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Isolated groups, such as indigenous tribes in the Amazon Rain Forest or religious communities such as the Amish in the United States, should no longer be allowed to remain isolated from society. This is an argument I began thinking about a few days ago and have brought up with some colleagues, most of whom instantly disagreed. I myself was not on either side, but found it an intriguing problem to consider. Obviously, it sounds wrong from the start. Of course people should be allowed to isolate themselves if they wish, especially if they belong to a culture that has been doing so for hundreds or thousands of years. Right? I'm not so sure. From the United Nations' "Universal Declaration of Human Rights:'
My argument against isolation is focused on education. The first two items in the list argue in favor of education for all children, but the last is problematic. Given that education is a huge determining factor in life possibility (i.e., a child educated in the Rain Forest her entire life is less likely to become a doctor than one educated in an urban area), why are parents allowed to limit their children? Parents do not have the right to control 100% of the lives of their children. Why is education not one of those things parents have no say in? All children, no matter where they are born, should be provided an equal opportunity to achieve whatever they may dream of. Children in isolated communities lack such an opportunity. This is unfair to these children. I am sure there could be many more arguments against isolation. Just as there could be many arguments in favor of it. I'd like to hear them.
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Oct 4, 2015 03:12
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Also, I think we should avoid this thread turning into a condemnation of past colonialist/imperialistic crimes against native peoples. Clearly, there have been many atrocities committed in the name of "civilizing savages." I'm not advocating in favor of that. The past is the past. Let's debate the present.
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Oct 4, 2015 03:15
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So in practice how would this be any different than the history of taking kids away from aboriginal parents and putting them in boarding schools?
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Oct 4, 2015 03:25
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Let them see the light of Jesus Christ.
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Oct 4, 2015 03:26
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Typo posted:So in practice how would this be any different than the history of taking kids away from aboriginal parents and putting them in boarding schools? You could bring the schools to them? Have regional schools. Aside from the practicality, how do you feel about the issue itself?
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Oct 4, 2015 03:27
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One of the big arguments against forcing this kind of thing is that even when it is done with the best of intentions and there is quite legitimately no ulterior motive, it still tends to go pretty terribly for the contacted group. In the most abstract sense I guess I agree with you, because I don't think it's right that the sheer chance of where you are born should control your life. By analogy, if we're being watched by a tremendous galaxy-spanning alien empire, I'd be pissed as HELL to have the opportunities of exploring, learning, engaging in culture, etc. denied to me without being asked. But here on earth the facts of nature mean that this is largely unavoidable, and there are far, far more severe examples of it hurting far, far more people. Syrian refugees didn't choose to be born in Syria, for example. Undocumented immigrants into the US didn't choose to be born in Mexico or Central America. Parentage making an immeasurable impact on your life is something that we should work against where feasible, but this particular issue - even if we were to accept that contact should be forced - has to be pretty far down the list of priorities even within the narrow remit of birthplace and immigration and so forth.
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Oct 4, 2015 03:29
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blue squares posted:You could bring the schools to them? Have regional schools. I find it in problematic even as an abstract because you are abridging the rights of communities of people who are not part of the social contract with the state to determine their own values and culture. Which incidentally violates article I of the UN Charter of Human Rights: http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml posted:To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace; It's generally accepted that taking kids away from abusive parents if fine, and even forcing them into public schools is fine but that's in the cases where people are citizens of a country and therefore are in a social contract with the state. The state and society therefore has some right to intervene in their lives to make things better for their children. The issue here is that isolated communities are not under the jurisdiction of states because they have never entered any sort of contract with the state, nor are they part of our society. Therefore I see an over-extension of state power to remove their children to educate them in ways society at large deems correct. This is actually a pretty good debate topic for college debate club btw Typo fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Oct 4, 2015 |
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Oct 4, 2015 03:32
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blue squares posted:All children, no matter where they are born, should be provided an equal opportunity to achieve whatever they may dream of. Children in isolated communities lack such an opportunity. This is unfair to these children. I agree. Children from wealthy families should be taken from them and placed in public low-income housing and enrolled in public schools. This will have your desired effect of de-isolating them from their 1% enclaves and will help ensure they have an opportunity equal with other children.
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Oct 4, 2015 03:37
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What about people who homeschool their children? Should that practice be banned? Forcing people to interact seems like a losing proposition. There is a reason that they have chosen to isolate themselves
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Oct 4, 2015 03:43
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Kawasaki Nun posted:What about people who homeschool their children? Should that practice be banned? Forcing people to interact seems like a losing proposition. There is a reason that they have chosen to isolate themselves Homeschooling is actually illegal in a large number of countries
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Oct 4, 2015 03:44
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The most concrete reason is that long-term contact with isolated groups results in 50% of the isolated groups members dying of measles. Most isolated groups are aware of human society at large, but they avoid further contact because they do not wish to do so. That is not because they fear disease, but because we occasionally murder them when their presence conflicts with our interests.
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Oct 4, 2015 03:47
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blue squares posted:Also, I think we should avoid this thread turning into a condemnation of past colonialist/imperialistic crimes against native peoples. Clearly, there have been many atrocities committed in the name of "civilizing savages." I'm not advocating in favor of that. The past is the past. Let's debate the present. this, but in a thread about stalinism instead
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Oct 4, 2015 03:58
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Sharkie posted:I agree. Children from wealthy families should be taken from them and placed in public low-income housing and enrolled in public schools. This will have your desired effect of de-isolating them from their 1% enclaves and will help ensure they have an opportunity equal with other children. lol @ the premise of wealthy people not having a rolodex of boarding schools in Switzerland to send their kids to
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Oct 4, 2015 04:00
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Yes! Let's drag them into this modern hell we've made that goes completely against our nature. I refuse to accept that there are people out there that don't know who the Kardassians are. I'm being flippant but issue I take with it is that once it's done it cannot be undone. Regarding the rainforest tribes sometimes they do come out of isolation on their own. The result is that they're brutally exploited. You also seem to want to do it under the absurd idea that everyone can be what they want if only they have an education. That's just not true. An education will open doors, sure, but it doesn't open doors to a magical paradise where everyone can follow their dreams. Maybe some of these kids will become doctors or scientists or whatever. The vast majority will end up being manual labourers, clerks or doing menial office work like the rest of us. Funky See Funky Do fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Oct 4, 2015 |
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Oct 4, 2015 04:00
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Liberal neo-colonialism, dissolve yourself in it, dissolve yourself in us, lower yourself into us, COMPLETE UUUUS
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Oct 4, 2015 04:30
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Considering things like disease resistance and all that, they probably shouldn't.
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Oct 4, 2015 04:43
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We all know about the great educational opportunities given to penniless children forcibly ripped from marginalized indigenous communities.
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Oct 4, 2015 06:07
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Actually, we should be more isolated.
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Oct 4, 2015 06:25
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People seem to be jumping towards aboriginal minorities but there's plenty more isolated communities out there. In the U.S. we've got Amish and various fundamentalist Mormon sects who keep their children isolated from general education. Heck in the terms of the Amish, since they grant their children the option to leave at 18 this often leaves Amish youth who choose to leave with no skills applicable in society asides from making meth perhaps. And some of those Mormon cults are known to outright kick out young men to maintain wives for the elders. The question is, do we toss a Millwall brick through Establishment Clause to deal with this sort of poo poo?Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Actually, we should be more isolated. Dr. Killjoy fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Oct 4, 2015 |
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Oct 4, 2015 06:28
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quote is not edit
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Oct 4, 2015 06:29
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Those isolated groups in the Amazon rainforest aren't that isolated, they'll have come in contact with groups trying to kill them, and who need to be (but aren't) punished. I'd still be 100% for integration in spite of that, were it not also for the fact that it's difficult to determine how disease resistant they are. Human diseases have this remarkable ability to spread much faster & further than you think, so it's unlikely that they are entirely isolated from diseases, but they'd still be at serious risk. But the broader question behind your topic would be 'is consent the dominant moral factor when interacting with the other?", with my answer being 'no'. There's no guarantee that, in the real world, people can accurately pursue their interests. They'll have mistaken beliefs, prejudices, fears and anxieties that are gonna push them around. OTOH, people enjoy the feeling of making decisions for themselves, and forcing something upon them is always traumatic. So as a general rule, respecting consent is good, but it's not dominant. This is relevant to states because, If we're being serious, the idea of the social contract doesn't really make sense. There was no point in your life that you ever had a realistic choice over being a member of the society you are in or not. There is no place on this earth that is habitable and not already claimed by a state. But while being part of the social contract has obligations, it has rewards too, and it solves the problems you get without it. It's not a choice you ever had, but it is to everyone's benefit. So the talk of jurisdiction also doesn't fly, because that's not the reality of what happens today. Assuming you could get around the disease problem (which you probably can't), integrating isolated groups would also be to the benefit of everyone. It's reasonable that the isolated groups want to remain that way, but that's not relevant as to whether or not it's the right outcome. rudatron fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Oct 4, 2015 |
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Oct 4, 2015 08:20
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We should de-isolate the labor aristocracy of the first world by redistributing their lands to the proletariat of the global south. The labor aristocracy will be de-isolated from the economic conditions of the third world by being placed on collective farms throughout the global south to work as laborers. I agree that for too long the average first world citizen has been isolated from the larger global conditions which they perpetuate and impose on the rest of the world - removing them from this isolation by forcibly shipping them to the third world to work as laborers would de-isolate them from their first world enclaves, and indeed would be better for them, and the world. I agree with rudatron in that consent is not the dominant factor when interacting with others. While most of us would not consent to being shipped to Bolivia and rural Laos to till the soil, the joint dictatorship of the proletariat of oppressed nations need not consider our consent when de-isolating us from the world of the rural poor.
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Oct 4, 2015 09:18
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A hundred generations tends to patch of land, then you come along and decide the hundredth-and-first needs to learn calculus.
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Oct 4, 2015 09:55
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Sharkie posted:We should de-isolate the labor aristocracy of the first world by redistributing their lands to the proletariat of the global south. The labor aristocracy will be de-isolated from the economic conditions of the third world by being placed on collective farms throughout the global south to work as laborers. I agree that for too long the average first world citizen has been isolated from the larger global conditions which they perpetuate and impose on the rest of the world - removing them from this isolation by forcibly shipping them to the third world to work as laborers would de-isolate them from their first world enclaves, and indeed would be better for them, and the world. I agree with rudatron in that consent is not the dominant factor when interacting with others. While most of us would not consent to being shipped to Bolivia and rural Laos to till the soil, the joint dictatorship of the proletariat of oppressed nations need not consider our consent when de-isolating us from the world of the rural poor. This but unironically.
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Oct 4, 2015 13:16
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Interesting case study here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island
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Oct 4, 2015 13:45
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Generally, the only groups that have managed to remain uncontacted are uncontacted for a reason. That reason is sleek, sharp, and distressingly accurate.
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Oct 4, 2015 14:17
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I think it's interesting that OP mentioned the Amish. They're not isolated by any stretch of the imagination, and putting them in the same category as uncontacted tribes in the Amazon or whatever is really weird and not helpful. Also, unless you're going literally full communism or whatever this is a bad idea (it's probably a bad idea under full communism too)
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Oct 5, 2015 08:54
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Well actually, a global proletarian dictatorship would solve a lot of problems, but you wouldn't really be shipping people around to be rural farmers as much as you would moving investments around till you get everyone at good QoL standards. So first world poor might not notice much, rich would lose big time, middle class would be 50/50. If you're moving anyone around, it'd be moving people from over populated areas to under populated areas. And it would be acceptable for, say, if one region breaks away, to annex that region back. You want a good example about how consent doesn't mean much when it comes to states, look at the US civil war. What the south wanted was irrelevant to whether or not they could rightly break away or not. The obvious response to that is the analogy doesn't work because single-issue (and an immoral one at that) succession isn't the same as self-determination, which is valid. But the problem comes with the scope of self-determination, and the fact that your fundamental unit of self-determination, the nation, is arbitrarily constructed and pointless, nevermind dangerous. Can you rigorously talk about this group being contained enough to justify self determination, but that a sub-group or super-group isn't? And more importantly: why are you doing this? Is the association between arbitrary imagined community and legitimate demarcation actually to the benefit of everyone?
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Oct 5, 2015 11:51
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blue squares posted:Also, I think we should avoid this thread turning into a condemnation of past colonialist/imperialistic crimes against native peoples. Clearly, there have been many atrocities committed in the name of "civilizing savages." I'm not advocating in favor of that. The past is the past. Let's debate the present. gently caress I'm ethnic cleansing! I warned you about forced acculturation bro! I told you dog!
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Oct 5, 2015 12:17
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Nevermind.
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Oct 5, 2015 13:05
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An idiotic idea. Leave the tribes alone, the last thing we need on this planet is more cultural homogenization. Not everyone on earth needs to live in the exact same way. Our systems of education are a joke, meant to babysit and burn time rather than empower youth. The schools churn out disposable drones for the workforce, it is not for the benefit of children that they are sent to such prisons. The real purpose of schools in this society is to teach children to respect authority and that violence is the monopoly of the state.
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Oct 5, 2015 17:14
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blue squares posted:My argument against isolation is focused on education. The first two items in the list argue in favor of education for all children, but the last is problematic. Given that education is a huge determining factor in life possibility (i.e., a child educated in the Rain Forest her entire life is less likely to become a doctor than one educated in an urban area), why are parents allowed to limit their children? Parents do not have the right to control 100% of the lives of their children. Why is education not one of those things parents have no say in? Your cultural biases are showing. Why do you think a child raised in an isolated culture would be less likely to be able to become a doctor than a child raised in an urbanized Western city? They are less likely to match Western cultural standards for Western-style doctoring, but given that these isolated cultures are isolated, their cultural perception of the medical profession - and the requirements to enter it - are no doubt substantially different and not dependent on Western-style education. Besides, your argument for equal opportunity is itself logically flawed. If all children are entitled to an equal-quality education, then before attacking isolated cultural groups which may just be able to offer the same education to every child, you should be focusing on the massive variance between schools in Western societies. If some kids are going to "good schools" and other kids are going to "bad schools", where is your equality? What if you take all the native kids out of the small native school every native attends and spread them randomly among Western schools, some good, some bad? Would that provide more equality of opportunity?
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Oct 5, 2015 21:19
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Main Paineframe posted:What if you take all the native kids out of the small native school every native attends and spread them randomly among Western schools, some good, some bad? Would that provide more equality of opportunity? Yes? Like, there are plenty of other arguments for and against it, but transparently yes, it would equality opportunity further? Not as much as all schools being of the same standards anyway, obviously, but absent that, random distribution is a good way to achieve that goal.
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Oct 5, 2015 22:08
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Mister Adequate posted:Yes? Like, there are plenty of other arguments for and against it, but transparently yes, it would equality opportunity further? Not as much as all schools being of the same standards anyway, obviously, but absent that, random distribution is a good way to achieve that goal. It wouldn't really because unless you're planning on giving the kids the rest of the stuff they need to make use of the education it's probably just going to give them a bunch of stuff they can't use and make them really sick.
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Oct 5, 2015 22:10
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As Main Paineframe kind of alluded to, I think we should also consider the merits of the UDHR itself. Representatives from 18 states wrote it, and only 48 states voted in favor of it in 1948, and of course nations not represented by powerful states were neither consulted nor included in the voting process. Is education actually universally important for a high quality of life, or is it highly important to us because that's what it "guarantees" in our societies? As they proved in their behavior during the process of passing the UDHR, Saudi Arabia's leaders believe that a strong faith in Islam is the key to a high quality of life in their society, and to some degree they are correct. Also, I understand OP's good intentions in trying to exclude the past's stories of assimilation, but the present is just the latest in history. Excluding history is excluding all reason.
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Oct 5, 2015 22:34
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freebooter posted:Interesting case study here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island I thought something similar to the OP when first reading of the Sentinelese people. In much the same way that I would prefer some Class II civilization monitoring Earth would have the decency to offer Earth and/or its individuals a chance to join greater galactic civilization, it seems only fair to present each generation of isolated peoples with a fair assessment of the deprivations and benefits of joining global society. I can think of a few problems with this, though: 1. Solving the disease problem 2. Finding out how to describe things a people have no frame of reference for 3. Delivering your message in a way that doesn't get the messenger shot with an arrow EDIT: This is assuming that an industrialized way of living is objectively equal in quality of life. William Bear fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Oct 5, 2015 |
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Oct 5, 2015 23:03
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Isolated cultures have had such an enlightened experience of being introduced to the wonders of civilization in the past, I can't see what could possibly go wrong. When the Sentinelese chase off boats with spears I like to think they've got a truly wise man in their society who can see which way the wind is blowing.
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Oct 5, 2015 23:04
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William Bear posted:it seems only fair to present each generation of isolated peoples with a fair assessment of the deprivations and benefits of joining global society. I mean strictly the vast majority of people in global society don't properly comprehend this either so if you figure out how to do it it may have other applications.
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Oct 5, 2015 23:23
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Uncontacted tribes in the Amazon might not have contact with global civilisation but presumably they have some interaction with contacted indigenous peoples? I'm sure they're not totally unaware that there are other people out there, and if they wanted to make contact then they'd probably find a way. Deliberately making contact with them removes all their agency in a choice which has a history of working out pretty badly for people like them. I have a special disgust for missionaries, I'm sure they think they're doing the right thing but it's pretty much just straight up cultural imperialism.
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Oct 5, 2015 23:33
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OwlFancier posted:I mean strictly the vast majority of people in global society don't properly comprehend this either so if you figure out how to do it it may have other applications. Yes, I probably understate the difficulty of that. But that sure would be interesting.
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Oct 5, 2015 23:41
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