The Ideas Guy
Richard Handler
Why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world
Last Updated: Tuesday, November 3, 2009 | 2:37 PM ET
By Richard Handler CBC News
A half-century seems like an eternity in broadcasting. But that's almost how long the Massey Lectures have been broadcast by CBC Radio. Forty-eight years to be exact.
In the contemporary media world of digital glitz, these lectures seem almost an evolutionary throwback.
There are no sonic rushes, no quick, vocal jump-cuts. Only a single human voice hurling itself meticulously from your radio.
At their best, the Masseys are supposed to throw a wide intellectual net and, in the past, they've featured noted thinkers, mostly from the academy, such as the literary critic Northrop Frye and philosophers George Grant and Charles Taylor.
The lecturers are supposed to take a step back and provide the context to help us understand contemporary society and culture.
Sometimes, they are overtly critical and display a simmering, scornful anger. Noam Chomsky on thought control in America and Stephen Lewis on the UN in Africa come to mind.
The tone can also be prophetic: Martin Luther King gave his Massey Lectures in 1967, about six months before he was assassinated.
Or it can be ironic, even playful — with more than a hint of the trickster — as was the case with Thomas King's 2003 lectures on native identity and storytelling.
The lectures can home in on the psyche, as Doris Lessing did in her 1986 The Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. Or warn us about how experts cloud our minds and abuse their authority, as John Ralston Saul told us in The Unconscious Civilization in 1995.
Massey lecturer Wade Davis. (CBC) In the past few years, Ideas, the CBC Radio program that has hosted the Masseys since 1965 (and the show I help produce), has taken the lecturers out on the road, as part of an attempt to shift the accent away from the academy and welcome a broader public.
This year's lectures, which are being aired all this week, began in Yellowknife, the first time we've ventured to the North.
It was an appropriate venue because the speaker is Wade Davis, the well-travelled anthropologist, writer and filmmaker who lives part of the year in northern British Columbia.
A wayfinder
Davis's five lectures and book (published by House of Anansi) are called The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World and, like other Masseys, they carry more than a plaintive note.
His message is that the global civilization being created in front of us, and which we are all so enamoured of, is not the end product of history, as some have argued, but in many ways a diminishment of human possibility.
Now, you may have heard versions of this argument before. It is, dare I say, a CBC specialty and yours truly has produced his full share of these critiques.
But don't be dissuaded from listening or returning to the online lectures posted by Ideas the day after they're broadcast.
As a critic of modern Western culture, Davis is among the most pleasing. With his rapid-fire patter, which you can hear in this earlier TED talk, he hardly needs a text in front of him.
He is a man who speaks in full, detailed paragraphs, throwing in impossibly native-sounding names.
Listening to him, you can ride along on his sweeping, magic-word carpet.
Explorer in residence
A Harvard-trained anthropologist and botanist, Davis is now the National Geographic's explorer in residence, one of the most wonderful job titles I have ever come across.
He was born in B.C. and grew up in Quebec. I first came across him when I was at Morningside in the 1980s, when he was promoting his first book, The Serpent in the Rainbow, about witchcraft in Haiti.
He was golden-tongued back then, too, and slightly manic with a full, wild head of hair.
I thought we were interviewing a Canadian version of Abbie Hoffman, the firebrand yippie, reconstituted as an eager young anthropologist, urging us to not dismiss the seemingly primitive, sacred aspects of indigenous culture.
A blanket of meaning
Davis's argument is simple enough. It is that human societies don't evolve in a straight line from the prehistoric to the sophisticated and modern.
Culture is "a series of options," as he puts it, and it is not trivial. "It is not decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of meaning that gives meaning to our lives."
And that blanket is being stripped from indigenous societies around the world by a ravenous, modern civilization that only cares about its needs and comforts.
Of course, we have all heard the argument before about the gutting of indigenous culture and the ruthless exploitation of resources.
About how modernity turns all culture into a monoculture or, in the words of Benjamin Barber, eventually pits two social ills against each other: reactionary jihad versus rapacious McWorld.
The 2009 Massey Lectures book. In some of his other talks, Davis can be somewhat dismissive of Western technology, as when he approvingly quotes a Buddhist teacher observing that "science is a major response to minor needs" (that is, until you need your appendix taken out or vaccines for smallpox or H1N1).
But in his Massey Lectures, Davis spends little time on our cultural pathologies and instead shows us how indigenous people so richly inhabit their world.
Massey shaman
It is a world that is not stuffed with mere commodities.
He tells us, for example, how Polynesian sailors can navigate with stunning accuracy without instruments, by using their senses and holistically experiencing the sea and the air.
He also tells us about a band of Indians, two hours from Miami, who pray in a circle to uphold the foundations of the world, at the same time as their land is turned into hotels and strip malls a few kilometres away and their daughters sell themselves as prostitutes to tourists.
Yes, I have heard these stories before and have often felt immune from the reality of it all.
But with only the simple instruments of his voice and his passion, Davis weaves a cloak that allows us to imagine for a moment the world as it might be seen through the indigenous imagination.
It's a deft feat and it transforms the literature of grievance, so familiar now, to a literature of love and almost celestial appreciation.
Wade Davis claims he's an optimist, not a doomsayer. Draw your own conclusions.
In any case, he is our very own Massey shaman, breathing life into fragile worlds that are rapidly growing extinct, worlds that mark the very boundaries of the human imagination.
