could use a reality check; our current government finds it really hard to cooperate with the Opposition, so much so that parliament is repeatedly held in contempt. The Opposition, for its part, would do well to take Haidt’s advice and stop loading their questions to the government with pejoratives that simply serve to heighten the animosity and make cooperation impossible.