Moreover we find our spiritual and moral values eroded as the kind of development paradigm perpetrated by the West had been anchored on a very materialistic perspective of the universe devoid of any spiritual presupposition or moral import, such that the materialistic development paradigm blatantly disregards our religious and spiritual traditions which have shaped our histories, our worldviews and patterns of relationships.
Thus in the name of development human rights are violated, indigenous communities are disenfranchised from their ancestral abode, the ecology destroyed and inequity created between those who control development, and, therefore, become the dominant figures in the development process, and those dominated who become less and less able to assert themselves as those who control development become more and more powerful for they are able to put the product of development into their own strategic advantage.
In this kind of situation where development coming from another perspective had been imposed, and, therefore, becomes responsible for the changes in the traditional patterns of particular societies, it cannot avoid but to run into some forms of conflict with the host culture, namely with its basic beliefs and values, worldviews and attitudes toward life, which conflict only subsides or can only be subdued, when the host culture finally adapts itself to, or is coopted by, the new patterns introduced by the imposition of such a development paradigm.
In this context we can say that development is anti-culture. This is a very serious judgment against development, i.e. against the Western model of development, as culture is the expression of the spirit of a people, of its experiences lived and transmitted from generation to generation giving it a character distinctly its own. To disregard the culture of a people is to kill its spirit. Without its spirit, people lose their particular identities and they die as a people.