Reverence for the Primitive
By Michael S. Berliner (New York Times, January 6, 1995)

Your Jan. 3 review of  PBS's "Tribe That Time Forgot" mentions barbaric practices and the thoroughgoing communism of the Amazon's Arara people. You then repeat without comment (but implied agreement) the message of the program: Arara existence is "endangered" by mining and industrialization.

Indeed it is endangered, the same way that disease is endangered by medicine, slavery is endangered by freedom, poverty is endangered by wealth, and mindlessness is endangered by reason. Such "danger" is what makes human life possible.

Politically correct reverence for the primitive is bad enough, but it's even more ludicrous when high technology is used to pound the message home.

  
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