What is Barbaric?

Let me start with a quite unrelated note. There is a custom of foot binding in Chinese culture. In short, the culture is about applying painfully tight binding to the feet of young girls to prevent further growth. In fact, the previous statement understates the pain associated with it. The following are two pictures. The first is a picture of a bound foot and the second is a Schema of an x-ray comparison between an unbound and bound foot.










It is a part of Chinese culture, but that does not prevent me from labeling this particular element as barbaric and backward. Despite several champaigns against it led by Woman's Christian Temperance Movement and other feminists, it did not end until Mao came to power:

When the Communists took power in 1949, they were able to enforce a strict prohibition on foot-binding, including in isolated areas deep in the countryside where the Nationalist prohibition had been ignored. The ban remains in effect today.

There are two takeaways. 1)The fact that certain custom/practice/etc is part of culture does not mean we cannot pass value judgement one it. Sometimes, it is outright barbaric. 2) To end certain barbaric behavior, reason might not be as helpful as a strict crack down.

Now let us imagine a church. The church pours resources from everyone and spend them on a very few selected people. Those people get educated at the expense of others being deprived of education. And the culture of that society is that the uneducated mass placing much faith on the few elites. That does not sound that inviting. Does it?  Let me go to what I intend to discuss in the beginning. To know more about Tibet, I consulted a close friend on what it is like in Tibet, and here is his/her response:

I have seen pious Tibetans, their religious devotion is incredible, but they are not perfectly kind, compassionate, and peaceful people (in fact ... someone's recent argument that Tibetan Buddhism is a culture infused with both extreme violence and extreme compassion). some are aggressive, and many are incredibly erotic and sexual. one can even argue that the complete devotion and trust of guru required in tibetan buddhism can be used to cultivate terrorism. but rather than concluding that religious devotion is the problem, I'd rather see the problem as the extreme lack of and inequality in education (religious and secular, in general). the way tibetans train lamas are perhaps elite intellectual education at its finest, and they do produce most incredible human beings, but that's the resources of the entire society poured into a few individuals. the vast majority is so un-educated that it is difficult to think about rationality. an uneducated population entrenched in a single belief system, that's like material waiting to be mobilized for collective aggression and chaos.

As an economist, I see gigantic problems right here.  Educating the rest of the population gonna be hard, because the lamas understand that once the people get educated and enlightened, they will not be as susceptible and worship lamas as much they did. The lamas stood to lose, just as the church in the past viewed science and enlightenment as its enemy. What the church did, is to turn the people against scientists and leaders of enlightenment. I suspect that is what happened in Tibet.

I called this practice "backward at best, barbaric at worst", but my friend protested against my use of the language. I stood by what I wrote however. Yes, every culture has good sides and bad sides, but certain elements are still barbaric.

As my friend later noted, most of the lamas are good-natured. Sure, just as I believe that most people in the church are wonderful people throughout history, but that does not mean, we should give them unlimited power.  For power abuse, it is not the majority that matters, it is the very few evil outliers that matters.

What should we do? There are only two ways. 1) leave it as it is 2) eliminate that element. The latter definitely is going to be painful. So I am not sure if we should go with the latter. But what I do wish to say here is that there is no middleground. It is not possible to campaign and advocate, hopefully people will ditch their old ways, as illustrated in the footbinding history. It is like a tumor that just does not heal by itself. Of course it is debatable if we need to remove the tumor or the pain of removing the tumor does not justify the removal, but I think it is overly romantic to wish for a middle ground.