Western Ways

Jack Turner, the “wildness” expert, says: “Western ways of classifying people according to education and career are meaningless. There are brilliant people who can’t read.” I suppose the converse is also true that some people who can read are idiots. But many people like Turner can read and are brilliant. And many who cannot read are not brilliant. Meaningless is a very subjective word. What is meaningless to you can have meaning for me. The word meaningless becomes judgmental. Turner congratulates himself for classifying people by their brilliance rather than their education but why not classify them by their kindness? And what does “Western ways” even mean? Does the West even have any universal ways? Americans are but a subset of the West and I cannot find much commonality among them in social norms, ethical values, and belief systems. Even traditional customs are hard to maintain. Sure, Education, Career, and Brilliance are classification categories but those factors are no more prominent than Race, Religion, Gender, Wealth, Political Party, Patriotism, and Integrity. Turner does not even share his wildness advocate category with natural resource managers, conservation biologists, environmental activists, park rangers, zoo directors, environmental activists, and wilderness tourists. He skewers all those people as destroyers of what true wildness is still left. Turner tells an anecdote of a student in Utah who wanted to save the wolves but who had never even seen one. That is probably why she wants to save them. You do not have to see starving children or sex slaves to want to save them. “Western ways” seems to be code for the flaws of others. But my view is distorted by personal bias because my beloved Polish daughter-in-law continually mocks my Western ways!