Things Fall Apart-19

After a long vacation, the books that give me things to blog about have returned!

This book was written from the standpoint of a native tribal man. The majority of the book was about his life, but it also gave insight to the culture of his tribe. Their religion, customs, and society that had existed for as long as the tribes could remember were described.

The real moral conflict appears when the white men come and start taking over the culture of the locals. It is really quite insidious how they do it, they first sent a single man to a tribe, and when communications failed due to a language barrier and the man was killed an army slaughtered the first tribe.

The other tribes, hearing of this, did not dare refuse the white men when they tried to convert them to Christianity, out of fear for their lives they made minor concessions and allowed a church to be built in "the Evil Forest." From that point forward the church acted as a slow poison to the tribes, gradually converting young tribesmen and women and establishing the white government. Time passed on and soon the tribe had no choice but to do whatever the white men said. It got to the point where when the tribe met to discuss what they should do about the problem all the white men needed to do to stop them was send a few men to tell them to disband.

The question that rises from this is if this was morally correct for the whites to do. While the tribal society and religion was "primitive" in the view of the white society, their society had nothing wrong with it. They worshiped different gods, but they got married, had children, traded with each other, made loans and payed them back, and did all the things white society had done when it was at that stage of development. What right then, do we have to say that since their religion differs from ours that we must replace their society with our own? If the tribes had been allowed to develop undisturbed, who's to say they wouldn't have advanced to the same technological and economical levels that ours has?

Of course back then religion operated on the principle that if you didn't follow their god then you were a barbarian who needed to either killed or be "saved" from your own ignorance. A concept that today is infuriating to even think about. Yet somehow back then it was accepted as perfectly logical and justifiable. How that was the case is beyond me, but it was.

So my question to any readers is how do you think this mindset came to be so absolutely accepted when even the slightest ounce of common sense would disprove it?