Book Review – Ancient futures: learning from Ladakh (Can development truly be for happiness?)

I read and wrote a book review of the book Ancient futures: learning from Ladakh by Helena Norberg-Hodge.

 

When we transform backward societies into modern ones, we often call the process ‘development’, ‘urbanization’ and ‘westernization’. Development is an effort to change the society we live in for the better. Through development, societies become more convenient and richer. Korea has also been able to create a society that is different from the past when it was poor through the process of development.
However, the word ‘development’ seems to be far from the word ‘happiness’. If you look at the happiness index published by British psychologist Rothwell and life counselor Cohen, the countries with the highest happiness index are mostly poor countries. There are also many countries that are economically rich but do not have high levels of happiness, so development is not a path to happiness. So we need to think about whether development is desirable.
Helena Norberg-Hodge answers this question in her book ‘Ancient futures: learning from Ladakh’, which describes the author’s thoughts and feelings during her 16-year stay in Ladakh. Ladakh is called “Little Tibet,” and although it is part of the Indian territory, it was a self-sufficient community with its own language and Buddhist culture. However, when the central government of India decided to open up the region to foreign tourists, the rustic Ladakh began to change. While there are certainly good things that development has brought to the people of Ladakh, the author focuses more on the values of the past that have been lost in the process.
The book is organized into three parts. Part 1, Tradition, depicts a simpler, happier version of Ladakh society. Part 2, “Change,” describes how Ladakh is changing under the influence of Western culture. In Part 3, “Learning from Ladakh,” the author, who has been observing these processes, writes his thoughts on progress and development in a simple style. This contrast between the first and second parts of the book made me feel sorry for the situation in Ladakh, which made the author’s arguments in the third part even more poignant.
In Part 1, Ladakh is portrayed as a happy, almost utopian society. Ladakhis work only four months a year, and their behavior is always relaxed. There is no concept of haves and have-nots, and they are content with what they have in a beautiful natural landscape. The author looks at this with a warm gaze and takes time for self-reflection.
Part 2 shows Ladakh after it was opened to foreign tourists by the central government of India. As tourism developed, Ladakhis began to earn more money. Money was never important to them, but once they started making money, they became attached to it. People became greedy, Ladakh’s youth saw Ladakhi culture as inferior to Western culture, and gradually, Ladakh’s nature began to be destroyed.
Part 3 summarizes the author’s impressions of these changes in Ladakh. First of all, the author points to ‘globalization’ as the fundamental cause of Ladakh’s deterioration. He argues that it is not only desirable to follow the same path that developed countries have taken, but that a leisurely life based on frugality is the way forward.
However, the author does not advocate a simple return to the old society. The kind of development that he negatively views is the conventional development that pursues only efficiency, which he calls Western development. As an alternative to such conventional development, he advocates a different kind of development, development on a ‘human scale’. In other words, “anti-development,” or “the Ladakh Project,” seeks to revive traditional values by promoting technologies that use energy that does not harm the environment, such as solar heating and gravity-fed water pumps. The author hopes that through this endeavor, the future of Ladakh will be more valuable and happier.

“There is no such thing as poverty here” – Chewang Palzor (Ladakh resident), 1975
“I hope you can help us Ladakhis, we are so poor.” – Chewang Palzor, 1983

This is the beginning of a chapter that struck me the most as I read the book. Development made a happy man unhappy in eight years. Is this what we think development is? It is obvious that the ills caused by development, such as the gap between the rich and poor and environmental pollution, cannot be solved by the same kind of development. That’s why values such as ecologicalism, which the author advocates, make sense.
However, our society is already steeped in materialism. The more we obsess over material things, the less we value spiritual values. We spend most of our lives trying to make money, and even though we know it’s wrong, we can’t easily do anything to fix it, so the author’s argument sounds too idealistic to apply to modern, Westernized society. Just as you can find values in Ladakh that you can’t find in the modern world, you’d have to give up too many conveniences, dynamics, and other things that you can only find in the modern world to follow the author’s ideas.
Still, I’m inclined to support “humane” attempts to revive traditional values in Ladakh. I hope that the author’s idea that true progress cannot come without respect for tradition and nature will blossom in Ladakh.