"Most foreign residents prophesy that Bali's vital culture is doomed, and will wither and die within ten or fifteen years. This may be over-gloomy, but certainly Balinese culture is in danger, and will die out or be debased by bastardized westernization unless something is done to check its decline. The question is what, and how? I can only hope that the Indonesian government will realize the value, to its own country and to the world, of this rich product of the centuries, and that Unesco will justify the 'C' in its name---C for Culture---and do all in its power to help. No one wants to keep the Balinese in a state of ill-health and ignorance: but instead of being pushed by well-meaning but ill-considered efforts of overzealous missionaries and administrators and 'scientific' experts to believe that their traditional culture is a symbol of backwardness, to be sacrificed on the twin altars of Christian doctrine and technological advance, they could be encouraged in the truer and profounder belief in the essential validity of their indigenous arts and ceremonials, and helped in the task of adapting them to modern standards. A traditional culture, like a wild species of animal or plant, is a living thing. If it is destroyed, the world is the poorer; nor can it be artificially re-created. But being alive, it can evolve to meet new conditions. It is an urgent but sadly neglected task of the present age to discover the means whereby the flowerings of culture shall not be extinguished by the advances of science and technique, but shall cooperate with them in the general enrichment of life. And in coping with this task we must not forget that population increase can make it more difficult, by forcing people to think of how merely to stay alive, less of how to live."
Julian Huxley
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