Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
But more than alive and connected, we felt powerful and dangerous.
Such emotions frighten secular liberal intellectuals, and with good reason. When they are mobilized by simple stories of absolute right and wrong, they can generate seismic social forces that drive bold actions with heroic and horrendous consequences. The Nazis mobilized exactly such experience through narratives of blood and soil, oppression and liberation. But it is equally true that such passion is an expression of life energy — Eros — lust for life. Simply squelching such emotional resonance with the past is ultimately deadly. But as the Nazis showed us, Eros can also be deformed and harnessed for destruction — Thanatos — the death impulse.
We all need big-picture narratives to inspire and guide our actions, to take us beyond short-term self-interest and help us find meaning, to help us be of service to our immediate and expanded community of life. The big picture, a worldview, is an essential component of knowledge of the Good. But the great danger of visionary narratives is that they become disconnected from the truth quest. When this happens, they easily get hijacked by libido dominandi — the lust for power.
Clearly, most narratives of tribal and national identity are truncated, without an authentic species dimension and thus lacking a grounding in the truth quest. The possibility of our present moment is to go beyond such limitations. A science-guided, truth-loving narrative can now, perhaps for the first time, take us back before the origin of all tribes and all civilizations to the roots of a shared humanity born in an African wilderness. In doing so it can give us a passionate basis for taking all nations and all tribes forward into a truly global humanity.
None of this was clear to me then. I was too caught up in the imminence of war and in the exhilaration of my own healing to pay attention to what should have been obvious: the parallel narrative of meaning connecting Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims to that same ancient landscape. I was integrating some opposites at the expense of neglecting others.
Standing guard alone one night, under the glittering winter stars, breaking discipline by smoking one of the cheap Nadiv cigarettes the kibbutz sent us, I thought back on my life in South Africa and England. I realized at that moment that I was better at soldiering than anything else I had ever done, except perhaps passing exams. I had moved around the medicine wheel 180 degrees from my starting point. Whether my service was ultimately compromised or noble, I knew I was growing and becoming more of a whole human being, and that seemed enough to justify the hardship and the danger.
Much later in Hawai‘i, when reading Native American literature, I immediately appreciated the esprit of the Dog Soldier Society of the Cheyenne as that of a closely bonded brotherhood of young men, living a life of the body, outdoors, defending tribal boundaries. Kibbutz and the army had given me a taste of a more indigenous, primal way of being Jewish. I felt wide awake as if for the first time in my life.
Philosophy in a War Zone
In October 1973, the Yom Kippur War blasted apart my healing revelations. On the holiest day of the Jewish year, Egyptian and Syrian forces attacked simultaneously and overran Israeli defenses. I had been discharged before the war started and was in South Africa visiting my parents. Since I was not an Israeli citizen — having volunteered as a Jew of the Diaspora — I had not been assigned a reserve unit and was not called up for one of the emergency flights to Israel. By the time I found my way back, the war was half over, and it was clear Israel would prevail. I returned not so much to help save the country as to be with my closest friends, who were going through that ultimate test — what we had spent those hard months preparing for. Most of them were serving as corporals dispersed among new platoons. Some had been guarding the frontline positions overrun on the Syrian border on the first day of the war. I went to my old base, which was empty except for a skeleton staff who told me the brigade had regrouped. It had joined the paratrooper counteroffensive across the Suez Canal and was now fighting “somewhere in Egypt.” No one knew exactly where. Had I checked in with central command, I knew, in the confusion of war I would have been ordered to some menial job away from the fighting, away from my friends. I decided to go and find them on my own.
I had no rifle or helmet, but I still had my olive fatigues, boots, and the dog tags, prisoner-of-war card, and plastic-wrapped field dressing soldiers carry with them at all times. I put on my uniform, stood at the roadside, and in minutes had caught a ride south to the fighting in Egypt. I got out of my first ride near the edge of the Sinai desert and an empty truck immediately stopped. It was driven by a jittery young infantry lieutenant who had lost his platoon on the Golan Heights on the Syrian border. He had made his way to the fighting in Egypt, where he was given the job of driving out of the battle zone every other day, carrying the bodies of dead Israelis home.
By late afternoon we could see the pontoon bridge across the Suez Canal a few kilometers ahead. We stopped behind an enormous traffic jam of military vehicles snaking across the single-lane bridge, trying to get back into Egypt before dark. My driver warned me that, at dusk every day for the past week, several Egyptian Katyusha missile trucks would race up close to Israeli lines and fire dozens of rockets zeroed in on the traffic jam at the bridge, and then escape under cover of dark. He indicated the fresh bandage on his hand from a shrapnel wound the night before. He warned me we would have maybe a second or two to take cover once we saw the rockets streaking toward us, like “little red birds.” We sat and waited and watched the view ahead. It is hard to overstate how utterly gripping the spectacle of war can be. Israeli jets were swooping low over the canal triggering Egyptian missiles and then climbing rapidly, blowing up the missiles behind them. By the time we crossed the canal, the sun had set and I was feverish with excitement.
As soon as we drove off the pontoon bridge onto Egyptian soil, I saw the “little red birds” flaming toward us. Then in one long second, with panicked screaming around me, I found myself somehow out of the truck, my face buried in the sand in the middle of a firestorm of rockets, ground-shaking explosions blasting shrapnel over me from all sides. I felt a sharp impact on my back. I thought, “You fool — now your adventure is over.” I felt behind to check the damage, but it was only a piece of packing crate sent flying by the blasts. Then for the strangest second, I saw in my mind’s eye the Egyptian soldier firing the battery — a full-grown man, scared, sweating, heroically trying to kill me. The vision couldn’t have been more unexpected or less welcome. I felt for the first time with crushing force that I was on someone else’s land, and he wanted me dead. At that moment I started to feel a personal responsibility for the whole murderous entanglement. I had chosen to be there.
For two days I hitched rides trying to find my battalion while watching a war going on around me in a fog of horror. A passing officer gave me an Egyptian helmet and a captured Russian Kalashnikov AK-47, which I cleaned, oiled, and loaded. I found a resupply unit preparing a truck of ammunition for my battalion and rode with them. Scorched, bloated bodies and burnt jeeps and trucks casually littered the roadside. Israeli tanks inexplicably charged across our path, chasing something through the sand dunes and firing just out of sight. Occasionally fighter jets screamed low overhead, making us leap out of the truck into the sand with rifles cocked. But by then the jets were all Israeli. I had grown up on my share of war comics, action movies, and stories of heroic combat. But this had no connection to any of my fantasies about war. I couldn’t get past the obscenity of the butchery — the simple fact that humans were blasting one another into pieces of burnt, bloody meat and splintered bone, left to lie and rot in the sun. Where was the glory?
The next morning my unit found us, and my friends gave me a warm welcome. That night they had charged an Egyptian position overlooking the canal and killed the garrison. Some were in shock, most simply thrilled to be alive. None of our boys had even been seriously injured. I sat with them in the newly occupied trenches listening to the crazed stories of those fresh from killing. Below us were bunkers and bodies; the air was still thick with that strange sweetish, sickening smell of fresh blood drying on the warming sand. We looked over the Suez Canal into the Sinai Peninsula where the Egyptian Third Army was now trapped, surrounded by Israelis on all sides. We could see the streams of tracer rounds from small arms as they fired in fear.
As I sat in the trench looking over the bunkers, without warning, an Egyptian soldier jumped up perhaps twenty yards below me. I saw him clearly, middle-aged, heavyset, unarmed,