Modernity

Modernity

“The myriad of cultures of the world are not failed attempts at modernity, let alone failed attempts to be us; they are unique expressions of the human imagination and heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive?”

— Wade Davis

All cultures, without exception, have their flaws and challenges. But unlike Western industrial culture, indigenous and place-based cultures that have maintained their connections to their homelands do not suffer widespread alienation from nature with its associated environmental and social crises. Their lives are intertwined with the natural world in fundamental ways, and they engage with their natural environments on a day-to-day basis. They are experienced and attentive participants in, and observers of, their surroundings, and over millennia they have accumulated sophisticated knowledge about their home environments.

Because the cultural identities of modern indigenous and place-based peoples require intact, healthy environments, they generally lead lifeways that are respectful towards the natural resources they depend upon. For thousands of years their very cultural and physical survival has rested upon sustaining and nurturing the biodiversity and productivity of their homelands. Over millennia their understanding of highly complex natural systems has allowed them to adapt successfully to changes in the ecosystems in which they are embedded.

Unfortunately, there is a long history of reluctance by members of Western industrial society to regard indigenous and place-based cultures as “modern.” This is because “modern” has long been understood to mean “Western.” In other words, “they” cannot be modern until they become like “us.” I believe it is reasonable at this point to reexamine this equation.

Certain of their inherent superiority, Western governments, colonial authorities, industries, religions, courts, and popular culture generally have long relegated indigenous peoples such as Inuit and Sami to lower rungs on the imaginary evolutionary ladder, consigning them to antiquity in order to deny their great cultural achievements and to strip them of their lands and resources. As Wade Davis writes, “Modernity provides the rationale for disenfranchisement, with the real goal too often being the extraction of natural resources on an industrial scale from territories occupied for generations by indigenous peoples whose ongoing presence on the land proves to be an inconvenience.”

The Western notion of modernity requires traditional peoples to abandon their time-honored ways of life and transition into industrial societies based upon individualism, capitalism, and economic growth. This “progress” is made at the expense of the natural world and gnaws away at humanity’s life support systems. Western industrial society has enjoyed great success substituting modernity for wisdom, but we are now facing the existential challenges rooted in this foundational notion of progress.

For the past several centuries up to the present day, for indigenous and place-based peoples to become “modern” in the Western sense required them to repudiate who they were, where they were from, and what they believed in order to try and successfully imitate Westerners. Even now the generally accepted definition of modernity effectively means that indigenous or place-based people are not permitted to define themselves. Instead, they must view themselves through the Western prism of what it means to be modern, and attempt to measure up as best they can — unfortunately, often while being mocked in the process.

Being forced to surrender your identity, your home, and your beliefs in order to meet someone else’s notion of modernity seems an unreasonable price to have to pay. And as we lose the full richness and diversity of human culture, with its myriad possibilities to live better and more satisfying lives, we are all impoverished. We lose the acquired wisdom that is the inheritance of all humankind, and our world becomes smaller, monochromatic, and bland; our options diminished as the global consumer monoculture takes over and systematically eradicates both the ethnosphere and the biosphere simultaneously. As this destruction progresses we all suffer, for where matters of equality, self-determination, and the understanding that all things in nature are interdependent are concerned, it can be said that by comparison with indigenous and place-based peoples, modern Western industrial society remains lost in a benighted past.

But hold on.

There is a way out of the darkness. As Vine Deloria Jr. said in plain American, Western industrial society “could save itself by listening to tribal people.”