by Lot Grundy

Created on: January 13, 2009

The neat phrase 'their plight' brings to mind some generic pain we imagine is felt in those less well off parts of the world where they do not have the same advantages of obesity and mind-numbing televisual diarrhoea we enjoy. What do those who feel strongly that 'something should be done to help those poor people in Asia' know of the lives of the those people? Do they understand the society they are disgusted by? What right do they have to judge the rights and wrongs of another culture?

There is a lot of fluffy thinking around these sorts of issues. But there is nothing new in it: Christian missionaries scattered themselves all across the world and were desperate to convince tribesmen and pagans and Hindus and Buddhists and every other kind of person that salvation could only be found through Christ. They treated the native beliefs of proud, ancient cultures with utter contempt and, where they could, outlawed and punished their continuance. Missionaries strong-armed people into Christian faith at the expense of the diverse religions of the world. They burned the sacred groves and strung-up the witch doctors. They slaughtered millions upon millions in the conquest of the Americas in a holocaust more grave than the Nazis could ever dream of. Their contempt is something we share - at least, those of us who think the world's societies should all follow the same democratic model - as it is what our societies were built on (in America; very literally - in Britain; their gold and lands fed our coffers for many years).

The assumption that there is an 'our business' rankles with me, too. What common project are I and my neighbour engaged in? Aside from paying taxes to the same government and rent to the same landlord: none. This is a common state of affairs throughout the West. What individual freedoms and rights have achieved is a fractured and broken society, where one man's trouble is his own affair and the concept of community responsibility is all but dead. Communities need roles fulfilled that are more strict in definition than any 'individual' of the west could countenance (at least in the main stream - there are always exceptions). If a culture demands a certain role fulfilled by a certain kind of person then that might well have advantages as well as restrictions.

A society is not the embodiment of an ideal, but is the reality of life lived by a group of people in a certain place, a reality formed by aeons of peculiar history - this should be respected, as this history is of humanity's clumsy union with the earth and there are far too few stories left yet to reach their final page.

Learn more about this author, Lot Grundy.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.