Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
origin was the most profound and sacred mystery. Each had a cosmology, a story of origins that formed the foundation of its way of life and guided its economics and politics. The viability of a society depended on the success of its cosmology in attuning human activity to the larger, ultimately unfathomable reality that created and sustained all of life.
Today, the story we tell ourselves about our economics and politics has run its course and is exhausted. Humanity enters the twenty-first century in a state of extraordinary crisis. It is a crisis of planetary dimensions involving every major social and biological system, affecting almost every aspect of our individual lives. The same method of persuasive scientific inference we trust to splice genes and rocket humans to the moon tells us that industrialized humanity is directly responsible for the collapse of ecosystems on every continent. All our oceans are polluted, our fisheries dying, coral reefs bleaching, deserts expanding, and forests shrinking. Almost half the terrestrial surface of the earth has been transformed by urbanization and agriculture. There is overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is accelerating global warming and climate change, which in 2012 melted the Arctic ice sheet to its smallest expanse in recorded history. Scientists warn that our civilization is forcing a planet-wide tipping point — a transition in our biosphere that is dramatically changing the conditions under which civilization developed and flourished for the past ten thousand years. They tell us we have entered the Anthropocene, a geological epoch marked by the destructive impact of industrialized humanity on the earth.1 There is a growing awareness that nothing this catastrophic has happened to life on earth since the last great mass extinction, which ended the age of dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago.2 Almost as astounding is the fact that most human beings are completely unaware of our situation. In the words of William van Dusen Wishard, we are “sleepwalking through the apocalypse.”3
How has this happened? More than three centuries ago the story driving our politics decisively separated human self-understanding from the experience of the natural universe as sacred. Today the primordial experience of the mystery of our earthly origins has ceased to be a moral force in our lives. All our dominant institutions, from the global marketplace to the factory model of industrial production, were constructed on the basis of a radically constricted understanding of the place of the human in the cosmos. We urgently need a vision of a new politics and economics that is attuned to our larger reality.
The Personal and the Planetary — A Primal Resonance
I started as an amateur political philosopher simply searching for a way to improve myself and my society. As I confronted the shocking extent of our crisis against the backdrop of the immensities of modern cosmology, the search came to dominate my life. Many times along the way I felt alone, as if swimming against the tide and was forced to question myself, to ask why and how I was searching. Then it occurred to me that in spite of the terrifying prospect of civilizational collapse, and in spite of the personal sacrifices and difficulties, the process of searching had also become a comfort, a way of connecting more deeply with others and with the world. The search had become a kind of psychological and spiritual discipline, a key to my personal growth. It was as if in waking up to the vastness of our outer universe and the chaotic condition of modern humanity, I had also woken up to the inner universe of the human psyche and found an expanse just as limitless, astounding, and full of creative possibility. Bringing the outer and the inner together generated a resonance that healed and inspired me; in doing so, this process revealed itself as the core of a better way to live — a new form of a very old politics.
Once I became more self-conscious about my searching, I saw how its most essential aspects were obvious and simple, but strangely neglected in modern universities and public life. There were four essential, perennial components of the search, which seemed to differentiate out from the nature of consciousness. They were the pursuit of self-knowledge and personal growth; honest, face-to-face discussion that enlarged and qualified personal understandings; communication within small democratic communities of trusted equals; and a collective, cooperative weaving together of a big story — a narrative of meaning — that helped the individual find his or her particular place in the ever-expanding shared big picture.
Today, reflecting on the big picture of scientific cosmology helps us recognize that the searching human being is an organic outgrowth of an evolving earth. At the deepest level, we are an integral part of the biosphere, inseparable from the planet we are currently despoiling. We can see that, in some extraordinary way, our science-informed searching is the earth’s way of knowing itself through the human. Early societies, immersed in an unpolluted wilderness on which they depended absolutely, recognized this resonance between the natural world and human consciousness intuitively and explored it through their shamanic systems of religion and healing. This attunement between inner and outer seemed capable of generating spiritual experiences we commonly call ecstatic or mystical, which have the effect of inspiring and ordering our lives.
When we approach politics from such a perspective, magnificent possibilities open up: of ways of life profoundly “better, truer, and more beautiful” than our sad and frenetic destructiveness. Future Primal offers one such vision by weaving together the various narrative layers of my search, from my personal history to the history of civilization, our species, and indeed the universe itself. The vision draws from other models of politics but differs from them in one fundamental respect: at its center is awareness of the ultimate mystery of our origins, and with it the necessity for an ongoing process of creative searching.
Bringing Soul Back into Politics — the Truth Quest
Our modern use of the word politics has become as thoroughly debased and misunderstood as the practice it is commonly used to describe — seeking and wielding power over others for personal gain. On the scale of public opinion, politicians rank somewhere between prostitutes and used-car salesmen. The whole business of politics is considered as far from its Socratic roots in philosophy and “cultivating virtue” as one can get. To move out of this dead end, we need to retrace our steps to find a new way forward. If we go back two and a half thousand years to classical Greece, we can find the origin of the word politics in the Greek polis — the self-governing, autonomous, democratic city-state — where “politics” simply referred to the affairs of the polis, and as the concern of all, it was regarded as the most ennobling and meaningful of all human activities.
I use the word politics in this original, inclusive sense, to mean the universal human struggle, individually and collectively, to seek and to live the best possible life. Political philosophy can then be reconnected to its original Socratic intention as the search for the ideal of “the good life.” This has two primary aspects: On the one hand, there is what Socrates called “the improvement of one’s soul,” or what we loosely understand as personal growth, since the Greek word for “soul” is psyche, from which we get our psychology. On the other hand, there is the improvement of one’s society. Traditionally, this sort of Socratic knowledge was called wisdom. By contrast, in today’s universities “political philosophy” refers to an obscure subspecialty within the discipline of political science that focuses on the texts of the great philosophers of the past. It has lost its living connection to the primordial questions: “How should I live?” and “How should we all live together?” Part of my purpose is to recover this original search for meaning, what I call “the primal truth quest.” Everything we do — the failure and success of all our politics — depends on our grasp of this quest and the reliability of the understanding it produces.
The dangers we face today are compounded by the fact that we have never been more confused or more cynical about what constitutes the good, the true, and the beautiful. We are daily inundated with vast quantities of information but lack the most basic shared understanding of how we should live together. Not only do we lack a shared vision but we are profoundly confused about the way we should search. Science provides only neutral tools. Religion, when based on strict obedience to the Holy Scriptures, remains blind and closed to the search. If we don’t know how to look, how will we recognize the truth of a vision of a better way?
Here is our central failing: We have created