Culture and Development

I was looking at the report of the World Commission on Culture and Development "Our Creative Diversity" (1998) and at a review of that report. Here are a couple of quotes from the report:

Development divorced from its human terms is growth without soul. Economic development in its full flowering is part of a people’s culture. This is not a view commonly held.

And:

the argument advanced in this Report is that development embraces not only access to goods and services, but also the opportunity to choose a full, satisfying, valued way of living together, the flourishing of human existence as a whole.

The report recognizes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as establishing that there are absolute criteria for development in the sense that any culture should seek to honor certain widely recognized human rights. (There have been cultures in the past that would have seen improving their ability to enslave people from other cultures as a development objective, but the world will no longer accept such a cultural aspiration as valid.)

The report recognizes that cultures change, and that an important stimulus for change is contact among cultures. A friend of mine, Bob Textor, pointed out that what we think of as the core values of our culture may change over time, raising the question of whether the current values of a culture should limit its developments in ways that culture's future peoples would find unacceptable.

The issue of how to deal with culture and cultural change in development is conceptually difficult. There are some simple things one can do to allow the people within a culture to choose while encouraging cultural changes that will achieve what are likely to be common objectives. People like for their kids to be healthy and to survive, and one can provide information showing how some cultural changes will promote health and survival, and do so in a discussion trying to find culturally acceptable changes in culture.

Cultural diversity itself has intrinsic value, but I see that as a lesser value. It is nice to have a variety of styles of food or music to choose from but I would not see people die in excess numbers to provide me those pleasures. So too, respect for other cultures is a value I hold, but that respect does not extend to people who kill their own children for reasons deemed valuable and appropriate within their own cultures.

So how does an outsider help a culture to develop in ways that satisfice its own values while achieving changes that satisfice the outsider's desire to reduce what have been termed "the worst aspects of poverty"? Perhaps we ignore the question too often,