Impoverished by Improvement

September 27, 2006

In the introduction to Globalization and Its Enemies, Daniel Cohen notes the strange case of a village in Algeria:

...let us consider the surprise of Germaine Tillion, a French Anthropologist who had lived in a mountain village in the Aurès region of Algeria in the 1930s, when she returned to the region 20 years later. The Aurès society that Germaine Tillion first knew, a society that she perceived as "balanced and happy in its ancestral tranquility," had become impoverished. What had been the cause? "Nothing of scarcely anything." Believing they were helping Aurès by bringing civilization, the French dispersed DDT in the ponds to combat malaria and typhoid fever and built a road to end the region's isolation. Then they went home. These two innovations produced a chain reaction. The eradication of typhoid and malaria triggered a demographic explosion. In one generation the population doubled. To meet the needs that resulted from this increase, shepherds had to enlarge their herds. The livestock rapidly destroyed the soil. Thanks to the road, some people were able to export their surplus stock. Some became rich; others fell into doubt; some were ruined. The inequality became apparent. The richest members of this society sent their children to the school in the nearest large town. The Koranic tradition was quickly devalued. [2]

It is not the case that the people of Aurès were doing anything wrong, they just lived by a system that was easily thrown out of whack by major changes like the sudden growth in life expectancy and increased ease of communication. This is a single example of a phenomenon that affects the world: modern improvements bring change to systems that have had no preparation. Cohen compares globalization to the diseases brought by the Spanish to the New World—the native Americans had no resistance to these diseases, to which the Spaniards had a developed a resistance (4). Similarly, people living in traditional societies have no built-in resistance to the changes that overtake their culture as it comes into contact with the modern world.

At the end of this paragraph Cohen notes an interesting result of cultural disintegration: "The Koranic tradition was quickly devalued." That seems logical enough. What would replace this traditional education? I think it would be something a lot like fundamentalism. The religious tradition ends, and after a while someone tries to reinstate the older tradition. Yet the village has changed: it has exploded in population, the employment patterns have shifted, and the problems of the neighboring city have come to the village. Someone may want to go back to the old system, but one can't reinstate the old system in the midst of a changed world. That is the definition of modern fundamentalism: the attempt to replant a bush whose rightful soil has disappeared. What was once a natural outgrowth of a culture now seems a little monstrous..