Tribes and Ethics in Voices Windward

Stumbled into a few barnies recently about traditional cultures and western/eartern modern society and the means of interaction.

Some of these have been based on eating meat and hunting, but I’d like to escape this for a moment.

I’d like to think about social issues which we have almost universal disapprove off - atleast on paper - such as caste systems, enforced gender binary, slavery, homophobia, physical abuse, child endangerment etc etc All found quite extensivley through many tribal cultures globally.

As a person grown up in Modern western society I have grown up with certain standards and ethics, most of us have, even ones which segregate us from other “modern” communities (such as cat eating, abortions for gender preferanc etc) but it’s with a lot of searching and learning that I came to the moral code I have now. It is not the same one that I advocate on a social level mind, but it is mine, it is important.

I do however thing that we as an international community have developed a fairly near perfect universal code of morality (one that I sometimes go against) and it’s one I think should permeate all our of varied collectives and nations.

Not just the universal declaration of human rights but the predominate shift for civil liberty and equal rights etc.

However, what right do we have to - I’ll use someone elses term - “colonise their minds with our ideas” … Removing a culture and community from ideas we considor harmful but that might be integral to their identity…

I personally favour a somewhat removed process of cultural development without it being enforced.

IE, make our culture and ideas accessable available but not invasive.

Tho I also believe that we should be active participants in tribal communities to provide a base for medicine and social support.

I want the people to choose how they want to develop, even if it’s to escape the - to qoute a Tuareg “..folksy throw-back(s) kept alive by meddling Western anthropologists” … and we should provide active support for first nations people to develop their communities with all the means of the modern world while retaining their idenities.

I have no qualm about enforcing our ideas on other groups when it is to protect people, it’s just a dangerous game while we live in a captilistic society with an Empire fetish.

Mind you saying all this I believe that those groups who want to be left alone completly should, with protected hinterlands surrounding their lands with the only rule being that if someone chooses to leave freely they should not be hindered.

I also believe that we should activley grown and foster our own customs and identities that were crushed under the raise of nationalism and patriotism these past couple of hundred years.