Up Front

The Morlocks and the Eloi, Reconsidered

Some several months back I ran across a news story about changes affecting the Parsee culture in India. It seems that traditional Parsee practice for dealing with the deceased in their group was to have a designated handler remove the body to the Towers of Silence, five 50-ft. high stone towers where corpses are arranged as part of a circle with other bodies according to age and gender. The vultures would take care of the rest, no muss, no fuss. However, environmental changes in the last several decades have caused a sharp drop in the vulture population unmatched by an accordant drop in the death rate of the local humans. All sorts of health problems could have ensued until a member of the Parsee council recommended the installation of eight giant solar reflectors, which are speeding the rate of decomposition and cleanly disposing of the bodies in short time.

While this story may have upset your morning coffee and muffin, or disturbed your power lunch, what flashed in your mind when you read the first sentence? For most of our Westernized readers, the image generated by Parsee culture in India might well be dirt roads crowded with simply-clad people jostling with the meandering local sacred cows. Elephants and British colonialism. That’s the fault of our upbringing and culture—we can’t associate Parsees with computers and cell phones, despite the number of engineers that came over from that part of the planet to graduate from our schools and work alongside us in US industry. “Third world” remains “third world,” in ironically the same sense of perspective that many cultures in these developing nations still prophesize that the child of a beggar will also be a beggar. 

But all that’s changing, despite the increasing cultural polarization of recent years. “Industrialized” was becoming interchangeable with “civilized,” fueling a sense in many corners that we were the most civilized people to walk the earth. But then we were reminded a few months ago of Einstein, when he was asked how the next war would be fought—his reply was to suggest that the Last War would be fought with stone weapons. Despite our smart bombs, our satellite survelliance and Star Wars technology, a “primitive” cult threw some very sophisticated stone weapons at us and ran back into its caves, leaving our Great Technologies at a loss for immediate response. 

As designers know, the human factor can get very creative when applying modern technology. The key to “world design,” then, lies not only in expanding operations into international markets, but also in a greater awareness of the end users in the global community.

rmandel@nelsonpub.com