Thought for the Day, 24 June 2009

Vishvapani

Perhaps it's the end of the culture of deference. Perhaps it's the technology that makes huge amounts of information accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Or perhaps it's the legal shift prompted by the Freedom of Information Act. Whatever the reason, the issue of the day is the need for 'openness' and 'transparency' in public life. These qualities will guide reform of the Commons, Gordon Brown said yesterday, and, after protest, they will also guide the Inquiry into the Iraq War.

It sometimes seems in these discussions that openness is considered an end in itself as if there were no corresponding value in privacy and discretion. But if transparency in public life shouldn't be a point of principle it remains a powerful way to counteract the corrosive effect of self-interest. When people with power conduct their affairs in secret we assume that the pull of their interests will be unchecked; and when MPs protest that they meant no harm and followed the rules, we disbelieve them because we don't trust people to be objective when self-interest is involved.

It's true that we easily slip into habits and that self-absorption creeps up unnoticed, in private life as well as in public affairs. Over the last two years I've been cloistered away, surrounded by ancient tomes and immersed in writing a biography of the Buddha. It has been an intense period that absorbed me in my world of writing and ideas. That ended abruptly seven weeks ago with the birth of my son Leo, our first child. My attention has hurtled from the distant past into the present moment in which Leo is so vibrantly alive. Suddenly my wishes have to be subordinated to his needs and my time, energy and patience seem like scarce resources to be marshaled with care.

The correspondence between becoming a father and openness in public life is the value of having a reality check -- confronting external demands that take us beyond our personal preferences. I learned about that from the Buddha, who seems to have helped me prepare for fatherhood, even though he, himself, abandoned his family to become a religious wanderer. For one thing, he taught ways to cherish whatever's happening right now. But he also warned that self-absorption stores up suffering and said the antidote is seeing your biases for what they are. If introspection doesn't achieve that then its time for the reality check of a crying baby or an angry public.