Beautiful poverty

If you're like me, you will have at some point seen pictures of rural pre-Industrial Revolution Britain, the canonical shepherd or goatherd with flock, with perhaps rambling simple dwelling in the background, and yearned for a simpler yesteryear consisting of sun, grass, and hearth, and notably not containing rush-hour traffic, overflowing email inboxes, and shopping centres on a Saturday.

Last weekend, we took a trip into the Colombian countryside. Soon after leaving the city limits of Bogota, the road took us through "campesino country". Campesinos are the peasants of Colombia, eking out a marginal living from the land by cultivating basic crops on a scrap of land, and perhaps rearing a cow for milk. Their life is no doubt picturesque. I tried and failed many times to capture on camera their picturesque poverty -- the clothes laid out neatly on the grass to dry, the self-built tumbledown dwellings, the donkey with a load of sticks weighing heavy across its back.

Unlike Colombia's urban poor, living in shanty towns hastily assembled wherever the displaced population arrive (1.5 million in Bogota's southern suburbs alone), the rural poor are lucky enough to be photogenic. Not displaced by violence, they live in steady communities, and can count on neighbours and family for support. Their lives are a small distance above gruelling grinding horror and poverty. They have a family, a place to call home, possessions, a tradition. Children learn at grandpa's knee the ways of the land.

But in our eagerness to appreciate the beauty of the simple country-dweller, we are at great risk of seeing the positive in an essentially negative situation. What hope does an intelligent, diligent, bright young woman born into such a situation have of becoming the next president of Colombia? Or a lawyer, doctor or member of Congress? Essentially none. When we look at developed countries, we find that the number of people who choose, when given a range of opportunities, to live such a nominally bucolic idyll of a life, is effectively zero. We feel that it is right that some people should be living such a simple life, so close to the land and part of a close-knit community -- whilst we ourselves nonetheless choose to work in the City, earn a six-figure sum, and live comfortably in the Home Counties with two pedigree dogs and a plasma TV.

The peasant has disappeared from British society, thanks to the Industrial Revolution. After the fact, we often bemoan the Industrial Revolution, the ensuing urbanisation, and loss of innocence and closeness to Nature. Yet the raw truth is that given the choice, nearly everyone would choose, and did indeed choose, to live in smouldering cities with some hope of wealth and betterment for their family, than a so-called happy life tending livestock.

Whilst it is only right that we should not see the development model followed by our own country as the only valid such model, we are also in danger of over-romanticising certain social states, such that we allow -- or cause -- people in other countries to stay in this model despite their own inclination to leave it.

Until every single citizen of Colombian has an equal opportunity to obtain a quality education and a career, I will continue to consider the material wealth of those who few who have had this opportunty an unfair bounty, unfairly gained, and thus not to be respected. One's right to happily enjoy the fruits of one's labour is proportional to how much others in one's society have had an equal opportunity to obtain such fruits.