I Can No Longer See Venus

Wade Davis on knowledge, attention, and the limits of progress

I’ve just finished reading The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis (anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and one of my favourite writers) and felt compelled to share this excerpt because it has really stayed with me. It offers such a rare kind of clarity.

What I keep returning to in the passage below is the insistence that ways of knowing are not neutral, and more importantly, that they are not free. Every culture sharpens certain ways of knowing and seeing at the expense of others. Every system of thought gains clarity by sacrificing something else. What we call progress is often a trade, and sometimes we have been making that trade for so long we can no longer see the cost.

Davis is not romantic about this, and he isn’t arguing against science, or reason, or explanation. He’s pointing to something far more profound: that our confidence in our models, even if that model is science, rests on faith as much as evidence. That in choosing to divide the world into ever smaller, more manageable pieces, in the pursuit of ultimate understanding, we lose the ability to see certain things at all. Not metaphorically. Literally.

‘I can no longer see Venus.’

That line stops me every time. Venus is the brightest natural object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. At its brightest it reaches about magnitude -4.7, bright enough to be visible even in the daytime if you know where and how to look. The idea that something so vivid, so present could slip from collective perception because we no longer practise the skill of seeing it is pretty devastating. We did not even register it as a loss. What else have we lost?

The excerpt tells us that there is danger in assuming that what we can measure is all that matters, or that breaking the world into parts will eventually tell us everything about the whole. Davis reminds us that coherence and meaning can come from many directions, and that dismissing other systems of understanding as primitive or irrational often says more about our own blindness than their supposed inadequacy.

I find Davis’ words here deeply grounding. They loosen the grip of certainty, which we all hold too tightly, and make room for humility. They ask us to consider not just what we know, but what we have trained ourselves not to see.

And to take this idea a step further, in 2026 we live amid competing certainties, warring tribes of knowledge, each convinced that their framework is the most accurate, the most ethical, the most complete. Every disagreement is treated as a failure of intelligence or morality, rather than a difference in emphasis, experience, training, or attention. Davis offers an alternative. One that doesn’t require us to abandon our convictions, but to simply hold them with more modesty and recognise that all ways of knowing involve trade offs. That clarity in one direction often comes at the cost of blindness in another. That feels not just intellectually honest, but necessary.

Take your time with his words. Let them work on you a little.

‘I woke twice more before dawn, first to a cobalt sky and moonbeams lapping the bushes, heavy with moisture. In the moonlight the roots of the mapou were white, motionless, and seemingly cold. By the next time the stars had faded and light cracked the horizon. Venus had moved all the way across the sky, and now it too dimmed. I followed it until my eyes ached. A grey cloud crossed over its path, and when it was gone so was the planet. I stared and stared until I couldn’t even see the sky. But it was hopeless. Venus was gone. It shouldn’t have been.

Astronomers know the amount of light reflected by the planet, and we should be able to see it, even in broad daylight. Some Indians can. And but a few hundred years ago, sailors from our own civilisation navigated by it, following its path as easily by day as they did by night. It is simply a skill that we have lost, and I have often wondered why.

Though we frequently speak of the potential of the brain, in practice our mental capacity seems to be limited. Every human mind has the same latent capabilities, but for reasons that have always intrigued anthropologists, different peoples develop it in different ways, and the distinctions, in effect, amount to unconscious cultural choices.

There is a small isolated group of semi-nomadic Indians in the northwest Amazon whose technology is so rudimentary that until quite recently they used stone axes. Yet these same people possess a knowledge of the tropical forest that puts almost any biologist to shame. As children they learn to recognise such complex phenomena as floral pollination and fruit dispersal, to understand and accurately predict animal behaviour, to anticipate the fruiting cycles of hundreds of forest trees.

As adults their awareness is refined to an uncanny degree; at forty paces, for example, their hunters can smell animal urine and distinguish, on the basis of scent alone, which out of dozens of possible species left it. Such sensitivity is not an innate attribute of these people, any more than technological prowess is something inevitably and uniquely ours. Both are consequences of adaptive choices that resulted in the development of highly specialised but different mental skills, at the obvious expense of others.

Within a culture, change also means choice. In our society, for example, we now think nothing of driving at high speeds down expressways, a task that involves countless rapid, unconscious sensory responses and decisions which would, to say the least, have intimidated our great-grandfathers. Yet in acquiring such dexterity, we have forfeited other skills like the ability to see Venus, to smell animals, to hear the weather change.

Perhaps our biggest choice came four centuries ago when we began to breed scientists. This was not something our ancestors aimed for. It was a result of historical circumstances that produced a particular way of thinking that was not necessarily better than what had come before, only different.

Every society, including our own, is moved by a fundamental quest for unity; a struggle to create order out of perceived disorder, integrity in the face of diversity, consistency in the face of anomaly. This vital urge to render coherent and intelligible models of the universe is at the root of all religion, philosophy, and, of course, science.

What distinguishes scientific thinking from that of traditional, and often non-literate, cultures is the tendency of the latter to seek the shortest possible means to achieve total understanding of their world. The vodoun society, for example, spins a web of belief that is all-inclusive, that generates an illusion of total comprehension. No matter how an outsider might view it, for the individual member of that society the illusion holds, not because of coercive force, but simply because for him there is no other way. And what’s more, the belief system works; it gives meaning to the universe.

Scientific thinking is quite the opposite. We explicitly deny such comprehensive visions, and instead deliberately divide our world, our perceptions, and our confusion into however many particles are necessary to achieve understanding according to the rules of our logic. We set things apart from each other, and then what we cannot explain we dismiss with euphemisms.

For example, we could ask why a tree fell over in a storm and killed a pedestrian. The scientist might suggest that the trunk was rotten and the velocity of the wind was higher than usual. But when pressed to explain why it happened at the instant when that individual passed, we would undoubtedly hear words such as chance, coincidence, and fate; terms which, in and of themselves, are quite meaningless but which conveniently leave the issue open. For the vodounist, each detail in that progression of events would have a total, immediate, and satisfactory explanation within the parameters of his belief system.

For us to doubt the conclusions of the vodounist is expected, but it is nevertheless presumptuous. For one, their system works, at least for them. What’s more, for most of us our basis for accepting the models and theories of our scientists is no more solid or objective than that of the vodounist who accepts the metaphysical theology of the houngan. Few laymen know or even care to know the principles that guide science; we accept the results on faith, and like the peasant we simply defer to the accredited experts of the tradition.

Yet we scientists work under the constraints of our own illusions. We assume that somehow we shall be able to divide the universe into enough infinitesimally small pieces, that somehow even according to our own rules we shall be able to comprehend these, and critically we assume that these particles, though extracted from the whole, will render meaningful conclusions about the totality.

Perhaps most dangerously, we assume that in making this kind of choice we sacrifice nothing. But we do. I can no longer see Venus.’