Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
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We stand at a breathtaking moment in human existence, an evolutionary turning point, where the integrity of the biosphere depends as never before on human understanding and choice. As I write, destruction to the living fabric of the earth accelerates and human suffering intensifies. What we lack are not technologies and tactics as much as political will. And this can only come from a compelling shared vision of our situation and the possibilities inherent in the paradox of the human condition: that the earth that gave birth to the free-thinking human is the very same earth we are choosing to devastate.
Future Primal is not a conventional academic work in history, philosophy, psychology, or anthropology, but rather a work of creative synthesis. It draws from a wide range of disciplines, cultures, and historical periods to answer the big questions of personal and political life. Given the broad range of this project, it is inevitable that my treatment will be, in places, oversimplified and superficial. But what I hope to offer is an integrated vision of a better way of life grounded, as any such work must be, in my personal search. In drawing together images of the past, present, and possible future of such a politics, I show how at its center is a model of a way of searching, which is also the core of the good life we seek. This means the vision of Future Primal differs from past paradigms of politics in recognizing that the ongoing search itself — the primal truth quest — needs to be at the center of a new politics.
By telling something of how this vision grew out of my search and my story, I invite readers to reflect on how their own worldviews have been shaped by their lives. When we pursue such understandings, and share them openly in face-to-face communication, we start to re-create a living shared cosmology while embodying the politics of questing in our lives. We find, in fact, that our searching becomes the goal; the path becomes the destination in a Tao of politics. Such a practice, if generalized into a political culture, could help constitute that dramatic leap in collective self-consciousness our species so desperately needs.
Organization of the Book
This book is organized in three parts. Part I, “Where Are We?” takes the measure of our current moment and how we got here. In the spirit of the truth quest, this weaves together both my personal story and society’s story. In a sense, chapter 1, “The Truth Quest,” begins at the end, describing how I came to recognize the structure of the mandala of primal politics in my life, the life of the San Bushmen, and society at large. Chapter 2, “Abandonment of the Quest,” tells the history of our ruling paradigm of the good life — the political philosophy of classical Liberalism and how it has come to constitute an increasingly global political culture that eliminated the quest from public life. Chapter 3, “Recovery of the Quest, Part I,” tells the “small story” of my life and my struggle for meaning, out of which this vision of primal politics emerged. Chapter 4, “Recovery of the Quest, Part II,” is the philosophical heart of the book, presenting the future primal political model I propose and explaining the dynamic of the four-part mandala structure of the truth quest at its center.
Part II, “Where Do We Come From?” elaborates on the “big story” of humanity and the traditional life of the San Bushmen; it focuses on identifying our original, ancestral primal politics; how that is rooted in the evolution of our species; and how it is exemplified in the lifestyle of San hunter-gatherers. Chapter 5, “Out of Wilderness,” tells the story of how both consciousness and the coordinates of the quest evoloved out of an African wilderness. Chapter 6, “Lost Worlds,” re-creates what we know of traditional San Bushman hunter-gatherers when the fully nomadic hunting-gathering way of life was still viable; it also examines the intentions, achievements, and limits of the researchers and scholars who did the research. Chapter 7, “Primal Politics,” looks at more recent scholarship on San society and presents a fuller picture of how its traditional life exemplifies the four elements of primal politics. Chapter 8, “If You Don’t Dance, You Die,” describes the spiritual life of the San as expressed through their rock art, mythology, and healing dance, and it shows how shamanic practices are integral to their politics. I explore shamanic practice and its role in the truth quest further and more generally in chapter 9, “Boundary Crossing,” and chapter 10, “The Outer Reaches of Inner Wilderness.” Chapter 11, “The Primal Polis: Socrates as Shaman,” steps back in time to explore the political parallels in the ancient Greek polis and the role of shamanism in Socratic teaching and the birth of Western politics.
Part III, “Where Should We Be Going?” focuses on our present moment. Chapter 12, “Our Primal Future,” highlights instances where we can already see elements of primal politics emerging around the world. In particular, it examines the Israeli kibbutz and the politics of Nelson Mandela for lessons on how we might apply these principles in radically different contexts. The epilogue, “A Tao of Politics,” tackles the limitations of all political paradigms and shows how the future primal model differs from past paradigms in recognizing that the process of searching is at the heart of the good life we seek. Finally, the appendix, “Future Primal Toolkit,” suggests a range of strategies for bringing our primal future into our lives here and now.
* Thanks to Brian Thomas Swimme and Thomas Berry for their inspirational framing of “The Universe Story” and for this more fitting alternative term to “the Big Bang.”
* There is no single satisfactory name for the indigenous click-language-speaking hunter-gatherers of southern Africa. Each tribe names itself in a different but closely related language. Outsiders have called them variously “Bushmen,” “San,” “Khoisan,” and “Baswara,” but there is no Bushman term for all the tribes taken collectively. While scholars favor the composite “Khoisan,” surviving groups in Namibia and Botswana tend to use the term “Bushmen,” in the way that “black” has been appropriated with pride in the United States. In this book, I use “San” and “Bushmen” interchangeably.
** For the genetic, linguistic, geographic, and archaeological evidence for this, see chapters 5 and 6.
“But how do you know when a path has no heart, don Juan?”
“Before you embark on it you ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you