50 pages • 1 hour read
Wade DavisThe Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Equality of Cultural Genius
In his first lecture Davis overviews modern genetic findings that confirm the overwhelming similarity among populations of humans. He reasons that “all cultures share essentially the same mental acuity, the same raw genius” (18). The ensuing lectures work to dispel the concept that modern Western cultures have any actual claim to advancement over cultures traditionally seen as primitive. The accomplishments of the West “do not make the Western paradigm exceptional or suggest in any way that it has or ought to have a monopoly on the path to the future” (194). Citing the technological advances that have occurred since the scientific revolution, Davis explains how other cultures also centralize around specific technologies that situate them in perfect balance with their surroundings. For the San, this is the arrow: a central facet of their economy, ritual, lifestyle, and identity. For the aboriginals of Australia and the Barasana of the Colombian rainforest, religion itself is a mental technology that protects the entire world.
Each culture speaks a complex language. Each culture invests in symbolism and has traditional legislations for dealing with others in the social realm. Each culture as such articulates a unique relationship to existence founded of equal merit to all others. Davis writes that “virtually all cultures would endorse most tenets of the Ten Commandments, not because the Judaic world was uniquely inspired, but because it articulated the rules that allowed a social species to thrive” (31). Destroying these cultures causes the loss of their unique expressions of genius. “It’s like dropping a bomb on the Louvre” (5), as Davis quotes MIT linguist Ken Hale.
The Enduring Value of Ancient Adaptations
Western philosophy is currently seeing the lasting consequences of its relationship to the earth. This causes some to question the actual efficacy of such beliefs in the first place—among them the methods of science that reduce all things to mind and mechanism, thereby desacralizing space, nature, and existence itself. But this is not the only, nor indeed the historically prevalent, belief. Most of the cultures covered in Davis’s lectures have an alternative relationship to landscape, one that positions humanity not as the champions but the inhabitants, stewards, and servants of this hallowed space. These deep connections to the personalized earth are perhaps the best ecological technologies humanity has ever produced, ensuring relationships of respect, exchange, and caretaking between humanity and a geography that is understood to have agency and action.
These cultures do not create wealth through raw resource, and they do not transform materials into complex machines. Instead their technologies are ancestral wisdom and ceremony. These technologies are themselves the products of adaptations that have allowed these cultures to survive without depleting their landscapes. The San, for example, understand how to survive the near impossible landscape of the Kalahari Desert, and their calendar and ritual world are organized around this desert’s requirements.
The people of Polynesia require intense wisdom, patience, and dedication to master the sea, and through their cultural tradition have created a system of navigation that can complete sea voyages rivaling those of modern vessels without any modern tools. These adaptations are suited to their landscape, remain vigorously connected to the life of their cultures, and manage to do so with minimal impact. Far from primitive, these are cultures the Western world should be learning from.
The Ethnocentrism of Science
In Davis’s first lecture he detailed how anthropology was appropriated by empire, producing such pseudosciences as phrenology and eugenics (15). In the historical record such bastardizations of scientific empiricism are sometimes easy to determine. At other times they are much subtler and longstanding. The assumption that the people of Polynesia must have landed there only by accident lasted until the 1970s, despite a lack of evidence. The modern botanical understanding of the Amazon’s fragile ecosystem subtly marginalizes this powerful landscape and its peoples. Such ethnocentrism is a philosophical habit of the West. Engrained in centuries of cultural elitism and colonial action, it still exists in the language of anthropology and science, which calls these cultures “primitive” or generically defines them as “nomadic” when their motions over the earth are in fact much more schematized. Both historically and today, such perspectives are used to justify genocide and assimilate these peoples to gain the resource wealth of their landscapes. Davis’s lectures contend that it is impossible to remove cultural bias from scientific perspective, and so encourages his audience to understand science as only one way of knowing, one way of understanding the truth.
