To Raze a Village The Modernization of a Thousand-Year-Old Culture by Helena Norberg-Hodge "The Case Against the Global Economy" An anthology of 40 essays published by Sierra Club Books edited by Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith. Ladakh is a high-altitude desert on the Tibetan Plateau in northernmost India. To all outward appearances, it is a wild and inhospitable place...Yet here, in one of the highest, driest, coldest inhabited places on earth, the Ladakhis have for a thousand years not only survived but prospered. Out of barren desert they have carved verdant oases --- terraced fields of barley, wheat, apples, apricots, and vegetables, irrigated with glacial meltwater brought many miles through stone-lined channels. Using little more than Stone Age technologies and the scant resources at hand, the Ladakhis have established a remarkably rich culture, one that has met not only their material wants but their psychological and spiritual needs as well. Until 1962, Ladakh, or "Little Tibet" remained almost totally isolated from the forces of modernization. That year, in response to the conflict in Tibet, the Indian Army built a road to link the region with the rest of the country. With the road came not only new consumer items and government bureaucracy but a misleading impression of the outside world. Then, in 1975, the region was opened up to foreign tourists, and the process of "development" began in earnest. During almost two decades of close contact with the Ladakhi people, I have been able to observe almost as an insider the effect of these changes on the Ladakhis' perception of themselves. Within little more than a decade, feelings of pride gave way to what can best be described as a cultural inferiority complex. Today, most young Ladakhis -- teenage boys in particular -- are ashamed of their cultural roots and desperate to appear modern. When tourism first began in Ladakh, it was as though people from another planet had suddenly descended on the region. Looking at the modern world from something of a Ladakhi perspective, I became aware of how much more successful our culture looks from the outside than form the inside. Each day, many tourists would spend as much as a hundred dollars -- roughly equivalent to someone spending fifty thousand dollars per day in America. In the traditional subsistence economy, money played a minor role and was used primarily for luxuries: jewels, silver, and gold. Basic necessities -- food, clothing, and shelter -- were provided for no money. The labor one needed was free of charge, part of an intricate web of human relationships. Ladakhis did not realize that money meant something very different to the foreigners; that back home foreigners needed it to survive; that for them food, clothing, and shelter all cost money -- a lot of money. Compared to these strangers, the ladakhis suddenly felt poor. This new attitude contrasted dramatically with the Ladakhis' earlier self-confidence. In 1975, I was shown around the remote village of Hemis Shukpachan by a young ladakhi named Tsewang. It seemed to me that all the houses were especially large and beautiful. I asked Tsewang to show me where the poor people lived. He looked perplexed for a moment, then responded, "We don't have any poor people here." Eight years later, I overheard Tsewang talking to some tourists. "If you could only help us Ladakhis," he said. "We're so poor." Besides giving the illusion that all Westerners are multimillionaires, tourism and Western media images help perpetuateanother myth about modern life: that we never work. It looks as though our technologies do the work for us. In industrial society today, we actually spend more hours working than do people in rural, agrarian economies, but that is not how it looks to the Ladakhis. (Alan A. --- In a recent study, it was revealed that modern Americans spend more time "doing the wash" than tribal/peasant women at riverside.) For Ladakhis, work is physical work: plowing, walking, carrying things. A person sitting behind the wheel of a car, or punching keys on a typewriter doesn't appear to be working. Development has brought not only tourism but also Western and Indian films and, more recently, television. Together, they provide overwhelming images of luxury and power. There are countless tools, magical gadgets, and machines... Machines can do everything; it's no wonder the tourists look so clean and have such soft, white hands. Media images focus on the rich, beautiful, and mobile, whose lives are endless action and glamour. (Alan A. --- In the traditional Easter Vigil liturgy, Christians are asked to re-new their baptismal vows by answering the question: "Do you reject the glamour of Satan?") For young Ladakhis, the picture is irresistible, an overwhelmingly exciting version of the American Dream, with an emphasis on speed, youthfulness, supercleanliness, beauty, fashion, and competitiveness. "Progress" is also stressed: humans dominate nature, and embrace technological change at all costs. In contrast to these utopian images from another culture, village life seems primitive, silly, and inefficient. The one-dimensional picture of modern life becomes a slap in the face. Young Ladakhis...feel ashamed of their own culture. Traditional Ladakh seems absurd compared with the world of the tourists and film heroes. The same pattern is being repeated in rural areas all over the less-developed Third World, where millions of young people believe contemporary Western culture to be far superior to their own. This is not surprising: looking as they do from the outside, all they can see is the material side of the modern world -- the side in which Western culture excels. They cannot so readily see the social or psychological dimensions: the stress, the loneliness, the fear of growing old (and the denial of death A.A.). Nor can they see the environmental decay... or unemployment. This leads young Ladakhis to develop feelings of inferiority, to reject their own culture wholesale, and at the same time to eagerly embrace the global monoculture. They rush after the sunglasses, Walkmans, and bluejeans --- not because they find those jeans, for example, more attractive or comfortable, but because they are a symbol of modern life. Modern symbols have also contributed to an increase in aggression in Ladakh. Young boys now see violence glamorized on the screen... and get the impression that if they want to be modern, they should smoke one cigarette after another, get a fast car, and race through the countryside shooting people right and left. No one can deny the value of real education -- the widening and enrichment of knowledge -- but in the Third World today, education has become something quite different. It isolates children from their culture and from nature, training them instead to become narrow specialists in a Westernized urban environment. This process has been particularly striking in Ladakh, where modern schooling acts almost as a blindfold, preventing children from seeing the very context in which they live. They leave school unable to use their own resources, unable to function in their own world. With the exception of religious training in the monasteries, Ladakh's traditional culture had no separate process called education. Education was the product of a person's intimate relationship with the community and the environment. Children learned from grandparents, family and friends, and from the natural world... From their own experience, children would come to distinguish different strains of barley and the specific growing conditions each strain preferred. They would learn how to recognize and use even the tiniest wild plant... They would learn about connection, process, and change, about the intricate web of fluctuating relationships in the natural world around them. For generation after generation, Ladakhis grew up learning how to provide themselves with clothing and shelter: how to make shoes out of yak skin and robes from the wool of sheep; how to build houses out of mud and stone. Education was location-specific and nurtured an intimate relationship with the living world. It gave children an intuitive awareness that allowed them, as they grew older, to use resources in an effective and sustainable way. None of that knowledge is provided in the modern school. Children are trained to become specialists in a technological rather than an ecological society. School is a place to forget traditional skills and, worse, to look down on them. (Alan A. --- In the 1950s, America's evolving technocracy began to dismiss so-called "useless knowledge." In secondary and post-secondary education, "dumb" courses were called "Basket-weaving 101". How deep does our disdain for traditional culture run? How many of us know anyone who can weave a basket?) Western education first came to Ladakhi villages in the 1970s. Today there are about two hundred schools. The basic curriculum is a poor imitation of that taught in other parts of India, which itself is an imitation of British education. There is almost nothing Ladakhi about it. Once, while visiting a classroom in Leh, the capital, I saw in a textbook a drawing of a child's bedroom that could have been in London or New York. It showed a pile of neatly folded handkerchiefs on a four-poster bed and explained in which drawer of the vanity to keep them. Many other schoolbooks were equally absurd and inappropriate. For homework in one class, pupils were supposed to figure out the angle of incidence that the Leaning Tower of Pisa makes with the ground. In another, they were struggling with an English translation of the Iliad. Most of the skills Ladakhi children learn in school will never be of real use to them. In essence, they receive an inferior version of an education appropriate for a New Yorker, Parisian, or Berliner. They learn from books written by people who have never set foot in Ladakh, who know nothing about growing barley at 12,000 feet or about making houses out of sun-dried bricks. This situation is not unique to Ladakh. In every corner of the world today, the process called education is based on the same assumptions... The focus is on faraway facts and figures, on "universal" knowledge. The books propagate information that is believed to be appropriate for the entire planet. But since the only knowledge that can be universally applicable is far removed from specific environments and cultures, what children learn is essentially synthetic, divorced from its living context. If they go on to higher education, they may learn about building houses, but these houses will be universal boxes of concrete and steel. So, too, if they study agriculture, they will learn about industrial farming: chemical fertilizers and pesticides; large machinery and hybrid seeds. The Western educational system is making us all poorer by teaching people around the world to use the same global resources, ignoring those that their immediate environments naturally provide. In this way, Western-style education creates artificial scarcity and induces competition. In Ladakh and elsewhere, modern education not only ignores local resources, but, worse still, robs children of their self-esteem. Everything in school promotes the Western model and, as a direct consequence, makes children think themselves and their traditions inferior. Western-style education pulls people out of agriculture and into the city, where they become dependent on the money economy. Traditionally in Ladakh, there was no such thing as unemployment. But now there is intense competition for a very limited number of paying jobs, principally in the government. As a result, unemployment is already a serious problem. Modern education has brought some obvious benefits, such as improvement in the literacy rate. It has also enabled the Ladakhis to be more informed about the forces at work in the world outside. In so doing, however, it has separated Ladakhis from each other and the land, and put them on the lowest rung of the global economic ladder. When I first came to Ladakh, the Western macroeconomy had not yet arrived, and the local, community-based economy was still rooted in its own soil. Producers and consumers were closely linked. Two decades of development in Ladakh, however, has led to a number of fundamental changes, perhaps the most important of which is the new dependence on food and energy from thousands of miles away. The path toward globalization depends upon continuous government investments, including roads, mass-communications facilities, energy installations, and schools for specialized education. Among other things, this heavily subsidized infrastructure allows goods produced on a large scale and transported long distances to be sold at artificially low prices --- in many cases at lower prices than goods produced locally. In Ladakh, the Indian government is not only paying for roads, schools, and energy installations but is also bringing in subsidized food from India's breadbasket, the Punjab. Ladakh's local economy --- which has provided enough food for its people for a thousand years --- is now being invaded by produce from industrial farms located on the other side of the Himalayas. The food arriving by the ton in trucks is cheaper in the local bazaar than food grown a five-minute walk away. For many Ladakhis, it is no longer worthwhile to continue farming. In Ladakh this same process affects not just food but a whole range of goods, from clothes to household utensils to building materials. Imports from distant parts of India can often be produced and distributed at lower prices than goods produced locally --- again, because of a heavily subsidized industrial infrastructure. The end result of the long-distance transport of subsidized goods is that Ladakh's local economy is being steadily dismantled, and with it the local community once tied together by bonds of interdependence. Conventional economists, of course, would dismiss these negative impacts, which cannot be quantified as easily as the monetary transactions that are the goal of economic development. They would also say that regions such as the Punjab enjoy "comparative advantage" over Ladakh in food production, and therefore it makes economic sense for the Punjab to specialize in growing food, while Ladakh specializes in some other product, and for each to trade with the other. But when distantly produced goods are heavily subsidized, often in hidden ways, one cannot really talk about comparative advantage or, for that matter, "free markets," "open competition in the setting of prices," or any of the other principles by which economists and planners rationalize the changes they advocate. In fact, one should instead talk about the unfair advantage that industrial producers enjoy, thanks to a heavily subsidized infrastructure geared toward large-scale, centralized production. In the past, individual Ladakhis had real power, since political and economic units were small, and each person was able to deal directly with the other members of the community. Today, "development" is hooking people into ever-larger political and economic units. In political terms, each Ladakhi has become one in a national economy of 800 million, and one in a global economy of about 6 billion In the traditional economy, everyone had to depend directly on family, friends, and neighbors. But in the new system, political and economic interactions take a detour via an anonymous bureaucracy. The fabric of local interdependence is disintegrating as the distance between people increases. So, too, are traditional levels of tolerance and cooperation. This is particularly true in the villages near Leh, where disputes and acrimony within close-knit communities, and even families, have dramatically increased in the last few years. I have even see heated arguments over the allocation of irrigation water, a procedure that previously was managed smoothly within a cooperative framework. As mutual aid is replaced by dependence on faraway forces, people begin to feel powerless to make decisions over their own lives. At all levels, passivity, even apathy, is setting in; people are abdicating personal responsibility. In the traditional village, for example, repairing irrigation channels was a task shared by the whole community. As soon as a channel developed a leak, groups of people would start shoveling away to patch it up. Now people see this work as the government's responsibility and will let a channel go on leaking until the job is done for them. The more the government does for the villagers, the less the villagers feel inclined to help themselves. In the process, Ladakhis are starting to change their perception of the past. In my early days in Ladakh, people would tell me there had never been hunger. I kept hearing the expression tungbos zabos: "enough to drink, enough to eat." Now, particularly in the modern sector, people can be heard saying, "Development is essential. In the past we couldn't manage; we didn't have enough." Cultural centralization through the media is also contributing to this passivity, and to a growing insecurity. Traditionally, village life included lots of dancing, singing, and theater. People of all ages joined in. In a group sitting around a fire, even toddlers would dance, with the help of older siblings or friends. Everyone knew how to sing, act, and play music. Now that the radio has come to Ladakh, people do not need to sing their own songs or tell their own stories. Instead, they can sit and listen to the best singer, the best storyteller. As a result, people become inhibited and self-conscious. They never feel themselves to be as good as the stars on the radio. Community ties are also broken when people sit down passively listening to the very best, rather than making music or dancing together. Before the changes brought by tourism and modernization, the Ladakhis were self-sufficient, both psychologically and materially. There was no desire for the sort of development that later would be seen as a "need." Time and again, when I asked people about the changes that were coming, they showed no great interest in being modernized; sometimes they were even suspicious. In remote areas, when a road was about to be built, people felt, at best, ambivalent about the prospect. The same was true of electricity. I remember distinctly how, in 1975, people in the village of Stagmo laughed about the fuss that was being made to bring electric lights to neighboring villages. They thought it was a joke that so much effort and money was spent on what they took to be a ludicrous gain: "Is it worth all that bother just to have that thing dangling from your ceiling?" More recently, when I returned to the same village to meet the council, the first thing they said to me was "Why do you bother to come to our backward village, where we live in the dark?" They said it jokingly, but it was obvious they were ashamed not to have electricity. Before people's self-respect and self-worth had been shaken, they did not need electricity to prove they were civilized. But within a short period the forces of development have so undermined peoples' self-esteem that not only electricity but Punjabi rice and plastic have become needs. I have seen people proudly wear wristwatches they cannot read and for which they have no use. And as the desire to appear modern grows, people are rejecting their own culture. Even the traditional foods are no longer a source of pride. Now when I'm a guest in a village, people apologize if they serve the traditional roasted barley, called ngamphe, instead of instant noodles. Surprisingly, perhaps, modernization in Ladakh is also leading to a loss of individuality. As people become self-conscious and insecure, they feel pressured to conform, to live up to the idealized images --- to the American Dream. By contrast, in the traditional village, where everyone wears the same clothes and looks the same to the casual observer, there seems to be more freedom to relax, and villagers can be who they really are. As part of a close-knit community, people feel secure enough to be themselves. Perhaps the most tragic of all the changes I have observed in Ladakh is the vicious circle in which individual insecurity contributes to a weakening of family and community ties, which in turn further shakes individual self-esteem. Consumerism plays a central role in this whole process, since emotional insecurity generates hunger for material status symbols. The need for recognition and acceptance fuels the drive to acquire possessions that will presumable make you somebody. Ultimately, this is a far more important motivating force than a fascination for the things themselves. It is heartbreaking to see people buying things in order to be admired, respected, and ultimately loved, when in fact the effect is almost always the opposite. The individual with the new shiny car is set apart, and this increases the need to be accepted. A cycle is set in motion in which people become more and more separated from themselves and from one another. I've seen many other similar divisions. Gaps are developing between young and old, make and female, rich and poor, Buddhist and Muslim. The newly created division between the modern, educated expert and the illiterate, "backward" farmer is perhaps the biggest of all. Modernized inhabitants of Leh have more in common with someone from Delhi or Calcutta than they do with their own relatives who have remained on the land, and they tend to look down on anyone less modern. Some children living in the modern sector are now so distanced from their parents and grandparents that they don't even speak the same language. Educated in Urdu and English, they are losing mastery of their native tongue. Around the world, another consequence of development is that the men leave their families in the rural sector to earn money in the modern economy. The men become part of the technologically based life outside the home and are seen as the only productive members of society. Women do not earn money for their work, so they are no longer seen as "productive." Their work is not included as part of the gross national product. In government statistics, the 10 percent or so of Ladakhis who work in the modern sector are listed according to their occupations; the other 90 percent - housewives and traditional farmers - are lumped together as "nonworkers." Farmers and women are coming to be viewed as inferior, and they themselves are developing feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. Over the years I have seen the strong, outgoing women of Ladakh replaced by a new generation of women who are unsure of themselves and extremely concerned with their appearance. Traditionally, the way a woman looked was important, but her capabilities - including tolerance and social skills - were much more appreciated. Despite their new dominant role, men also clearly suffer as a result of the breakdown of family and community ties. Among other things, they are deprived of contact with children When men are young, the new macho image prevents them from showing any affection; later in life, when they are fathers, their work keeps them away from home. In the traditional culture, children benefited not only from continuous contact with both mother and father but also from constant interaction with different age groups. It was quite natural for older children to feel a sense of responsibility for the younger ones. Younger children in turn looked up to the older ones with respect and admiration and sought to be like them. Growing up was a natural, noncompetitive learning process. Now children are split into separate age groups at school. This sort of leveling has a very destructive effect: by artificially creating social units in which everyone is the same age, the ability of children to help and to learn from each other is greatly reduced, while competition is automatically increased, because each child is put under pressure to be just as good as the next one. In a group of ten children of quite different ages, there will naturally be much more cooperation than in a group of ten 12 year olds. The division into separate age groups is not limited to school. Now there is a tendency to spend leisure time exclusively with one's peers. As a result, a mutual intolerance between young and old has emerged. Young children nowadays have less and less contact with their grandparents, who often remain behind in the village. Living with many traditional families over the years, I have witnessed the depth of the bond between children and their grandparents. It is clearly a relationship that has a very different dimension from that between parent and child. The severing of this connection is a profound tragedy. Similar pressures contribute to the breakdown of the traditional family. The Western model of the nuclear family is now seen as the norm, and Ladakhis are beginning to feel ashamed of their traditional practice of polyandry, one of the cultural controls on population growth. As young people reject the old family structure in favor of monogamy, the population is increasing significantly. At the same time, monastic life is losing its status, and the number of celibate monks and nuns is decreasing. This, too, contributes to population increase. Interestingly, a number of Ladakhis have linked the rise in birth rates to the advent of modern democracy. "Power is a question of votes" is a current slogan, meaning that, in the modern sector, the larger your group, the greater your access to power. Competition for jobs and political representation within the new centralized structures is increasingly dividing Ladakhis. Ethnic and religious differences have taken on a political dimension, causing bitterness and envy on a scale hitherto unknown. This new rivalry is one of the most painful divisions I have seen in Ladakh. Ironically, it has grown in proportion to the decline of traditional religious devotions. When I first arrived, I was struck by the mutual respect and cooperation between Buddhists and Muslims. But in the last decade, growing competition has actually culminated in violence. Earlier there had been individual cases of friction, but the first time I noticed any signs of group tension was in 1986, when I heard Ladakhi friends starting to define people according to whether they were Buddhist or Muslim. In the following years, there were signs here and there that all was not well, but no one was prepared for what happened in the summer of 1989, when fighting suddenly broke out between the two groups. There were major disturbances in the Leh bazaar, four people were shot dead by police, and much of Ladakh was placed under curfew. Since then, open confrontation has died down, but mistrust and prejudice on both sides continue to mar relations. For a people unaccustomed to violence and discord, this has been a traumatic experience. One Muslim woman could have been speaking for all Ladakhis when she tearfully told me, "These events have torn my family apart. Some of them are Buddhists, some are Muslims, and now they are not talking to each other." The immediate cause of the disturbances was the growing perception among the Buddhists that the Muslim-dominated state government was discriminating against them in favor of the local Muslim population. As a minority group, the Muslims were anxious about defending their interests in the face of political assertiveness by the Buddhist majority. The underlying reasons for the violence, however, are much more far-reaching. What is happening in Ladakh is not an isolated phenomenon. The tensions between Muslims of Kashmir and the Hindhu-dominated central government in Delhi, between the Hindus and the Buddhist government in Bhutan, and between the Buddhists and the Hindu government in Nepal --- along with countless similar disturbances around the world --- are, I believe, all connected to the same underlying cause: the intense centralizing force of the present global development model, which is pulling diverse peoples from rural areas to large urban centers and placing power and decision making in the hands of a few. In these centers, job opportunities are scarce, community ties are broken, and competition increases dramatically. In particular, young men who have been educated for jobs in the modern sector find themselves engaged in a struggle for survival. In this situation, any religious or ethnic differences quite naturally become exaggerated and distorted, and the group in power inevitably tends to favor its own kind, while the rest often suffer discrimination. Most people believe that ethnic conflict is an inevitable consequence of differing cultural and religious traditions. In the less-developed third world, there is an awareness that modernization is exacerbating tensions, but people generally conclude that this is a temporary phase on the road of "progress," a phase that will end once development has erased cultural differences and created a totally secular society. On the other hand, Westerners attribute overt religious and ethnic strife to the liberating influence of democracy. Conflict, they assume, always smoldered beneath the surface, and only government repression kept it from bursting into flames. It is easy to understand why people lay the blame at the feet of tradition rather than modernity. Certainly, ethnic friction predates colonialism, modernization, and globalization. But after more than 2 decades of firsthand experience on the Indian subcontinent, I am convinced that "development" not only exacerbates tensions but actually creates them. As I have pointed out, development causes artificial scarcity, which inevitably leads to greater competition. Just as importantly, it puts pressure on people to conform to a standard Western ideal --- blond, blue-eyed, "beautiful", and "rich" --- that is impossibly out of reach. Striving for such an ideal means rejecting one's own culture and roots --- in effect, denying one's own identity. The inevitable result is alienation, resentment, and anger. I am convinced that much of the violence and fundamentalism in the world today is a product of this process. In the industrialized world, we are becoming increasingly aware of the impact of glamorous media and advertising images on individual self-esteem: problems that range from eating disorders to violence over high-priced sneakers and other "prestigious" articles of clothing. In the Third World, where the gulf between reality and the Western ideal is so much wider, the psychological impacts are that much more severe. There were many real problems in the traditional society, and development does bring some improvements. However, when one examines the fundamentally important relationships -- to the land, to other people, and to oneself --- one sees development in a different light. Viewed from this perspective, the differences between the old and the new become stark and disturbing. It becomes clear that the traditional nature-based society, with all its flaws and limitations, was more sustainable, both socially and environmentally. It was the result of a dialogue between human beings and their surroundings, a continuing coevolution that involved a thousand years of trial and error. During that time, the culture kept changing --- Ladakh's traditional Buddhist worldview emphasized change --- but that change occurred within a framework of compassion and a profound understanding of the interconnectedness of all things. The old culture reflected fundamental human needs while respecting natural limits. And it worked. It worked for nature, and it worked for people. The various connecting relationships in the traditional system were mutually reinforcing and encouraged harmony and stability. Most importantly, having seen my Ladakhi friends change so dramatically, I have no doubt that the bonds and responsibilities of the traditional society, far from being a burden, offered a profound sense of security, which seems to be a prerequisite for inner peace and contentment. I am convinced that people were significantly happier before development and globalism than they are today. The people were cared for, and the environment was well sustained. What could be more important? End The following comments are by Alan Archibald Comment: Ever since NAFTA tariff reductions, the artificially low price of imported mid-West grain has so eroded Chiapas' corn prices that indigenous farmers have been driven out of the market. Since Native Americans are "inefficient" producers, their inability to "compete" is - in the "objective" view of the globalized economy - "just" cause for their demise: they competed and they lost. To what extent does Social Darwinism impart the belief that electronic technology should (and must) supersede traditional ways? Is it possible that high technology - by its nature - concentrates wealth in the hands of the intellectually endowed, simultaneously justifying the denigration/destruction of those less cerebrally-oriented individuals who don't (or won't) take advantage of "job training" and other forms of technocratic largesse? No matter how one answers these question, a stark fact remains: unemployment in traditional societies is non-existent. In traditional societies, everyone has a meaningful role in the management of daily affairs. By comparison, the unemployment rate in present-day Nicaragua is 70%. Imagine, 150 years ago every Nicaraguan had important work to do. Comment: "An American is someone who spends money he doesn't have, to buy things he doesn't need, to impress people he doesn't like." Now Ladakhis and other third world people feel pressure to throw themselves - and their cultures - on "the bonfire of the vanities." Comment: (A.A. --- Ivan Illich details the replacement of value by price. This ongoing substitution means that integral functions of daily life -- which were formerly highly-valued (but un-remunerated) services -- are transformed by the mechanisms of modernity into fee-for-service marketplace exchanges. Propelled by the depersonalizing mechanisms of modernization - and the creation of so-called "dynamic" economies - most economic functions undergo a secondary process of "professionalization." Recently, "creeping professionalization" (in New York, California, Texas and Ohio) has resulted in legislation that obliges Afro-American hair-braiders to undergo sixteen hundred (1600) hours of cosmetology training! Only by participating in this costly certification process can hair-braiders secure the credential which legalizes their craft. "Training" and "certification" -- along with the generalized commodification of instruction -- have transformed the "military-industrial complex" into the "military-industrial-educational complex." Whereas adults in traditional societies are as comprehensively competent as our own nation's Amish -- building, farming, marketing, weaving, healing, sewing, cooking, baking, preserving, birthing, burying, and perhaps most importantly, child-rearing -- the specialist orientation of The Modern World transforms (and reduces) each of us into "monocrop" functionaries who routinely perform tedious, meaningless, or maddening jobs. Simultaneously, the System extrudes "professional societies" that sequester large sums for "the certified few", while economically dispossessing most of the rest. This replacement of value by money/price is akin to Oscar Wilde's observation that "a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." Whatever the cynical processes of modernity may have achieved, it is also true that the relentless machinations of modernization disdain marginal peoples, who - according to the received wisdom - are daft enough to resist modernization. Such people are viewed ill-informed, stupid or even bestial for refusing to exchange their universally-distributed "values" for the purchasable blandishments of a fixed-price marketplace based on fee-for-service, pay-as-you-go, highly-individualistic economics. Economic globalization further dispossesses all those already marginalized by development schemes whose basic thrust is to replace traditional "values" with the alleged "superiority" of price. While non-industrial peoples continue to lose their land (and consequently the groundedness of their ancient cultures), they are offered educational "opportunities" that will transform "a lucky few" into "successful" managers of the global economy. These lucky few then become the envy of the majority made culturally homeless by the destruction of traditional folkways. As Wendell Berry noted: "The only escape from the destiny of victimization has been to "succeed" -- that is, to "make it" into the class of exploiters, and then to remain so specialized and so "mobile" as to be unconscious of the effects of one's life or livelihood." Berry also notes that if we consider "living in the world by one's own will and skill, (then) the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker, technician or intellectual in a society of specialists." In related vein, Ivan Illich observes that "in a consumer society, there are inevitably two kinds of slaves, the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy." Comment: Martin Luther King Jr's civil rights movement - particularly when contrasted to the subsequent Black Power movement - is a case in point. King's conscious religious grounding enabled him to improve race relations, whereas the Black Power upheaval that supplanted King - despite its justifiable outrage - created a very mixed bag of results... not least of which is its endorsement of violence as a desirable means to achieve ends. One may argue that the degradation of inner city Afro-American life in the wake of King's death arose from Black Power's substitution of value by the supremacy of price. In King's time, no one would have conceived killing another human being over fashionable jackets and athletic shoes. However, with the ascendancy of price-predicated political economics, it has become "reasonable" to kill for trivial motivation. Comment: Toward the end of her essay, Helena Norberg performs a subtle analysis of the relationship between mounting political divisions and "the decline in traditional religious devotions." I understand why Norberg uses the word "ironically." However, the situation is inappropriately categorized as "ironic." In fact, it is a "reasonable" outcome. Carl Jung noted that the 20th century has witnessed the usurpation of the religious instinct by the political instinct. In Jung's view, it is "natural" that religious sentiment run deeper than political sentiment. Therefore, because politics is a vehicle that cannot - by its nature - contain the depth and breadth of religious sentiment, politics can neither contain nor channel these deeper feelings. As a result, unacknowledged religious passions are constantly overflowing into this century's public sphere. I would add that all value systems adopt poses that are functionally religious. This is to say that all value systems (whether they are based on "spirit", sex, sports, politics or golden calves) seek to "re-ligare"-- or, to "re-ligature" the existential split that cleaves the human psyche. Since value systems based on "price only" do not attempt alignment with any intrinsic value system (i.e., a system of values embedded in "the nature of universe," thus serving as an external touchstone of value regardless an individual's shifting "feelings"), the radical subjectivity of the twentieth century has created a charnel house of unprecedented horror. In the last 85 years we have witnessed two world wars, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Central America's agony, Africa's turmoil, Sendero Luminoso, Osama Bin Lama and the slow exsanguination of the Third World through economic globalization. To name a few. Nominal religious practitioners play an essential role in these unfolding calamities. However, it is difficult for many moderns -- particularly agnostics and "atheists" -- to recognize that "nominalists" partake of authentic religiosity to the same extent that Political Action Committees foster "government of the people, by the people and for the people." As horrifying as religious abuse of power has been, the Inquisition and Crusades pale in contrast to the ghoulishness of the twentieth century. In the last 100 years, we have witnessed the futile attempt to refill an unprecedented religious void with abject adulation of "markets." The upshot of this radical trans-valuation -- the replacement of the invisible hand of God by the invisible hand of the marketplace -- has evoked unprecedented violence and a collapse of personal meaningfulness that is -- in large part -- attributable to the "default" canonization of "the govern-ness," that fused impulse of government and business whose only interest in the Common Good is to strategize the prevention of open revolt. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the political purpose of religion was to provide conscionable counterpoint and meaningful resistance to the inevitable enormities perpetrated by "the principalities of the world." With the canonization of the World's "governess" - the ongoing fusion of "government and business" - this indispensable polarity has been lost. *** Aymará Indian women from Peruvian highland villages near Juli gather once a week to talk and work. They have formed an artisans' association that enables them to increase their earnings by directly marketing their own products. Two women sit side by side embroidering a large wall hanging. Others spin thread and work on smaller projects. The same cooperative spirit that fills the air as they work prevails at lunch. Each woman takes out a cloth filled with something she brought for the noon meal and places her contribution on a large colorful cloth known as an aguayo. Then the women seat themselves on the ground in a circle around the cloth and share the food: chunno (freeze dried potatoes), puffed corn, and patties made from quinoa, a high-protein grain. The women discuss events in their villages as they eat. Not long ago a food aid program offering milk powder, flour, and oil began in their region. Some women have stopped coming to the cooperative gatherings so they can attend the day-long meetings that are required to receive the food aid. The women gathered around the aguayo spread with traditional foods lament the absence of these women and quickly agree they do not want these new foods. "We're happy with the food we and our ancestors have always eaten," comments one. "We do not want aid," concludes another. "All we want are markets in which to sell our embroidery so we can keep growing our own food." Linda Shelly, La Esperanza, Honduras. Excerpted from: "Extending the Table... A World Community Cookbook" by Joetta Handrich Schlabach. It was wants that made man poor. E. F. Schumacher It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all. I found it invariably true, the poorer I am the richer I am. Thoreau He who dies wealthy dies shamed. Andrew Carnegie Poverty is not the problem. Wealth is the problem. Poverty is the solution. Satish Kumar Not he who has little, but he who wishes for more is poor. Latin Proverb A full stomach doesn't believe in hunger. Italian Proverb More than you need is never enough. Alan Archibald No man should praise poverty but he who is poor. St. Bernard of Clairvaux It is not progress if the absence of "an improvement" results in envy, despair or denigration. Similarly, it is not progress if the improvement itself fosters these characteristics. Humankind does not live by bread alone. |
