Technology and Life in The Hills (3 February 2010)

I’m thinking today about necessity again, a theme which seems to be coming up frequently on this trip and is coming dangerously close to being the theme of this blog.  This time it started innocently enough, at one of those bizarre celebrations of local culture that are both the burden and the reward of touring the fringes of modernity.
 
On my second night in the remote hillside community of Samibhanjyang, at the end of my first day coaxing English words out of Nepali students at my volunteer post, my two fellow volunteers (“Clive and Jude” from The U.K.) and I were being forced to dance.  We had just hiked 2 hours to reach another equally isolated village where we were greeted with garlands of flowers before being asked to hike another hour and a half in the dark of night to see an unimpressive temple at the top of a ridge.  When we returned to the village there was a traditional dance show planned.  It began with two precious Nepali teenage girls dancing with closed eyes accompanied by a steady drumbeat and the singing of five or six men who had a disconcerting habit of repeatedly stopping to chat, presumably about the next verse, while the girls stood and waited with their eyes still dutifully shut.   A crowd of villagers, perhaps one hundred, was gradually forming a circle to celebrate the presence of Westerners.  I had been informed by Clive and Jude that we would probably be expected to dance for the crowd’s amusement, although we all still held out hope that we had managed to convince our host that the march up the ridge had rendered us unfit for dancing.  When the girls finally opened their eyes, walked over, and dragged us to the dirt dance-floor, we accepted our inevitable loss of dignity the only way one can:  With unrestrained enthusiasm, hamming it up just as the crowd demanded.  As Clive had put it, encouraging me with his endearingly British word-choice, “There’s no way around it, mate.  You are going to look like a tit.” And look like a tit I did.

When we finally sat down to wild applause and gratefully watched a few Nepali boys take our places, dancing with far superior grace, I started wondering if this traditional dancing was considered “cool”.  I wondered if these boys had peers who were watching now with condescending smirks, as I likely would be if they were my friends in The States, or if they were regarded locally as smooth, possibly even desirable to the ladies.  In this casual way, I stumbled onto the thought, obvious after it occurred to me, that most of these people have no electricity in their homes and very few have television.  Pop culture magazines are not sold in either of the village’s two shops.  I doubt that most of these kids have even seen a recent Nepali film.   How do they know what’s cool?  Before I could stop it, the next thought rolled in: Are they perhaps better off for that lack of influence?        

Before leaving Kathmandu, I had spent an hour back at Silver Home arguing with Hugo, while we listened to obscurely fashionable American rock music from his computer, championing the position that technology has been undeniably a net positive in the world.   Sure, there’s the military nightmare, my line of reasoning went, but there’s also penicillin and the power of widely disseminated information.  You can’t say you’d keep the technology you like best and still argue that it’s a net negative.  To make a sound argument you would have to imagine a world where technology stops at a certain year and say that such a society is better than the one we have.  I still feel good about my thesis, but out here where the presence of two computers not yet connected to the internet makes our school a rarity and nobody has indoor plumbing, I find myself unexpectedly close to that hypothetical world.  I also notice a peculiar dizzying sensation brought on by my well-crafted reasoning slipping a little.  Take all modern technology away and I doubt these people’s lives would change much.  They would still be much harder than mine, but not much harder than they are now.  Of course I’m not sure how happy they are now, but I’m willing to bet that if you conducted a survey there would not be a noticeable gap between the relative happiness of their society and ours.  This is not to say that I’ve changed my mind, just that the points don’t seem as obvious as they did a week ago.