Dean MacCannell on the modern v. the non-modern world

"No other major social structural distinction (certainly not that between the classes) has received such massive reinforcement as the ideological separation of the modern form of the non-modern world. International treaties and doctrines dividing the world into multinational blocs serve to dramatize the distinction between the developed nations and the lesser ones, which are not thought to be capable of independent self-defense. Modern nations train development specialists, organizing them into teams and sending them to the underdeveloped areas of the world, which are thereby identified as being incapable of solving their own problems. The giving of this and other forms of international aid is a sine qua non of full modern status, a dependence on it is a primary indicator of a society trying to modernize itself. The national practice of keeping exact demographic records of infant mortality and literary rates, per capita income, etc, functions in the same way to separate the modern from the non-modern world along a variety of dimensions. The domestic version of the distinction is couched in economic terms, the ‘poverty line’ that separates full members of the modern world from their less fortunate fellow citizens who are victims of it, immobilized behind the poverty line in such places as Appalachia and the inner city. The field of ethnology dramatizes a still more radical separation: primitive versus modern. When the underdeveloped world fights back, the distinction is embedded in the structure of conflict, where one side uses ‘guerrilla’ while the other side uses ‘conventional’ warfare."
--Dean MacCannell, The Tourist (1976)