A Biker's Trail Blog and more ...

Since last few days I have been reading an astoundingly interesting books of modern times. "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond is a great, well researched scientific non-fiction books I have come across in last few years. While reading I came to understand that the whole history of human species development from apes and chimps millions of years ago to modern males is a constant story of inequality, of haves and have nots. And so all the talks of equality and efforts to bring equality in this world will always remain a unfulfilled wish for many. I can write about this too at length but that will be topic for another blog post.

Coming back to this question that was once posed to me by one of my friends - "Should we not impart modern education to aboriginals and let them decide what is good for them", argument being that education would provide level ground, would help them encounter modern diseases and help them lead a better life. Another argument provided for it was - "We can doing disservice and crime against humanity by not imparting modern education and disease fighting capabilities to these native tribes".

But to prove my point of non-interference, let me ask a question, who are we to judge who is intelligent or who is not?? Is the yardstick for being intelligent just the fact that you are educated in some brick and mortar school somewhere. After all isn't it us, the so called well educated modern people, who have decided and justified this yardstick. Is it necessary that traditional cultivated societies are far better than hunter-gatherer lifestyles of most of the surviving native tribes? And just because they don't have electricity and don't know the modern periodic table makes them less intelligent?

To quote from the book - " ..., an entire field of science, termed ethnobiology, studies peoples' knowledge of the wild plants and animals in their environment. ... The study generally show that people are walking encyclopedias of natural history, with individual names (in their local language) for as many as thousand or more plants and animals species, and with detailed knowledge of those species' biological characteristics, distribution and potential uses. As people become increasingly dependent on domesticated plants and animals, this traditional knowledge gradually loses its value and becomes lost, until one arrives at modern supermarket shoppers who could not distinguish a wild grass from a wild pulse."

These are some of the very intelligent people who have been maintaining their way of life since many thousands of years. As far as the argument about fighting diseases in order to help improve their lives, just leave these people alone. More interaction with us modern people will only make them more susceptible to diseases that they have never encountered before and will wipe out these communities. Their human bodies are immune to the local diseases and so there is no reason for us so called modern intelligent folks to intervene.

Modern education would only make then dependent of few cultivated crops just like billions of us and the world would loose a treasure chest of knowledge which these people have been carrying since generations. We might have to turn to these pre historic methods of survival if our major food source such as wheat, rice, corn, potato, bananas must fail suddenly. Their methods would make sure that human race survives if we could learn from them how to locate and recognize alternative (wild but edible) sources of food.

As far as the quality of life argument goes, all I can say is that is a big load of c*&p!!! We are the ones who have set up this yardstick and we can not judge others based on our own yardstick for quality of life. This would be exactly similar to saying - i like sweet so I like apples and cherries but then by my yardstick lemons and oranges would be nasty. So let us all be wise and uphold the tradition of intelligence (that we all claim we are) and not compare apple and oranges, both are good in their own ways ...