Quote:
|
What's their infant mortality rate? How many of them die of starvation when local food is scarce and traded food is unavailable? How many die of diseases long since cured by modern medicine?
|
How many of them starve in the midst of plenty? How many of them are unable to access medical care that their fellows take for granted? How many of them work in backbreaking poverty to ensure the more powerful of them live in luxury? How many of them face rape and violence on a day-to-day basis due to the breakdown of their social structures?
Not all that the modern world offers is beneficial. What's the infant mortality rate in the Sudan, in Zimbabwe, in Mogadishu? What's the life expectancy in the shanty towns of Rio? How much modern medicine is available in Bangladesh?
Modern civilisation relies upon inequity. The market as we understand it cannot bring the benefits of prosperity to all, there is always a loser. This is the case even in wealthy nations. What's the life expectancy of a black boy in the projects? What's the infant mortality rate in the poorest parts of europe?
They will not be sharing in many of our advances, but for all we know they may not be sharing in some of our less savoury civilised practices either. There was a tribe contacted for the first time about tqwenty years ago (can't recall its name now). They were a collectivist society to a large extent. If there was plenty nobody starved. If there was scarcity, all hurt. Their culture has been fundamentally altered by modern contact. A new elite has become separated off from the rest and a new group of poor who have not succeeded under the new system. They have become fragmented and their young are leaving in droves to do menial work in the nearest cities. They still have only minmal access to modern medicine because of their geographic distance and relative poverty. But they do have t-shirts.