RISK *

MIKE THOMPSON

HIGH STANDARD Himalayan climbing is a risky business. Indeed, it is quite possibly the riskiest business there is. The fact that it is also an expensive business makes it difficult to understand why anyone should choose to engage in it and scotches right at the outset the sort of explanation, favoured by some, that people take risks because they Ire poverty-stricken. Whilst it is undoubtedly true that people some- times do take risks from economic necessity, the fact that climbers often, in effecet, pay heavily to put their lives at risk suggests that economics has not got that much to do with it. And, of course, people sometimes are poverty-stricken because they are not prepared to take risks. It would be a curious sort of explanation that required us to hold that poverty was the cause of risk-taking and that the avoidance of risktaking was the cause of poverty.

Such an explanation is curious not because it is wrong but because it is incomplete. It would be perfectly valid if the two states, poverty and its absence, were cyclically related in such a way that the collapse Into poverty took place under conditions of risk avoidance and the rise out of poverty took place under conditions of risk acceptance. A complete explanation would have to include some sort of delayed trigger mechanism to provide the switching from one set of conditions to the other. For instance, it would not be too unreasonable to assume that poverty leads to desperation and desperation to risk taking. If the risk taking proved successful the poor person would find himself on the up- and up and might well find his newly adopted strategy reinforced by its evident success. Only when he was well and truly removed from poverty might Prudence catch up with him and, by suggesting that he could now afford not to take risks, set him on his downward course.

How, then, do we account for these two regimes: risk taking and risk avoidance and for the switching mechanism between them? As it happens, anthropologists have already described the two regimes but to understand the switching mechanism we have to look at the aesthetics, not the economics, of risk.

The anthropological discussion of risk centres upon the fascinating phenomenon of Himalayan trade. To explain why Himalayan trade exists is a simple matter, but to explain why some people engage in it and others do not is a problem that is, as yet, unresolved. The Greater Himalayan Range, running roughly from East to West, separates two remarkably different regions. To the North is the high, dry, cold plateau of Tibet sparsely populated by Lamaist Buddhists. To the South are the low, wet and hot Middle Ranges quite densely populated by Hindus. The largely pastoral people of Tibet have a lot of hairy animals, virtually unlimited deposits of salt but very little grain. The largely agricultural inhabitants of the Middle Ranges produce a lot of grain, particularly rice, on their terraced hillsides but their cattle are not very hairy and they have no deposits of salt. Beyond Tibet lie the great civilisations ol Mongolia and China whilst, to the South, a narrow strip of malarial jungle (the Terai) separates the Middle Ranges from the plains of India. The Greater Himalayan Range, though high, is surprisingly narrow and this means that anyone prepared to move into the uninhabited high valleys below the even higher passes into Tibet would be onto a very good thing. He would be in a position to generate wealth as effectively as a hydro-electric station that happened to have a massive head of water in both directions would be able to generate electricity. He could become the profitable channel through which wool and salt would flow down from Tibet whilst grain of various sorts flowed in the opposite direction. Once these flows were established he could expect the varied and sophisticated products of China and Mongolia to the North and of India to the South to be sucked in by the strong trade currents he had set in motion.

Reprinted from Mountain 73, with kind permission of the editor and the author. The article first appeared in 'Societal Risk Assessment', a symposium on Risk sponsored General Motors, Detroit.—Ed.

 

As if this were not enough, the various cross-breeds between the Tibetan yak and the Indian cows are highly prized in Tibet: they yield more milk and they are more tractable than the pure-bred yak whilst their hardiness is scarcely less. Indian cattle would perish in Tibet whilst Tibetan yak cannot survive in the thick air of the Middle Ranges. Thus the high valleys provide the only possible meeting ground and, in consequence, anyone moving into these valleys will be able to breed and export these desirable but fortunately, for him, in fertile beasts.

But the price he will have to pay in taking up this tempting position is the acceptance of a high level of risk. He will have to live in a place the natural resources of which are probably not sufficient to support him and this means that trade will be vital, not just to his prosperity, but to his very existence. And trade across passes of up to twenty thousand feet or more is a risky business. A sudden storm can wipe out not only his entire stock but him as well. If he gets safely across he may be robbed by Tibetan bandits, he may find that political changes (such as the Chinese occupation of Tibet) have made it difficult or impossible for him to sell his goods, or he may find the market in these goods has been flooded, or that for some other unforeseeable reason there is no longer any demand for them. And all this time that he is away he may be worried about the arrangements back home: the ploughing of the fields, the planting and harvesting of the crops, the husbanding of the yaks, the health of those members of his family who have remained behind to see to all these tasks. And then he has the long and dangerous journey back!

There are two possibilities concerning the occupying of this tempting but risky middleman position. Either the Buddhists could move down or the Hindus could move up. In all cases, it would appear, it is the Buddhists who have moved and it is the Hindus who have stayed put. All attempts at explaining why this should be so have foundered in a classic anthropological whirlpool. Do they move or stay put according to whether they are Buddhists or Hindus, or do they become Buddhists or Hindus according to whether they move or stay put?

All the evidence suggests, not that one of these answers is right and that the other is wrong, but that they are both right. Yet, since they are mutually contradictory, they can't both be right at the same time. Sometimes, we must assume, one is right: sometimes, the other. If this is the case, then there is still a large piece missing from the explanation; we need to know when one answer is right and when the other answer is right and, of course, it would be nice to know why as well. So let us have a look at risk taking and at the aesthetics of those who take the risks.

The real physical risks in Himalayan mountaineering — the avalanches, the- frostbite, the verticality, the cerebral and pulmonary oedema, even the leeches and the Nepalese food—would probably be all too apparent to non-mountaineers even in the absence of the books and slide lectures which, with their relentless and emphatic rehearsal of these horrors, are the favoured means by which those climbers who have survived recoup the financial losses incurred in their latest exploit and accumulate something towards the expenses of the next.

But sometimes an expedition will entail, as well as these physical lid , financial risks that in their own way are every bit as great. When Barclays Bank agreed to back the 1975 British Everest Expedition there had already been six attempts by powerful teams, including one led by Chris Bonington who was also to lead our 1975 attempt, all of which had failed by a considerable margin to climb the South West Face: the formidable 'last great problem' on Everest. Obviously, Barclays were well-equipped to assess our chances of success but there were plenty of experienced mountaineers, and many a self-appointed pundit, only too willing to bend their corporate ear. Most were strongly pessimistic but prudently elected not to pronounce too specifically on the likely outcome. But one journalist, Chris Brasher, actually went so far as to quote the odds as fifty to one against.

The full enormity of Barclays' financial risk becomes apparent when you see the same institution that is so reluctant to lend a customer just a few hundred pounds against the ample security of his freehold house, calmly handing out a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, completely unsecured, for a madcap scheme that they know has only a fifty to one chance of succeeding. Of course, Barclays will point out that this is not what they were doing and that the money, in fact, came entirely from that part of their budget allocated to advertising and public relations. But the fact that they were bombarded with letters from incensed customers suggests that the general public has difficulty in visualising the Big five banks as benign grannies with the cash they have earmarked for various purposes distributed between different tins and vases on their mantleshelves. Rather, they employ a simple input-output model. They see their money going into the bank and they see that same money being dished out to Chris Bonington, his friends and a whole lot of opportunist Sherpas on the other side of the world.

In the event the prophets were confounded, the South West Fact was climbed and Barclays' great gamble paid off in the sense that they have now got back much more than the hundred and fifty thousand pounds that they laid out. I hasten to add that these profits have not disappeared into their coffers but have all been carefully placed in a little tin on Grannie Barclay's mantleshelf and are to be devoted to the encouragement of youthful adventure.

There can be no doubt that Everest climbing involves massive physical and financial risks. The reason why Everest climbing, unlike say air travel, has not got safer with the passage of time is to be found in its uselessness. Once air travel became useful there were powerful economic incentives to increasing the likelihood of a passenger being delivered live to his destination. Technology, management, the selection and training of personnel, even international law, were all bent towards this paramount aim of increasing the probability of a passenger arriving safely and on time in the place where he wished to be. Mountaineering has been mercifully free of such utilitarian constraints.... until recently.

The first ascent of Everest (twenty-three years before ours), coinciding as it did with Queen Elizabeth's coronation, was one of the great imagination capturers of this century. Almost every child in Britain saw the film: 'The Conquest of Everest’ . . . the members of the expedition regrouped into lecture teams to visit every corner of the Kingdom . . . Plain men with simple tastes became Knights of This and Companions of That, and found themselves sustained on a diet of champagne and smoked salmon . . . 'We knocked the bastard off', entered the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

Every man destroys the thing he loves: the leader, Brigadier John Hunt, left the army and, as Sir John (later, Lord) Hunt, headed the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme designed to channel the pure spirit of the great achievement to every schoolboy and schoolgirl in the land. Outdoor Pursuits arrived in education and with it came a whole new profession: Outdoor Pursuits Instructors; hideous Frankensteins, half teacher half mountaineer.

One result of all this was that a small number of children, who left to themselves might never have gone near a mountain, died. Mountni neers are an irresponsible lot, teachers are responsible: the faces of the Frankensteins were contorted with anguish. In vain did they hold Official Inquiries, introduce Codes of Safety, initiate Mountain Leader ship Certificates and weigh down their charges' rucksacks with devices that would enable them to extricate themselves from every conceivable eventuality. Some children still died.

In desperation they even asked the mountaineers why this should be so. They replied: 'Some children die because mountaineering is dangerous'. The message was clear: there is no place for mountaineering in education. It was also unacceptable. If mountaineering was removed from education Outdoor Pursuits Instructors would be left with no childrern to instruct and Mountain Leadership Certification Boards would have no candidates to certify. The solution was simple and obvious: mountaineering must be made safe.

In this way a programme originally inspired by a great achievement in now poised to bring about a situation in which such an achievement will be impossible. Nearly all the Buddhists have been converted to Hinduism: there are very few of us left. Before we become extinct, and before achievements involving a high level of risk become impossible , let me enter a plea for our preservation. I do not ask that we be recognized as yet another oppressed minority and granted the security of a Buddhist sanctuary: to make such a request would be to capitulate and to join the Hindus in their prescription-ridden and risk-free world. Rather, I would urge that we understand the Hindu- Buddhist cycle, and its switching mechanisms before it finally breaks down. If we understand it we can rebuild it and so retain access to the full range of capabilities that it alone can generate.

The aesthetics of high standard mountaineering are such that a proposed route is only felt to be worthwhile if there is considerable uncertainty as to its outcome. It is for this reason that we wished to climb the South West Face. Advances in equipment and technique, and the familiarity resulting from its many ascents, have rendered the original route by the South Col of little interest to the leading climbers of today (unless it be an attempt with a very small party or without oxygen). To repeat the original route with a large party or without helicopters to ferry loads into the Western Cwm, as happened recently, is simply to do less with more and to render the outcome almost a foregone conclusion. The traditional mountaineering response to this aesthetically repugnant behaviour is ridicule, and I was interested to discover that the Sherpas who accompanied us on the South West Face also entered into this aesthetic framework and disparagingly reffered to the line by which Hillary and Tensing first reached the summit as 'The Yak Route'.

In sharing this little joke, European climbers and Nepalese Sherpas are both revealed as Buddhists poking a little malicious fun at some European Hindus. For a moment, as we chuckle, the mists of cultural difference clear and we see through to the universal mountain that usually they obscure. These mists are formed by our personal processes of risk management. Risks, it turns out, come in several different forms and the way in which we emphasise one and play down another often clouds our understanding of what is actually going on.

As well as physical risk and financial risk there is a third type, intellectual risk. A person takes an intellectual risk when he sets out to provide an adequate explanation for something where previous attempts have failed, and he takes an intellectual risk when he sets out to question the validity of some explanation which most people believe to be perfectly adequate. In taking an intellectual risk a person stands to lose neither his life, nor his fortune, but his credibility. Since knowledge, like air travel, is usually believed to be useful there are strong disincentives to intellectual risk-taking, and anyone who wishes to take such risks would be well-advised to immerse himself in some relatively useless area of knowledge, such as anthropology.

If Everest climbing and anthropology are united to the extent that they are both pretty useless, they are set apart by the very different kinds of risk-taking that each encourages. The picture is further confused by the intrusion of financial considerations. Though neither the Everest climber nor the anthropologist is particularly interested in financial risk both need money to indulge in the sorts of risk-taking that do interest them. When it is not forthcoming the problems they face and the risks they must run are compounded. For example, Don Whillans, in the first batch of mail to arrive at Base Camp after he and Dougal Haston had returned exhausted but triumphant from the summit of Annapurna, received just two letters. One, from the Mayor of Rawtenstall, offered him the freedom of his native borough, the other, from a different room in the same Town Hall, informed him that if he did not pay his rent arrears he would be evicted from his council house.

An example of intellectual risk-taking in the face of financial difficulties every bit as severe as those besetting Whillans is provided by the application, by Professors Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, to the British Science Research Council for funds to investigate their hypothesis that life originated in outer space and arrived, and is still arriving, on earth by meteorite. Although the credentials of these two gentlemen are quite impressive, and although eight thousand pounds is a quite small price to pay for evidence that might upset widely held beliefs about evolution, the application was rejected. By the simple expedient of saving itself eight thousand pounds the Science Research Council stood a good chance of preventing the evidence being gathered, thereby avoiding the risk that the amount of certainty in a wide field of very useful knowledge might be suddenly and dramatically reduced. At the same time it could avoid the risk, inherent in approving the application, of itself losing credibility and becoming, in the eyes of its faithful, the Science Fiction Research Council.

Now intellectual risk-taking is not usually much in evidence on Himalayan expeditions. A climber knows he wants to climb Everest and his main concern is to try to do it in as aesthetically pleasing a way as possible. If he were all the time asking himself why he wanted to climb Everest he would probably not get far beyond Base Camp, and might well fall down a crevasse if he did. Mallory's famous reply: 'Because it's there': was not an answer to the question: 'Why climb Everest?': it was a way of stopping people asking it for long enough for him to have a stab at doing it. The charm of the Sherpas' little 'Yak Route' joke is that, by momentarily clearing those mists, it encourages me to take a large and exciting intellectual risk. In anthropological terms I want to try to formulate a general theory of risk. In everyday terms I would like to have a go at answering that perennial question: 'Why climb Everest?'

 

It is perhaps only appropriate that that ugly pyramidical lump which happens to terminate in the highest point on earth should act as a focus not just for physical risk but for financial and intellectual risk as well.

Aesthetics, of course, have always been recognised as an important part of mountaineering. The aesthetic form may change, from the stiff upper-lips of the pre-war Everest climbers, through Smythe's 'spirit of the hills', Winthrop-Young's craftsmanship and Whillans' job-of-work- to be-done, to Bonington's shameless exposure of his inner states, but, whether it be the aesthetics of reticence, nature mysticism, esoteric skill, hard graft, or of letting it all hang out, there can be no doubt that more than just economic considerations motivate the mountaineer.

Yet, curiously, such aesthetic niceties are not assumed to extend to the Sherpas who throughout the history of Himalayan mountaineering have carried the Sahibs' loads, and sometimes the Sahibs themselves, up their chosen peaks. True, virtually every expedition book is full of praise for the Sherpas' fortitude, courage, cheerfulness and dependability, but at the same time there is always something rather stereotyped about this handsome expression of credit and inevitably the reader finds the Mingmas, the Dorjes, the Pasangs and the Kanchas merging into a succession of indistinguishable brown, hairless, smiling faces. The same convenient anonymity permits their formidable achievements to be condensed into a statistical table of loads carried and altitudes reached somewhere among the appendices on food, health, logistics, communications and the like, towards the end of the book. Despite the numerous best-selling accounts of expeditions, and despite the real bonds of affection and admiration that link many a Western climber and his Nepalese counterpart, the Sherpa still remains the Cheshire cat of mountaineering literature: little more than a big smile at the opposite end of the arm to the Sahib's pre-dawn mug of tea. The basic assumption is that the Sahib climbs Everest because it is there whilst the Sherpa climbs it for the money.

It is a convenient assumption. If climbing is most about aesthetics and if the Sherpas are concerned only with economics, then their contribution to any mountaineering achievement can be equated with that of, say, Barclays Bank. You need money to climb Everest so the argument runs, and you need Sherpas to climb Everest, but both are simply the pre-conditions for Himalayan mountaineering: neither has anything to do with its essence, with what climbing is really about.

In other words, our personal risk management leads us to expand the aesthetic scope of our own actions and to contract that of the Sherpas: East is East, we say, and West is West, and cultural difference explains all. But, of course, all that this appeal to cultural difference does is set a limit to what we are prepared to explain. Sharing a joke with Sherpas overrides these distortions produced by our risk management and reveals that the frames of our aesthetic scopes are identical. Suddenly, appeals to cultural difference are of no avail: we can no longer call upon Kipling to bail us out when the intellectual risks become too great.

Probably the greatest achievement of anthropology has been to shatter the convenient assumption that, in the same sort of situation people will tend to do the same sort of thing, and no sooner does an economist, a psychologist, a sociologist or a political scientist produce some elegant universal model of some aspect of human behaviour than an anthropologist will jump up to spoil his fun by adding the carping codicil: 'in our culture'. Anthropologists have become so carried away by their spoilsport success that they have almost completely lost sight of the really interesting, and difficult, question which is: 'Granted that different people in the same sort of situation may do different things, why do they do the different things that they do?' This is the question that a general theory of risk will have to answer. It will have to offer some satisfactory reason why Mallory wanted to climb Everest, and why Mingma wants to climb Everest, and it will have to give some satisfactory reason why all sorts of other people don't want to climb Everest.

Since climbing Everest is both a voluntary and a risky business, an explanation of why some people accept risks and others avoid them will go a long way towards answering these questions. The answer to the secondary question, 'Why climb (or avoid climbing) Everest, in particular?', is simply that Everest climbing is very risky and very useless. The risk taker, anxious to expand the pure aesthetic scope of his preferred style, could not ask for a more perfect objective. There is nothing peculiar, or hard to understand, in his choosing Everest. On the contrary, if Everest did not exist it would probably be necessary for him to invent it. The risk avoider is positively repelled by these very same properties that the risk taker finds so attractive. For him, risk of any kind is nasty and a useless and voluntary risk is just about the nastiest thing there could be. So the whole explanation hinges upon these two personal styles: risk taking and risk avoiding.

For every proverb and catchphrase there is, it would seem, a contradictory counterpart: 'Look before you leap' versus ⁶He who hesitates is lost', 'There's safety in numbers' versus 'Only a dead fish swims with the current'. If we were to collect these contradictory pairs and line them up with one another we could sketch out the world views: the sorts of predictive frameworks: that the risk taker and the risk avoider use in choosing, and justifying, the very different courses of action that each follows. The risk taker's world view corresponds to that of the adventurous Himalayan trader: the Buddhist. The risk avoider's world view corresponds to that of the cautious stay-at-home cultivator: the Hindu. One grants credibility to one set of proverbs, the other to the opposing set. Once equipped with these very different perceptions of the world it is hardly surprising to find that, when confronted with uncertainty, they operate very different strategies.

The Buddhist is an optimist: his response to uncertainty is positive. He acts boldly, but not foolhardily, in the hope of reaping rich rewards. The Hindu is a pessimist: his response to uncertainty is negative. He prefers not to act for fear that one thing may lead to another. He subscribes to a 'domino theory' that insists on the connectedness of everything. The Buddhist operates on a 'one-off theory' that allows him to disregard those possible consequences that lie outside his immediate concern. He goes in for risk-narrowing: 'Spot on he wins, way out he loses'. The Hindu goes in for risk spreading: 'A trouble shared is a trouble halved'. Why should one be led to adopt the risk-narrowing strategy, the other risk-spreading strategy?

First of all, it is not because one is a Buddhist and the other is a Hindu. 'Buddhist' and 'Hindu' are simply convenient labels to identify a person's commitment to one or other set of proverbs. (One disadvantage of this shorthand convention is that there turn out to be lots of Hindu Buddhists in the world and not a few Buddhist Hindus.) No, the answer to why a person accords credibility to one set of proverbs rather than the other is quite ridiculously simple, and has nothing to do with cultural difference.

The Hindu adopts a risk-sharing strategy, and subscribes to the pessimistic all-embracing world view that justifies such a strategy, because he has someone to share with. The Buddhist adopts a risk- narrowing strategy, and subscribes to the optimistic piecemeal world view that justifies such a strategy, because he has no one to share with.

Social context is enormously persuasive. If there is no-one there to share your risks with you, you cannot go in for risk-sharing and, conversely, only a mug would take a huge personal risk knowing that, if he was successful, he would have to share the rewards among all his cautious risk-shunning fellows. Of course, a risk avoider may, in certain circumstances, be prepared to take certain risks: those that are not for personal gain but for the survival, the glory or the honour of the group. These altruistic acts can sometimes be so risky as to be suicidal: the team spirit of Horatius and his comrades and the selfless heroism of the Kamikaze pilot typify the risks a risk avoider may accept: 'Never volunteer for anything, except certain death'. Paradoxically, the risk acceptor has a strong aversion to these sorts of risks. As a perceptive mountaineer, Tom Patey, once put it: 'He should never underestimate the importance of staying alive'.

I can foresee two possible objections to this devastatingly simple answer to the question 'Why climb Everest?' The first is that, if my theory states that individualism encourages risk taking and collectivism encourages risk avoidance, then, in equating Everest climbing with individualism, I have got it all wrong because Everest climbing is a collectivist activity wholly dependent for its success upon superlative teamwork and upon highly motivated and skilled individuals selflessly surrendering their personal ambitions (to be the man on top of Everest) to the common cause (getting a man on the top of Everest). Now, though this heroic picture is often what those who do not go on Everest expeditions choose to see and, indeed, is often what those who do go on them are happy to paint for their armchair public, Everest expeditions are not like that at all.

High standard mountaineers are extraordinarily individualistic and are only prepared to join together to form an expedition in the first place because they know that, regrettably, they can't get to the top of Everest unaided. The steady progress of an Everest assault can only be maintained by continually changing the lead climbers: those who have done their stint returning to Base Camp for a rest whilst others, still fresh, take their place. Going down .to Base Camp takes one or two days, coming back to the sharp end is at the rate of one camp per day. It is most fortunate that the total amount of time it will take to climb the mountain is unknowable; if the members of an expedition knew just how many days lay between the first pair of climbers setting out from Base Camp and the placing of a man on the summit, they could quite easily work out which position in the sequence of lead climbers they should take up in order to end up on the summit. Having myself watched and been involved in these complex dynamics, I am quite certain that, if the optimum position happened to be that of the first pair to set out from Base Camp, all the members of the expedition would hurl themselves simultaneously at the mountain and that, if this was not the optimum position, not a soul would stir from his sleeping bag.

Of course, as the climb proceeds so this degree of uncertainty decreases and towards the end it becomes quite predictable, either that the summit will not be reached, or that it will be reached in a certain number of days. But, by this time, it is usually too late for the individualists to be able to do much about it. If they are resting at Base Camp they have had it: if they are moving up towards the top camp they are in luck. Of course, those in the top camp, sensing victory, could if they were selfish enough refuse to return to Base Camp and this, indeed, is often what happens. On one brilliantly successful expedition Base Camp contained only the Sherpa cook and a Yorkshireman with a wooden leg: all the other members were crammed into the top camp and the last one to drag himself up to this overpopulated spot received for his pains, not a steaming mug of tea, but a punch on the nose.

But, usually, events move too quickly and many of the members are stranded without any real hope of getting to the top camp in time. It is at about this moment that they turn their hands to good works — selflessly ferrying essential supplies to the higher camps . . . manning the Base Camp radio (in their sleeping bag) in case the summit party should suddenly come on the air . . . getting a good sweet brew ready for the returning victors. The leader for his part plans increasingly unrealistic second, third, fourth and even fifth summit parties in a pretence of fair shares for all, and the Sherpas, sensing the end of the expedition, lose their upward momentum and divert their energies to the stripping of the camps and the accumulation of staggering loads of personal booty.

The second possible objection is that, if the answer to this perennial question really is so simple, how come somebody hasn't come up with it sooner? The reason is twofold. First, people are usually very strongly committed to their view of how the world is, and this commitment is partly maintained by denying the validity of other ways of seeing the world. Second, though the world view to which they are committed depends upon their social context, they are unaware of this dependence. As far as they are concerned, their world view is not some artificial construct, it is an accurate factual account of how the world is. One might say that the collectivised context is to the Hindu what the earth is to the worm, and that the individualised context is to the Buddhist what the air is to the bird. Each is as firmly and unquestioningly committed to his world view as are the worm and the bird to their respective eye-views.

But there is a crucial difference. For worms and birds the environments are natural: for risk avoiders and risk takers the environments are social. No matter what actions worms and birds take they will never find themselves living in one another's media but, for the risk avoider and the risk taker, there exist the possibilities equivalent to the worm sprouting wings and the bird slithering into the soil. Social contexts can change, either as a result of the actions of the individuals who constitute the totality, or as a result of external natural or social pressures. This means that, whilst wormhood and birdhood are two clearly separate and unrelated states, risk avoiders can be transformed into risk takers and risk takers into risk avoiders. Yet the path to risk acceptance is not the reverse of the path to risk avoidance: there is a cyclical relationship between the two states: a Hindu-Buddhist cycle.

Though people are convinced that the view they have of the world is something natural — something self-evident — they have in fact worked very hard to make it appear like that. The Hindu in his collectivised context learns to avoid risk taking. Since he learns from his mistakes, as well as by getting it right, he will have built up a considerable profit and loss account by the time he is firmly locked onto the set of proverbs that makes sense of his world. In the same way, the Buddhist will build up his distinctive pattern of investments that commits him firmly to the other set of proverbs. The consequence of all this work — all this aesthetic investment — is that, in order to let go of the Hindu world view and acquire a firm grasp on the Buddhist world view, you have to dismantle one investment structure and build another. This means that, if you went right round the cycle from Hindu to Buddhist to Hindu again, you would, on the first leg, ding to your risk avoiding strategy long after you had passed the midway point between collectivised and individualised contexts and, on the return leg, you would similarly over-persist with your risk accepting strategy.

Apart from providing some sort of answer to the question 'Why climb Everest?', what does this examination tell us that we don't already know?

It tells us:

1. That changing people's social contexts is a costly business.
2. That, though risk taking and risk avoiding strategies are contradictory, little is to be gained and a great deal could well be lost by insisting that one is right and the other is wrong. Rather, each is appropriate in a particular kind of social context.
3. Though each is convinced that his view of the world is the right one, Buddhist and Hindu each stand to gain, as well as lose, from the activities of the other. This means that in all probability there will be, in the distribution of Hindu and Buddhist contexts, some optimum arrangement at which the gains minus the losses for the totality reaches a maximum.
4. Since a modern industrial society inevitably generates both sorts of social context, and since the social policies that such societies implement inevitably result in the transformation of some individual's contexts, there exists the possibility of evaluating these policies according to whether they will bring us nearer to, or take us further from, this optimal.

Having put forward these few suggestions, I am assailed by awful premonitions. Could it be that I am about to destroy the thing I love: have I got something useful out of Everest climbing?

 

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