The Wayfinders

By Wade Davis, 2009

I suspect that anthropology can serve as an ideal “gateway drug” to conservatism.  Take this book, subtitled “why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world”.  On the surface, it seems like a pretty standard bash-whitey book, and, indeed, Professor Davis’ philosophy could be aptly summarized “all cultures are equally superior to the Christian West.”  Much of the book is given to lamenting bad things that white people have done to non-white people, all allegedly because of greed or racism.  Liberals eat that stuff like catnip.  But Davis’ concerns are not the standard Leftist issues of inequality and exploitation.  He is worried less directly with the fate of individuals as that of cultures.  The world’s cultures, he points out, are being destroyed at an alarming rate.  In our lifetime, half of the world’s languages now spoken will likely disappear.  With each of those languages will go an entire worldview, centuries of wisdom and expertise, a distinct and irreplaceable “way of being human”.  Davis takes the reader on a tour across the world to survey the accomplishments of some of these tribal peoples.  It is indeed remarkable, what ingenuity it took the Polynesians to explore the entire Pacific Ocean on canoes or for the Inuit to survive in the Arctic.  Not only have these peoples found ways to survive, they have built cultures that give dignity and meaning to their lives.  Davis can be (unintentionally) quite conservative in his appreciation for tradition and mythology, so long as they come from cultures other than his own.  Among the destructive effects of the West, he lists not only colonialism, but also Marxism.  The lack in the West of the virtues he praises in other people he attributes to Descartes and the Enlightenment.

Davis is right.  These natives should be proud of their cultures.  They should strive to preserve what their ancestors entrusted to them, and it would be wrong of us to hinder them.  The logical ultimate conclusion is that we too have a right and duty to preserve our traditions against Enlightenment corrosion.  That is, we should be conservatives.  That, of course, is not the conclusion Davis reaches.  In the last chapter, perhaps to preserve his liberalism, Davis seems to revert into Enlightenment thought.  Consider the following:  “Were I to distill a single message from these Massey Lectures it would be that culture is not trivial…It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives.  It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither.”  No doubt my fellow conservatives were nodding along happily until that last phrase, when the author admits his belief that the cultures he’s been praising are all ultimately nothing but lies.  These great visions of unity held by Amazonian tribesmen and Buddhist nuns are just imagination.  If that’s true, then why should they be preserved?  Why not be honest and face the abyss of nihilism, as Dr. Davis himself apparently has?  I’ll let him answer:  “But to sum it up, two words will do.  Climate change.”  That’s it; these mystical and mythological beliefs about man’s place in the world should be preserved because they can be used to motivate man to take better care of the environment.  Don’t get me wrong—global warming is a very big problem, but we know this because of Western science, not because the universal Mother of Indian belief told us.  If that’s all culture is good for, then we really don’t need it.  In the end, it is the religious conservative who can offer a better justification for the natives than the anthropologist, because we believe that their intuition of a greater reality is, in a fundamental sense, actually true.