Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
developed a central nervous system and self-reflective consciousness, creating the most complex layer interacting with all the others — the noosphere — the layer of creative, culture-producing, freely choosing humanity.
Teilhard recognized this tendency to grow in complexity and consciousness as a fundamental feature of the evolving universe, which he stated as the law of complexity-consciousness. This meant simply that over time increasing complexity of structure was associated with increasing consciousness. Consciousness was not a foreign implant, seeded on our planet by some extragalactic alien, but a fundamental, emergent property of matter. Consciousness could be simply regarded as the interior aspect of matter gradually manifesting through the eons of the evolutionary drama, expanding its interiority, as material complexity increases over time. This continued until it reached its most self-conscious form to date — the knowledge-seeking, ethically awake human being. Teilhard summed up his revelation with the statement that the “atomic physicist is the atom’s way of looking at itself.” We could rephrase that as “the philosopher is the planet’s way of knowing itself,” and then choosing its future. Descartes was wrong. Inner and outer are not absolutely separated; they are two faces of a single reality. Consciousness is a facet of matter.
The Teilhardian vision didn’t end there. The superclusters of galaxies are still racing apart with the energy from the initial Big Bang; the universe is still cooling and complexifying. There is no reason why this trajectory, which has been unfolding for billions of years, should suddenly stop dead once the noosphere has produced a civilization that has discovered consumerism. As humanity stumbles to grasp itself through the symbolic narrative of science, history, and philosophy, the cosmic process seems to be reaching some sort of threshold. The obvious question is: What is impending? What would a further leap in complexity-consciousness look like? Given our current reality, what would a more fully self-conscious realization of human agency and creativity look like?
Teilhard made the crucial connection between the evolutionary vision and the political project of seeking the best way to live. But he expressed his anticipated leap in the language of Christianity — as the emergence of a Christ consciousness — the “Christosphere.” This left me cold. Christianity was still, for me, contaminated by centuries of anti-Semitism. Nothing in the Christosphere resonated with the Zionism that by now had become the guiding passion in my life. What sort of personal and collective politics could the Teihardian vision support? At some level I must have known I would eventually have to reconcile my politics with scientific cosmology. But more urgent existential issues intervened. I would have to commit fully to the Israeli drama before I returned to philosophy years later, when I could think more freely in the peace and beauty of a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Redemption Land
By the time I graduated, I had a degree in medical science and the history and philosophy of science, but intellectual life had lost its enchantment. Graduate work seemed like another layer of verbiage added to an infinite regress of words and reflections on other people’s experiences of life. I felt unbalanced, unsure of my grounding in the world. My indoor bookish life seemed a continuation of two thousand years of alienated Jewish existence in exile — escapist intellectualism, study, prayer. The overheated brilliance of Cambridge accentuated what was missing: the world of nature and the body, and direct experiences of the primary realities of existence.
I started reading Micah Berdichevsky, the Nietzschean Zionist writing at the turn of the twentieth century, and all my doubts disappeared. I suddenly saw my path clearly. Berdichevsky was born in the Russian Pale, the son of a long line of rabbis and scholars, and was himself a brilliant scholar of the Talmud and Kabbalah. His father disowned him when he discovered him reading forbidden enlightenment literature. Berdichevsky responded:
I recall from the teaching of the sages: Whoever walks by the way and interrupts his study to remark, How fine is that tree, how fine is that field, forfeits his life!
Is it any wonder there arose among us generation after generation despising nature, who thought of all God’s marvels as superfluous trivialities?
Is it surprising that we became a non-people, a non-nation — non-[human], indeed?
But I assert that then alone will Judah and Israel be saved, when another teaching is given unto us, namely: Whoever walks by the way and sees a fine tree and fine field and fine sky and leaves them to think on other thoughts — that man is like one who forfeits his life!
Give us back our fine trees and fine fields! Give us back the Universe!7
I wanted to experience trees and fields — the natural universe that I felt I had shut out for years. I needed to get out. I needed action.
In three more years I could have been a fully qualified doctor. Instead, as soon as I graduated, I turned down my place at a teaching hospital, left the golah, the Jewish exile, and made aliyah — the ascent to Israel. I moved to a kibbutz, where I worked as a laborer in the banana plantations while improving my Hebrew.
Kibbutz Zionism seemed to offer a respectable, even noble, respite from academia. While at Cambridge I had considered some of the other radical political philosophies of the sixties. But none of the visions to emerge from the amorphous counterculture came close to the richly realized utopia of the modern Israeli kibbutz.8 Kibbutz Zionism in its most complete form offered more than agrarian communal living. It included a passionate narrative of meaning in which the Jewish return to the land was offered as a kind of psycho-spiritual healing. Scholar and mystic Aaron David Gordon preached a “religion of labor” in which physical work on the biblical homeland would unite body and soul in a liberated life. Without access to a life on the land, Jews would always be at the mercy of others, lacking the basis for true self-sufficiency. This was a matter not simply of economics and politics but of a psycho-spiritual disease that could only be healed by contact with the living earth. As Gordon put it:
The Jewish people have been completely cut off from nature and imprisoned within city walls these two thousand years. We have become accustomed to every form of life, except to a life of labor — of labor done at our behest and for its own sake.9
Gordon was, like many of the other chalutzim — the early pioneers — the son of a family of scholars. He came to Israel at the age of forty-seven, a frail, slight, white-bearded figure, revered as Hazken — “the Old Man.” He spent the rest of his life working the land, living an ascetic existence, and preaching his philosophy based as much on Kabbalist mysticism as Zionist agrarianism. During the day he sweated in the fields extolling “labor not to make a living, not work as a deed of charity, but for life itself …one of the limbs of life, one of its deepest roots.”10 At night after an exhausting day of work, he would join the spinning circles of hora dancers, caught up in the joy of bonding with his beloved community of farmers.
For Gordon this reconnection with the primal realities of human existence was the movement’s moral and spiritual center, the source of its vitality and creativity. Another thinker, Ber Borochov, used a graphic image to support this insight: for centuries in exile the Jewish pyramid of labor had been upside down, balancing on its point with the base up in the air. The majority of Jews, the base, were intellectuals, scholars, rabbis, and professionals — luftmenschen — literally “air people.” Only a tiny minority, the point of the pyramid, worked on the land in the primary productive process without which no society can survive. The labor Zionist vision in its essence was simple: set the pyramid back on its base; replace the vulnerable, neurotic intellectual with muscular, earthy farmers and soldiers. Or as fellow Zionist Jeffrey Goldberg summed it up sharply: “Only donkey work could straighten the crooked back of Jews in exile.”11
But the kibbutz was meant to be more than tribal therapy. It saw itself as a specifically Jewish contribution to the utopian vision of creating a democratic egalitarian community. The average kibbutz had a few hundred members and functioned, like the Athenian polis, as a self-governing direct democracy. Unlike Athens, the kibbutz insisted on complete gender equality, with all adult members, men and women, involved directly in government, gathering face-to-face in the general assembly (assifah klali) to discuss and decide issues