Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
whole.
The most recent leap in human self-awareness has been accomplished through industrial capitalism, inspired and guided by the political philosophy of Liberalism, which advocated freeing the rational self-interested individual from the constraints of religion, tradition, and arbitrary government. Liberalism helped liberate the individual from a calcified and corrupt feudalism. It produced the astonishing understandings of modern science and its near-miraculous technology. But this revolution has also deformed crucial dimensions of what it means to be human — in particular, the organic connection to other humans and to the larger world of nature from which our humanity emerged. Over the past few centuries the astounding leap in our technological prowess has been supported by an increasingly complex division of labor, held together by hierarchies of wealth and organized violence.
In the past century, while we have applied our scientific intelligence to brilliantly illuminating aspects of the human condition, we have also applied it, with equal passion, to the bureaucratically administered extermination of millions. We have endured two world wars and witnessed how a highly developed industrial nation, Nazi Germany, focused advanced engineering in a production line of mass murder. The transports, gas chambers, and crematoria of one of the death camps, Auschwitz, operated for two years, killing and cremating up to twenty thousand people a day. Altogether somewhere between eleven and seventeen million perished in the Nazi extermination program. After declaring “never again!” we have already witnessed several smaller genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and now Darfur. Since World War II we have not had a single day without warfare. The toll of government-directed murder for the twentieth century exceeds 260 million human beings.10 We face a situation in which humanity has become almost godlike in its technological prowess but demonic in how it directs that power.
Peter Russell’s curve of accelerating change suggests that we are on the cusp of a “fourth revolution” in human self-consciousness. Thanks to science and critical scholarship, we have a depth of understanding of all three revolutions that no previous generation could have hoped for. We are in a position to recognize the enduring but partial truths of each and to integrate their wisdom in a higher, more-inclusive synthesis. Such an understanding would join together what has been fragmented; it would integrate the earth-based wisdom of primal societies, which sustained humanity for nine-tenths of the time that we have been human, with the achievements of the classical civilizations and the past four hundred years of science and industrial capitalism. It would bring us into a fuller and more creative partnership with the evolving earth community. Such a future primal synthesis ultimately requires rethinking almost everything we do and, in the process, living differently.
The Three Revolutionary Leaps
There are three parts to this enormous undertaking:
• Understanding how the crisis of civilization has emerged within the evolutionary story “telling us into being.”
• Grasping the critical role of the psyche of the individual and the significance of choice, constituting the realms of “good” and “evil” in this drama.
• Growing into a fuller humanity by pursuing our capacity for understanding and creativity and by fashioning a wisdom-based way of life — a new politics — guided by a larger, truer vision of the good of the evolving whole.
The Four-Part Nature of the Quest as a “Tao of Politics”
Today, there are clear signs of something dramatically novel emerging: a vision of an evolving, creative humanity developing out of an evolving and stupendously creative universe. Many all over the world seem to be responding intuitively to the truth of this vision and to the existential reality of our global crisis. They are doing what they can, with what they have, where they are — creatively and courageously struggling to live more conscious, more meaningful, and more satisfying lives in ways that enhance the living diversity of the biosphere. A number of great thinkers, scholars, and artists have already contributed to clarifying and developing this emerging cosmology. What is urgently needed is a corresponding political vision — a political philosophy — that will help us better relate the life of the individual to that of the community, and the life of the whole human community to that of the natural world.
Future Primal is my contribution to this enormous work. It presents a model of the truth quest as an archetypal dynamic of the human search for order. I discuss this model on several levels: as I have experienced it in my own life, as it apparently unfolded from the emergence of consciousness in the earliest human society, as it has been variously repressed and cultivated by different societies, and then as it is emerging in our own times.
The model itself identifies four fundamentally interconnected elements — each is both a process and a value, together constituting minimal conditions for the truth quest. As mentioned, the four elements are
1. The self-understanding of the searching, growing individual;
2. Honest and ongoing face-to-face discussion;
3. Participation in a democratic community of fellow seekers;
4. The collective effort to construct an open-ended big picture of our single shared reality.
Together, these constitute a four-part structure that can be represented graphically as a circle divided by a cross into four quadrants — a mandala. The mandala is also, appropriately enough, the oldest and most universal symbol of order, representing the relationship of the searching individual to the cosmos (see the diagram in chapter 4, page 118).
We see the model most clearly exemplified in one of the last remaining indigenous hunting-gathering societies, the San Bushmen* of the Kalahari Desert. The San have been shown to be one of our closest relatives to that original human population we are all descended from.** If the success of a society is to be judged by longevity and resilience, San hunter-gatherers were probably the most successful society on earth. Despite the assumptions of early modern philosophers, life as a hunter-gatherer in a state of nature was not a “war of all against all.” Nor was it a desperate struggle for survival. Under reasonable conditions, ancient and modern hunter-gatherers seem to have enjoyed more leisure than any other form of society. They directed their energies to cultivating a rich social and spiritual life, attuning their existence to “the story telling us.” In the pages that follow, I show how the San exemplify this four-part dynamic as both the core of the truth quest and the coordinates of a humanizing politics.
Surprisingly, we can also find the primal structure emerging as the central values of the classical Greek polis — the creative font of Western civilization, the source of our scientific rationality, humanism, and politics. It was as if in the relative freedom and affluence of a mountainous part of the eastern Mediterranean, the Greeks reached back to the primal wisdom of the hunter-gatherer band and integrated it into their own experience in a blaze of creative brilliance. Since the model seems to express an archetypal structure of the search for order that is rooted in the primal human condition — the autonomous creative individual, in face-to-face community, embedded in nature — we find it reappearing at those creative moments of transition in history where one order is collapsing, a new one is emerging, and the big questions resurface. This is the situation we find ourselves in today.
Throughout I show how the mandala structure of the quest can function as a conceptual map — an intellectual, moral, and political compass — helping orient our movement into the future by keeping us organically rooted in our deepest nature. It can help us diagnose our crisis and clarify connections among a growing number of widely separate, liberating political and cultural initiatives — ranging from the “Arab Spring” to the Israeli kibbutz, from corporate reform and economic decentralization to eco-villages, Green politics, and what appears to be a mass spiritual revival. In so doing it can hopefully inspire,