While reading a book (not about poverty) today, I came across a very interesting passage that I want to post on the blog. In their book, Waorani: The Contexts of Violence & War
At this point, perhaps we should make clear our position with regard to missionaries and their activities. It is fair to say that, at the beginning of our careers, we shared the generalize antipathy toward missionaries that is common among anthropologists and among academics generally. We still have the same fundamental philosophical disagreement with the primary goal of missionization: that of convincing people that their traditional beliefs are false and the another’s are true. (It is also the case, however, that we see little difference in this regard between Christian missionaries whose objective is to replace the belief in “demons” with the word of Christ and his disciples, and the Marxist missionaries of recent decades whose goal was to destroy the “false consciousness” of traditional cultures and to inculcate the revealed truth of their prophet and his disciples.)
The undeniably negative consequences that missionization often had in the past notwithstanding (and this was certainly the case in the Oriente-see chapter 5), it is clear to us, after having lived and worked in traditional societies on both sides of the world, that now, at the end of the twentieth century it is not the ideological and social changes introduced by missionaries that are destroying traditional societies like those of the Semai and Waorani.
Any negative psychological, social, and cultural effects of missionary activity are today utterly insignificant compared to the catastrophic impact of the worldwide industrial megaculture – in both its capitalist and socialist variants – with its insatiable hunger for resources: land, water food, timber, oil, minerals, and labor. It is “development”: mining, oil extraction, lumbering, ranching, plantation agriculture, dam construction, and environmental degradation through deforestation, soil erosion, and toxic wastes that is obliterating the cultures and societies, and often the very lives, of native peoples the world over.
“Development” forces or entices them from their lands and ways of life, robs them of their self-sufficiency and destroys the social and cultural coherence of their traditional lives.
The last point about robbery of self-sufficiency motivated me to post that excellent excerpt on this blog. I like most that the excerpt explains that the damaging expansion of industrial exploitation comes from both capitalism and socialism. Those two political philosophies represent two-sides of the same dangerous coin.
Industrial growth requires the degradation of the planet to fuel itself, which means that so-called “developed” nations need to economically invade and manipulate otherwise self-sufficient and stable communities in the world, leaving those communities instable and poor.
Many currently poor communities and local societies existed in economic harmony with their part of the earth while isolated from industrial society, before industrial society consumed them for their resources.
The agents of industrial society couldn’t care less about behaving fairly. They want to get natural resources (labor, oil, etc.) from these previously self-sufficient communities in whatever way they can while giving as little as possible; hence the economic exploitation and neo-imperialism. If a person doesn’t feel the need to pay a fair price for something, they steal it.