In his few lines he managed to articulate what many before
him have attempted and failed. 74 year old French mountaineer Bernard Amy was
this winter made an honorary member of the Italian Academic Alpine Club. His
acceptance speech, while only a couple of paragraphs long, was remarkable.
I am dog-paddling my way through a PhD, something I don’t
necessarily recommend for a middle aged person hoping to maintain what others
would call a life. Regardless, my brain is painfully growing. My field of study
is motivation, and one consistent belief in this area of research is that
people cannot be trusted to explain why we do the things we do. Motivation is
complex, and each situation is complex. There is no one reason for anything,
let alone the highly biased reason we provide to validate ourselves.
Unfortunately for all of us outdoor types, George Mallory’s 1923 justification
for attempting the as-yet unclimbed Mount Everest “because it’s there” is much
more shallow than it is profound. Because of this we all deal – paddlers and
climbers alike - with a public perception that we are reckless risk takers. We
are written off as irresponsible and totally lacking in reflection.
Amy
included all mountain sports, to which we paddlers belong, when he spoke of
society becoming increasingly “precautionary”, requiring us to redefine our
“social contract”. A social contract is more or less a level of permission
granted upon all of us to do what we choose – assuming it meets some nebulous
standard that society deems ok. Adventure activities such as paddling and
climbing live on the borders of such acceptance, as non-enthusiasts have a hard
time understanding why anyone would do what we do. Mallory’s comment still
echoes into today.
Amy’s
significant contribution is in changing the conversation. He proposed that in
order to be “accepted as a risky activity, we must explain what the mountains
give us and what we learn from them. In other words, we must not try to
explain why we go to the mountains, but what we find there”. What Amy is saying
is that our own personal reasons can’t justify an activity, but their outcomes
may. He goes on to list some of the mountain sports outcomes that could prove
“useful” to society:
o
the development of our capacity for enterprise
and initiative
o
developing courage through reasoned risk taking
o
the capacity for autonomy and the feeling of
responsibility
o
the appreciation of the values of solidarity
o
self-confidence, character development,
self-control, and socialization
As the
basis of a social contract, what we do is not only acceptable, but important to
society. Read like this, mountain sports become a vehicle to provide skills and
abilities widely recognized as lacking in today’s society. In fact what we do
may align more closely with societal ideals of ‘precaution’ than non-participants
would think: Amy characterized mountaineering as having “a permanent element of
doubt, [and] a continuous questioning of oneself about the sense of the
activity”. This doubt, I would argue, is a defining feature of whitewater
paddling as well. Our ability to deal with uncertainty is what is needed in
today’s society. I take my hat off to Bernard Amy for wisely laying the
foundation of a redefined social contract.
A link to the full address can be found at
A version of this essay appeared in Rapid Magazine: