A Motley of Ideas and Views

1. Bits of Philosophy
3. On Art
4. On Morality
6. Cultures and Society
7. Religion and Other Life Positions

1. 'Bits of Philosophy'

One of the exciting things I found when I came to philosophy was the work of Donald Davidson, who seems to me to have solved some of the problems which had concerned me for a long time -- and, as I found out, the philosophical community much longer already. I shall here try to give a summary of some of his points, but in various forms they will be found throughout.

Davidson is concerned with what we mean by understanding what other people do and say.

Understanding the action of another person, he argues, means being able to give a reason for it, and this in turn means attributing to the person beliefs and desires such that the action can be viewed as a means, according to the person's beliefs, for achieving the satisfaction of the desires. However, given no more than a particular action it is never possible to determine a reason for it uniquely: thus, when someone picks up his umbrella as he leaves the house, we may attribute to him the desire not to get wet, and the belief that it is or will be raining (as well as certain subsidiary beliefs, such as that an umbrella protects one from the rain); or the desire not to get mugged, say, and the belief that he can protect himself with the umbrella; and so on -- there are infinitely many possible reasons for the action. And even if we take into account as many other actions by the same agent as we can, so as to narrow down the possible reasons by considering the conjunction of them all, there will in general (or even always) be many different ways of making sense of all of them.

The obvious reaction to this is that we can simply ask the person for his reason for the action, e.g. why he took the umbrella. But if this is to be helpful at all, we must of course be able to understand what he then says. Understanding the utterance of another person, Davidson argues, means attributing a meaning to the sentence uttered, and a belief or desire to the speaker. And again, for any particular utterance, even given the context in which it was made, there is an infinite number of possible interpretations. The only reason why this process of interpreting may at first seem unproblematic is that we usually take for granted that the speaker and the listener have a common language; but if one considers the situation of someone in a foreign country who doesn't speak the language (-- or of an anthropologist among a newly discovered tribe with a new language, or even that of a philologist trying to decipher some writing in an unknown dead language --) it becomes clear that just listening to what is being said, for however long, is not enough to understand what the speaker is actually saying. And difficulties can arise even when the speaker and the listener do speak the same language: it can easily happen that a sarcastic remark is taken literally.

The conclusion to be drawn, according to Davidson, is that in order to achieve the best understanding of what another person is doing and saying it would (theoretically) be necessary to simultaneously, and with a view to their context, attribute reasons to all his actions and interpret all his utterances. One way of summarizing this 'holistic' account is as follows: when one wants to understand what another person does and says, one is in fact attempting to construct a theory, not unlike a scientist tries to find a theory which accounts for his observations so as to be able to make predictions for the future. The evidence one has consists of the actions and utterances of the other, and the theoretical entities in terms of which one hopes to explain these as well as possible are beliefs and desires which one attributes to him. Having attributed such mental attitudes to the other one can then have certain expectations concerning his future behaviour (-- which may of course turn out to be false, just as a scientist's prediction of the outcome of an experiment): this account therefore has a moral aspect to it.

Among the most interesting aspects of this account of Davidson's of what it means to understand another person's actions and utterances are the conditions necessary for the whole process to 'take off' at all. What is noticeable about all of them is that they, too, are closely related to moral values.

There is first of all the Principle of Charity, as it is called: it requires that in order to be able to understand the actions and utterances of another person, one must attempt to make sense of his behaviour as well as possible, and one must not try to impose one's own thoughts and ideas, say. Thus, when I see someone taking his umbrella as he leaves the house, and it is clear from other things he has said or done that he is not expecting rain, I must attempt to find another reason for his action than that he wants to stay dry. And when I see someone not taking their umbrella although it is raining and it is clear that they do not want to get wet, then I must suppose that he does not know that it is raining, or find some other reason.

Next there are the Assumptions of Consistency and of Rationality: these require me to assume as far as possible that the beliefs of the other person are consistent with each other -- although they do not all need to be true! -- and that given a desire and certain beliefs we will agree on whether they can constitute a reason for a particular action. Thus it would not be rational behaviour if someone who wanted to avoid getting wet and knew that it was raining did not take an umbrella which was available -- unless, of course, there were other reasons for not taking it.

And there is the Supposition of Truthfulness: this requires, for an explanatory theory to be possible at all, that the majority of speakers' utterances be intended by them as expressions of their actual beliefs, i.e. that in general they attempt to tell the truth rather than lie. Otherwise no understanding of one person by another is possible at all.

In the natural sciences, understanding a phenomenon consists of subsuming a particular case under a general law, and a scientific theory (typically employing some kind of model) often allows one to relate events as cause and effect. Thus this apple's falling, according to the law of universal gravitation, is caused by the gravitational force between the earth and it. At this point it is clearly meaningless to ask any further: why? Of someone who asked that one would say that he had not properly understood the nature of the natural sciences.

It is characteristic of the social sciences, on the other hand, that their theoretical statements are open to this further question: why? The reason for this difference is that the relation between two observable, often even measurable, quantities in the social sciences is always (-- that is how one could perhaps define them --) through the actions of individuals, and that therefore it involves their reasons for so acting.

Thus the correlation observed around the turn of the century by Emile Durkheim between changes in a society -- be they for the better or for the worse -- and the increase in the suicide rate in that society is not due to any direct causal link, covered by a universal law; rather it is due to the fact that the objective changes become reasons for individuals to kill themselves and thereby to contribute to the objective increase in the suicide rate. Similarly, although prices, interest- and exchange-rates are fundamental quantities in economic theories, the correlations which the theory may claim between them are the result of summing up, over the whole of the economy, the effects of particular decisions by individuals.

And whatever sets the social sciences apart from the natural sciences -- such as that the evidence can often be only statistical, that the laws tend to be 'bendy', that the evidence is not always value-free, that explanations are given in terms of 'ideal types', etc. -- simply follows from the one difference explained above. In some respects, however, they do not differ: the social sciences no less than the natural sciences are capable of being empirical and rational and objective, and of helping us to understand the phenomena around us.

3. On Art

We are quite used to categorising works of art according to their style, which can be thought of as the aesthetic -- rather than the historical, or the biographical -- context in which it helps to view them. Thus, pieces of baroque music share certain technical and structural characteristics, so that having studied some works of that period allows one to understand, and enjoy, other pieces more easily. And often we are able to describe explicitly what it is that works of a certain style have in common. (It may at first seem just a trivial game to try to recognize works by a particular composer, or to spot paintings by a particular painter in museums, but one must have understood something about the artist's work if one is able to do so regularly.)

A recent such style is minimalism. I felt I needed to formulate explicitly what it is that makes a piece of music a minimalist piece, when I gave illustrated talks on two supposedly minimalist operas, Akhnaten by Philip Glass and Nixon in China by John Adams. But I had been thinking about this question for some time, for instance when listening to concerts in the Vale of Glamorgan Festival over the past few years: if minimalism, as the name seems to imply, is 'less music', why do I like it? Or have I just been hoodwinked, as some people would claim? The reviewer who said on the radio that Arvo Pärt had been ''tarred with the minimalist brush'' certainly did not have a high opinion of works in this style.

What I have now decided, for myself, is that the term ''minimalism'' only describes one side of what is happening in this music; true, some of the aspects of what we expect in a piece of classical music have been reduced -- but with the purpose of bringing to the fore other aspects of music. The reason that there is a wide variety of minimalist works is that it is different aspects that a composer can choose to 'make his topic': in the by now classic Music for Pieces of Wood by Steve Reich it is rhythms that keep shifting against each other, while in The Tuning Path by Terry Riley very little happens other than an exploration of the different harmonics of four saxophones. These aspects of music have always been there in good music, but we haven't been able to hear them so fully until they were separated out for us, in different minimalist compositions.

One of the main aspects of pieces of classical music is their structure: what 'holds a piece together' is typically that it has a theme, or various themes, which are developed and often in the end restated, and what may be disorienting at first to many listeners of classical music is that in minimalist music, structures like this may be absent, that the pieces are 'held together' in other, new ways. There may be an analogy which will make this clearer. If traditional representational paintings are 'held together' by what is represented, by the fact that they are a picture of something, then minimalism in music is perhaps like abstract art: paintings have always had formal aspects, used more or less intentionally by painters, such as balance, pattern, colour coordination, and so on, but we were not able to see them clearly, because we were too busy looking at the content, at what was represented in the works -- until, that is, abstract art moved these formal, non-representational aspects into the foreground.

Something else that minimalism in music and abstract art have in common is the contrast between an apparent simplicity that is easily mocked -- "My little sister could have painted that." -- and much greater technical demands than may be apparent. In fact, I started to be more confident that I had not just been hoodwinked by minimalism when I watched a programme on TV about Philip Glass and his orchestra, in which the instrumentalists discussed the new techniques they had had to develop to be able to perform his music.

So if someone complained that minimalist music is boring, or that it is insubstantial, I would now reply that they are looking (listening?) for the substance in the wrong place -- the music has moved to somewhere else from where we are used to looking, or listening.

Shakespeare's outstanding ability as a psychologist, which is said to be shown by the characters he was able to create in his greatest plays, has often been commented upon and praised, and in some ways he seems to have been far ahead of his time in understanding. But might it not, instead, be the case that those remarkable insights are due more to the fact that he was such an outstanding poet? -- i.e., that what seems to derive from an almost unnaturally keen observational sense and an almost superhuman capacity for the emotions is, in fact, the result of his ability and willingness to follow where his art would lead him? -- not that that would be any less remarkable than his being gifted with amazing psychological insight.

There may be other examples of this. In the introduction to his novel A Son of the Circus John Irving writes: ''This novel is not about India. I don't know India.'' However, his descriptions of certain places and their atmosphere are very graphic, and as a reader I believe the author, so much so that I feel he must be writing about 'some India', though it may not be the real India. But then, what is the real India? And perhaps Irving has been able to catch something of India, something important, without having spent more than a month there -- because he is a good novelist.

Similarly, Peter Paul Piech, on his prints inspired by haiku, some of which I am thrilled to have hanging on the walls in my flat, has printed his name in katakana-syllables: they have come out very well, and look 'really Japanese' -- not just, I think, because he has copied them so skilfully or practised them so many times, but because of his sensibility as a graphic artist.

The novel is an essentially moral art form. Whereas drama must, by its very nature, be concerned in the first place with (external) interactions between the characters, and poetry typically expresses (internal) mental states, the feelings of the poet, a novel -- at least a novel in the main Western tradition -- depends on the relations between the characters' (internal) motives and their (external) actions, which is why the omniscient narrator is such a common device of traditional novel writing. This is not to say that there are no 'limiting cases' of novels, (such as The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas, which is in some respects more like poetry,) nor that it is not possible for a play or poem to have moral concerns. But by establishing a certain kind of relation between his characters' motives and their actions, the novelist writes at the very locus of morality and therefore cannot but take some moral position, at least implicitly.

Thus I do not quite share the following view, expressed by Arthur Koestler: ''In the true novel, as opposed to reportage or chronicle, the main action takes place within the characters' skulls and ribs.''

Certain novelists seem to me to have a 'dirty' style: they write as journalists, (which some of them actually were, at least for some time,) rather than as novelists, they lack grace and elegance; and I don't enjoy reading their works, although I may have to consider some of them important and interesting. One need only compare George Orwell's 1984 with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World; or the style of D. H. Lawrence with that of Virginia Woolf, say; or Hemingway with Scott-Fitzgerald; or Günther Grass with Heinrich Böll. What the former authors seem to me to have in common is that in their writings, message and feeling overpower aesthetic considerations.

It seems to me that modern dance is actually a 'new' art form; certainly the people who enjoy classical ballet and those who appreciate modern dance are generally not the same.

In classical ballet the dancers' movements follow the music: they follow its rhythm, they tell the story which the composer represented in the music, and so on. But precisely because it follows it, the dance is separate from the music, it is added on to it -- almost, it seems at times, as if to entertain those members of the audience who are not sufficiently interested in the music.

In modern dance, on the other hand, the visual aspects, the movements of the dancers, but also, importantly, the lighting, the costumes, etc., and the music form a new whole. Thus, just as music on its own has the aspects of harmony, melody and rhythm, which can be distinguished and yet come to be related in a necessary way in a good composition -- so modern dance has the two aspects of the aural and the visual. The aural aspect usually is music, but it need not be: it can be any process which structures time. The visual aspect usually is dance, but it need not be: it can be any process which structures space. It is in relating time and space in this way that for me the power of modern dance lies.

The approach required to the movement and the other visual elements in a modern dance performance is the same as when one listens to a musical performance: such concepts as 'plot' and 'grace' are not in general relevant, as they are in classical ballet; rather one looks for themes and variations, for the development of ideas, for motifs, for patterns and symmetries. Since it is men and women moving on stage, one possible approach when one watches a modern dance performance is to think in terms of meetings and partings and relationships; but it is a weakness of a work if it derives its coherence solely, or even largely, from this way of looking at it (-- as it is a weakness of a novel if one keeps reading it solely, or even largely, just to find out 'who dunnit.') Much of the work of the Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen strikes me as suffering from this weakness.

Considering the movements of the dancers, each movement takes place in two different 'spaces': the space immediately around the dancer and the space on stage. A choreographer can in a particular movement or in a set of movements, or even for a whole piece, put greater emphasis on one or the other -- although the two 'spaces' can of course not really be separated; and I remember hearing the two American pioneers, Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, described as differing in their approaches in this respect. One could perhaps draw a parallel with music, where each sound in a composition has both a vertical and horizontal context, i.e. each sound is related to other sounds at the same time (harmony) and to the sounds before it and after it (melody) -- although, again, harmony and melody can of course not really be separated.

A similar distinction between two different 'spaces' can perhaps be found in architecture: the space -- in the landscape, the city -- which is structured by the building corresponds to the space on stage, and the building's internal and external surfaces -- such things as the windows and the roof -- to the space immediately around the dancer. Again the two cannot really be separated, but it can be of interest to see how they are related in a particular work.

4. On Morality

Often when someone has to take a decision about an issue, they mistake the situation, for one of having to find something out. One difference is that when we find something out, there often is 'a right answer', which there is not -- or at least we may not be able to know what it is -- when we take a decision. For example, when a student has to choose what subject to study at university, they should find out about the various options -- such as the entrance requirements, the differences between courses, the job prospects with different degrees, and so on --, but however much they have found out, in the end they cannot avoid deciding. The reason that this confusion arises may well be that having to decide, and then to take the responsibility for the decision and live with the consequences, causes some people a lot of anxiety, and so they try to find out more and more, in the attempt to avoid a decision and to have a guarantee -- which in fact there cannot be -- that they are doing the right thing. All one needs is to find out enough so that one has a basis on which to take the decision: sometimes one sees people putting so much effort into finding out everything they can that they actually limit their options in the process.

It may be the same people who after they have had to take a decision keep wondering, to the point of punishing themselves, whether they have taken the right decision. For example, after buying something, instead of using or enjoying it, they may be going far out of their way to see if they could have got a slightly better deal, (and in the case of computers, the next month's magazines will always have an advertisement for a better computer at a lower price ...) That kind of behaviour is a waste of energy: if one has made sure that one has taken the decision on the best available evidence in a proper manner, then one should always still understand it in future, and therefore be able to live with it, even if the consequences turn out to be worse than expected. But that kind of behaviour seems to me to also suggest something about the moral character of the person, in that it may reflect an unwillingness to take responsibility for one's decisions.

What we should mean by freedom is always freedom from something: an action is free, or a decision is reached freely, in so far as its determinants -- which it must have, lest it be no more than random -- have entered into it as part of the reasons for the action or decision rather than immediately, i.e. without mediation through the rational mind, as causes. Thus a bank clerk who has been forced at gunpoint to hand over the contents of his till to a robber has been unfree if his behaviour was exclusively determined by his fear for his life, so that he was incapable of considering any alternative course of action (although one would of course have a lot of understanding for the victim); whereas he has acted freely if he rationally decided -- on the basis of his fear for his life -- that the bank's cash was not worth risking his life for. He has acted freely in so far as he is later willing to take responsibility for what he has done, but he was unfree if he refuses to do so and defends himself by saying that he had no choice.

Because of this negative characteristic of the concept of freedom one can never be sure that one's actions and decisions are actually free. Thus one may find in later life that one's choice of a career, though free from external -- e.g. parental -- pressures, was in fact the result of certain unacknowledged, even unconscious needs at the time: e.g. to be professionally successful so as to compensate for personal failures, or to please one's parents. It is therefore only by constantly doubting, and allowing others to doubt, the reasons for one's actions and decisions that one can attain any measure of freedom, by giving due consideration in a rational process to all factors which may have a bearing on the outcome. This requires that one think of oneself not as a victim of internal and/or external forces, but firmly perceive oneself as an agent, as a responsible being.

Despite the beautiful photographs in it, I did not enjoy reading Richard Bach's best-seller Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, 1970. But it was only when a few years later I read his Illusions: the Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, 1977, which I liked even less, that I was able to give reasons for my distaste and to put my objections into words.

There are many people, it seems to me, who share a certain way of thinking, which I call 'victim mentality'. What this means is that rather than viewing themselves as agents -- i.e. as responsible for their actions, as capable of taking decisions freely -- they tend to view themselves as victims: as victims of their own character, of circumstances, of other people's actions; and so their typical attitude is a negative one of resentment: ''Why is everyone always getting at me?'' Common 'excuses' used by victims to disown their actions are: ''I can't help it, that's the way I am,'' and: ''Don't blame me, I was drunk,'' or (with a slight whine in the voice): ''That always happens to me!'' And a victim's typically defensive way of 'justifying' some behaviour is: ''I felt like it (or: I didn't feel like it,) alright?'' -- when they should probably be owning up to a mistake and apologizing.

There is of course no denying that there are constraints on what each one of us can do: we are limited, for instance, by our practical situation, and by who we are and what we have experienced; thus we are obviously not able to walk through a brick wall, and most smokers cannot quit the habit from one day to the next. But this does not mean that we are not capable of acting freely within these constraints. In fact, an essential aspect of taking a decision freely -- which must be distinguished from just doing what one feels like doing, (where this need not be anything 'immoral' and may even be 'a good deed') -- is precisely to recognize these constraints for what they are, and then to either take them into account rationally, or work to remove them. True freedom, as far as it is possible, means acting both (i) on one's desires and (ii) within given constraints, whether external or self-imposed; but it also requires never ceasing to be critical, both of one's desires and of the constraints.

Now, the 'miracle-mentality' represented in those books by Bach is, in my opinion, no closer to this true freedom than the 'victim-mentality' referred to above: imagining that there are no constraints is no better than feeling oneself completely determined by constraints. For a seagull, to strive for a supernatural manner of flying is no better than being afraid to develop the flying skills it does have naturally; and for a person, to fantasize about being able to walk through walls is no better than avoiding a wall where there actually isn't an obstacle that cannot be overcome. Those two books, then, are nothing but escapist phantasies for 'victims', they appeal as daydreams -- without, as some readers might claim, even pointing in the right direction, towards the freedom we are actually capable of. Freedom, though in some sense it may lie on the continuum between the victim- and the miracle-mentality, requires a different way of thinking altogether.

In Akira Kurosawa's remarkable film Rashoomon (1950) a certain sequence of events, as a result of which a samurai has been killed and his wife raped, is described before a court, (which remains invisible throughout, as we take its place,) by the four people who were in some way involved; but their stories, told in visual terms, differ very fundamentally on what actually happened -- and the film does not attempt to resolve the disagreements between the different stories.

It is obvious that the film tries to say something about the nature of truth. However, two essential points have I think been disregarded by the critics. One is that one of the 'witnesses', the woodcutter who is reporting the events in court, in the end gives a reason, why he told the story in his particular way: he had wanted to cover up the fact that he had stolen a valuable dagger from the dead samurai. After having admitted a reason why he should not tell the story as he had witnessed it, the woodcutter could -- although this does not happen in the film -- describe the events more truthfully, although one could still not be certain that he would then be telling 'the truth'. The other point is that while the question about the truth of the events remains unanswered, deliberately so, there is no moral uncertainty about the action of adopting an abandoned baby they all discover at the end rather than letting it die there.

So it may be that the concept of truth has the same kind of negative characteristic as that of freedom: we can never be sure of having attained the truth about a matter; all we can do is to try and remove the obstacles, such as our wishful thinking and preconceived ideas, which might prevent us from seeing things as they are. And even with the best will this is possible only up to a certain point; thus, when talking about a rape, as happens in the film, one's perception of what happened will of course be affected by one's general attitude to women, to sex, etc.: but that does not mean that we don't have a moral responsibility to take a stand.

This negative characteristic of the concept of truth also underlies Karl Popper's account of scientific progress: he argues that scientists, by doing experiments, can only attempt to disprove a hypothesis rather than actually being able to find positive proof for their theory. To put it in our terms, what scientists do when they test a theory is to remove possible obstacles to our accepting that theory as true.

6. Cultures and Society

Often when someone has to take a decision about an issue, they mistake the situation, for one of having to find something out. One difference is that when we find something out, there often is 'a right answer', which there is not -- or at least we may not be able to know what it is -- when we take a decision. This can happen not only with personal decisions, but also in discussions of general issues: as long as the discussions are ostensibly about facts, they will keep going on without arriving at any conclusion; but when it is accepted that what is at issue are our preferences and why we have them, we may be able to take a decision.

A case in point are discussions about different ways of representing the world on a map. We need to start by accepting that there is no way of representing the surface of the earth in all respects accurately on the flat surface of a map. Some projections will represent distances in certain directions accurately, while others will preserve angles. So we need to make a choice which projection we use, and it seems to me that when it comes to economic and political issues we should be using a projection that shows areas accurately. The ''should'' in the last sentence is used in a moral sense: it is immoral to use a map, like the usual Mercator map, which shows 'the South' as being smaller in size than 'the North', when in fact it is twice the area, or South America as being about te same size as Europe. It is immoral because, for instance, it very conveniently downplays the magnitude of problems -- such as underdevelopment and hunger -- that we, the map-makers and -users, suffer from less than most of the world's population.

Nowadays, the main candidate for an area-accurate map is the Peters projection, proposed by the German historian Arno Peters in 1973, (though there had been a version developed by James Gall, a Scottish clergyman, in 1885.) The arguments surrounding the Peters projection are an example of the confusion mentioned above: after finding out about the properties of different projections, we decide that for certain purposes we should use the Peters projection, rather than the usual Mercator projection, (which is the right one for the purpose it was designed for, navigation at sea;) we decide that for certain purposes, representing areas accurately is more important than representing the continents in their familiar shape. Neither taking this decision, nor even being critical of the motives that people may have for wanting to continue to use the traditional kinds of maps, is the same as ''ignoring or misrespresenting the achievements of academic cartographers.''

A larger version (39 kB) of the above map can be viewed in a new window.

There are other projections that represent areas accurately, but they show most of the earth with even more distortion than the Peters projection. But J. Paul Goode's 'homolosine' projection (14 kB,) presented in 1925, minimises shape distortion by having individual lobes for each continent.

While maps, occasionally seen on tea-towels from down-under, showing a large Australia in the centre with the rest of the world in a narrow margin around the edges, are clearly a joke, Japanese maps of the world do have Japan close to the middle line and divide the world across the Atlantic Ocean, rather than across the Pacific as do the maps we are used to.

We take it for granted that different people have different characters, and that whether I like and get along with someone or not depends largely on our characters, though not in the shallow sense of either ''Birds of a feather ...,'' or ''Opposites attract.''

It seems to me that cultures too have a certain character, in the sense that persons of one culture, (because of their shared background,) have a tendency to also share certain characteristics -- which is not to deny or underrate their individual variations.

We should not reject this idea just because similar ones have proved liable to abuse and dangerous in the past: atrocities have often been 'justified' by claims of superiority supposedly based on a nation's 'national character', or the 'racial characteristics' of different races. But thinking in terms of culture, as we are doing here, makes it clear that it is a matter of how each one of us has grown up, and not of political power or of genetic differences.

Now here is the point I want to make: if there is such a thing as the character of a culture, then it is only to be expected that I like people from certain cultural backgrounds more and get along with them better, just as I like certain people from my culture more than others and get along with them better.

Thus, to give a very simple example, if someone is a relatively outgoing individual in their culture, they will presumably feel more comfortable, on the whole, with people from a culture where people in general are also outgoing, and perhaps even with people from that culture who are less outgoing.

Having been able to live in a multicultural environment for much of my life, I have found that I do indeed get along better with certain national/ cultural groups than with others; but also that which groups these are has changed as I have changed.

As people overcome the prejudices, or just the ignorance, that they may have grown up with, they may arrive at the conviction, especially if they have the chance to come into an international community of idealistic young people, that ''no matter where we come from, no matter what the colour of our skin, deep down we are all the same,'' and decide that for that reason it is wrong not to respect our fellow human beings.

While this way of thinking is clearly better than ignorance and prejudice, it does seem to me that it is somewhat naive, and only the first step to a truer realisation -- that however similar we may appear at times, deep down we are very different: even if, as we live together, our behaviour and thoughts and feelings may appear similar, people from different cultures often experience the same situation very differently, they have different ways of relating to other people, for instance, different expectations of friends, and so on. As an idealistic person, one's tendency seems to be to deny these differences -- and so one misses the chance to learn for and improve oneself, and to help the other person by behaving appropriately. How different things can be, one can perhaps see only when one has had a chance to be 'culture-shocked' oneself.

Coming to realise that we are so diverse is not sad -- on the contrary: it is the ways in which we are not the same that make us interesting to one another and worth knowing, so the differences are something to welcome. In fact, is there not something deeply wrong, in moral terms, with the argument that we should respect our fellow human beings because they are not so different from us?

(Strictly speaking, the term ''international understanding'' does not quite cover what I have been talking about: people from different nations may be quite close to one another in their way of thinking, even if they don't manage to understand the politics of the other country, or their nations even are at war -- that is the situation when Israelis and Palestinians meet, for instance. What I was talking about above, and is often more difficult at the personal level, could perhaps be called 'inter-cultural understanding'.)

When I read or listen to the news, or consider the political, social and economic developments in different parts of the world, there is a question that I cannot help asking myself again and again: What's wrong with Africa, or Africans? (Enough Africans ask the same kind of question, for the same kind of reasons, for it not to be too offensive, I hope, being put by an outsider.) -- Here is one answer that has occurred to me.

The different societies in different parts of the world have all evolved, in the course of many thousands of years, certain structures, ways of relating: of individuals to their families, of families to society as a whole, and between individuals and between families. Some of these structures may, more or less by chance, be more suitable for functioning on a large scale, as society becomes larger -- and it may be just be that the African structures are particularly unsuitable.

Of course the situation has been easier in those parts of the world where large-scale societies have developed gradually, over thousands of years, and the structures have had time to adapt slowly: the African nation states are the product of the often quite random division of the continent by the colonial powers.

The colonialists are also responsible for exploiting certain aspects of the original social structures, like the division into and rivalry between tribes, and using them for their own ends. The resulting tribalism, as well as the racist distinction between blacks and whites, continue to be major factors in Africa today. A young African today who demands ''Africa for the Africans'' (meaning black Africans, of course) is still thinking in terms of a distinction inculcated by the colonialists and used by them against the native population. The fact that he now turns the same racial distinction against the white people makes him no less of a racist than the colonialists were -- he is still not free, but continues to be their 'successful' product, no less of ''a die-hard remnant of colonialism'' than the white supremacists in South Africa.

The suggestion made above, that particular aspects of African social structures may contribute to general political problems on the continent, can perhaps be made more concrete by looking at examples of such aspects from the writings of anthropologists, although this of course in no way constitutes a 'proof' that the suggestion is valid.

For example, if one asks where the attitudes to another tribe originate from and how they are experienced at an individual level, the following observation, about the Lele of the (then) Belgian Congo, by Mary Douglas may point to one answer: ''Animal foods offer a particularly rich field for discernment. Certain animals are abhorrent to all the Lele, men and women, and not considered as edible: rats, dogs and cats, snakes and smelly animals such as jackals. ... Discernment in eating is made the basis of status evaluation, not only between men and women, adults and children within the tribe, but between tribes. The Cokwe are thought of as rat-eaters, the Luba as winged-termite eaters, or goat-eaters, the Nkutshu as snake-eaters, and consequently despised'' (Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology, 1975, p. 14.)

Similarly, about the attitudes to political leaders: ''Chiefs are the other class of persons said to be wanting in buhonyi [shame, shyness, or modesty, the sense of propriety]. This is regarded as an inevitable aspect of the exercise of authority. Feelings of compassion, respect for age, recognition of the claims of hunger and fatigue, these aspects of buhonyi are incompatible with chiefship as the Lele think of it, arbitrary, irregular, and predatory in the enjoyment of its prerogatives. ... the idea of chiefship thus symbolised for the Lele is hardly warranted by their actual experience of the chiefs, who are ineffectual and weakened by rivalry with each other. ... The Lele obviously have very little experience of authority in any form. It is perhaps understandable that in circumstances such as these the idea of strong government should be a frightening one, and that chiefship should be symbolised by inhuman behaviour'' (p. 25.)

And about the organisation of political leadership: ''The entire region [referring to that of the Arapesh of New Guinea] depends on kinship ties as the major social mechanism and the tendency, so conspicuous in Polynesia and in Africa, of elaborating kinship ties into effective political superstructures is lacking'' (p. 69, quoting Margaret Mead.)

A thesis advanced by the American sociologist W. J. Goode in 1963 suggests an answer similar to the one put forward here, to the question 'what is wrong with Africa?' It asserts that the nature of family life in Europe may have favoured a certain kind of political and economic development; by contrast then, that in Africa (and other parts of the world) may have had, and may continue to have, the effect of hampering such development. It should be noted, though, that this does not amount to a value-judgment on the different kinds of social structures.

''W. J. Goode advanced two main theses. First, that there was a 'fit' or congruence between the conjugal family [-- his short-hand for the whole complex of characteristics of the western family --] and the modern industrial economy. ...

Western family life had 'always' approximated to the conjugal model, certainly for many centuries before the industrial revolution. It was not a response to industrialization, the result of a breakdown of an earlier extended family system. 'The classical family of western nostalgia' was a myth. A form of family emphasizing the husband-wife-child unit might very well have been 'a facilitating factor for industrialization, rather than the other way round'.

According to Goode, the conjugal family system facilitated both geographical mobility and 'class-differential' mobility. It encouraged achievement orientation, making one's own way; and it afforded fewer opportunities for nepotism. It may be suggested that Goode could have advanced stronger arguments here, such as the tradition of young adults leaving home and going into service; while the concentration of resources in nuclear families facilitated the accumulation of capital in the family firm, and also the education of children.

Goode's second thesis was that as other societies become industrialized their family patterns may consequently be expected to converge on the conjugal type. [The evidence for 'convergence', that where changes are taking place at all, they are in the direction predicted, is indeed very strong.]'' (J. E. Goldthorpe, The Sociology of Post-Colonial Societies, 1996, pp. 142f.)

Convergence on its own does not add much support to Goode's thesis that ''the particular forms of the family that prevailed in the West were such as to facilitate industrialization in those countries''; there might be all kinds of other reasons for convergence, such as a spreading of Western values which affects family structures in Third-World countries. Stronger evidence for the suggested causal link could come from a comparative study of different countries: were family structures in countries like the 'Asian tigers', where development in the past half-century has been very rapid, more similar to Western ones, or have they become more similar -- or have they become similar more quickly --, than in African countries?

From personal experience it seems to me that whereas in Europe 'individual' relationships, like friendship and love, tend to be rated most highly, in African societies it is family relationships. In Europe, to emphasize the closeness of a family relationship, one may compare it to a friendship; thus, many European parents say that they want to be considered as friends by their children and not 'just' as their mother or father, and they may even prefer to be called by their name rather than ''mom'' or ''dad''. In Africa, conversely, the closest friendships are likened to family relationships: so someone is a close friend when he can be taken for granted, like one's relatives.

In Ghana, I visited a friend for six days in an inland town, Tarkwa. It was an exciting experience just to walk around, meet his relatives, his friends, his friends' relatives, his relatives' friends; and so on. But one of the most striking observations I made after about four days there, when I heard a child cry in the distance. Of course, there had been children everywhere as we had walked around, many of them greeting me, calling: ''Obroni, obroni [White man, white man,] how are you? I am fine'' (-- that being the first things they learn in English at school.) But not once, it suddenly occurred to me, had I heard or seen children fighting, arguing, chasing one another.

When I mentioned this observation to a British acquaintance who as a medical student has spent some time at a hospital in Uganda, she became aware of the same kind of thing. ''There, if a child was crying,'' she told me, ''you knew something was seriously wrong with them, whereas here they have probably just dropped their toy or are missing their mother.''

I am not sure what this difference means, but it does seem to indicate quite a different way of being socialised as one grows up.

If Africans are socialised quite differently from Europeans, might there not be differences in the way people -- friends, parents and children, and so on -- relate to each other? I do have a very personal, very vague impression of this kind: that Europeans on the whole tend to model relationships more on the pattern of 'ownership of objects' than Africans do. Again, I am not quite sure what this means ...

''Africa'' here refers to sub-Saharan, or black, Africa. While there are major differences between the different parts of the continent -- East, West and South Africa, roughly --, not least in what people from the different parts tend to be like, and even between individual countries, both their cultures and their experiences of the past few hundred years are similar enough, it seems to me, for it to be justified, in most contexts, to 'lump them together'.

North Africa, on the other hand, seems to be more distinct in many more respects, and to be part of a different cultural sphere altogether. This seems to me so, despite the fact that the religion that almost defines the Arab world, Islam, has spread to some other parts of Africa; but then, the Christianity of much of black Africa has not made it much more like Europe, or less African, either.

Individual Africans themselves often seem to feel a certain ambivalence about this: when a non-African 'lumps them together' they may complain about his lack of understanding, but much of the time, both in what they say and in how they behave, they themselves seem to be assuming that closeness, and indeed want it politically.

7. Religion and Other Life Postions

Experience shows that the concept of God is not one that we can define rigorously, or uniquely. Not only different religions, but also adherents of the same religion can have quite different conceptions of God, and it may be that to some extent everyone has to make up their own mind about what they mean when they talk about God.

Now, some people who do not belong to any established church, usually because they don't care to accept the responsibilities and restrictions that such 'membership' would bring with it, mistake this unavoidable uncertainty in the concept for licence -- saying, for instance: ''I am not a Christian, but I do believe in God, in my own way.'' Typically, and not surprisingly, this 'God' of theirs will tend to be tolerant precisely in those areas in which they themselves tend to be casual.

This seems quite empty to me. After all, if the God in whom one believes has precisely those characteristics one wants him to have, then he is so obviously 'home-made' that one cannot possibly believe that he exists outside one's own mind. Only a God whom one sometimes finds it hard to obey, or even too hard, and who is not always tolerant of one's weaknesses is worth believing in.

Unlike Western knowledge, the wisdom of Buddhism is not such that it could be taught by a positive, direct method, and the famous teachers of Zen have therefore often resorted to trying to put across its essence to their students by indirect means. About the great teachers and their ways of teaching there are many stories, some of which are collected in the book Zen-Flesh, Zen-Bones. The following could be one such story:

One day, in the early evening, a student once again came to the famous teacher and asked him to tell him how he could become enlightened. After a short time the teacher raised his arm, pointed to the moon, which was just then rising behind some trees in the distance, and said: ''Look.'' -- ''I see,'' the student said after a while, ''you mean to say that life is like the moon, ever shifting and inconstant; that our material fortunes wax and wane; and that therefore we must learn to follow the eight-fold path and free ourselves from the suffering in this world.'' The teacher, his arm still raised, only said: ''Look again.'' And the student saw that, while the moon had risen some little distance, the teacher was still pointing in the same direction as before, to the place where she had been. -- They remained sitting there in silence for a long time that evening.

It is something of a commonplace, at least amongst certain 'liberals', that when the white man came to Africa, he used the bible as well as bribery and his guns to subjugate the natives, and that Christianity therefore is an imposed faith, an aspect of colonialism, and part of the threat to the native African ways.

However, as a Zimbabwean friend of mine argued very well in his Extended Essay, what this view overlooks is that Christianity in Africa -- at least black Christianity there -- is not the same as that of the Europeans, either as it was then or is now; but that it has both adopted native elements, and taken on some of the functions played by traditional African social structures -- thus divisions along gender- and age-lines, for instance, seem to be more common there. This may not be so surprising in the case of the new, evangelical churches: in Swaziland, late on Sunday afternoons, one can see groups of people in colourful long robes returning across barren hills to their homesteads after all-day services and celebrations; and loud singing and chanting from different 'churches' can be heard ringing out on most evenings over a town in Ghana. But even Catholicism, it seems, has become quite different: unlike in any Western country I know of, congregations form themselves into very active 'ministries', such as a singing ministry, to which their members apparently devote much of their time and energy throughout the week. So it does feel like that faith is properly 'theirs' now.

Moreover, contrary to the avowals of some Africans, Christianity -- just like science -- has failed to replace the traditional way of seeing the world: such as the belief, wide-spread in different forms, in witchcraft, or in a spirit world; but seems in many places to have to coexist with it. So it is not the case either that the native African ways have simply been supplanted by a 'spiritual import'.

Sometimes there seem to be coincidences of certain kinds of events, when a number of such events, like plane crashes, suddenly happen close together. For people who believe in something like 'fate', these coincidences corroborate their suspicion that the distribution of the events is not random, and that there is something to be explained.

However, the appearance that such events are not randomly distributed is easily accounted for as a perceptual illusion: take a long piece of string, and place a mark at one end; then toss a coin and place another mark further along the string, 1 cm away from the previous one if the coin showed Heads, and 5 cm away if it showed Tails; continue to place further marks in the same way. When one looks at the string as a whole, it does indeed seem as if the marks were bunched together and not randomly distributed, as we know they are.