Increasingly, Western culture is coming to be seen as the normal way, the only way. And as more and more people around the world become competitive, greedy, and egotistical, these traits tend to be attributed to human nature. Despite persistent voices to the contrary, the dominant thinking in Western society has long assumed that we are indeed aggressive by nature, locked in a perpetual Darwinian struggle. The implications of this view for the way we structure our society are of fundamental importance. Our assumptions about human nature, whether we believe in inherent good or evil, underlie our political ideologies and thus help to shape the institutions that govern our lives.
Technological development is seen as part of a continuum of evolutionary change.
We do not distinguish between evolution and the changes wrought by the scientific revolution, forgetting that while Europe was transformed by industrialization, the majority of the world continued to live according to other principles and values. In so doing, we are effectively saying that Westerners are more highly evolved than traditional peoples. We treat technological change as more natural than the changing weather, and seem locked into the belief that wherever scientific inventiveness goes, we must follow. This is not to deny that human nature has a dark side or that the process of development has brought benefits, but Ladakh has shown me that this process exacerbates greed, competition, and aggression while vastly increasing the potential for destruction. It was never previously possible to affect the climate, to poison the seas, or to eradicate forests, animal species, and cultures at the rate that we are doing today.