Climate change has created irreversible problems for some people. Deforestation in the Amazons or the melting of polar ice caps in the Arctic have left some people without their homes. This climate change was brought about by the consumer culture that has dominated the global economy since the Industrial Revolution. Countries take large amounts of resources and make and sell as much as they can to create greater wealth and luxury for their people. Unfortunately, this growth has often come at the expense of other people. Consumers take resources and land from smaller countries to make goods. This is a clear infraction of human rights.
The first video looks at the defects of this consumer culture and asks people to return to a simpler state. Consumer culture has fostered the belief that more money and more materials will make us happy. So people buy, and they build, searching for that elusive happiness. Dr. Lindsey argues in the talk that happiness is found in the simple places like home and with family and loved ones. After years of chasing big contracts and dreams, she learned her greatest lesson on the beach where she grew up: happiness is at home. She begs people to search introspectively and discover what happiness means to them and beseeches them to disregard a consumer culture that promotes more as a means to happiness. A simple life and a recognition of a person’s place in the world could go a long way towards capturing personal happiness according to Lindsey.
In the second video Davis also bemoans the effects of a single, materially driven global network. In the search to put themselves forward, larger nations have drowned out the influence and livelihood of smaller peoples in those forests and up North, creating endangered cultures that are a generation away from losing a language or practices. The video was from 2003 and said that nearly half of the world’s languages had become extinct. He had traveled around the world and seen that people outside of consumer culture have amazing and happy lives. Consumer culture is just one way of thinking about the world and our place in it. All the other people groups have developed their own ways of relating to one another and to nature. He commends their fearless adaptation to the things bigger nations have forced on them and hopes that diversity will increase not decrease like it has been.
We’ve already discussed Native American groups in class, but this is the first people group that I think of when I hear “endangered cultures.” I spent some time at a Navajo Reservation and got to witness the blending of two cultures. However, most of the old culture was up on the walls in paintings or in pictures. Students were encouraged to speak English and the natural resources on the reservation were sparse. Their culture had to rely on the resources around them to survive. Sure, the tribe had been given land and autonomy, but it had no real means of sustaining itself.
Eurocentrism is the idea that Western thoughts and practices are the standard for the world. Every other country will be measured on a Western barometer and will always be lower. Other people’s cultures are odd and different, not the West’s. Noor is adamant that this sort of thinking is destructive. Multiculturalism produces the best form of the world. Different ideas and practices create more good results not just one subjective result. Noor says that in promoting these differences there should also be an understanding that everyone needs and promotes and general welfare. Water, shelter and food are all simple needs that can be grown and understood in different systems, but they are universally needed and consumed. One particular process isn’t necessarily better, but they should all understand each other and promote a universal welfare.
Globalization 3510W 