Third World People Shouldn’t Be Enticed to Emigrate to the West
(Watch video of pilgrims returning home from Dhaka)
There is a new secular moralism that is securely lodged in media, education, and government in both America and Europe. It drives foreign policy and public awareness of Third World issues.
But, alas, this rival to traditional religion is based on snobbery, keeping in mind that a “snob” (according to the online dictionary) is “a person with an exaggerated respect for high social position or wealth who seeks to associate with social superiors and dislikes people or activities regarded as lower-class.” Charity unwittingly demeans those who don’t need help.
In fact, a snob is anyone “who thinks they are better than someone else based upon superficial factors.” Sure, wealthy people are surrounded by all the emblems of material well-being, but are they necessarily happy? Advertising and global marketing have made poorer folks long for things they don’t have the money for. Many migrate from rural settings to urban jungles in search of novelty and increased consumerism. But are they happier?
Immigrants currently pouring into Europe aren’t just escaping war (they could go south, east, or west) but they really want economic spending power. Isn’t this the impetus of northward global migration these days?
Aggressive religious reformers like ISIS, however, have already turned down the decadence of the West, such as LGBT “civil rights” and other forms of cultural partying. To ISIS militants, Charlie Hebdo and Eagles of Death Metal are an ugly face of modernism that they’d rather die (and kill) to prevent being forced to accept, as pointed out in a recent post:
“The Friday the 13th attack at the Bataclan in Paris is emblematic: instead of operetta by Jacques Offenbach, the theater became a party venue for the Eagles of Death Metal concert. A banner for the rock band might have read ‘licentiousness,’ but the word is too revealing to be used. While Christians politely gripe from the pulpit, ISIS has demonstrated that it will take the fight to the streets.”
Religion everywhere is being hollowed out and revised into nothingness: “Both Islam and Christianity hark back to an ancient world now being quickly drowned by secular forces.” Those who meditate daily on the Bible and the Koran all but live in a world thousands of years old. Moral relationships and spiritual realities counted for everything back then. People were happy even under social constraints that we would call dire poverty today.
So should we pity the ancients? Should we wish upon them all of the problems of life in the modern world? Has everything gotten better and better over the centuries, or worse and worse?
We in the affluent West are cultural snobs who look down on everyday people in the Congo’s Kinshasa (earlier post) or Bangladesh’s Dhaka (video above) but aren’t these Third World people just as happy as Westerners in their own way? As the video describes, “At the end of Ramadan, thousands cram into ferries and overloaded trains, leaving Dhaka to return to their villages. This is Bangladesh during a very chaotic rush hour.”
Perhaps those in the West are actually less happy. Didn’t Thoreau note for Americans that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
The Dhaka video shows a teeming humanity, but isn’t there also excitement and hint of unpredictability more satisfying than anything we find in safe and orderly crowds at pro football games in the US? After all, they were just returned from a real religious holiday, perhaps taken more seriously than the excess of consumerism that has gutted (for most) the holy day still called (by some) Christmas:
