Sen, Respect for Other Cultures, and the Power of Money

            In the tenth chapter of Development as Freedom, Sen talks about what it means to allow cross-cultural influence: “My point is not at all to argue against the unique importance of each culture, but rather to plead in favor of the need for some sophistication in understanding cross-cultural influences as well as our basic capability to enjoy products of other cultures and other lands.” (244) This quote made me think about a different quote he used earlier in the same chapter, when he wrote, “the sun does not set on the empire of Coca-Cola or MTV.” (240) In particular, it made me think about one of the largest purveyors of Coca-Cola, McDonalds, on whose empire, the sun certainly never sets. Sen asks us to respect the autonomy of each culture to decide what aspects of other cultures it will or will not accept into its own. But what to do with the prevailing power of money? If the way we should help countries develop moving forward is to allow them to decide their own fates democratically, what happens to the ones where McDonalds and other large, Western corporations have already entered? Are the former values of these cultures an unfortunate, already-gone past? Do they then vote to exterminate the McDonalds and Nikes of the world from their midst, only to leave their economy in shambles (likely for generations) until they can get back to the way they want to do things? Sen also wrote: “Ways of life can be preserved if the society decides to do just that, and it is a question of balancing the costs of such preservation with the value that the society attaches to the objects and the lifestyles preserved.” (241) This would seem to indicate that he would think, in the aforementioned case, that the country could choose to extricate the corporations, but do so at its own cost. Sen, I think, would conveniently say that there are other variables than money, but it seems to be a powerful one in the world in which we live. That decision, between some wealth (albeit very minimal) and none (in addition to a long road back to economic viability), is a terrible and difficult one to have to make.