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50 pages 1 hour read

Wade Davis

The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2009

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Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 5 Summary: “Century of the Wind”

Spreading out of Africa and across the earth, humanity has diversified into countless unique cultures that represent “ten thousand different ways of being” (163). Half of these cultures are today nearing extinction, and with them their cultural wisdom will be erased. We may think these people fade away due to the natural progress of society, but this is untrue. Davis asserts that “in every case these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable and overwhelming external forces” (167).

The great buffalo herds of North America were almost fully extinguished in a single decade. By 1890 the sun dance of the Kiowa was outlawed, and the people waned, wiped out by disease. This is only one example of the two-fold destruction of culture and landscape that occurred across the earth. The outlawing of sacred ritual expressions goes hand-in-hand with genocide. Eduardo Galeano calls the 20th century the “the century of the wind” (171), reminding us that “these fateful events happened not in the distant past but in the lifetimes of our own grandparents, and they continue to this day” (171).

The Penan people of Borneo are “a culture of hunters and gatherers often said to be among the last nomadic peoples of Southeast Asia” (172). Not truly nomadic, their movement in the forest is cyclical, ensuring the consistent replenishing of the resources they harvest. Penan society is permeated with “a sense of stewardship” that dictates “consistently the manner in which the people utilize and apportion the environment” (172).

As all Penan people are self-sufficient, living on what the forest provides, their culture lacks significant social hierarchy. They perceive wealth as the strength of social relationships, so social conflict is very rare and reciprocity is constant. When taken to North America, they saw the continent’s greatest shame as homelessness and were unable to understand how people could let their peers live in such destitution.

By the 1980s the Penan homelands were set upon by logging industries. The government of Malaysia, leading the logging endeavor, aimed to assimilate the Penan for the benefit of this industry. Today their culture is gone.

A similar story is that of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, whose destruction began with the Chinese Republic’s march on Lhasa in 1959. Mao’s government aimed to destroy the old world to found a new communist order of China, and over 1 million Tibetans were killed in the process. This was done in the name of progress, but in reality the Tibetan Buddhists killed were deep into a progression of what Davis’s friend, biologist-cum-monk Matthieu Ricard, calls a “science of the mind” (183). Their religion is “a spiritual path informed by 2,500 years of empirical observation and deduction” (187), centered on curing the suffering of ignorance through dispossession of worldly illusions such as wealth. With Ricard, Davis visited the monk Tsetsam Ani, who lives in solitude in Tibet as a true bodhisattva—one who reaches enlightenment but remains on earth to assist others. The ideas of the Buddhists and the Penan are very different from the “cult of progress” (188) that drives the Western world.

Singular adaptive challenges typically have waterfall effects within cultures that end up defining their ideas of humanity (189). Such is true for the Rendille, Samburu, Ariaal, Boran, and Gabra, all nomadic peoples of the Sahara. Their adaptation to desert landscapes is the foundation of their initiation and marriage rites and their conception of social good. As with so many cultures, external pressure from Western nations to begin sedentary lives destroyed their traditional economy, adaptations, and culture.

Today we risk confining all human imagination into the shallow history since the Industrial Revolution, erasing all other understandings of the meaning of being alive. But “modernity” is just a word that is invoked to express our particular worldview; it is nothing but “an expression of our cultural values. It is not some objective force removed from the constraints of culture” (193). All other cultures are equally modern, and their ways of life equally valid. Certainly, our technological and medical accomplishments are marvelous, but they are “balanced by the embrace of an economic model of production and consumption that compromises the life supports of the planet” (195) and exploits developing nations. Davis writes that “when peoples and cultures are squeezed, extreme ideologies often emerge” (198), and these ideologies are currently active, and highly dangerous, all over the world.

We are also awakening to the destruction of the biosphere and our fragile existence on this planet. Canada is “prepared to acknowledge past mistakes and seek appropriate means of restitution” (204) with the Inuit people of Nunavut, which is a good example of nations’ ability to understand “that unique ethnicities, indigenous peoples, First Nations, do not stand in the way of a country’s destiny; rather they contribute to it, if given a chance” (204). The Inuit of Canada are a highly resourceful people who survive expertly in constant sub-zero conditions. In the 1950s the Canadian government pushed them into settlements, and even more recently many Inuit children were abducted into residential schools. Today their world of ice is literally melting away—a true tragedy, as this occurs “on the very eve of their emergence as a culture reborn politically, socially, and psychologically” (213).

The effects of climate change on the global population has already been and will continue to be catastrophic. Many of the world’s indigenous cultures are doing more to stop it than the policies of developed nations. The only way our solution as a species may emerge is through listening to the wisdom of the world’s ancient cultures.

Chapter 5 Analysis

Previous lectures encouraged readers to appreciate how the seemingly idiosyncratic aspects of indigenous cultures are expert adaptations to their environments, honed over centuries of practice. They showed how these cultures may enshrine their adaptations in religious beliefs, forming them into powerful social technologies. They highlighted how the dissolution of cultural elements that protect these adaptations cause cultural collapse. They illustrated how ancient cultures, who exceed Western abilities to thrive in their geographies, do so with purposeful mandates to preserve their often delicate ecological structures.

“Century of the Wind” is Davis’s final and summative point. The lecture returns to the tragedy of the destruction of the ethnosphere, a concept proposed in the first lecture. Davis argues that with the loss of these cultures comes an accompanying loss of wisdom, a loss of meanings of life. Crucially, he argues that the extinction of these cultures is not the result of true human progress but the “identifiable and overwhelming external forces” (167) of industry, capital, and human greed. Davis reasserts that the “cult of progress” (188) is only one way of life on earth, just as science is only “one way of seeing” (17). However, if people don’t take action soon, it will become the only one.

Like in the prior lectures, the plight of a single culture is used to introduce a global historical trend. Here “what transpired on the American frontier was repeated throughout the world” (169). Davis’s following litany of ancient cultures destroyed by modern government (169-71) is harrowing and effectively illustrates his point that we face massive contemporary cultural loss.

When Davis transitions to discussing Penan culture, he describes his passage into their “traditional territory” (172) through debris and garbage-clogged logging ports, a setting of “opportunity and despair—muddy logging camps and clusters of shanties [… with] leprous facades” (172). The powerful imagery gathers the reader’s pathos even as it introduces them to the darker side of the adventures the lectures have previously welcomed them on. These images are a symbol of industry’s destructive effects, which are juxtaposed with the peaceful behavior of the ancient Penan, who live in “another world, a varied and magical landscape of forest and soaring mountains” (172). This juxtaposition intensifies the tragedy of the Penan’s cultural assimilation into the destitute landscape that surrounds them. This is positioned as a moral failure of humanity, an unnecessary casualty of philosophies of progress: “a unique way of life, morally inspired, inherently right, and effortlessly pursued for centuries, has collapsed in a single generation” (179).

The subsequent description of Buddhist tradition is Davis’s summative example of how ancient cultures can themselves be scientific, even if they do not use the methods of the Enlightenment. Buddhism is a “science of the mind” (183) developed over millennia and proven to succeed in liberating people from mental suffering, yet the propositions of this science are in complete opposition to those of our modern culture: “Billboards in European cities celebrate teenagers in underwear. The Tibetan billboard is the mani wall, mantras carved into stone, prayers for the well-being of all sentient beings” (183). Again, Davis lightly shames his readers, implying their pursuits are likely hollow, and their lack of action against cultural destruction negligent.

Davis’s more brief discussion of the Rendille people is a particularly good example of the idea that singular adaptive changes in cultures can have waterfall effects that end up defining them: “A single adaptive challenge, surviving drought, reverberates through the entire culture, defining for these nomadic tribes what it means to be human” (189). When, like a load-bearing brick, these adaptations are outlawed, these cultures collapse. Forced into settlements and denied their traditional nomadism, the Rendille fell apart due to the encroachment of industry. The section is a particularly effective case study in this process.

Davis ends his lecture series by reminding us of the dangers of cultural loss. Pressure on cultures creates extremism, and the destruction of the communities and geographies of indigenous peoples goes hand in hand with the destruction of the biosphere and plant and animal life. It is only culture that protects us from these eventualities: “Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart” (198). When culture is lost but individuals live on, “extreme ideologies often emerge” (198). This warning against extremism is a compelling argument for the preservation of the world’s cultures. It seems strange that Davis makes it only here, briefly, near the end of his lectures. This, along with Davis’s overall avoidance of technical jargon or extensive statistics, suggests that more than emphasizing the consequences of cultural loss, Davis wishes to express their beauty. This is his technique to gather his reader’s support while honoring both the cultures that survive and those that have passed. This connects with how Davis ends his final lecture, with another personal anecdote, describing his experience being offered tea by a pauper in Timbuktu. The act of kindness reminds Davis that there “are the moments that allow us all to hope” (223). Davis refuses pessimism to become a champion of the joy, beauty, genius, and wisdom of the world’s ancient cultures.

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