Western lifestyles

By P.V. Narasimha Rao

The Hindu: Monday, Mar 22, 2004

The first and second World Wars were fought mainly between white nations. The conflict had now to be, logically, between Western and non-Western cultures since the cultural dimension had played an important part in empire-building. This automatically brought on the questions of colour and race, taken simply as a means of easy identification. The result is that mankind is riddled with multiple prejudices that become concomitants of the erstwhile white man's burden.

Samuel Huntington, while offering his theory of a clash of civilisations, also predicted that problems of stark and sub-human poverty of the twentieth and earlier centuries might not persist in their previous form. This prediction may not be far wrong. Hereafter poverty will increasingly take on a highly disguised appearance, much more difficult to detect and address; it may even look as if it has actually gone down both in developed and developing countries.

This change has come and is coming from Western lifestyles; it is so attractive that it is sure to engulf almost all societies. It is a system of usurious loaning in which a person is able to line up important consumer items all at once and set up his home establishment just as a person who has spent his own money and bought each single item separately. There is nothing to indicate that one of them has to pay for his purchases almost for the rest of his life. Life-style obstacles are thus removed at once and a veneer of equality is created. This appearance tends to divert the attention of the middle class from real economic issues to a considerable extent. Yet the scourge of increasing disparity in the world does not go away.