Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
the fly whisk made from wildebeest hair — the signature of the dancer. Once caught up in the trance-inducing energies of the singing and dancing, some of the healers started entering the spirit world, shaking, sweating, shrieking, talking in tongues, circling the group diagnosing and healing sickness and disorder. That night, under the stars, on the sands of the Kalahari, I witnessed an activity that I had seen depicted in rock paintings over a thousand miles away in South Africa, where the now-extinct southern San — the /Xam — performed the same dances and then painted their experiences on the rock walls of their shelters.
I had no illusions of playing anthropologist or of contributing to the empirical fieldwork on the San, one of the most thoroughly studied groups of hunter-gatherers in the world. One scholar estimated that there are over a thousand published pages for every living San. I simply approached them with the big questions of political philosophy in mind. What can we learn about human nature from one of the last and oldest of such cultures that can guide us now? How did the changing context and circumstances of San life shape their society and politics? How can speculations about our distant past illuminate how we all should live together on this single, increasingly crowded, and fragile planet?
After 1998, I continued making regular trips to South Africa. In 2007 I went to Andriesvale on the edge of the Kalahari to visit one of the last groups of Bushmen to survive within South Africa — the Khomani San. They had inhabited what is now the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (which includes the old Gemsbok National Park) on the border between South Africa and Botswana. During apartheid, they had been removed from the park and had scattered, losing their language — perhaps the oldest of all the San languages — and much of their culture. Then in 1999 the new South African government returned to the Khomani some forty thousand hectares, half of which were inside the game reserve. Since then some fourteen surviving language speakers have been found, and there are vigorous attempts to revive the culture and establish a viable local economy.
But the Khomani I saw were still living in shacks in the sand, plagued by poverty, sickness, alcoholism, and boredom. I traveled with one of the leaders — now an Afrikaans speaker with an Afrikaans name, Jan van der Westhuizen, or simply “Oom Jan” — into the central Kalahari of Botswana to D’Kar, where dozens of other Bushman groups had gathered from all over southern Africa for the annual Bushman dance and healing festival. There, filmmakers Craig and Damon Foster were filming /Urugab “Toppies” Kruiper, a young Khomani man who with his family was on a mission to reconnect with the “old ways” and become a fully initiated hunter.* Toppies was all muscle and sinew, his front teeth knocked out and his chest marked with long, jagged white scars from several near-fatal knife fights. He was soft-spoken and laughed as he told me, pointing to his scars, that it was a miracle he was still alive. I spent several days with Oom Jan in the red dunes of the Bushman section of Kgalagadi Park, listening to his stories about how as a young man he had been raised in the park and taught how to hunt with a spear, running down antelope. During the day we followed animal tracks, and at night I did a lot of thinking, sitting in front of the campfire, and then lying on my back, looking up — or was it down?! — dizzyingly into those millions of distant suns glittering in the unpolluted blackness of the desert sky.
Primal Political Philosophy
The insight I got from repeated and sometimes difficult returns to Hawai‘i made me realize that I was no longer primarily interested in being a detached academic, applying critical methodologies to solve scholarly problems. Like it or not, I came to understand that my whole life was a struggle with something like the daunting project of classical political philosophy. This traditionally required nothing less than bringing together the totality of one’s lived experience to confront the defining question of the truth quest: “How should we live?” Socrates and Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx, all giants among many others, attempted to articulate an integrated vision in response to this question. Entire societies and ways of life were organized around these visions. In each case the philosopher had responded to a personally felt sense of crisis in the life of the larger society. In each case the creative response required a return to beginnings, to asking and attempting to answer the foundational questions around which every worldview and way of life are constructed: What is the human condition? What connects humans to the rest of creation — the community of being? How can this guide our thinking about good governance, a just and healthy economy, and a satisfying and meaningful life for the individual?
From the perspective of scholarly research, the scope of such a project was clearly huge, and I hesitated to admit my ambition and face the accusation of grandiosity. Then the primal perspective gave me courage, reminding me that in a very basic sense no one escapes the challenge facing the political philosopher. Everyone has to take a stand in the face of the totality of life — even if it is the bad-faith choice of simply going with the flow or living in denial and choosing not to think. We are part of an epic story whose beginning and end are the deepest mystery. We all grow from infancy into adult consciousness asking periodically, “Who am I? What is real? Where am I going? What role shall I play?” All of us answer these questions more or less self-consciously, more or less hurriedly. Ultimately we answer them in the pattern of the daily decisions and actions that make up our lives.
I was also encouraged in this task by the groundbreaking work of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962, which exposed the inherent limitation of all paradigms — all models of reality in science, and by extension every other area of human knowledge. Kuhn demonstrated convincingly that all scientific theories are inevitably shaped by the context and intention of the scientists and scholars who formulated them. There is no absolutely objective knowledge independent of the perspective and situation of the researcher. Discoveries in modern physics and evolutionary cosmology have confirmed that even at the most fundamental level of elementary particles the observer can never be fully separated from what is observed. So in the late 1990s, it seemed to me that politics was in something of a “postparadigm phase,” where we could no longer defer to the great minds of political science and wait for another John Locke to figure it all out for us. Somehow we now all have to be implicated in the business of thinking about how we should live together. We all have to wrestle with the big questions that were reserved for the geniuses of the past.*
I was further heartened by the fact that, as I went back to beginnings and confronted these questions, I could feel myself becoming whole and healthy. The deeper I went into wilderness, the faster the regeneration, and the more I could see the glories and flaws of civilization in sharp relief. I discovered I was also following a path that could be called shamanic and that was much more ancient than our written philosophical and religious traditions.
Shamanic practices seem to constitute the earliest form of religion and are central to the lives of hunter-gatherers the world over. Today, related practices can still be found in many religious and spiritual paths across cultures. Shamanic experiences seem to have a common structure in which the ego is overcome, opening awareness to a larger, transpersonal field of information in the service of healing and visioning. The variety of shamanic “psychotechnologies” is truly extraordinary, ranging from chanting, fasting, and self-mutilation to wilderness immersion, incessant dancing, and the ingesting of hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms. The loss of ego can be terrifying but is more typically ecstatic, providing an experience of reality that is often described as larger, deeper, and exquisitely beautiful. Scholar of comparative religion Mircea Eliade described shamanism simply as “archaic techniques of ecstasy.”4 The old shamans seemed to realize that in order to understand society and live more fully attuned to reality, we need periodically to go wild, to travel out of our normal minds to the invisible world of spirit, which underlies the visible. The uninitiated often dismiss such experiences as vague, misty, and emotional. The reality is that the visions are often so incredibly detailed and vivid that one is convinced of having looked through the veil of everyday life into an