Cash poor, culturally rich?

Mark Krikorian identifies as embodying a "crunchy dilemma" this story out of Laos. It seems that as a historic Laotian Buddhist city becomes a popular destination for cultural tourism, it is seeing the very thing that makes it so significant destroyed. Excerpt:

Luang Prabang, a place of mists and temples in the mountains of central Laos, was until recently one of the last pristine remnants of traditional culture in a region that is rapidly leaving its past behind.

Today, Luang Prabang displays preservation’s paradox. It has saved itself from modern development by packaging itself for tourists, but in the process has lost much of its character, authenticity and cultural significance.

Like some similar places around the world, this small 700-year-old city of fewer than 20,000 people is being transformed into a replica of itself: its dwellings into guest houses, restaurants, souvenir shops and massage parlors; its rituals into shows for tourists.

“Now we see the safari,” said Nithakhong Somsanith, an artist and embroiderer who works to preserve traditional arts. “They come in buses. They look at the monks the same as a monkey, a buffalo. It is theater.”

Here's the killer quote:

Tourist brochures describe Luang Prabang as a place where “time stood still”; poverty and hardship have allowed the past to linger.

“The paradox is that Unesco gives out the Heritage Site label partly to reduce poverty, but reducing poverty is reducing heritage,” Mr. Rampon said. "If you want to preserve heritage, you must keep poverty."

I am reminded of what Jonathan Hale observed in his great book "The Old Way of Seeing." He pointed out that the town of Newburyport, Mass., had been a prosperous city until about 1875. "For a hundred years," he writes, "almost nothing was added or taken away; the town survived in genteel shabbiness, until a renewal project fixed it up during the 1970s. Newburyport today preserved the old spirit of harmony, from the time before it was lost to everyday American architecture."

An American town that was doing well until the Civil War, more or less, and then was frozen for a hundred years, today looks vastly better than a town that was swamped by the modernist bulldozer. The paradox, of course, is that relative poverty froze the town at what was a beautiful era of architectural history. (I think one of our regular readers who lives in an old New England village remarked the other day that the reason her town is so lovely and walkable today is that it was poor during the era when cities were rebuilt to accomodate cars and the assumptions of mid-century modernity). A town that fell into poverty in 1960, though, would today look horrible (I was driving yesterday through a section of Dallas that has been unchanged architecturally since around that era, because of poverty, and it's an aesthetic disaster).

It all goes back to the same basic point: what are we willing to sacrifice in terms of wealth to conserve things of greater value? It's not an easy question, or one with obvious answers that fit every case. But in no case should we presume that wealth and "progress" will be unambiguously good, and should be accepted without protest.