Ethnocentrism

It’s sad to know that such a thing as ethnocentrism even exists but we see it in our lives everyday. One culture is constantly criticizing or questioning the rituals of another; even the simplest of differences are scrutinized. We make decisions and act they way we do because we were raised by our parents or guardians and conditioned by our society to think the way we do.

Consider what it would be like if you were your neighbor’s child, taught by their morals and experiencing life under their care and influenced by their actions. Using this small comparison of one American family to the other next door and it is simple to see a multitude of differences. What if you were born in another part of our country where people talk different, cook different and even dress different? Now go even further beyond our country’s border and visualize yourself born in another land; one without highways, cars, malls or even indoor plumbing. What would it be like to wake up every morning without electricity or hot water? What would your daily routine consist of? Suddenly getting water from the river is more important than what you’re going to wear to the meeting today. Wait a minute! You don’t have to be at a meeting! You’re not employed by another. You work for yourself. What you have to live from is the land and animals that co-exist with you. You grow your own food, butcher your own meat, sew your own clothes and build your own house. You may not even venture any further than your own village. There is no television, there’s no telephone; just you and those closest to you. How do you see your world now? What is normal for one is obviously not normal for another.

Following man from his existence we can see how his insatiable hunger for progress has harmed his fellow man. More civilized cultures conquered the less civilized, believing that their modern way was the best for the entire society. Indigenous peoples were forced by ethnocide (death of their culture) into civilization. Many however, perished when robbed of their way of life and others who refused to forget their own culture, slaughtered. Genocide was committed in the name of progress of course; or in the name of science; or even in the name of God. Those people who were not civilized and living in a modern way were considered to be less human; better known as savages; posing a problem for modern society and therefore deemed expendable for the good of the whole.

One of the biggest perks of civilization is technology. It allows us to do more of basically everything. Technology is everywhere inside the modern realm. However, we are constantly learning that technology, the progression of civilization, is harming us in ways we never thought possible. In her research Devra Davis discovered that we are in an era when “half of all men and a third of all women in developed nations will contract the disease (cancer), and more than one in four of their citizens will die from it.”

Not only are the products we are producing in the name of progress slowly killing us but we have also managed to detach ourselves from the one thing essential to our survival on this planet; Mother Nature. We have sewn our society together in such a way that we no longer have a relationship with non-human things. As David Abram put it, “We can attribute much of this oversight to the modern, civilized assumption that the natural world is largely determinate and mechanical, and that which is regarded as mysterious, powerful, and beyond human ken must therefore be of some other, nonphysical realm above nature, ‘supernatural’.” Unlike the less civilized who remain connected with their natural surroundings, we who are civilized do not have a balanced relation to the earthly biosphere (Abram). “...hundreds of our fellow species becoming extinct each month as a result of our civilization’s excesses, we can hardly be surprised by the amount of epidemic illness in our culture…”

Civilization looks more and more like the death of us all; human and non-human; rather than our salvation as we hoped it would be. Perhaps we would be healthier and happier today if we had just allowed ourselves the freedom to live as savages.