Hope by Tim Costello

Author:Tim Costello
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2012-06-29T04:00:00+00:00

What? And plunge the world into total darkness?

I often tell a story (maybe apocryphal) of the Hopi Native Americans, who inhabit the mesas (cut-off plateau mountains) of north-eastern Arizona in the US. For millennia, they have been rising before dawn on their flat mountains and praying the sun up. Of course, it is an ancient set of rituals and prayers, but the effect for their belief system is to see the sun rise.

The four important elements in the definition of an ancient group today are elders, tribal land, rituals and at least five anthropologists studying them! Some anthropologists were camped with the Hopi, researching and watching them. One of the anthropologists came up with a suggestion. ‘Why don’t you just sleep in one morning? Don’t do your ritual and prayers. Just roll over and go back to sleep.’ The elders discussed this, came to a quick consensus and came back and flatly refused. The researcher said, ‘But one morning would not make that much difference, would it?’

They shot back the answer, ‘What, and plunge the world into total darkness for the sake of your stupid experiment?’

We give a knowing smile when we hear this story, but who is right? Science may be on our side, but once the sun rises without their prayers, a whole culture and way of life drifts apart. The darkness would be real, if not physical. Their whole sense of purpose and daily routine would be shattered.

It is fundamentally a political act to question the power structures in a culture. Many would question by what right we do this – is this not covert colonialism under the guise of the twenty-first century notion of development? Aid and free markets may be a softer form than guns and empire administrators, but they are equally effective in subjugating other cultures to a Western worldview.

We do need to be self-critical about the blindness of our superior insights. They may be just as real and no different to the same conceits of past generations we deplore. Even when we learn the language, adopt the dress and mores, we can never fully inhabit the cultural story of others and know better. They are different and have a right to be different.

But there are some fundamental questions where we have to chance our arm and allow that we might get it wrong. I prefer to chance my arm than to bow to those relativists who say there are no universal human rights, only Western conceptions that are different to African or Asian conceptions of human rights. Their take on it would mean we fold up any efforts to help, and retire to our cultural corner without the confidence to act.

This will be an eternal debate. In the West we value individual freedoms of speech, assembly and religion, whereas others value social rights like a job and housing, and find individual rights expendable as long as these are met. Development must be offering the good life as people choose to name it for themselves.

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