I recently stumbled upon this TEDTalk (hat-tip Andrew Sullivan) and found it pretty interesting. I was going to comment on the speaker’s delivery, but instead of forever being an armchair critic I’ll just share a few thoughts I had. 

Here were the two best quotes from the talk, which was given by anthropologist Wade Davis who is an explorer/writer for National Geographic about the importance of preserving and learning from indigenous peoples: 

… The central revelation of anthropology… is the idea that the world in which we live in doesn’t exist in some absolute sense but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices our lineage made, albeit successfully many generations ago… (1:14). 

… The problem is that even those of us sympathetic to the plight of indigenous peoples view them as quaint and colorful, but somehow reduced to the margins of history meanwhile as the real world, meaning our world moves on… Now the problem isn’t change. All cultures through all times have constantly been engaged with new possibilities of life. And the problem is not technology itself… It’s not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere, it’s power: the crude faith of domination. And whenever you look around the world you see that these are not cultures destined to fade away, these are dynamic, living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to…

I see some connection between the two quotes, and it’s the same thing that I always come back to that when I hear about these subjects: science and evolution. 

My first thought when the very environmentalist character Walter Berglund from Jonathan Franzen’s great Freedom says, “Every animal has a right to its own survival” was, “Says who?” I don’t believe that Davis — or Franzen for that matter — believe that there is some higher reason why every species/society has the right to its own survival… but they don’t offer much to make me think otherwise — though Franzen is a much different case because he’s writing fiction and I don’t want to make the mistake of the intentional fallacy. 

Because there is probably is no higher reason — and if there is, it hasn’t revealed itself to be all that efficient. The fact is that animal and plant species die out, as do civilizations. It’s all of a product of the ongoing project of evolution — all this is, basically, is a free-for-all. 

I don’t mean to play devil’s advocate — I would much rather see everyone live in harmony, but my preferences, like many others’, carry very little weight in the face of “progress.”* It’s simply not the case. 

So in fact, it actually is a matter of change and adaptation. The march of man is just as natural a change as any other natural change, if you take a macro view. Just because we have consciousness doesn’t mean all of a sudden that what we do isn’t “natural.” Man is beholden to the same impulses and inclinations as other animals are — and other plants are, as well — though those impulses and inclinations are more varied and complex.

And if you can’t adapt to these changes that are byproducts of man’s evolution… then you are living at odds with your environment as it is now, and you are prone to suffer the consequences. 

This is why I think this first quote of his is misleading in some regards. It suggests that there are all these different forms of reality… which is true, though only if you are speaking of reality as a subjective conception produced by human consciousness. But there is also another “reality,” and that this a larger objective reality that no one can escape… the law of gravity and all of that. 

It reminds me of what science blogger John Horgan wrote about Jonah Lehrer’s recent New Yorker essay, which explored the recent uptick of faulty scientific studies (and is totally worth reading):  

But here is how Lehrer ends his article: “Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.” This assertion is absurd. We may choose to believe in psychoanalysis rather than behaviorism, because both are equally flimsy. But the evidence is rock-solid for quantum mechanics, general relativity, the germ theory of infectious disease, the genetic code and many other building blocks of scientific knowledge, which have yielded applications that have transformed our world. There’s nothing truthy about a hydrogen bomb.

Though I think he’s being a little unfair to Lehrer’s writing, he is right. There is nothing truthy about a hydrogen bomb. And there is nothing truthy about evolution. And the faster that fact is established the better we will be equipped to deal with how we react to that and handle — which is something relatively in our powers as conscious beings with free will. 

But Davis’ talk doesn’t really help facilitate that very worthy discussion — it instead creates easy dichotomies of good and bad, the corrupt powerful and the noble powerless, while missing the larger points. 

There is some worth in this video though. The most interesting part of his talk came from this quote: 

… In the end, it really comes down to a choice. Do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity? Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said before she died that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous, generic worldview, not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would awake from a dream one day having forgotten that there were even other possibilities… (18:12). 

I have heard this thought expressed before — and that previous expression was actually more to the point and more powerful, so I will quote it (hat-tip Old Roads Blog):

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives. 

Wow, that’s a great quote that deserves to be chewed on.

Anyways, this is what is interesting to me about Davis’ talk. It represents the faults of one way of grappling with the world — education would be an appropriate word — and the benefits of the other. The talk does a great job of, at least, giving glimpses into other ways of life and what we can learn from them. But it shows the pitfalls focusing too narrowly on these alternatives at the exclusion of seeing a larger picture. 

For me, I have been on the other side of the spectrum from Davis. I always have been interested in understanding the shape of this larger picture… what is true and what is not. This has not always been the pursuit of the objective — it has been partially that, but also an effort to establish my own subjective viewpoint. 

But recently I have enjoyed exploring some alternatives. I’ve been reading a book called the Gift which, it turns out, is partially about the artists role in the modern economy — which is what I originally thought it was — but also partially about gift societies throughout history. Reading about how gifts constituted a large economic and societal role is so intriguing because it’s so foreign to me. And I think I’ve been doing a good enough job of pushing away the voices that scream “Evolution! Defense!” at the turn of every page to actually learn some things, which is great.**

I’m not sure that I would want to be like Davis and primarily concentrate on alternative forms of living — I would actually say his thinking suffers from the intensity of this concentration. But I think his talk can act as a good explanation of why it’s so important. 

* I use the word “progress” with no subjective intentions. I do not mean that things are getting “better” just that they are always moving forward. 

** Here is a short article — and it’s second part — that were actually too of the most profound ways imagining, or learning about, an alternative viewpoint has changed my thinking recently. I think they are both great reads.