April 23, 2021 • 32 mins
Lady Sale (played by Helena Bonham Carter) was part of a bloody and ignominious British retreat from Afghanistan in 1842. The arrogant colonial invaders had thought intervening in Afghan affairs and dominating the country would be easy - they were wrong. Lady Sale was among the lucky few to escape with her life.
Wiser heads later recommended "masterly inactivity" as a better course of action. In politics, parenting and even medicine - avoiding the temptation to act is a sadly neglected art form.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Lady Sale was eating her last breakfast in Carbal, Afghanistan.
She'd had to burn the legs of her mahogany dining
table to cook it. That was her last remaining wood.
(00:36):
There wasn't much food either, but it would have to do.
The year was eighteen forty two, the sixth of January,
not the best time of year to embark on a
five day trek through the mountains. The cold was bitter,
the snow knee high. Shortly after nine in the morning,
(00:57):
they set out. Hundreds of British and many thousands of
Indians recruited from an India that was under British control.
There were sea pois or soldiers, and the camp followers, civilians,
wives and children. The British lead troops had occupied Afghanistan
for three years. It had been clear for weeks now
(01:18):
that they'd had to leave their base in Carbal. It
still wasn't clear if they'd get out alive. They'd been
trying to negotiate with the various Afghan rebels who surrounded them,
both for the safe passage to the British held fort
at Jalalabad and to buy the food they so desperately needed.
The soldiers were on half rations. There was nothing at
(01:40):
all for the animals. The cattle chewed the bark off trees,
wrote Lady Sale in her journal, I have seen my
own riding horse snall voraciously at a cartwheel. Lady Sale's
son in law had spent the previous night waist deep
in the icy Carbal River constructing a makeshift bridge for
(02:02):
the convoy. This must have been a galling task because
he'd repeatedly told his superiors that the river could easily
be forded upstream, and they told him built the bridge anyway.
As usual, every sensible proposition was overruled. Trying to get
almost twenty thousand people plus pack animals across rickety planks
(02:26):
between icy river banks proved slow going. As the day
dragged on, a long line of baggage carriers backed up
at the bridge. The rebels started to shoot at them.
They abandoned the baggage, and so as night fell, the
convoy had managed to cover just six miles and lose
(02:48):
most of their supplies. One of the few tents that
had made it through was chivalrously pitched over. Lady Sale,
her pregnant daughter, and her exhausted son in law at daylight,
we found several men frozen to death, hungry and frostbitten.
The survivor as trudged on straight into a carefully planned ambush.
(03:17):
I'm Tim Harford. You're listening to cautionary tales. We'll come
(03:45):
back to the story of Lady Sale and why the
bedraggled Imperial convoy was fleeing Carbal First, I want to
talk about something that may seem quite unrelated. Helicopter parenting,
dropping in to micro manage your child's life. The practice
is much mocked, but it's also widespread. Some evidence suggests
(04:08):
that it's not a good idea. In twenty thirteen, for example,
researchers from the University of Mary Washington in Virginia asked
college students to say whether or not they agreed with
statements such as my mother monitors my exercise schedule, or
if I'm having an issue with my roommate, my mother
would try to intervene. The more their parents were like helicopters,
(04:33):
constantly hovering over their child's life, the more likely the
students were to be depressed and dissatisfied. Criticism of helicopter
parenting goes back to long before the invention of the helicopter.
Charlotte Mason was a Welsh educator in the late eighteen hundreds.
Her writings are still studied today, especially by homeschoolers. Mason
(04:57):
chastised parents who think they have to organize every moment
of their children's lives. Fussy and restless, she called them.
Let them choose their own friends, Mason and said, and
form their own opinions and spend their own pocket money.
Don't repeatedly remind them to do the things you've asked
them to do. Instead, let them choose to fail to
(05:20):
do those things, as long as you then make them
suffer the consequences. When Charlotte Mason wanted a memorable phrase
to sum up this approach, she reached for one that
had suddenly become popular in the British discourse of the
eighteen sixties. I wish to bring before parents and teachers
the subject of masterly inactivity. Masterly inactivity. It's a lovely
(05:47):
phrase and a surprisingly useful concept. As we'll see, Afghanistan
in the eighteen thirties was not an easy place to rule.
Pushte hartepe yek padishah nishast Behind every hill, Look there
(06:10):
sits an emperor, so many competing tribal leaders had to
be kept happy or at least quiescent. But Dost Mohammad
Khan was proving remarkably adept at it. He was also,
or so he thought, on friendly terms with Britain, the
colonial power that in effect governed neighboring India through the
(06:32):
British East India Company. At any rate, Dost Mohammad had
hit it off with Britton's man in Carbal, the charming
and brilliant Scotsman, thirty four year old Alexander Burns. Carbal
was thriving. Its Grand Bazaar was the commercial hub of
Central Asia. You could buy anything from spices to silk,
(06:52):
furs to fine porcelain. Carbal was diverse. Traders from Hindu
and Jewish minorities felt welcome and secure. Alexander Burns was
impressed by how skillfully Dost Mohammad was running the country.
The peasant rejoices at the absence of tyranny, the citizen
at the safety of his home, the merchant at the
(07:13):
equity of the decisions and the protection of his property,
and the soldier at the regular manner in which his
arrears are discharged. A man and power can have no
higher priest. So imagine the outrage when Afghans learned that
Britain was invading their land to oust Dost Muhammad and
Alexander Burns was riding with the invading troops. Burns was
(07:39):
cast as Namakhram, a traitor literally impure salt. In the
histories told by Afghan poets, Burns does not come out
well on the outside. He seems a man, but inside
he is the very devil. To be fair to Burns,
(08:00):
he had tried. Russia was trying to muscle in on
Central Asia, threatening Britain's influence in the region. Burns repeatedly
begged his political masters leave this to me. I can
handle it. Let me work with Dost Mohammad. But all
of Burns's charm and brilliance couldn't make up for his
(08:21):
unforgivable youth. Who was this upstart questioning the received wisdom
of Britain's most senior experts on Afghan affairs, Those senior
experts had admittedly never actually been to Afghanistan. Still, they
were sure they knew exactly what the Afghan people wanted,
(08:42):
the reinstatement of their former king, who had been deposed
by relatives of Dost Mohammad some three decades earlier, and
had since been living in exile as a guest of
the British East India Company. From their far away desks,
the experts hatched a dramatic plan to deal with the
Russian threat dead invade Afghanistan to put the former king
(09:05):
back on the throne, where he'd rule gratefully in Britain's interests.
The story of the eighteen thirty nine invasion is told
in William Dalrymple's masterful book Return of a King. As
the British and Indian army marched through Afghanistan, it dawned
(09:26):
on the senior officers that Afghans had not, after all
been hankering after their former king, Alexander Burns was exasperated.
He tried to tell them, but he was also loyal,
or maybe just ambitious. He was sent ahead of the
troops to try to smooth their path with local leaders.
(09:48):
On hearing about the size of the advancing army, one
such leader told him, you can easily replaced us to Hummed,
but you will never win over the Avar Niche. You
have brought an army into the country. How do you
propose to take it out again. That turned out to
be a very astute question. Cautionary tales will return after
(10:17):
this message. The British took action in Afghanistan. With hindsight,
they should have left it alone. That's an obvious enough
point from our modern perspective, but colonial invasions are by
no means the only situation we're doing less achieves more.
(10:40):
I've had a bad throat for a couple of days.
It happens every year. They usually give me zitherum ax
and it goes away. Let me see your throat looks normal.
It's very unlikely that you have stripped throat. I'll take
u s what, but it will likely be negative. Can
I have a prescription in the meantime? You don't need
a prescription? Why can't you just give me the prescription?
(11:03):
A surprising amount of medical care simply isn't necessary. A
few years ago, researchers conducted a survey of over two
thousand American physicians. On average, they secretly reckoned that one
tenth of the procedures they approved didn't actually need to
be done. Furthermore, their patients could have survived without a
(11:25):
fifth of the medications they were prescribed, and over a
quarter of the tests ordered were quite pointless. That adds
up to a lot of wasted time and money. What
were the doctors thinking? Sometimes they told the researchers it
was quicker to do another test than tracked down a
(11:46):
patient's medical records. But two motives far outweighed the others,
the fear of being sued for malpractice and a desire
to get rid of the pushy patients. That conversation about
zeromax and antibiotic came from a blog post by an
emergency room doctor in Canada, and it was shared by
(12:06):
the Canadian branch of an initiative called Choosing Wisely. The
aim of Choosing Wisely is to cut down on wasteful
medical spending. It produces lists of things not to do,
such as prescribing antibiotics for minor infections, viral infections, or
infections that exist only in a patient's imagination. Antibiotics are
(12:30):
a clear cut case. Their overuse affects us all by
speeding the growth of drug resistant bugs. But few medications
or procedures are completely free of risk, and some tests
can be a waste of time too. Say a patient
has lower back pain, they've had it for less than
six weeks and they have no other red flags. Do
(12:52):
you send them for a scan? It turns out to
make no difference to the patient's outcomes. Francois Mai is
an author and professor of psychiatry. He wrote about choosing
Wisely for the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Sometimes waiting and
seemingly doing nothing is the favored therapeutic modality. The favored
(13:16):
therapeutic modality. What Francois Mai is saying is that sometimes
the best treatment is no treatment at all, instead waiting
and watching. Ready to act, but only if you have
to make explains how he first came across this idea.
(13:36):
When I was a medical student, A wise old professor
introduced me to the treatment concept of masterly inactivity. So
there it is again, masterly inactivity. It's eighteen thirty nine.
A huge army of British and Indians is marching on Carbal.
(14:02):
The Afghan leader Dost Mohammad sees that the cause is hopeless.
Soon the old king is duly reinstalled. But while Dost
Muhammad had painstakingly earned the respect and goodwill of the
many tribal factions, those emperors behind every Hillock. The returned
king was seen as Britain's puppet. He relied on British
(14:24):
largesse and the occupying troops to keep everyone in line.
It was clear that the king wouldn't last if the
British troops withdrew, so they stayed. Some of the officers
had their families joined them. Lady Sail arrived in Carbal
with a grand piano, a marriageable daughter, and the collection
(14:46):
of seeds. My sweet peas and geraniums are much admired
in the kitchen garden. The potatoes especially fry. But the
cost of occupying Afghanistan was ruined us. The British East
India Company made tidy profits from tea and opium, but
(15:06):
those prophets were all swallowed up and more, and Afghans
were becoming more and more appalled at the liberties taken
by the Firangis the foreigners. One complained to the King
that female prostitutes are publicly day and night, carried on
horseback into the English camp. The King took it up
(15:28):
with the top British envoy, who unwisely waived the warrior away.
If we stopped the soldiers having sex, the poor boys
will fall quite ill. One man was acquiring a particularly
saucy reputation, the Envoy's deputy, Alexander Burns, the very devil himself.
(15:51):
Burns wasn't just a diplomatic charmer. He charmed the ladies too.
As one local writer described in his Private Courts, it
with decabath with his avrandmistress in the hot water of
lust and pleasure, as the two rubbed each other down
with the flans of giddy joy and the talk of intimacy.
(16:14):
Have a care Alexander Burns. Next to the flannels of
giddy joy and the talk of intimacy lies the tinder
of bad feeling. And in November eighteen forty one, something
happened to put a spark to that tinder. Some say
Burns seduced someone he shouldn't have, offending a local powerbroker.
(16:37):
Whatever the reason, a mob descended on burns house. He
sent a messenger to ask what they wanted. They killed
the messenger, stormed burns compound and hacked him to death.
The young Scott's dismembered body was left in the street
for the dogs to eat. Clearly the British lead forces
(17:00):
couldn't stay in Carbon Now Afghan rebels cut off the
camp's food supplies. That's why Lady Sales riding horse was
gnawing at a cartwheel. The British envoy tried to negotiate
for safe passage, but he clumsily doubled crossed the leaders
of rival factions in the rebellion, a sub diffuge that
(17:20):
ended with the swish of a sword, a sickening thunk,
and in the words of one young officer who witnessed it,
the British Envoy's head was whereas heels had been. Consternation
and horror depicted on his countenance after that execution, the
incompetent retreat, the unnecessary bridge, the long delay, the abandoned baggage,
(17:43):
the frozen night, the ambush. I had fortunately only one
bullet in my arm. The party that fired on us
were not above fifty yards from us, and we owed
our escaped to urging our horses on as fast as
they could go over a road where at any other
time we sort have walked our horses very carefully. Lady
(18:05):
Sayle's son in law was not so lucky. In the
stomach he died after the ambush came the blizzard. The
convoy made just one mile's progress in a day. Living
and dead were indistinguishment, motionless, and the frozen waists. The
(18:27):
British met a rebel leader on the road. He said,
give me the officers, wives and children. I'll keep them
safe and warm and fed. Lady Sale and her daughter
were now among the hostages taken back. Along the route
of their attempted escape, The road was covered with awfully
(18:48):
mangled bodies, all naked camp followers still alive, frostbitten and starving,
some perfectly out of their senses. The sight was dreadful,
the smell of the blood sickening. It required care to
guide my horse so as not to tread upon the bodies.
(19:13):
Nearly twenty thousand British and Indians soldiers, camp followers, men,
women and children set off from Carbal in the knee
high snow in January eighteen forty two. Barely one in
ten survived to tell the tale of what happened. It was,
in the words of the historian William Dalrymple, a rare
(19:35):
moment of complete colonial humiliation. The British Empire's pride had
been stung, and they lashed out. They still had other
troops in other Afghan cities. The orders came through withdraw
via Carbal, leaving decisive proofs of the power of the
(19:56):
British army. There followed one of the most shameful episodes
in British colonial history. The remaining troops laid waste to villages,
killing the men and raping the women, and even taking
the time for less heinous acts of cruelty, such as
destroying the ancient fruit trees in Carbal. They plundered the
(20:18):
shops and dynamited the grand bazaar that wants diverse and
thriving hub of commerce. As the Afghan writer Mirza Atta
put it, for all the treasure they expended and for
all the lives they sacrificed, the only result was ruin
and disgrace. Cautionary tales will return. Just a quarter century later,
(20:56):
in eighteen sixty seven, the drumbeats of war were sounding
again once more. British foreign policy experts were worried about
Russian ambitions in Central Asia, and the British military were
gung ho. But for now, at least, there was a
cautious man in charge of that decision. Britain had appointed
(21:19):
as India's Governor General, a man called John Lawrence. He
had his own views on the Afghans. I am for
letting them alone to adjust to their own affairs. What
you mean do nothing? Yes, but that didn't mean indifference
as some critics assumed. Remember how the physician Francois may
(21:42):
put it waiting and seemingly doing nothing. John Lawrence asked
a subordinate to write an article explaining that he had
his eye on things and he'd act if he had to,
but not before The article was published in the Edinburgh Review,
and it ran to some forty seven pages. Within those
(22:03):
pages were two words that caught on as a description
of Lawrence's approach. You know what's coming. Those words were
masterly inactivity. It's a challenge for doctors to practice masterly inactivity,
(22:26):
and the Canadian physician Francois Mai explains why many patients
demand that something, anything, be done to ease their complaint.
They believe that action, any action, is better than waiting
for the bodies built in remedies to do their bit.
Those lists of things not to do from the Choosing
(22:46):
Wisely initiative are intended to help doctors to have those
difficult conversations. Political leaders too often face demands to do
something about a perceived threat, and that often leads to
action that's rushed and ill conceived. There's an old joke
about politicians logic, we must do something. This is something, therefore,
(23:11):
we must do this. Behavioral economists call this an example
of action bias. In some situations, we seem to feel
compelled to take action even if there's no real evidence
that action will help. Perhaps the purest example of action
bias is seen in soccer goalkeepers facing a penalty kick.
(23:34):
The goalkeeper tends to dive either left or right a
split second before the penalty taker kicks the ball. The
thinking is that if they've correctly guessed which side the
striker will aim for, that split second will give them
more chance of reaching the ball if it goes near
the edge of the goal. But penalties are often kicked
(23:54):
nearer the middle of the goal, and studies show that
if the goalkeepers stood still and waited to see where
the ball was heading, they'd say more penalties. So why
don't they? Presumably because soccer fans are like patient patience
or anxious voters. They expect action. Seemingly doing nothing, you
(24:17):
can take a lot of courage, Sir Stafford Northcott was
the British government minister in charge of India at the
time John Lawrence was its Governor General. He told the
House of Commons, the policy of Sir John Lawrence, which
has been characterized sometimes half sneeringly, I'm afraid as a
(24:42):
policy of masterly inactivity, is what we ought in every
way to support and strengthen them, sometimes half sneeringly. Why
the sneers well. Some of John Lawrence's more bellicose critics
thought he was too afraid to act. They thought he'd
(25:03):
been scarred by his family connection to the omnishambles of
the first Anglo Afghan Or remember that young officer who'd
watched in horror as the top British envoy was beheaded.
That officer was John Lawrence's brother. Other critics doubted if
Britain could do anything in Afghanistan, after all, the last
(25:26):
time they'd tried it had ended in humiliation. And if
in fact there's nothing you can do, your inactivity can't
be masterly, you're deluding yourself if you think that it is.
The Victorian pioneer of free range parenting, Charlotte Mason took
pains to make that point. Consider the difference between this
(25:48):
scenario an ice cream shop, can we get ice creams? Yes,
we can, let's treat ourselves, and this scenario an ice
cream shop, can we get ice creams? I don't think please,
It'll be dinner time sooner. I really want an ice cream.
Oh well, I suppose please? Can we get ice creams?
All right? Then? Mason describes that as the difference between
(26:13):
a masterly yes and an abject yes. She points out
how much better it feels to give a masterly yes
if you're eating ice cream after an abject yes. It
tastes of nagging, worry that you've incentivized more pestering in
the future. But the only way you get to give
a masterly yes is if you know that you could
(26:35):
have said no. So masterly inactivity has two ingredients. You
need the wisdom to judge where an activity would be
pointless or counterproductive, and you need to be sure that
you would have the ability to act if and when
you judge that the time is right. It's that second
(26:58):
ingredient that makes masterly inactivity such a useful idea. It's
what makes it different from ideas like benign neglect, lay
say fair or lay say allay. Those phrases imply a
realization that trying to act will always be pointless or counterproductive.
As Mason herself put it, the phrase has nothing in
(27:20):
common with the lazy alley attitude that comes of thinking
what's the good? There are times when that is the
right attitude. There's a much repeated story of an investment
brokerage that discovered their best performing accounts belonged to clients
who had died, because being dead, they were no longer
(27:41):
tempted to keep meddling with their stock portfolio. Sadly, that
story seems to be an urban myth, but it persists
because it rings true. One classic study finds that the
most active investors did significantly worse than those who simply
brought into the market and let their investments ride. If
(28:02):
your Warren Buffett masterly inactivity might make sense, what's your
portfolio always ready to act? For most of us, benign
neglect looks like the better option. We should just admit
that we lack the competence ever to intervene wisely. But
of course that's hardly an attitude you want from doctors
(28:24):
or parents, and you don't want a goalkeeper to benignly
neglect her goal. Lady Sale spent months as a hostage,
along with her widowed daughter and now a baby granddaughter too.
(28:45):
She said, the Afghan rebels treated them well. Honor has
been respected. It's true that we have not common comforts,
but what we denominate such are unknown to Afghan females. Eventually,
the hostages were assigned new guards, who proved to be bribeable,
especially with the news that British troops were on their way.
(29:09):
The guards even offered the hostages their guns. The men
were so surprised nobody rushed to take one. But one
person had her wits about her. You had better give
me one and I will leave the party. Someone else
had been held captive too. Dost Mohammed, the Afghan leader
(29:31):
the British had deposed. He had surrendered to British troops
and they'd let him live in India. Now they quietly
set him free. He rebuilt his power and ruled Afghanistan
again for two more decades. He was good at it,
As Alexander Burns had noticed once, Afghans would have been
(29:52):
far better off if Dost Mohammed had never been interrupted.
Britain eventually fell in love with a notion of masterly inactivity,
and it was certainly an improvement on the atrocities committed
by their armies, but perhaps benign neglect would have been
(30:14):
better all along. Key sources for this episode include William
Dalrymple's of the Return of a King, Charlotte Mason's book
School Education, and Francoire MAI's article for the Canadian Medical
Association Journal. For a full list of references, see Tim
(30:39):
Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley and
Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the
work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring
in this series of Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonan Carter
(31:01):
and Geoffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Alderazzi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge,
Rachel Handshaw, Cognor Holbrook Smith, Greg Lockett, the Siamunroe and
Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Hella Fane, John Schnarz,
(31:23):
Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lakhan,
and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
If you like the show, please remember to share, rate,
and review.
Pushkin. Lady Sale was eating her last breakfast in Carbal, Afghanistan.
She'd had to burn the legs of her mahogany dining
table to cook it. That was her last remaining wood.
(00:36):
There wasn't much food either, but it would have to do.
The year was eighteen forty two, the sixth of January,
not the best time of year to embark on a
five day trek through the mountains. The cold was bitter,
the snow knee high. Shortly after nine in the morning,
(00:57):
they set out. Hundreds of British and many thousands of
Indians recruited from an India that was under British control.
There were sea pois or soldiers, and the camp followers, civilians,
wives and children. The British lead troops had occupied Afghanistan
for three years. It had been clear for weeks now
(01:18):
that they'd had to leave their base in Carbal. It
still wasn't clear if they'd get out alive. They'd been
trying to negotiate with the various Afghan rebels who surrounded them,
both for the safe passage to the British held fort
at Jalalabad and to buy the food they so desperately needed.
The soldiers were on half rations. There was nothing at
(01:40):
all for the animals. The cattle chewed the bark off trees,
wrote Lady Sale in her journal, I have seen my
own riding horse snall voraciously at a cartwheel. Lady Sale's
son in law had spent the previous night waist deep
in the icy Carbal River constructing a makeshift bridge for
(02:02):
the convoy. This must have been a galling task because
he'd repeatedly told his superiors that the river could easily
be forded upstream, and they told him built the bridge anyway.
As usual, every sensible proposition was overruled. Trying to get
almost twenty thousand people plus pack animals across rickety planks
(02:26):
between icy river banks proved slow going. As the day
dragged on, a long line of baggage carriers backed up
at the bridge. The rebels started to shoot at them.
They abandoned the baggage, and so as night fell, the
convoy had managed to cover just six miles and lose
(02:48):
most of their supplies. One of the few tents that
had made it through was chivalrously pitched over. Lady Sale,
her pregnant daughter, and her exhausted son in law at daylight,
we found several men frozen to death, hungry and frostbitten.
The survivor as trudged on straight into a carefully planned ambush.
(03:17):
I'm Tim Harford. You're listening to cautionary tales. We'll come
(03:45):
back to the story of Lady Sale and why the
bedraggled Imperial convoy was fleeing Carbal First, I want to
talk about something that may seem quite unrelated. Helicopter parenting,
dropping in to micro manage your child's life. The practice
is much mocked, but it's also widespread. Some evidence suggests
(04:08):
that it's not a good idea. In twenty thirteen, for example,
researchers from the University of Mary Washington in Virginia asked
college students to say whether or not they agreed with
statements such as my mother monitors my exercise schedule, or
if I'm having an issue with my roommate, my mother
would try to intervene. The more their parents were like helicopters,
(04:33):
constantly hovering over their child's life, the more likely the
students were to be depressed and dissatisfied. Criticism of helicopter
parenting goes back to long before the invention of the helicopter.
Charlotte Mason was a Welsh educator in the late eighteen hundreds.
Her writings are still studied today, especially by homeschoolers. Mason
(04:57):
chastised parents who think they have to organize every moment
of their children's lives. Fussy and restless, she called them.
Let them choose their own friends, Mason and said, and
form their own opinions and spend their own pocket money.
Don't repeatedly remind them to do the things you've asked
them to do. Instead, let them choose to fail to
(05:20):
do those things, as long as you then make them
suffer the consequences. When Charlotte Mason wanted a memorable phrase
to sum up this approach, she reached for one that
had suddenly become popular in the British discourse of the
eighteen sixties. I wish to bring before parents and teachers
the subject of masterly inactivity. Masterly inactivity. It's a lovely
(05:47):
phrase and a surprisingly useful concept. As we'll see, Afghanistan
in the eighteen thirties was not an easy place to rule.
Pushte hartepe yek padishah nishast Behind every hill, Look there
(06:10):
sits an emperor, so many competing tribal leaders had to
be kept happy or at least quiescent. But Dost Mohammad
Khan was proving remarkably adept at it. He was also,
or so he thought, on friendly terms with Britain, the
colonial power that in effect governed neighboring India through the
(06:32):
British East India Company. At any rate, Dost Mohammad had
hit it off with Britton's man in Carbal, the charming
and brilliant Scotsman, thirty four year old Alexander Burns. Carbal
was thriving. Its Grand Bazaar was the commercial hub of
Central Asia. You could buy anything from spices to silk,
(06:52):
furs to fine porcelain. Carbal was diverse. Traders from Hindu
and Jewish minorities felt welcome and secure. Alexander Burns was
impressed by how skillfully Dost Mohammad was running the country.
The peasant rejoices at the absence of tyranny, the citizen
at the safety of his home, the merchant at the
(07:13):
equity of the decisions and the protection of his property,
and the soldier at the regular manner in which his
arrears are discharged. A man and power can have no
higher priest. So imagine the outrage when Afghans learned that
Britain was invading their land to oust Dost Muhammad and
Alexander Burns was riding with the invading troops. Burns was
(07:39):
cast as Namakhram, a traitor literally impure salt. In the
histories told by Afghan poets, Burns does not come out
well on the outside. He seems a man, but inside
he is the very devil. To be fair to Burns,
(08:00):
he had tried. Russia was trying to muscle in on
Central Asia, threatening Britain's influence in the region. Burns repeatedly
begged his political masters leave this to me. I can
handle it. Let me work with Dost Mohammad. But all
of Burns's charm and brilliance couldn't make up for his
(08:21):
unforgivable youth. Who was this upstart questioning the received wisdom
of Britain's most senior experts on Afghan affairs, Those senior
experts had admittedly never actually been to Afghanistan. Still, they
were sure they knew exactly what the Afghan people wanted,
(08:42):
the reinstatement of their former king, who had been deposed
by relatives of Dost Mohammad some three decades earlier, and
had since been living in exile as a guest of
the British East India Company. From their far away desks,
the experts hatched a dramatic plan to deal with the
Russian threat dead invade Afghanistan to put the former king
(09:05):
back on the throne, where he'd rule gratefully in Britain's interests.
The story of the eighteen thirty nine invasion is told
in William Dalrymple's masterful book Return of a King. As
the British and Indian army marched through Afghanistan, it dawned
(09:26):
on the senior officers that Afghans had not, after all
been hankering after their former king, Alexander Burns was exasperated.
He tried to tell them, but he was also loyal,
or maybe just ambitious. He was sent ahead of the
troops to try to smooth their path with local leaders.
(09:48):
On hearing about the size of the advancing army, one
such leader told him, you can easily replaced us to Hummed,
but you will never win over the Avar Niche. You
have brought an army into the country. How do you
propose to take it out again. That turned out to
be a very astute question. Cautionary tales will return after
(10:17):
this message. The British took action in Afghanistan. With hindsight,
they should have left it alone. That's an obvious enough
point from our modern perspective, but colonial invasions are by
no means the only situation we're doing less achieves more.
(10:40):
I've had a bad throat for a couple of days.
It happens every year. They usually give me zitherum ax
and it goes away. Let me see your throat looks normal.
It's very unlikely that you have stripped throat. I'll take
u s what, but it will likely be negative. Can
I have a prescription in the meantime? You don't need
a prescription? Why can't you just give me the prescription?
(11:03):
A surprising amount of medical care simply isn't necessary. A
few years ago, researchers conducted a survey of over two
thousand American physicians. On average, they secretly reckoned that one
tenth of the procedures they approved didn't actually need to
be done. Furthermore, their patients could have survived without a
(11:25):
fifth of the medications they were prescribed, and over a
quarter of the tests ordered were quite pointless. That adds
up to a lot of wasted time and money. What
were the doctors thinking? Sometimes they told the researchers it
was quicker to do another test than tracked down a
(11:46):
patient's medical records. But two motives far outweighed the others,
the fear of being sued for malpractice and a desire
to get rid of the pushy patients. That conversation about
zeromax and antibiotic came from a blog post by an
emergency room doctor in Canada, and it was shared by
(12:06):
the Canadian branch of an initiative called Choosing Wisely. The
aim of Choosing Wisely is to cut down on wasteful
medical spending. It produces lists of things not to do,
such as prescribing antibiotics for minor infections, viral infections, or
infections that exist only in a patient's imagination. Antibiotics are
(12:30):
a clear cut case. Their overuse affects us all by
speeding the growth of drug resistant bugs. But few medications
or procedures are completely free of risk, and some tests
can be a waste of time too. Say a patient
has lower back pain, they've had it for less than
six weeks and they have no other red flags. Do
(12:52):
you send them for a scan? It turns out to
make no difference to the patient's outcomes. Francois Mai is
an author and professor of psychiatry. He wrote about choosing
Wisely for the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Sometimes waiting and
seemingly doing nothing is the favored therapeutic modality. The favored
(13:16):
therapeutic modality. What Francois Mai is saying is that sometimes
the best treatment is no treatment at all, instead waiting
and watching. Ready to act, but only if you have
to make explains how he first came across this idea.
(13:36):
When I was a medical student, A wise old professor
introduced me to the treatment concept of masterly inactivity. So
there it is again, masterly inactivity. It's eighteen thirty nine.
A huge army of British and Indians is marching on Carbal.
(14:02):
The Afghan leader Dost Mohammad sees that the cause is hopeless.
Soon the old king is duly reinstalled. But while Dost
Muhammad had painstakingly earned the respect and goodwill of the
many tribal factions, those emperors behind every Hillock. The returned
king was seen as Britain's puppet. He relied on British
(14:24):
largesse and the occupying troops to keep everyone in line.
It was clear that the king wouldn't last if the
British troops withdrew, so they stayed. Some of the officers
had their families joined them. Lady Sail arrived in Carbal
with a grand piano, a marriageable daughter, and the collection
(14:46):
of seeds. My sweet peas and geraniums are much admired
in the kitchen garden. The potatoes especially fry. But the
cost of occupying Afghanistan was ruined us. The British East
India Company made tidy profits from tea and opium, but
(15:06):
those prophets were all swallowed up and more, and Afghans
were becoming more and more appalled at the liberties taken
by the Firangis the foreigners. One complained to the King
that female prostitutes are publicly day and night, carried on
horseback into the English camp. The King took it up
(15:28):
with the top British envoy, who unwisely waived the warrior away.
If we stopped the soldiers having sex, the poor boys
will fall quite ill. One man was acquiring a particularly
saucy reputation, the Envoy's deputy, Alexander Burns, the very devil himself.
(15:51):
Burns wasn't just a diplomatic charmer. He charmed the ladies too.
As one local writer described in his Private Courts, it
with decabath with his avrandmistress in the hot water of
lust and pleasure, as the two rubbed each other down
with the flans of giddy joy and the talk of intimacy.
(16:14):
Have a care Alexander Burns. Next to the flannels of
giddy joy and the talk of intimacy lies the tinder
of bad feeling. And in November eighteen forty one, something
happened to put a spark to that tinder. Some say
Burns seduced someone he shouldn't have, offending a local powerbroker.
(16:37):
Whatever the reason, a mob descended on burns house. He
sent a messenger to ask what they wanted. They killed
the messenger, stormed burns compound and hacked him to death.
The young Scott's dismembered body was left in the street
for the dogs to eat. Clearly the British lead forces
(17:00):
couldn't stay in Carbon Now Afghan rebels cut off the
camp's food supplies. That's why Lady Sales riding horse was
gnawing at a cartwheel. The British envoy tried to negotiate
for safe passage, but he clumsily doubled crossed the leaders
of rival factions in the rebellion, a sub diffuge that
(17:20):
ended with the swish of a sword, a sickening thunk,
and in the words of one young officer who witnessed it,
the British Envoy's head was whereas heels had been. Consternation
and horror depicted on his countenance after that execution, the
incompetent retreat, the unnecessary bridge, the long delay, the abandoned baggage,
(17:43):
the frozen night, the ambush. I had fortunately only one
bullet in my arm. The party that fired on us
were not above fifty yards from us, and we owed
our escaped to urging our horses on as fast as
they could go over a road where at any other
time we sort have walked our horses very carefully. Lady
(18:05):
Sayle's son in law was not so lucky. In the
stomach he died after the ambush came the blizzard. The
convoy made just one mile's progress in a day. Living
and dead were indistinguishment, motionless, and the frozen waists. The
(18:27):
British met a rebel leader on the road. He said,
give me the officers, wives and children. I'll keep them
safe and warm and fed. Lady Sale and her daughter
were now among the hostages taken back. Along the route
of their attempted escape, The road was covered with awfully
(18:48):
mangled bodies, all naked camp followers still alive, frostbitten and starving,
some perfectly out of their senses. The sight was dreadful,
the smell of the blood sickening. It required care to
guide my horse so as not to tread upon the bodies.
(19:13):
Nearly twenty thousand British and Indians soldiers, camp followers, men,
women and children set off from Carbal in the knee
high snow in January eighteen forty two. Barely one in
ten survived to tell the tale of what happened. It was,
in the words of the historian William Dalrymple, a rare
(19:35):
moment of complete colonial humiliation. The British Empire's pride had
been stung, and they lashed out. They still had other
troops in other Afghan cities. The orders came through withdraw
via Carbal, leaving decisive proofs of the power of the
(19:56):
British army. There followed one of the most shameful episodes
in British colonial history. The remaining troops laid waste to villages,
killing the men and raping the women, and even taking
the time for less heinous acts of cruelty, such as
destroying the ancient fruit trees in Carbal. They plundered the
(20:18):
shops and dynamited the grand bazaar that wants diverse and
thriving hub of commerce. As the Afghan writer Mirza Atta
put it, for all the treasure they expended and for
all the lives they sacrificed, the only result was ruin
and disgrace. Cautionary tales will return. Just a quarter century later,
(20:56):
in eighteen sixty seven, the drumbeats of war were sounding
again once more. British foreign policy experts were worried about
Russian ambitions in Central Asia, and the British military were
gung ho. But for now, at least, there was a
cautious man in charge of that decision. Britain had appointed
(21:19):
as India's Governor General, a man called John Lawrence. He
had his own views on the Afghans. I am for
letting them alone to adjust to their own affairs. What
you mean do nothing? Yes, but that didn't mean indifference
as some critics assumed. Remember how the physician Francois may
(21:42):
put it waiting and seemingly doing nothing. John Lawrence asked
a subordinate to write an article explaining that he had
his eye on things and he'd act if he had to,
but not before The article was published in the Edinburgh Review,
and it ran to some forty seven pages. Within those
(22:03):
pages were two words that caught on as a description
of Lawrence's approach. You know what's coming. Those words were
masterly inactivity. It's a challenge for doctors to practice masterly inactivity,
(22:26):
and the Canadian physician Francois Mai explains why many patients
demand that something, anything, be done to ease their complaint.
They believe that action, any action, is better than waiting
for the bodies built in remedies to do their bit.
Those lists of things not to do from the Choosing
(22:46):
Wisely initiative are intended to help doctors to have those
difficult conversations. Political leaders too often face demands to do
something about a perceived threat, and that often leads to
action that's rushed and ill conceived. There's an old joke
about politicians logic, we must do something. This is something, therefore,
(23:11):
we must do this. Behavioral economists call this an example
of action bias. In some situations, we seem to feel
compelled to take action even if there's no real evidence
that action will help. Perhaps the purest example of action
bias is seen in soccer goalkeepers facing a penalty kick.
(23:34):
The goalkeeper tends to dive either left or right a
split second before the penalty taker kicks the ball. The
thinking is that if they've correctly guessed which side the
striker will aim for, that split second will give them
more chance of reaching the ball if it goes near
the edge of the goal. But penalties are often kicked
(23:54):
nearer the middle of the goal, and studies show that
if the goalkeepers stood still and waited to see where
the ball was heading, they'd say more penalties. So why
don't they? Presumably because soccer fans are like patient patience
or anxious voters. They expect action. Seemingly doing nothing, you
(24:17):
can take a lot of courage, Sir Stafford Northcott was
the British government minister in charge of India at the
time John Lawrence was its Governor General. He told the
House of Commons, the policy of Sir John Lawrence, which
has been characterized sometimes half sneeringly, I'm afraid as a
(24:42):
policy of masterly inactivity, is what we ought in every
way to support and strengthen them, sometimes half sneeringly. Why
the sneers well. Some of John Lawrence's more bellicose critics
thought he was too afraid to act. They thought he'd
(25:03):
been scarred by his family connection to the omnishambles of
the first Anglo Afghan Or remember that young officer who'd
watched in horror as the top British envoy was beheaded.
That officer was John Lawrence's brother. Other critics doubted if
Britain could do anything in Afghanistan, after all, the last
(25:26):
time they'd tried it had ended in humiliation. And if
in fact there's nothing you can do, your inactivity can't
be masterly, you're deluding yourself if you think that it is.
The Victorian pioneer of free range parenting, Charlotte Mason took
pains to make that point. Consider the difference between this
(25:48):
scenario an ice cream shop, can we get ice creams? Yes,
we can, let's treat ourselves, and this scenario an ice
cream shop, can we get ice creams? I don't think please,
It'll be dinner time sooner. I really want an ice cream.
Oh well, I suppose please? Can we get ice creams?
All right? Then? Mason describes that as the difference between
(26:13):
a masterly yes and an abject yes. She points out
how much better it feels to give a masterly yes
if you're eating ice cream after an abject yes. It
tastes of nagging, worry that you've incentivized more pestering in
the future. But the only way you get to give
a masterly yes is if you know that you could
(26:35):
have said no. So masterly inactivity has two ingredients. You
need the wisdom to judge where an activity would be
pointless or counterproductive, and you need to be sure that
you would have the ability to act if and when
you judge that the time is right. It's that second
(26:58):
ingredient that makes masterly inactivity such a useful idea. It's
what makes it different from ideas like benign neglect, lay
say fair or lay say allay. Those phrases imply a
realization that trying to act will always be pointless or counterproductive.
As Mason herself put it, the phrase has nothing in
(27:20):
common with the lazy alley attitude that comes of thinking
what's the good? There are times when that is the
right attitude. There's a much repeated story of an investment
brokerage that discovered their best performing accounts belonged to clients
who had died, because being dead, they were no longer
(27:41):
tempted to keep meddling with their stock portfolio. Sadly, that
story seems to be an urban myth, but it persists
because it rings true. One classic study finds that the
most active investors did significantly worse than those who simply
brought into the market and let their investments ride. If
(28:02):
your Warren Buffett masterly inactivity might make sense, what's your
portfolio always ready to act? For most of us, benign
neglect looks like the better option. We should just admit
that we lack the competence ever to intervene wisely. But
of course that's hardly an attitude you want from doctors
(28:24):
or parents, and you don't want a goalkeeper to benignly
neglect her goal. Lady Sale spent months as a hostage,
along with her widowed daughter and now a baby granddaughter too.
(28:45):
She said, the Afghan rebels treated them well. Honor has
been respected. It's true that we have not common comforts,
but what we denominate such are unknown to Afghan females. Eventually,
the hostages were assigned new guards, who proved to be bribeable,
especially with the news that British troops were on their way.
(29:09):
The guards even offered the hostages their guns. The men
were so surprised nobody rushed to take one. But one
person had her wits about her. You had better give
me one and I will leave the party. Someone else
had been held captive too. Dost Mohammed, the Afghan leader
(29:31):
the British had deposed. He had surrendered to British troops
and they'd let him live in India. Now they quietly
set him free. He rebuilt his power and ruled Afghanistan
again for two more decades. He was good at it,
As Alexander Burns had noticed once, Afghans would have been
(29:52):
far better off if Dost Mohammed had never been interrupted.
Britain eventually fell in love with a notion of masterly inactivity,
and it was certainly an improvement on the atrocities committed
by their armies, but perhaps benign neglect would have been
(30:14):
better all along. Key sources for this episode include William
Dalrymple's of the Return of a King, Charlotte Mason's book
School Education, and Francoire MAI's article for the Canadian Medical
Association Journal. For a full list of references, see Tim
(30:39):
Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley and
Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the
work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring
in this series of Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonan Carter
(31:01):
and Geoffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Alderazzi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge,
Rachel Handshaw, Cognor Holbrook Smith, Greg Lockett, the Siamunroe and
Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Hella Fane, John Schnarz,
(31:23):
Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lakhan,
and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
If you like the show, please remember to share, rate,
and review.
Host
Tim Harford
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