Civilize the Civilized

Guardian of today reports about the British expedition into the uncontacted Indians in Bolivia and other parts of South America. Indians are most vulnerable and innocent people of the planet. They can be victimized in the name of civilization. People in the cities are civilized than the Indian who prefer to live away from these civilized people of the city.

Let us try to understand the meaning of the terms civilized and uncivilized. These two concepts are equally important to all of us. Suppose a person acts weird than he is called as uncivilized, on the other hand, if a person who looks smart, speaks smart and thinks smart is called civilized. Is this right way of looking at the reality. Some would say Yes, but others would sit back and think twice. A person who is mentally ill is called crazy in the sight of those who are not crazy. But if we had the ability to venture into the psyche of that crazy person; he might think the others are crazy. Therefore it is very difficult come to a conclusion whether one is right or wrong. To further emphasize, are we sure that there is right and wrong in this world? Or it is just our popular consensus? It is a big challenge for the philosophers to prove their metal in this line of thought. Many of them try to arrive at a consensus but often they were counter refuted by their contemporaries.

Let me narrow down the condensed philosophical implications on the topic above; if we say civilized people are right and they are free and most happy people in the world, are we right? On the other hand if we say these so called bush people (I don't like the title) are non-civilized as a result they are unhappy people, therefore we have a duty to civilize them and make them like us; are we right?

I worked closely with Indigenous people of Guyana for a year. I was teaching in the school. My experience has been tremendous. I think they are the most happy people in the world where there is no war, communal fight, domination, power tussle, debt, detrimental deceases, and so on. One of the most incredible attitude I appreciate in them is, their way of life with minimum things. They don't have things to store, or money to deposit in the bank in other words no security as we would call it. But how do they survive; yes they do, Birds of the air don't sow.

Today their happy times has come to an end because of the invasion of the city people taking away their women, men, children in the name of making them civilized. How do we see this? Can we just ignore and go along or respond?

I will be following these kinds of news very closely so that we are aware what is going on around us. Let us wake up and try to civilize the civilized people who wants to civilize the Indigenous people who are part of the nature (we have lost this sense of Nature, as a result nature turns to us in fury).