Parable of the Sadhu

Parable of the Sadhu

Bowen H. McCoy's 1983 Harvard Business Review article "The Parable of the Sadhu" describes the author's own experience of how he "literally walked through a classic moral dilemma without fully thinking through the consequences" (p.106). During a sightseeing junket to the peak of Everest, McCoy and his moralistic Quaker buddy Stephen have their travel interrupted by the discovery of a religious pilgrim -- a "sadhu" -- found basically naked and half-frozen on one of the high mountain passes. The weather is good and this high mountain pass is not invariably passable for tourists like McCoy, so the fact of the good weather means that all the parties present -- which include various tourists from Japan, Switzerland, and New Zealand -- are more concerned with getting over the pass than with a two-day trek back down the mountain to get the sadhu to a hospital or the like. Stephen feels like his death will be their fault in this case, and so he then orders his paid porters -- the local Nepalese Sherpa laborers hired to carry his bags up the side of Everest -- to carry the Sadhu down to a safer distance, where Japanese had given him food and drink, and he seemed to be alert and lively enough. But McCoy and Stephen would continue the trip, and McCoy frankly admits that "we do not know if the sadhu lived or died." His real point, though, does not require that ultimate knowledge, because McCoy's concerns turn toward the ethical dilemma presented by the situation, and so what concerns him most is the sense of process or communal endeavor breaking down, ethically. This is how Stephen will angrily describe it, stating that "I feel that what happened with the sadhu is a good example of the breakdown between the individual ethic and the corporate ethic. No one person was willing to assume ultimate responsibility for the sadhu. Each was willing to do his bit just so long as it was not too inconvenient. When it got to be a bother, everyone just passed the buck to someone else and took off. Jesus was relevant to a more individualistic stage of society, but how do we interpret his teaching today in a world filled with large, impersonal organizations and groups?" (McCoy 1983, pp. 104-6).

Alas, McCoy does not give the proper response here to Stephen, which would be that Jesus Christ had already given clear and unambiguous teaching that could be applied to the sadhu, such as Matthew 8:22 ("Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead") or Matthew 26:11 ("The poor you will always have with you"), although it wouldn't help Stephen with his concern, which is how to "fulfill" his "obligations" "as individual Christians or people with a Western ethical tradition" (p.106). Yet this is a classic instance of how cultural differences can impact the moral dilemma, and McCoy does not properly address the issue. As "Christians" or "people with a Western ethical tradition" (which is surely Stephen's hideously inelegant way of confessing that some of his best friends are Baha'i), should McCoy and Stephen not have grappled a bit more with the fact that the sadhu was neither? McCoy takes it for granted that his own standards are the right ones: he notes to Stephen that "the people appeared to be far less caring" in the actual village. He has also demonstrated an almost total incuriosity about the sadhu as to "why he was almost naked and with no shoes" or "how long he had been lying in the pass," because "the answers weren't going to solve our problem" (p.104) The simple fact is that the sadhu represents part of a local religious and cultural tradition, and is probably best understood as part of that tradition. It struck me that perhaps the villagers were so uncaring because they were familiar with the sadhu as someone who was mentally ill, or vaingloriously seeking martyrdom, or possibly just a whimsical gymnosophist -- and that specific local and cultural information might have altered McCoy's ethical sense of the situation. If the sadhu had been seeking a glorious religious martyrdom, it is entirely possible that McCoy and Stephen did him a disservice with their polypragmatic "ethical behavior" towards him.

A leadership style which was more closely attentive to cultural relativism would surely have taken this into account. Of course, the article is really more about the disagreement between McCoy and Stephen: Stephen thinks the problem was that there was no leadership style, but he then compares this with the corporate world generally, implying that, in corporate ethics, it is possible for everyone to duck responsibility entirely. McCoy by contrast emphasizes that each person did what they could, but offers that a corporate culture would need to define and foster its own sense of ethics in order to have one. Of course, the leadership style that would have best suited the sadhu was a governmental one, i.e. An existing infrastructure -- especially around a high-end tourist trap like Mount Everest -- which would have taken the possibility of a sadhu in the road into account in designing that infrastructure.