1 Soul Bound
1.2 Taking Control
1.2.4 An Artful Carnivale
1.2.4.6 Sharpe Lecture: moral high ground (part one)
What was it about Bungo that reminded her of a particular lecture at UCL? She cast her mind back.
The image on the slide projector posed a riddle: “When can a woman carry a mountain on her head?”
After they were seated, Dr. Sharpe clicked the projector to add to the slide a photograph of a purple and white crown, with a very large gemstone on the front, then gave the answer:
“When it is a mountain of light, which in Persian is Koh-i-Noor. Literally, a gem from India was the jewel in one of the crowns of the monarch of the British Empire. And like many such items, legends sprang up about it. That it is intended to be worn by a woman or a god, so bad luck will come to any man who wears it. That whoever owns it, will own the world.”
“But figuratively, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire was India itself. It had a large population willing to be recruited into Britain’s army, and it was a rare source of cotton, silk, tea and, above all, spices. These had been monopolised by the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese but in the year 1600, the British East India Company was founded and a more successful and ruthless company has never been seen on this planet. The prospect of gaining exclusive rights over the spice trade attracted massive investment, enough to fund the piecemeal conquest of an entire sub-continent.”
“By the 1700s, Major-General Lord Robert, Fellow of the Royal Society, Knight of The Most Honourable Order of the Bath, Baron Clive (first of that name) and (by grace of the British Raj) governor of much of India, had granted monopolies on everything from tobacco to betel nuts to the senior officers of the East India Company. And the most valuable of these was salt. By the 1800s, taxes upon salt had increased from 5% to over 75%. India was producing more than a million tons of salt a year and, by some accounts, just the tax on salt alone contributed more than 10% of all Britain’s annual profit from India.”
“The company investors were keen to see a return on their initial investment, and they didn’t care about the effect upon the diet of poor Indians of not being able to afford enough salt, just so long as the bottom line of their accounts looked healthy. The British had on their side the education, the technology, the guns, and an unyielding complacent sense of moral superiority. The situation might have continued indefinitely. Except for one man; a lawyer and journalist named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.”
“In one of the most remarkably effective political actions in history, Gandhi not only broke the salt monopoly, he also laid the foundations for Indian self-rule. Today we’re going to look at how he did it, and the lessons we can learn.”
Dr. Sharpe brought up a picture of a presentable young man with thick well-trimmed dark hair, wearing a western-style business suit and tie, under which was a quote:
All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take.
--M. K. Gandhi
“There are two types of action that advance a movement towards their end goal: instrumental and symbolic. Instrumental actions are ones which, if they succeed, progress the goal directly. For example, for an army whose goal is conquest of a country made up of 10 states, conquering one of those states would count as an instrumental action.”
“Symbolic actions are ones which make indirect progress that affects the odds of success when taking future instrumental actions. For example, if that army won lots of new recruits by sending a small force to hold a militarily unimportant location just long enough to protect evacuating civilians.”
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“The best sort of action to take is one which is seen to make tangible progress and which serves to communicate your identity and values, framing the conflict in terms that benefit you. If people share your vision of how things ought to be then even small tangible gains will be seen as a part of a progression which, even if not in this generation, will lead to an eventual and inevitable victory.”
“It is that identity, hope and sense of direction, that is fundamental to any movement, and that is not worth compromising upon at the negotiation tables, no matter how lavish a proposed settlement of a particular issue may seem. All else may be honourably compromised upon.”
“This is, in part, why it is so important for a movement to have a positive vision they wish to achieve, rather than just a negative vision of what they wish to avoid. During the initial stages of a conflict, it might seem easier to form a coalition dedicated to the removal of some hated figure, rather than trying to get buy-in on a specific vision of what a ‘better society’ would actually look like in detail. But in the long term, a group whose individual parts are moving away from something will diverge and lose cohesion, while a group whose individual parts are drawn towards something will converge and get stronger even if intervening setbacks temporarily scatter them. Only a group with a unified purpose can resist being divided against itself at the negotiation table, by a manipulative opponent, being tricked into sacrificing long term victory for short term gains.”
Dr. Sharpe pulled up a new slide showing the lyrics to “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, by The Who. Kafana hummed it under her breath, finishing with the sting at the end: "Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss"
“In the worst case scenario, a movement succeeds in ousting a hated authority, only to find that during the all-out struggle they’ve inched too far down the slippery slope of ‘temporarily condoning abhorrent means in order to achieve a worthy end goal’ and are now indistinguishable from the old authority, except for trivia like the names and colours on a flag.”
The slide was now changed to show a pig standing on two legs, carrying a whip in his trotter:
“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“Everyone knows slippery slopes are dangerous, but they’re also an opportunity. There are advantages to going down a little way, as long as you don’t go too far. The problem is that your perception of what’s at stake, how far down you can go before the risks outweigh the advantages, changes with how many of your morals you’ve already discarded, and how much of your reputation you’ve already sunk into a project that will fail if you don’t go just a bit lower.”
The slide changed to show a branching path going along the side of a hill. The high routes, leading towards a shining city at the far side of the slope, looked rocky and slow. The lower routes looked better paved but kept diverting down to a tempting village located by a swamp in the valley below. A group was at an intersection part-way along the path and appeared to be arguing about which branch to take.
“In mathematics, this is an example of what’s known as a coordination problem. If everyone in a group independently decides what they think is the lowest point on the slope of moral standards that can be safely travelled to, then you never get a clear majority backing the decision to take not a single step further down, until way too late.”
Dr. Sharpe changed the slide again, to show the same image, but this time one of the group members was taller and holding a map in one hand and a red paintbrush in the other. The hillside ahead of them had a dotted red line blocking off the lower half of the slope, and the group members were all proudly wearing badges.
“One of the functions of leadership is to provide a focal point about which a group’s opinions can gel; what mathematicians sometimes call a ‘Schelling point’. If a group agrees upon some minimum standards as well as aspirational ones, and uses a symbolic action to publicly commit to not crossing that particular red line, it improves their chances of arriving at their originally intended destination with their payload of values intact.”
The slide changed to a third version of the hillside. This time at the start was a human farmer shaking a whip at a group of fleeing animals. At the swamp village could be seen the same group of animals, being lorded over by the pig wielding a whip who was keeping all the tempting treats for himself. At the shining city, the whip had gone, and the animals were peacefully grazing together and living the good life.
“Historically, the leaders of armies have sometimes done this by making a point of publicly hanging the first of their own soldiers they catch looting from the local population. It sends the message ‘we have standards, there are things we won’t stoop to, unlike the enemy we believe in the rule of law, you can safely stick around and trade goods to us without fear of being robbed’.”