Future Primal. Louis G. Herman

       The Journey Home

My search for a way forward took me back to beginnings — my birthplace and the likely birthplace of humanity, southern Africa. My hometown, Port Elizabeth, is a small coastal city on the eastern corner of the southern tip of Africa. Here, at the foot of this great continent, two ocean currents meet and mix: the icy Benguela sweeping up from Antarctica along the Skeleton Coast of West Africa, and the warm, hazy Mozambique flowing down from the tropics along the east coast. Their confluence creates one of the richest collections of coastal and ocean ecosystems on earth. Rocky ledges and tidal pools support a wealth of shellfish, with whales, seals, dolphins, and great white sharks cruising offshore. North and east of Port Elizabeth begins a dramatic geological feature, the Great Rift, which runs most of the length of the continent. This epic mountainous escarpment separates the rain forests of the west from drier, more open savanna to the east — what South Africans call the veldt* — the game-filled, tree-dotted parkland around whose lakes, rivers, and coastlines our earliest ancestors thrived. This forms what the South African historian Noel Mostert calls the “hemispheric seam” of the planet, a primordial frontier separating east and west, from which early hominids emerged.

      In 1998 I returned to Port Elizabeth, the site of luminous childhood experiences that started me on my quest long before I understood what “politics” meant. I had been at the University of Hawai‘i for two decades, teaching and researching, trying to get the largest, clearest picture of the crises that seemed to grip the heart of our civilization. In the process I had come to some shocking realizations. The first was that the collective impact of globalizing industrial capitalism was destroying wilderness ecosystems and causing the extinction of living species at a rate unprecedented since the earth’s last great mass extinction. We were applying our African-incubated genius to an act of destruction equivalent to the impact of the gigantic asteroid that collided with the earth sixty-five million years ago. The second was that this situation was the result of choices we made centuries ago, choices we remake daily when pledging our allegiance to political and economic institutions promising growth in material wealth at all costs.

      My studies in political philosophy had made it clear that the intellectual foundations of our current way of life had long since been demolished. But the institutions those philosophies led to — the bureaucratic nation-state, the multinational corporation, the global marketplace, the mechanized factory producing cheap goods, and competitive, self-centered individualism — all continued reproducing and expanding with the crazy vitality of a cancer. Their sheer overwhelming presence paralyzed political imagination, trapping us in a tyranny of “what exists.” The first step out of this impasse seemed intuitively obvious: to go back to “what was,” to imaginatively reconstruct the simplest, earliest form of human society, in order to rethink “what could and should be.” Later I came to think of this movement back to go forward as a fundamental aspect of creative renewal — an “eternal primal return.”

      Personal reasons also drove me back. Until that point I had approached the consciousness of early human societies through texts, libraries, and universities. I felt an urgent need to fix this contradiction, to balance some of the thousands of hours spent indoors with my face turned away from the world, sitting at a desk, staring at books and computer screens. I was hungry for strong, simple experiences of what it meant to be a fully embodied human being in a southern African wilderness. Finally, I was close to burnout and just plain homesick.

      The Port Elizabeth airport had barely changed since I was a child. Its single, small terminal building sat in the bush near a rocky wild coastline. As soon as I stepped out of the plane, I took in a deep breath, thick with the smells of salt spray and coastal vegetation, and savored the thrill of being home again. The coastal terrace of southern Africa gets rain throughout the year and is covered with tough, small-leafed, flowering bush — the aromatic fynbos or “fine bush” of the Southern Cape. This small area is so ancient and so unique that it constitutes one of the earth’s six plant kingdoms, with one of the largest concentrations of biodiversity anywhere.¹ Forest- and bush-covered mountain ranges follow much of the coastline, providing a noble backdrop to enormous curving bays of surf-pounded white sand beaches. Clear rivers and streams, stained amber by forest vegetation, run through valleys and steep gorges to empty into rocky coves and open sandy bays.

      When Europeans first arrived, the area was filled with the magnificent big game of Africa — elephant, rhinoceros, lion, leopard, buffalo, and a great variety of buck. Hippopotami waded out of river mouths into the ocean surf to greet the startled Dutch sailors, who named the creatures zeekoe, “sea cows.” The natural bounty of a region filled with flowers and birds is reflected in the Khoisan name for one of the mountain ranges, Outeniqua, meaning “laden with honey.” The coast is dotted with gaping rock shelters, which hold some of the richest evidence for that last leap into modern human consciousness that took place roughly two hundred thousand years ago. Few places on earth could be more evocative of an African Eden than this most southern point of the ancient continent of Africa.

As a child I regularly explored one shelter on the Robberg Peninsula, the Mountain of Seals, which juts off the coast halfway between Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. The eastern edge of the peninsula offers a spectacular view of the former whaling station of Plettenberg Bay. The western coast overlooks a small sandy beach cove fringed by rocks and tide pools. I began my pilgrimage home by returning to the Robberg for the first time after many years. I arrived at the end of the day to find the place deserted. I stepped out of the car, followed the path down the cliff to the cove, and was immediately immersed in the sights, smells, and feel of the coast: the sharp, feral mix of the fynbos, seaweed, and salt; the surf crashing on the ocean-scrubbed, bone-white shell-and-stone beach; and the shock of the cold water as I dove in. I scrambled out quickly, spooked by the shadows of large fish next to me in the raised swell. I climbed up and sat inside the mouth of the largest shelter, wide enough for a band of perhaps a dozen people. The floor was made up of fresh and fossilizing shell and bone; in nearby caves, these floors can extend down more than a dozen feet. The whole coastline is rich with archaeological finds from the period when self-conscious Homo sapiens emerged over the past two hundred thousand years. Nothing had changed since my childhood except for the addition of a small knee-high fence through which Stone Age relics spilled down the slope. As I sat warming in the golden last light of the day, I could see almost no sign of the intervening thousands of years of civilization. I felt as if I was stepping through a personal dreamscape into our deep past to when some of the first humans lived in that same place.*

      We now know in persuasive detail that the earth was once nothing but wilderness: everything, everywhere untouched by human hand, unseen by human eye; nothing tamed, domesticated, or civilized. We know that out of an African savanna, incubated in it, nurtured by it, a primate lineage gradually evolved into hominids. Then hominids slowly developed the self-reflective, creative consciousness capable of language,