Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
aware gradually that the threads of the truth quest were spun out of the basic ordering processes in the life of the hunting-gathering band. There was something in the push-pull of life in small, decentralized, democratic, and self-sufficient communities, living in a shamanic resonance with the natural world, that sustained and promoted the quest. My personal search in its own faltering and incomplete fashion had been following an archetypal dynamic embodied in a primal politics.
* Veldt is the old Dutch spelling for the more common Afrikaans word veld, derived from the word for “field.” It is pronounced with a soft v and a hard t as in “felt.” I follow the older spelling to help non–South Africans approximate the correct pronunciation. The word refers to the wide-open spaces of scrub- and grass-covered savanna reminiscent of the landscape on the North American prairie.
* Humanity’s oldest symbolic artifact, a piece of carved ochre seventy-seven thousand years old, was found a little farther down the coast in a rock shelter called Blombos near the small town of Stilbaai. More recently, a pair of hundred-thousand-year-old “painting kits” in abalone shells were found in the same shelter. See chapter 5 for more on this.
* Chapter 6, “Lost Worlds,” discusses the evidence for this. “Land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of Pasturage, Tillage, or Planting, is called, as indeed it is, wast[e]: and we shall find the benefit of it amounts to little more than nothing.”2 Locke didn’t have the slightest idea of the evolutionary continuity of species or the fact of mass extinction. His view was precisely the opposite of my own deepest experiences of wilderness: that the man-made is the realm of the mundane, and the natural world of creation is the domain of the sacred — God-made — exquisitely beautiful, supremely valuable, its very existence miraculous.
* I discuss this particular painting in more detail in chapter 8, “If You Don’t Dance, You Die.”
* Much credit goes to Dr. Ian Player for leading the efforts to create this wilderness reserve and initiating the “Save the Rhino” project. Rhinos are again critically endangered by poaching for the Asian market in rhino horn. In South Africa in 2011, over three hundred rhino were slaughtered by poachers.
** There is confusing variation in the spelling of Ju/twasi, ranging from Ju/wasi and Zhun/twasi to the scholarly Ju/hoansi, which follows phonetic convention. Elizabeth Marshall points out that Ju/hoansi reads to the average person like “Jew hone si” and has little resemblance to the actual pronunciation. The “/” is a dental palatal click made by withdrawing the tongue sharply from the back of the front teeth in a sucking sound, as in “tsk.” The spelling that comes closest to the actual pronunciation to my ear is the slightly unconventional Ju/twasi (singular: “Jul/twa”). For more on this name, see also chapter 6.
* In 1986 this become the Nyae Nyae Farmers Co-operative, a grassroots advocacy organization for the Ju/twasi.
* The film, a full-length high-definition feature, My Hunter’s Heart, has since been shown throughout South Africa.
* I return to Thomas Kuhn in the epilogue, where I consider the model of primal politics as a “metaparadigm.”
* Chapter 9, “Boundary Crossing,” discusses shamanism in more detail.
* I return to my expanded use of Voegelin’s “in-between” in chapter 4, “Recovery of the Quest, Part II.”
ABANDONMENT OF THE QUEST — A PATH WITH NO HEART
With the seventeenth century begins the incredible spectaculum of modernity — both fascinating and nauseating, grandiose and vulgar, exhilarating and depressing, tragic and grotesque — with its apocalyptic enthusiasm for building new worlds that will be old tomorrow, at the expense of old worlds that were new yesterday; with its destructive wars and revolutions spaced by temporary stabilizations on ever lower levels of spiritual and intellectual order through natural law, enlightened self-interest, a balance of powers, a balance of profits, the survival of the fittest, and the fear of atomic annihilation in a fit of fitness; with its ideological dogmas piled on top of the ecclesiastic and sectarian ones and its resistant skepticism that throws them all equally on the garbage heap of opinion; with its great systems built upon untenable premises and its shrewd suspicions that the premises are indeed untenable and therefore must never be rationally discussed; with the result, in our time, of having unified mankind into a global madhouse bursting with stupendous vitality.
— ERIC VOEGELIN, Published Essays, 1966–1985
It has no doubt been worth the metaphysical barbarism of a few centuries to possess modern science.
— E. A. BURTT, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science
The Western Revolutions
All the defining institutions of modernity emerged out of western Europe beginning in the sixteenth century as a thousand years of feudalism collapsed and three revolutionary movements converged. Traditionally, historians deal separately with the Protestant Reformation, the scientific revolution, and the commercial revolution. But taking them together we can see how each changed the common cultural and intellectual context in ways that reinforced the most revolutionary ideas of the other two to produce a civilizational shift. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these ideas solidified into the “metaphysics of modernity,” the philosophical underpinnings for global industrial capitalism. It provided the framework for approaching the search for the best way to live, which eventually produced the political philosophy of classical Liberalism. This was most clearly expressed by the writings of the defining Liberal thinkers — Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith — who together offered a compelling vision of the good life and the just society that remains the default ideology of modernity. Liberalism remains the primary philosophical justification for our dominant institutions and values: free-market capitalism, minimal representational government, the rights and freedoms of the individual, industrial mass production, and a culture of unlimited material consumption.*
The Liberal vision inspired a wave of democratic revolutions, including, most notably, the American Revolution, which culminated in the drafting of the Constitution of the United States. The founding fathers of the American republic represented the creative elite of the new revolutionary philosophy. The delegates from the colonies who met in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the Constitution were exemplars of a triumphant middle class: predominantly successful businessmen, lawyers, and farmers; Protestant, property owning, and imbued with the promise of the new mechanistic science. The country was vast