Sick Societies

This review of the book Sick Societies fits with the ending of the Book of Mormon (and of the Book of Ether).  In short, not every society is functional.  Societies can get locked into nasty and destructive practices that keep them back or even cause them to dwindle to extinction.  The Tasmanians, e.g. (not mentioned in the article).  Some of the societies mentioned were locked into cycles of genocidal violence and feuding among themselves, just like in the Book of Mormon.

I believe that our own society has a number of nonfunctional features, many of them comparatively recent innovations within the last decades or the last century  (serial monogamny and widespread divorce come to mind) but some even older than that, and we collectively are blind to it because our society is comparatively more functional than most.  But only comparatively.  Like Adam and Even in the garden, we keep accepting a simulacra of godliness.  ‘You shall be as gods,’ the serpent said, and we said, hey, close enough.  I say this as a proponent of Western civilization.  It really is superior in many, many ways.  But only comparatively superior.  We look down and think we are something.  We should look up, and realize we are nothing.

This has implications for the Saints.  The worst thing the Gentiles ever did to us was make us think our mediocrity was excellence because they were worse than mediocre.

Here’s another interesting aspect of sick societies that has implications for the gospel, particularly the 2nd Coming.

In many cases, though, small-scale societies were delighted to abandon practices that ethnographers had convinced themselves were central to their culture. The Dugum Dani of western Papua New Guinea were so notoriously warlike that when an Australian police post was introduced to the area, anthropologist Karl Heider predicted that it would do little to stem the Dani’s endemic violence. In fact, though, they quickly abandoned their warfare as soon as the presence of the colonial authorities gave them a plausible coordinating mechanism, and many later expressed relief that they were free of the cycle of violence and retribution.

When Christ comes, we will greet him as a liberator.