Book 2 Post 1

For my second book, I chose Wade Davis’ The Wayfinders. I’ve always been in search of wisdom, which to me is knowledge relevant to anybody, anywhere, at any time. In other words, it is knowledge we can use in and for life, whether to improve our relationships, better ourselves, or find meaningful fulfilment. Not only would The Wayfinders offer me such wisdom, lessons I would be able to apply to and recognise in areas of my life, this wisdom had also gone unnoticed to Westerners like me. Davis shares what is essentially, to us, unsung wisdom from unsung heroes; from warriors in the Sub Saharan plains, to matriarchal pillars to their communities and Polynesian wayfinders. After all, until a few months ago, I’d lived in Europe my whole life, and eurocentric voices had always been the echoes in my chamber. This book gives me the opportunity to discover the ways and teachings of lives so remote, whether temporally, culturally, or geographically, that simply seeing a sign of their existence is a miracle. 

Speaking of “ignorance”, Davis opens with a resonant celebration of humanity. He sings that the ethnosphere, “the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all we are and all that we are”, is the greatest legacy of “a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species”: homo sapiens. It is at this moment, when heightened in pride for who we are, at our very roots, that Davis startles. “Just as the biosphere is being eroded”, he explains, the ethnosphere is dying, “only at a far greater rate”. The key indicator of the health of our rich ethnosphere is language loss. Well, of the 7,000 languages spoken today, more than half are not being taught to children. In just a generation, the last syllables of half of all ancient tongues will be uttered. To the grave will be taken “half of humanity's social, cultural and intellectual legacy.” This is the hidden backdrop of our age, and I had no clue. Davis ends his cry for help with a striking clarification. Many think the world would be a better place if we all spoke the same language. After all, wouldn't communication be facilitated, making it easier for all of us to get along? This sounds like a wonderful idea, “but let's make that universal language Haida or Yoruba, Inuktitut or San.” This is what absolute alienation feels like, and it’s happening everyday across the world.