It is true that we have science and technology that native societies may lack, but it is no less true that they possess profound spiritual resources, natural wisdom, and knowledge of their physical surroundings that we have lost. THE MODE OF LIFE of the industrialized countries of the West, this thing we call progress, is wiping out cultures at a terrifying rate. A recent study made by the linguist Ken Hale of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates that 3,000 of the 6,000 languages that exist in the world are fated to die because they are no longer spoken by children. The fragile oral traditions that have preserved ancient knowledge are being lost. The new generation turns its back on its ancestors, its traditions, its languages, dazzled by the ephemeral brilliance of progress.
Young people abandon their families and set out for the great cities, pursuing an illusion.
Most of them end up as marginal beings who never truly benefit from the modern world and yet cannot return to their villages, because they no longer belong their, either. Borges, who has spent much of his life traveling to this vanishing world, recounts that he will never forget his first trip to Mexico in the late 1960s. There, any pretext served as a reason for a fiesta. People had time to gather together in markets during the day and in the plaza at night, singing, making music, celebrating. Children ran around freely, playing and shouting, with no one watching over them, because there was no danger.