Professor Reynolds links to this very lengthy essay on cultural contamination, and how that may not be as bad as some people want you to believe, by Kwame Anthony Appiah. There's far too much good content here for me to summarize, so I'll just pull out what I think is the most critical point:

So liberty and diversity may well be at odds, and the tensions between them aren't always easily resolved. But the rhetoric of cultural preservation isn't any help. Again, the contradictions are near to hand. Take another look at that Unesco Convention. It affirms the "principle of equal dignity of and respect for all cultures." (What, all cultures - including those of the K.K.K. and the Taliban?) It also affirms "the importance of culture for social cohesion in general, and in particular its potential for the enhancement of the status and role of women in society." (But doesn't "cohesion" argue for uniformity? And wouldn't enhancing the status and role of women involve changing, rather than preserving, cultures?) In Saudi Arabia, people can watch "Will and Grace" on satellite TV - officially proscribed, but available all the same - knowing that, under Saudi law, Will could be beheaded in a public square. In northern Nigeria, mullahs inveigh against polio vaccination while sentencing adulteresses to death by stoning. In India, thousands of wives are burned to death each year for failing to make their dowry payments. Vive la difference? Please.

I'm currently reading Jack McDevitt's Omega, which involves a sorta Prime Directive situation like in Star Trek: a catastrophe looms for a primitive culture, and the cultural preservationists would rather let the natives die than save them and thus expose them to a more advanced culture. The older I get, the more arrogant the Prime Directive sounds to me: sacrificing people's lives for some supercilious view of "culture" that sounds on awful lot like "keeping the primitives in their place". Kwame Anthony Appiah skewers this notion quite adeptly. His essay is long, but it's well worth your attention.

UPDATE: I just read the credits at the end of the essay. It turns out to be an extract from the author's book, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, coming later this month. Gee, just what I needed: an excuse to shop for books...

...I'm just calling it far better news than I predicted 9 hours ago:

SAGO, W.Va., Wednesday, Jan. 4 - Forty-one hours after an explosion trapped 13 men in a West Virginia coal mine here, family members and a state official said 12 of the miners had been found alive Tuesday night.

Earlier Tuesday evening, the body of one miner was found 11,200 feet from the mine entrance, within a few hundred feet of a vehicle used to transport the workers deep into the mine, company officials said. The miner was not identified, and the cause of his death was unclear.

Joe Thornton, deputy secretary for the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety, said the rescued miners were being examined at the mine shortly before midnight and would soon be taken to nearby hospitals. Mr. Thornton said he did not know details of their medical condition.

One man lost is tragic, of course; but after they found his body, I expected to hear about twelve more bodies by the morning. Seldom have I been so glad to be wrong.

UPDATE: Communications breakdown. Instead of one fatality, there's one survivor, who's in critical condition right now.

Seldom have I been so sorry to be right.