Post #5

Preserving Cultural Diversity

In her TED talk Ancient Wisdom for a Modern World, Dr. Elizabeth Lindsay recounts her life as a young girl growing up on the beaches of Hawaii.  She shares intimate stories of her people, her culture, and their deep devotion to the land: “they mend broken bones by chanting softly, they fish according to the lunar cycles, they speak to the winds and the rains as intimately as you and I would a beloved.” Despite this devotion, and intimate knowledge of the land, her kupuna predicted that there would come a time when the world would be in trouble: “they said it would be because we forgot who we are, and we ceased to remember an ancient memory, a deep knowing — the stories [that] will help them find their way home.” As we begin to lose sight of those who came before us, we begin to stray away from the very things which have provided our lives with meaning and purpose.

Faced with the deterioration of culture amidst a globalizing world, Lindsey begs the question, “what price do I pay for my busyness? This well-intentioned veneer of efficiency, it keeps me separated from a deeper longing of something richer and far more meaningful. Faster is not always better, and more is never enough.” As we humans continue to work more, and produce more, and spend more, and consume more, it often feels as if meaning in our lives only continues to dwindle, as the intimate memories and stories of those who came before us slip through the cracks, as ancestral lands with ancient wisdom are covered up in the name of capitalistic venture. The value of a human life cannot be expressed in a dollar amount, and accordingly, our capacity as human beings should not be defined in terms of the amount of hours we can work in a week, or the amount of money stored in our bank account, or the amount of products we can consume in our lifetimes, but rather in terms of our capacity for love, and compassion, and the degree to which we can find meaning in our lives. Our lives should not be guided by the goal of merely obtaining more — more production, more money, more things — but rather with the intentions of creating intimate connections with those around us, with those who have come long before us, and with those who will come after us, for this is the way that we as humans derive our meaning.

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As pointed out by Wade Davis in his talk entitled Dreams From Endangered Cultures, our planet not only faces existential threat to the safety and diversity of its biosphere, but to its ethnosphere as well. Defined by Davis as, “the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness,” the ethnosphere represents collective human consciousness, pulled together from thousands of unique and interconnected cultures and perspectives. According to the The Encyclopedia of World Problems & Human Potential, “there are an estimated 15,000 cultures remaining on earth,” demonstrating a diversity of cultures and peoples which teaches us that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting ourselves in the earth. This, Davis says, is “an idea when you think about it, can only fill you with hope,” as the vast array of cultural perspectives can enable us to navigate the world and its obstacles through a set of varying lenses.

That is, however, until we consider the idea that many of our endangered cultures are becoming extinct at an alarming rate, “doomed or significantly threatened by erosion of cultural integrity, loss of habitat and environmental quality, and the ravages of disease and socio-economic infections,” bringing with them generations of cultural values, ideas, and expertise as elders continue to pass away before being able to pass on the wisdom of their ways. Davis reports that of the 6,000 languages in the world today, fully half are not being passed on to children. With threats to our ethnosphere and cultural diversity come threats to our humanity — just as our biosphere relies on the delicate balance of a strong and diverse ecosystem, our collective human consciousness relies on a framework which considers all cultures of the world and emphasizes their significance, diversity, complexity, and interrelatedness to one another.