Progress

A common meme on facebook is to show a picture of some ancient device, like a typewriter or a rotary  phone, with the caption “share if you remember this,” and I wonder why they don’t just cut to the chase and say “share if you’re over 50 years old.”  I also wonder what kind of a kick people get out of this.  Is it a sense of solidarity?  I’m old, so I belong to this club of all the other old people out there.  Is it a sense of superiority? Ha! I know something you young punks don’t.  Or, is it a sense (and I see a lot of comments indicating this) that the past was somehow better than the present.

There’s no turning back

It was not.  Without mobile phones, there were missed appointments like crazy.  You’d have to wait for people forever, with no way  to contact them and say ‘where the hell are you?’ the way we do today if someone is 30 seconds late.  Without the internet, sure, we had more face to face conversations, but you can still have those if you really want.  There must be a reason we are so willing to spend so much time with our artificial friendships on-line.

In short, the present is better than the past and I’m reasonably confident the future will be better than the present, if  we can  avoid this  Ukrainian mess from turning into WWIII, and if we can avoid making the world uninhabitable because of all the carbon emissions and toxic chemicals threatening to extinctify the honey bee.

Which brings me to tonight’s topic.  The Mashco Piro are a tribe in Peru, deep in the western regions of the Amazon jungle.  They live much as their ancestors have for thousands of years.  They hunt.  They do not use telephones, or read books.  They know nothing of electricity, and have not had much contact with the outside world.

In fact, authorities are trying to discourage people from having any contact with them at all because they’re worried that contact could be fatal to them, because of disease.  But, it’s unstoppable.  They’ve seen us, they  know we’re out there.  They  sneak into logging camps and steal tools.  They will learn how to use some of them, and they  will not look back.  They will want more.

Many people, who no doubt are well intended, say we should respect their lifestyle and not try to bring them into the 21st century.  That’s possible any more.  They may not like all western developments – clothing,  I imagine,  will be unappealing.  But they’re going to love television, and chocolate, and motorboats.

People  want to move forward.  Not back.