Skip to main content

Somethings never change

One of the illusions you hold to working for an international development organisation is that evidence counts in policy making...

I remember sitting in the office of the then (and possibly now) Minister of Health of a substantial country, listening to a patient explanation by the appropriate local experts of the barriers dis-advantaged and poor people faced in accessing medical care. However, it was the intervention of a story of one victim of that exclusion, who happened to be a military veteran, that visibly tipped the balance in the subsequent (and highly favourable) decision making process. Emotion triumphed where evidence merely provided a cloaking rationale.

I was reminded of this in finishing Stephen Platt's excellent book on the Taiping Civil War in China in the nineteenth century.

The continuing refrain might be never allow evidence to impinge on, let alone correct, your view of reality.

I think every principal character acted from belief not evidence - what people imagined was (or could be) the case drove action. This was much to the detriment of most 'ordinary' people who wanted to grow rice, sell silk and puff away at opium and who got civil war, 'ultraviolence' and disease instead.

Meanwhile, there was a radical disjunct between what was the case and what people said to themselves, let alone others, was the case!

It has to be said that the British were especially competent at this bifurcated approach and one group, the missionaries, managed to practice it in favour of the Taiping and then against the Taiping in the course of the same conflict (having collectively changed their opinion within a couple of months principally on the basis of the unsubstantiated rumour of an American Baptist who had fallen out of love with the rebels. Almost everything he claimed to have happened proved to be false and quite quickly. Did that change anyone's opinion? No)!

So you had the British consul in one of the treaty reports repeatedly telling the Foreign Office that trade had collapsed after its fall to the Taiping even when the custom duties (on that very same trade, collected at the same rate) had increased by 80%. But the Taiping, being rebels, could not be good for trade so it could not be happening and, even if it was, it should not be. I will report accordingly.

This is why, unfortunately, liberals are at a continuous disadvantage because they believe in evidence and rationality and weighing the former with the latter in informed debate.  Occasionally the world slips into a momentary calm when such things become both possible and welcome but alas rarely... Think our present response to the civil war in Syria...

There is a wonderful moment when James Legge (the first Professor of Chinese at Oxford), who had befriended the Taiping 'Prime Minister' when the PM was a humble mission assistant in Hong Kong, gave a beautifully balanced and reasoned assessment both of his erstwhile friend and the situation in China and what his own country, the UK, might do in response. Did anyone take notice? No!

P.S. A friend, reading this, helpfully made me realize that by 'liberals' I do not mean the US variety 'liberals' as opposed to 'conservatives' (both of which may be misnomers - the conservatives fail to conserve in their fetish to worship the market and the liberals self-righteously interfere with people's liberties because they know what is good for them) but in the more philosophical sense (like John Stuart Mill as archetype) who may only exist in aspiration rather than reality. However, a deeper point is, of course, that we are all challenged by minds that are constructed from belief (and prejudice) and seeing what is there through our prejudiced minds is an arduous discipline that few of us more than partially achieve. But we need to: we need a greater sense of living with the texture of things. This used to be called humility, not a virtue that is greatly praised now.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev