Ox Travels has been resident on my bedside table for several months now. This is a collection of stories by travel writers, each story based on a meeting or encounter that happened while on the road. The stories are evocative, charming, and at about ten pages per piece, are not too demanding - ideal for a dip into another world before drifting off to sleep.
One story I just read in this collection is The Fourth World, by Jan Morris. The Fourth World is Morris' term for the virtual nation of kind people around the world, who together should be a powerful force for the good:
"My own experience, after seventy odd years of the meandering life, is that there exists a kind of vast supranational community whose citizens are essentially kind.
...the qualities of this virtual nation of mine can be elusive...But I know them by now, and I recognize them in all their myriad guises. I have recognized the signs in statesmen as in housewives, in taxi-drivers as in actresses and tycoons - a look in the eye, a smile, a gurgle of laughter is often enough. I knew I was in the presence of an initiate when, one day in the high Himalayas, alone in the high snows, I met a wandering holy man with whom I shared not a word or even a gesture, just an instinct.
...over the years I have come to realize that these people constitute a vast and powerful freemasonry...
I think of them one and all of constituting a Fourth World of their own...an association as wide and varied as my Grand Diaspora, bound only by decency and humour, would surely be unconquerable..."
Morris proceeds to give an Edinburgh barmaid an impassioned spiel about the latent force of the Fourth World, which is the "encounter" in the story. Regardless, I found this notion of the Fourth World seductive. My experience is also that most people, everywhere, are basically kind. I went to sleep thinking that, surely, basic human decency, kindness, the latent power of the Fourth World, will be harnessed one day to make the world a better place.
When I woke up, however, I remembered a paper I read in B-School which shows why it is so hard to engage the power of the Fourth World. Basically, people are kind when they have time on their hands. The same people stop being kind when they get busy.
The paper in question is "From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behaviour", by Darley and Batson (thank you Google). This study looks at whether or not people stop to help a man slumped in an alleyway, moaning with pain; whether or not people behave like the Good Samaritan in the biblical parable. It found that people with time on their hands stopped to help. Those who were under time pressure, including those who were bustling off to give a lecture on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, did not help. This wasn't a small effect, it was observed in almost all the subjects of this study. People with time were kind, people who were in a hurry were not.
Looked at this way, Fourth World citizenship is situational. It increases when people are feeling time-rich. Perhaps the best thing organized religion did to promote kindness was to enforce the sabbath, to give people the experience of being time-rich, to create a space where time is in our hands, where we're not in the hands of time.
