Whataboutism. Yawn.
It’s a valid point. If the Sentinelese had white skin, names like “John” and “Mary,” wore jackets and ties and dresses, and practiced fundamentalist Christianity, SDMBers would be clamoring for UN forces to strap on full body armor and invade so that their women could get on contraception, go to grad school, and get jobs at PR firms in Manhattan.
Good ressurection of a thread.
I applaud you for your creative fantasies about liberals (and liberal Dopers in particular). Truly you have a wonderful imagination!
There’s some truth to it, and not just that liberals would care. The more we identify with members of a group of strangers, the more we care about the particular people, and the less we care about the group as an entity.
“The poison Oracle”, by Peter Dickinson, is mostly a light murder mystery, but it is set in Iraq, mostly among an isolated tribe of “Marsh Arabs”, and over the course of the story the protagonist goes from respecting their culture to wanting to rescue members of it. I think he makes a good case in general.
And the last time we went over to Iraq and Afghanistan to save them from their primitive culture, how did that work out for us?
Can we please gave some humility about what saving these people would actually mean in practice? We would have to shoot half of them and send the rest to what would boil down to prison camps for reeducation, where most of the survivors would die soon enough from disease and culture shock.
Why are we talking about sending what would amount to an invasion force to the islands to rescue them from themselves when we won’t even help refugees who show up at our border begging for our help?
Serious question, why are these people not allowed self determination?
I can relate with some of the desires for justice or …?
But I really don’t get how people can claim to be patriots yet attempt to deny others the right to self govern.
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
Does that only apply when you are the person who wants to self govern, but not when you want to force “injuries and usurpations” on others? I get that humans can tend to be selfish, but it seems that those who claim to honor the ideals of the founding fathers the most never want to grant those same ideals to others.
Depends on what you’re talking about. These guys are under the jurisdiction of India, and could be subject to Indian law just like everyone else in that country. India has chosen to take a mostly hands off approach. They are not under the jurisdiction of US law, so Americans have no business interfering.
The US does grant some exemptions from US law to certain American subgroups (the Amish come to mind), but there are limits. If the Amish decided to institute human sacrifice, or even if they decided no education for girls, the state or the feds would jump in quickly to stop it.
If the Sentinelese were white Christians with names like “John” and “Mary,” this thread would never have gotten off the ground.* No one’s started a thread asking if we should invade Islay because the inhabitants might be drinking too much whisky, could be molesting their sheep, probably eat haggis (which by U.S. law isn’t even food), and one crackpot poster thinks having a local Starbucks should be Article 31 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
I think we should let them be, because I consider them my equals and respect their right to choose their destiny. Everything we know about them says they want to be left alone. If global warming or anything else makes it literally a matter of life and death, we should intervene, because it’s safe to assume they don’t want to die. Otherwise, we should follow their expressed wishes, because they’re adults with moral dignity, even if they are black and naked.
E.T.A. Yeah, what rat avatar said.
*Although if they were fundamentalist Christians, a few dopers might say they should be kidnapped and deprogrammed into rational atheists.
But what constitutes self determination, and for whom? It’s not an easy question. Unless a society operates in a reasonably democratic manner, and moreover protects the basic human rights of all its citizens (including minorities), then what about the right to self-determination of those who lack any power within that society?
Only because the Sentinelese were part of the Indian British colony. Remember we also refused to accept the rule of the crown and I can’t find any treaty signed with these people.
They existed before the colonial period, and being “uncontacted peoples” never were the spoils of war. As they consistently refused any interaction with the outside world, the problem still exists and a historical colonial claim doesn’t change that fact.
It appears that the Europeans hadn’t even attempted to establish ownership through conquest in the area BTW. This seems counter to the supposed ideals of self determination and sovereignty most people who claim to be patriots seem to hold dear.
Part of self-determination is having knowledge of your options. It also allows those who wish to leave the system the ability to do so. It’s not self-determination if you’re unaware of any other way. If you’re locked in a room with a secret exit, it’s not self determination if you don’t leave the room. If thiscwere a case where the Sentinalese were fully aware of their options and said, "No thanks, we prefer our current existence, then yeah, I’d say that we need to leave them alone. What I object to is a paternalistic attitude where they are “protected” from modern society as though they were children incapable of making a choice in the matter.
Not sure if you mean the OPs questions or real life, but the Sentinelese ARE allowed self-determination; in fact, they may be the most self-determined people in the world. They are basically their own nation, with the Indian government protecting them (and they probably don’t even realize that.)
Philosophically and ethically there’s a lot to unpack here. I will not succeed.
Intuitively it seems like we should follow nature’s cue to let people live as they wish if they are isolated enough to do so, and don’t otherwise impinge on our modern ideals of how society ought to be.
But to stretch the philosophical experiment, what if we observe them doing something like female genital mutilation? It offends our sense of harm to the innocent, of harm to children, of discriminatory harm to women. If we put ourselves in the position of a very young woman facing female genital mutilation, what would justify a stronger person allowing this to happen? That someone needs this to happen as kind of a living museum exhibit, or to satisfy someone’s ideal that societies should govern themselves as they choose? I feel like the victim would find both of those rationalizations lacking in the extreme.
I don’t think there are any categorical answers to the question. The best course of action would be involve gathering as much covert surveillance as possible, learning about the people as much as possible, and then deliberately weighing whether certain modern “human rights” impinge on their cultural practices. We have a moral obligation to learn as much as possible, we don’t have a moral obligation to let people harm other people.
Is there a human right to harm others? I say no. Is there a human right to remain uncontacted by other humans? I say no. We make decisions prioritized first on the knowledge to be gained from observing these tribes, second based on whether they are harming one another, third based on our respect of their autonomy. I could be persuaded differently regarding the order of these priorities, but I firmly believe we must make some value judgment based on these priorities.
Hunter-gatherer societies are more democratic than our own.
How would we make them aware of their options? We don’t speak each other’s language. We could invade their island, wearing Kevlar armor so they don’t shoot us, sleep in shifts so they don’t kill us in our sleep, eavesdrop on their conversations, and practice speaking Sentinelese to them, even though they don’t want to talk to us or teach us. We might learn how to say, “Your mother pleasures herself with rotten tubers,” or, “May the spirits of the evil dead eat your liver,” because we’d probably hear that a lot, but I can’t see how we could become fluent enough to tell them about the outside world. Or we could invade and kill them until the survivors were frightened into being nice to us, and then learn their language. Or we could kidnap them, isolate them from each other, and surround them with Indians until they got lonely enough to learn English or Hindi or whatever. If that made any of them say, “Thanks for making me aware of my options; I want to move to Kolkata,” I’d be flabbergasted. I don’t think any of these are anywhere near as moral as just leaving them alone. They know as much as they want to know.
My stance is that they are, and should be.
I feel that lots of people who want them “arrested” or “charged” do not, and I have a hunch that those people would also believe that they have the right to use deadly force if someone broke into their home.
There is no moral difference between “stand your ground” laws and their actions. The only reason it is even perceived to be that way is that Western society looks on them with pity because they are “savages”.
These people don’t want to be “saved” from anything. It is only cultural bias that causes people to think that they need to be exposed to technology. These people made their desires clear and deserve those wishes to be respected.
However you see none of that happening to any real extent with the Amish. While girls in the Amish community get very little education and few choices about the trajectory of their life you hardly see a call to arms by liberals wanting to dismantle Amish communities. Frankly I find the lack of education and allegations of abuse sad and scary, but no one is calling for intervention on any meaningful scale.
They need to be protected against modern society, because our track record of integrating uncontacted/lightly contacted peoples is pretty awful. Admittedly, I can imagine a moral and expensive strategy for pulling that off. I doubt whether India would consider it, and frankly I doubt whether they should consider it given that solid majorities in their country live in poverty. They have bigger fish to fry.
As for the US, we devote a minuscule fraction of our economy to third world aid, including private third world aid. There are plenty of effective projects to throw money at; I see little justification in attempting to introduce an island nation to modern civilization in the face of staunch and justified hostility. It’s high risk with low probable net reward.
India’s policy of “Eyes on, hands off” is a framework I support.
Why do you get to decide what they need protected from? These aren’t endangered animals who need their habitat protected. They’re human beings with free will and fundamental human rights. There are at least four articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that we are arguably ignoring in our treatment of them (19,21,25,26)
You are denying them fundamental information about the nature of the world and their place in it. You are denying them food security and modern medicine. You are not allowing them representation in international bodies, nor elected representation in their own government. A simple question I would ask is whether you would be willing to go back to a stone age hunter gathere existence. My guess is you would say No and if you don’t say No, then you’re an idiot. Why then do you condemn an entire people to that decision? Again, we’re not talking about people that understand modern societies and reject them, we’re talking people who never get to choose to continue existence as they have it or embrace modernity.
So? Almost all the borders of modern countries could be disputed if we went back far enough. The international community recognizes India’s sovereignty over the islands, so that’s pretty much the end of it. As it is, the Indian government is leaving them alone and preventing most outsiders from invading the land. If they were on their own, they’d be much worse off.
They can stand in line with the Welsh, the Scotts, the Basques, the Native Hawaiians, the Catalonians, etc, etc, etc. I don’t know who these patriots you are speaking of, but I guess I’m not one of them. The Sentinalese have the best arrangement the modern world is going to give them. They probably don’t realize it, and that’s part of the point.