culture blurb...A Path of Our Own and the Dilemma of “Progress”

firstprinciples.com:

An important observation governs Adam Webb’s fine book, A Path of Our Own: the modern world often arrives in rural places, and then is inevitably sustained there, by violence. That the violence may have associations with the left and right respectively is ultimately irrelevant: in the Andean village of Pomatambo, which is the object of Webb’s investigation, the peasants have suffered more harm because of violent revolutions than because of poverty, but alleviating that poverty by importing unfettered capitalism will perpetuate another kind of violence that will prove equally, and perhaps more lastingly, destructive. This is another way of saying that for Webb the line between the left and the right disappears as both sides, disdaining peasant life, trumpet their programs in the name of progress. They do so with little or no regard for their putative beneficiaries and no eyes to see the good that may obtain amid the penury they rightly wish to mitigate.