An American in Mongolia: Part VII

On Ethics

Of the good we have an understanding, for fools we keep a stick upstairs. -Mongol Proverb

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From the very moment I arrived at the airport terminal in Ulaanbaatar my professor offered a warning, and as people continued to caution me throughout my stay in Mongolia, I began to internalize their warnings. The early advice given to me by my professor was presented by nearly everyone that I met thereafter, including my host mothers and brothers, lecturers, strangers, language teachers, friends, religious leaders, shaman, U.S. Peace Corps volunteers, politicians, translators, interview subjects, and NGO workers. 11 The warnings they gave my classmates and me all amounted to the very same “beware of bad people, don’t trust anyone, and look out for drunks.”

I always took these warnings to be in earnest, but also with a grain of salt, eager to see the good in people, and schooled in the rough history of Mongolia as well as critical thinking. Nonetheless, while I was studying in Mongolia there were several indicators that the country was going through a period of immense transition and social upheaval, and that it was being heavily influenced by a shift in government and spiritual life, an uncompassionate economic system, and foreign interests. All of these factors as well as others, such as a lack of infrastructure, job availability, and a limited understanding of world history and (even) Mongolian history beyond the reign of Chinggis Khan were contributing to a state of crisis in the realm of ethics.

The crisis in ethics, if you want to call it that rather than the inevitable corollary of raging structural inequalities colliding within a poor-but-precocious society, manifested itself in many ways. The symptoms were sometimes unobservable to me because of my outsider status and minimal language skills, or were sometimes observable only because of my outsider status. Some of the symptoms might include (depending upon who you’re talking to) unchecked corruption within the political system, widespread pick-pocketing, endemic alcoholism fueled by the prevalence of poverty or vice-versa, ubiquitous racism (directed mostly towards Chinese people), dissolving familial structures, lack of civility, etc. Instead of analyzing all of these seemingly insurmountable issues using anecdotal evidence, I will elucidate the few that were glaring to me from my position of privileged outsider, utilizing at times a Ulaanbaatar based daily English news periodical called the UB Post.