Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
and beauty. But shamanic visions are also like mystical experiences in having a powerful, subtle salutary effect of great value in guiding and tuning our lives.*
So while I was developing my theories about politics, I would also regularly pry my rationality-indoctrinated, logic-trained ego from its civilized existence and open myself to the subtle prelinguistic knowledge from the body and the earth. Hawai‘i offered me a simple discipline for balancing the poles of civilization and wilderness. I could bookend a workday spent inside — reading, writing, arguing, and teaching — with an hour or two early and late in the day immersed in mauka and makai, mountain and ocean, the old Hawaiian daily prescription for healthy living. Neither beach nor mountain was more than fifteen minutes from my campus office. By late afternoon I could be alone running on empty mountain trails or swimming half a mile beyond the reef in open ocean. I loved the way I could almost magically exit one world and enter its opposite. Each world — hyperintellectual and urban on the one hand; physical, unfocused, and wild on the other — seemed an essential complement to the other.
After work, I would start running with my head filled with the arguments, encounters, and anxieties of the day. After twenty minutes of deep breathing and sweated exertion, my eyes saturated with greens and blues, my ears full of birdsong, the talk in my head would exhaust itself and slowly be replaced by a blissful sense of peace and boundlessness. I would only realize the absence of the voice in my head when it returned periodically. At certain points I would stop and look back down at Honolulu, shrunk into something I could cover with my outstretched hand, and remind myself that all of it — the stacked white and gray blocks of concrete high-rises fringing the ocean — only existed because of this richly forested, much-ignored upland, holding the rain clouds, filling the underground aquifers, replenishing oxygen, photosynthesizing carbon dioxide into our food. I bushwhacked up and down the steep slopes and streambeds and learned where the feral pigs lived and where the wild food grew. I learned the patterns of wind, sun, and rain and got to know the trails well enough to run in moonlight — just as I got to know the ocean well enough to swim beyond the reef at sunset, my senses sharpened knowing that tiger sharks swam the same waters and occasionally mistook humans for prey.
After a while I realized that my daily wilderness immersion was not simply a pleasant escape but a kind of meditation, one that literally brought my intellectual life down to earth and helped align mind, spirit, and body. Afterward I would feel more elevated, cleansed, and inspired than I ever did coming out of a synagogue or temple. The intellectual fog would lift, and the reason for my frustrations with academia would become absurdly obvious. Texts, interpretations of interpretations, and language games had been eclipsing all of “what was not text,” not-language. What I needed, what any politics needs, is direct experience of how the human being is ultimately connected to the natural world of creation as a whole. I started to think of running trails as part of my philosophical practice, helping restore the balance between opposites: experience and language, body and mind, wilderness and civilization. A huge truth had been so close it was invisible.
Then I discovered Eric Voegelin, the only major political philosopher to recognize the importance of understanding this in-between nature of the human condition for politics. During a lifetime immersed in the scholarship of world civilizations and the history of philosophy, he developed a philosophy of consciousness that was surprisingly congruent with an understanding of an evolving earth and shamanic states of consciousness. Voegelin stressed that we have to keep reminding ourselves that we are born into a drama not of our making. We wake up within the story of our civilization, which in turn emerges from the story of the earth, as the earth itself emerges from the unfolding universe. We have some freedom to write our own script, but like it or not, we are also playing a part in a script written by another hand. Politics involves tuning ourselves and our stories to the “story telling us.”*
This means we are always “looking out” from within our own field of awareness. This is the reason that I make a point to tell something of my own life story, in order to be self-conscious and explicit about my own lived perspective. For the same reason I also make a point of considering the lives and contexts of the scientists, researchers, and thinkers who developed the stories and theories on which modernity has been constructed. For instance, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, John Locke, and Adam Smith are primary architects of our current paradigm of the “good life,” but it is beyond naive to expect their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century answers to continue to work for us today. Understanding the context for their thinking helps us distinguish what remains vital and illuminating and what does not.
As this unusual mix of political philosophy, shamanism, self-knowledge, and science converged into what I came to identify as the archetypal truth quest, I saw with increasing clarity the failure of our current paradigm in education. I saw that political science was not primarily interested in the big questions of value and meaning; in fact, the very terms truth and wisdom, good and evil, were being purged from the curriculum. Even meaning had been eclipsed by almighty critique. This was strange and disappointing, since it was precisely questions of value and meaning that had led me to political philosophy and had defined it for its founders, Socrates and his pupil, Plato. On the face of it, the situation seemed bizarre. The university, the preeminent institution of higher learning, was ignoring the question of questions, the answer to which was required to justify its own existence. No more an ivory tower, the university has long been an integral part of the larger society. Its focus on specialization without generalization, critique without reconstruction, and its increasingly refined division of labor ultimately served the values and institutions of the ruling political philosophy of classical Liberalism: rationalism, competitive individualism, and efficient production in a global marketplace.
I saw that the primary function of higher education was to equip the individual to contribute to the common good by pursuing self-interest. Across disciplines, there was little consideration of what the “good of the whole” might mean, other than being the unintended outcome of competing self-interest in an ever-expanding free market. Instead of education for responsible participation in the life of a democracy, the focus was on mathematics, science, and literacy in the interests of job training and workforce development. The logic of the factory and the marketplace determined university disciplinary divisions as much as it did most research budgets and methodologies. The sciences thrived, and philosophy, history, and the humanities fragmented and declined, with only cosmetic attempts to address the search for the good through vague references to character, integrity, and ethics.
Reflecting on my dissatisfaction with the current state of the knowledge industry, I considered what distinguished wisdom from mere knowledge or information. First of all, wisdom has a moral concern; it brings all of human experience and knowledge to deal with questions of how we should live — questions of right and wrong, good and bad. I could imagine how, throughout most of human existence, when we lived as hunter-gatherers this sort of teaching was freely shared, as young and old sat around the same campfire every night, under the stars, surrounded by wilderness, talking, arguing, and telling the stories relating one life to another, the living to the dead, and the human community to the great, wide world of nature. Traditionally, wisdom was the special purview of elders, those who had experienced some of the great, archetypal transitions from infancy through adolescence to maturity, adulthood, and then old age; they were those who had tasted the great passions of life — love and hate, beauty and ugliness, the sweetness of victory and the bitterness of loss. Most importantly, elders were closer to the mystery of death, a fate as certain as the fact of our birth and just as crucial for grasping what “life” might mean.
Wisdom is built on self-knowledge — a recognition that our most valuable understanding is energized and shaped by our strongest emotions and deepest experiences. Ultimately, everything we learn and teach is framed and given meaning by the unique stories of individual lives. But the wise individual also knows how to live in society, something learned over years of face-to-face engagement with others — direct, honest, caring communication within a community of similarly seeking individuals sensitive to the great natural community of being. The search for wisdom needs to be the core of the “good life” that the classical political philosophers