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Оглавление“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 must choose another path.”
“But how will I know for sure whether a path has a heart or not?”
“Anybody would know that. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path.”
— CARLOS CASTAñEDA, The Teachings of Don Juan
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T. S. ELIOT, Four Quarters, “Little Gidding”
The truth of the quest is not a true doctrine resulting from an intentionalist investigation of objects, but a balanced state of existence… [formed in the process of the quest].
— ERIC VOEGELIN, In Search of Order
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, art, religion, and politics. The very nature of our freedom and creativity emerged gradually, conditioned by the daily rhythms of sunrise and sunset, the seasonal movements of game, and the smells and colors of fruit, flower, and veldt. This is the first fact of life — one of the most startling discoveries of modern times: human beings were made by wilderness. Yet all our contemporary political institutions were created by men ignorant of this most basic reality.
Around sixty thousand years ago a population of hunter-gatherers walked out of southern Africa and rapidly spread over the rest of the planet. Most human beings alive today are direct descendants of that small group. Parts of that founder population never left their African Eden; they continued to develop and thrive as nomadic hunter-gatherers into modern times, protected by the harshness of the Kalahari Desert. Today their children barely survive, forced off their ancestral hunting grounds, often living in squalor, at the mercy of government agencies. Recent genetic and linguistic mapping studies support what long seemed clear to many of us who grew up in South Africa: Bushmen populations are the closest living relatives to our shared “African Adam and Eve.”* Their traditional cosmology is most likely among the oldest on earth, seeming to recede back into the Paleolithic origins of human consciousness. Traditional nomadic Bushmen led an existence that in some ways seems enchanted, moving in small egalitarian bands held together by an ethos of caring for and sharing with one another, while being sensitively attuned to the natural world.
By contrast, the dominant political and economic institutions of our modern world were created from radically different assumptions about our origins. Political philosophers like John Locke accepted the Genesis account of earth’s creation: that the planet was young, that all the plant and animal species appeared as a result of separate acts of divine creation, which culminated on the sixth day in the miraculous appearance of human beings. They believed the natural world existed as raw material for the central human project of productive labor — converting wilderness into wealth. In 1688, when Locke published his Two Treatises on Government, the iconic text of modern politics, the global human population was less than half a billion and vast tracts of forest and prairie still covered North America. Southern Africa was an Eden filled with great herds of grazing and browsing animals. To Locke and his contemporaries, all of this existed to feed human appetite and ambition. It was simply “waste” until transformed by human labor:
Revelation
After visiting the Robberg and other coastal sites of early modern humans, I continued my pilgrimage north through Johannesburg, the violence-plagued metropolis of the country, and then into the sanctuary of the Drakensberg, the “dragon mountains,” the highest range in the South African escarpment. This was the ancient summer hunting ground and last refuge of the /Xam, the southern San Bushmen. It is also something of a wilderness temple containing one of the largest concentrations of the most complex and beautiful of their sacred rock paintings.
I spent most of the first day following my guide across a gloriously empty setting: golden grass-covered foothills, sandstone cliffs, sheltered bush-lined valleys with icy streams, all framed by mountains, hazy blue and purple in the distance. It was perfect winter weather, warm, sunny, and windless with an impossibly blue sky. Every stone, every leaf, every blade of grass sparkled as if cut from crystal. Occasionally we would spot grazing eland — the largest of the African antelope and the sacred game animal of the Bushmen. We were looking for a shelter that contained a particularly significant collection of old paintings. The guide crossed a stream and then climbed up to the base of a sandstone cliff. We walked through a clump of thick bushes and, without any warning, stepped into the entrance — an enormous overhang of sandstone with a level sandy floor and sun-warmed rock panels. The shelter was like a gigantic natural balcony, offering a panoramic view of the valleys below and the mountains in the distance. But the view that fixed my gaze was the back wall covered with dozens of hauntingly detailed multicolored paintings.
A line of eland seemed to move across the central panel. Several cloaked figures stood behind. Some of the images are carefully painted over one another, in great detail and with obvious care. Off to one side was a large solitary eland with its head down, back legs crossed, and the hair on its shoulders erect, all signs of its death throes. Touching the tail of the eland was an upright human-like figure, also painted with legs crossed — but instead of human feet, the figure had painted hooves with the detailed fetlocks clearly visible. The part-antelope, part-human creature held what looked like a dancing stick in one hand, suggesting the central religious ritual of the Kalahari San — the healing trance dance sometimes called “the little death.”*
The complexity and mystery of the images were immediately obvious. No easy literal interpretation would do. The sensitivity of execution contrasted movingly with the rugged mountainscape outside the shelter. Yet the paintings seemed to complete the scene perfectly by suggesting the presence of an ancient creative hand and beauty-loving eye, both hand and eye crafted by that same surrounding wilderness.
The guide left me to spend the rest of the day alone, examining the paintings and enjoying the view. In late afternoon I walked back, satisfied and relaxed, happily musing how ancestral San life must have fitted into this landscape, hand in glove. The sun was setting below the hills in the distance. On my right, a series of steep sandstone cliffs glowed pink and gold in the last light. Suddenly, a hoarse shout echoed across the valley, sounding like “GET-EM!” Shocked wide awake, I looked up: the silhouette of a head and shoulders appeared on the cliff edge ahead of me. More figures appeared. My thoughts flashed to Johannesburg, then the murder capital of the world. I tensed and held my breath. The shout was repeated — and just as suddenly I relaxed, recognizing from some forgotten memory the strangely human sound of a baboon’s warning bark.
While less dangerous than their two-legged, urban relatives, baboons can still be intimidating. They seem a mix of human and dog, with teeth that can match a leopard’s and a bad habit, probably learned from humans, of stoning climbers from above. A whole troop had arrived, and in the distance, a second troop appeared; I could see the outlines of the young scampering over the rocks. They were no longer looking at me. The adults moved to the edge of the cliff and squatted, still as sentinels, staring at the sinking sun. I found a flat rock, and as we sat together and watched the sun disappear, something deep inside me shifted and settled. For a long moment I had an exquisite feeling of complete identity with the baboons echoing back through the millennia to some old, ancestral primate sitting on a warm rock watching an African sunset. It was an exquisite feeling of connection to this place and a bone-deep certainty of the truth of Darwin’s insight — “who understands the baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke.”
This simple revelation was a turning point in my journey and a powerful affirmation of my quest. It had touched some emotional bedrock that gave me the confidence to continue my efforts to reconstruct a deeper, truer way of being human, of living together on this miraculous, evolving, and now-threatened earth.
The Navel of the World
My subsequent journeys back to South Africa also helped me find meaning in my comfortable Hawaiian exile through an illuminating opposition. Hawai‘i is one of the most isolated, ecologically fragile pieces of land on the planet. Surrounded by thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean in every direction, it is the exact antipode of South Africa, both geographically and culturally as far away from my African roots as it is possible to get. As I sit on my lanai writing this, I can look up and see the emerald green Ko‘olau mountain range at the back of the valley. Directly beneath the Ko‘olaus, on the other side of the planet, are the eroded granite cliffs of Cape Town’s Table Mountain. Like the Ko‘olaus, Table Mountain rises dramatically from beaches and rocky coves. In photographs the two locations appear strikingly similar. On the ground they couldn’t be more different. The Ko‘olaus are geologically young, pushed up through a volcano on the ocean floor barely three million years ago. Their valleys and cliffs often seem lonely — no screeching monkeys, no snakes, no leopards, no sunset bark of baboon.
On the other hand, the Cape Fold Mountains are hundreds of millions of years old, scarred, cracked, and weathered by baking sun, storms, cold ocean fog, and the numberless generations of African wildlife living, growing, and dying on its surface. Hiking around the Cape today one still meets baboons foraging in an environment similar to the one that helped shape our shared primate ancestry. Southern Africa is where the great human adventure of globalization began; Hawai‘i is where, in a sense, it ended — one of the last places to be colonized by our African ancestors. Kilauea, on the Big Island, is the longest continually erupting volcano in the world — like a piko, or “navel,” of the earth — still actively giving life to new land. From the oldest to the newest, from the first to the last, this symmetry of opposites made the islands a privileged place for philosophical distance. Distance from my birthplace also helped by putting the sharp edge of homesickness to my reflections on humanity’s alienation from our African Eden.
My journey to Hawai‘i was circuitous. My family left South Africa for England when I was a boy. After a Cambridge education in science, I emigrated to Israel, lived on a kibbutz, served as a paratrooper in the Israeli army, and survived a Middle Eastern war. Throughout, I made trips to South Africa every few years to visit my parents, who had returned from England in 1970. Most of the trips were confined to the southern coast, where I revived old friendships and started to recover some of those extraordinary states of consciousness I had experienced in wilderness with a child’s fresh eyes. By the time of my first university sabbatical in 1998, I had been in Hawai‘i twenty years, and I had come to realize that South Africa stood in unique relationship, not only to Hawai‘i, but to the rest of the world. The natural and human history of my birthplace seemed to offer a crucial perspective on my times and my species.
I felt ignorant and excited about exploring my neglected homeland more thoroughly. I wanted to experience directly the people and the places that would allow me to imaginatively reconstruct something of the life of the first people of southern Africa — the ancestors of all humans. My goals were modest. I wanted to be able to sit and think in front of some of those ancient Bushman rock paintings that cover the walls of rock shelters throughout southern Africa. There are an estimated fifteen thousand such painted sites — an immense wilderness art gallery filled with tantalizing images from the spirit world of the first people of South Africa. I wanted to find some of the best-preserved examples in the wildest settings, so I could experience them closer to the way the long-dead artists had, surrounded by the multitudes of African wildlife. Finally, I wanted to meet face-to-face, if only briefly, the modern descendants of the human beings who had never left southern Africa, those who still lived in the desert of the Kalahari and still knew something of the “old ways.”
After getting acclimatized in Port Elizabeth revisiting my childhood haunts, many virtually unchanged over the years, I traveled to the urban nightmare of Johannesburg. I was told not to stop at traffic lights when driving at night because hijackers had been shooting the drivers and stealing their cars. But Johannesburg was also home to the world-famous Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, where I met David Lewis-Williams, its founder and director, and one of the pioneers of the shamanic interpretation of Bushman rock art. He generously gave me introductions to the wardens who would be able to direct me — sometimes accompanied by armed rangers — to some of the more impressive paintings in the Drakensberg Mountains. Much of the game in the Drakensberg has been hunted out, but large empty areas are protected and being repopulated by herds of eland.
To get a little closer to imagining what life in wilderness must have been like, I spent a few days in a primitive wilderness camp in the lowveld of Kruger National Park — a wilderness area the size of the entire country of Israel. Every morning at dawn our small group walked out into the bush led by two armed rangers in search of encounters with the “big five” — elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion, and leopard — supposedly the five most dangerous animals to hunt on foot. The Kruger is one of the first, the largest, and the least-transformed game reserves in southern Africa. It is also one of the few places where it is still possible to find a few Bushman paintings in an indigenous, intact ecosystem with the full variety of animals the painters lived with. Today we often think of a walk in the woods as placid, where nature is a pretty backdrop for what really interests us — the human drama. But an intact African ecosystem is enormously complex and continually fascinating.
One morning we were following the spoor of a lone bull buffalo — regarded by many big-game hunters as the most dangerous of the big five because of its habit of turning off the trail and doubling back to ambush the hunter. We stopped for a break, and I walked out of sight of the group to some bushes at the base of a small outcrop of rock. As I approached the bushes and peered inside, an enormous mass of black muscle exploded out of the vegetation, almost knocking me over with fright, and galloped off in a panic. A lone wildebeest bull had, for some reason, separated from the herd and hidden himself in the shade of the bush. The whole event had taken place out of sight of the rangers, who on hearing my story laughed in disbelief. Wildebeest are herd animals and seldom found alone in a bush. Life in an intact savanna wilderness is full of surprises.
The Bushman paintings in the Kruger were worn, but their mere presence was evocative, reminding me that the theater of Bushman life included a cast of thousands — from the majestic elephant and rhino to the mantis, the little green flying insect, one incarnation of the trickster deity of Bushman mythology.
After a gentle initiation in the Kruger, we proceeded to a more extreme wilderness immersion experience: five days backpacking in the riverine bush of the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in what used to be called Zululand, and is now Kwazulu, Natal. We carried all our food and slept under the stars. This was the hunting preserve of Shaka and the Zulu kings, and is still home to the full complement of indigenous, savanna megafauna, including the largest rhino population in the world.* Surrounded by large and potentially dangerous animals, guided and protected by two seasoned rangers, I experienced some of the most beautiful and peaceful moments of my life.
The climax of the trip involved flying to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, renting a Land Rover, and driving into the veldt of Nyae Nyae, East Bushmanland, to visit surviving Ju/twasi** (Ju/hoansi) San communities. After Namibian independence in 1981, the filmmaker and ethnographer John Marshall, who had grown up with the Ju/twasi, helped set up the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation of Namibia with the purpose of helping the people get access to their traditional land — Bushmanland — and gradually transition from hunting and gathering to farming and raising livestock.* As development priorities shifted, the government started working with international aid and conservation agencies — the US Agency for International Development and the World Wildlife Foundation — to establish the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in 1996. This was in part inspired by the idea that Bushmen were best suited for a hunting-gathering way of life, and they should be encouraged to pursue it as much as possible, together with benefiting from trophy hunting and ecotourism. Large numbers of elephants and lions had migrated to the area, attracted by the water of the newly dug bore holes. The tourist and trophy-hunting markets, however, were fickle, lions and elephants did not mix well with farming, and the land base was too small to support a traditional nomadic hunting-and-gathering lifestyle. The result was that the people remained impoverished in what John Marshall called “death by myth” — the myth of the Bushman forever consigned to hunt and gather — the title of the final volume of his five-part film documenting the saga of his family’s time with the San.3
Amazingly, in 1998, some of the old ways still remained. One of the anthropologists who spent many years working with the community introduced me to a young Bushman guide, /Twi (/Ui) Toma, who helped me connect with some of the old healers and shamans. We camped outside a tiny village consisting of a few simple huts, went hunting with the men, gathered veldkos (bushfood) with the women, distributed pouches of the harsh Botswana tobacco that visitors are expected to provide, and shared rounds of tea and biscuits around the campfire. Finally, we found singers and healers in a neighboring village who organized a healing trance dance for the group. The Kalahari Bushmen still practiced the same trance dance that seems to have been universal among diverse Bushman groups throughout southern Africa. The healer-shamans stamped and danced in a tight circle around the singers, who sat shoulder to shoulder around the fire singing and clapping the eerie, complex contrapuntal songs. The healers were bent over, propping themselves up with their dancing sticks, and carried the fly whisk made from wildebeest hair — the signature of the dancer. Once caught up in the trance-inducing energies of the singing and dancing, some of the healers started entering the spirit world, shaking, sweating, shrieking, talking in tongues, circling the group diagnosing and healing sickness and disorder. That night, under the stars, on the sands of the Kalahari, I witnessed an activity that I had seen depicted in rock paintings over a thousand miles away in South Africa, where the now-extinct southern San — the /Xam — performed the same dances and then painted their experiences on the rock walls of their shelters.
I had no illusions of playing anthropologist or of contributing to the empirical fieldwork on the San, one of the most thoroughly studied groups of hunter-gatherers in the world. One scholar estimated that there are over a thousand published pages for every living San. I simply approached them with the big questions of political philosophy in mind. What can we learn about human nature from one of the last and oldest of such cultures that can guide us now? How did the changing context and circumstances of San life shape their society and politics? How can speculations about our distant past illuminate how we all should live together on this single, increasingly crowded, and fragile planet?
After 1998, I continued making regular trips to South Africa. In 2007 I went to Andriesvale on the edge of the Kalahari to visit one of the last groups of Bushmen to survive within South Africa — the Khomani San. They had inhabited what is now the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (which includes the old Gemsbok National Park) on the border between South Africa and Botswana. During apartheid, they had been removed from the park and had scattered, losing their language — perhaps the oldest of all the San languages — and much of their culture. Then in 1999 the new South African government returned to the Khomani some forty thousand hectares, half of which were inside the game reserve. Since then some fourteen surviving language speakers have been found, and there are vigorous attempts to revive the culture and establish a viable local economy.
But the Khomani I saw were still living in shacks in the sand, plagued by poverty, sickness, alcoholism, and boredom. I traveled with one of the leaders — now an Afrikaans speaker with an Afrikaans name, Jan van der Westhuizen, or simply “Oom Jan” — into the central Kalahari of Botswana to D’Kar, where dozens of other Bushman groups had gathered from all over southern Africa for the annual Bushman dance and healing festival. There, filmmakers Craig and Damon Foster were filming /Urugab “Toppies” Kruiper, a young Khomani man who with his family was on a mission to reconnect with the “old ways” and become a fully initiated hunter.* Toppies was all muscle and sinew, his front teeth knocked out and his chest marked with long, jagged white scars from several near-fatal knife fights. He was soft-spoken and laughed as he told me, pointing to his scars, that it was a miracle he was still alive. I spent several days with Oom Jan in the red dunes of the Bushman section of Kgalagadi Park, listening to his stories about how as a young man he had been raised in the park and taught how to hunt with a spear, running down antelope. During the day we followed animal tracks, and at night I did a lot of thinking, sitting in front of the campfire, and then lying on my back, looking up — or was it down?! — dizzyingly into those millions of distant suns glittering in the unpolluted blackness of the desert sky.
Primal Political Philosophy
The insight I got from repeated and sometimes difficult returns to Hawai‘i made me realize that I was no longer primarily interested in being a detached academic, applying critical methodologies to solve scholarly problems. Like it or not, I came to understand that my whole life was a struggle with something like the daunting project of classical political philosophy. This traditionally required nothing less than bringing together the totality of one’s lived experience to confront the defining question of the truth quest: “How should we live?” Socrates and Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx, all giants among many others, attempted to articulate an integrated vision in response to this question. Entire societies and ways of life were organized around these visions. In each case the philosopher had responded to a personally felt sense of crisis in the life of the larger society. In each case the creative response required a return to beginnings, to asking and attempting to answer the foundational questions around which every worldview and way of life are constructed: What is the human condition? What connects humans to the rest of creation — the community of being? How can this guide our thinking about good governance, a just and healthy economy, and a satisfying and meaningful life for the individual?
From the perspective of scholarly research, the scope of such a project was clearly huge, and I hesitated to admit my ambition and face the accusation of grandiosity. Then the primal perspective gave me courage, reminding me that in a very basic sense no one escapes the challenge facing the political philosopher. Everyone has to take a stand in the face of the totality of life — even if it is the bad-faith choice of simply going with the flow or living in denial and choosing not to think. We are part of an epic story whose beginning and end are the deepest mystery. We all grow from infancy into adult consciousness asking periodically, “Who am I? What is real? Where am I going? What role shall I play?” All of us answer these questions more or less self-consciously, more or less hurriedly. Ultimately we answer them in the pattern of the daily decisions and actions that make up our lives.
I was also encouraged in this task by the groundbreaking work of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962, which exposed the inherent limitation of all paradigms — all models of reality in science, and by extension every other area of human knowledge. Kuhn demonstrated convincingly that all scientific theories are inevitably shaped by the context and intention of the scientists and scholars who formulated them. There is no absolutely objective knowledge independent of the perspective and situation of the researcher. Discoveries in modern physics and evolutionary cosmology have confirmed that even at the most fundamental level of elementary particles the observer can never be fully separated from what is observed. So in the late 1990s, it seemed to me that politics was in something of a “postparadigm phase,” where we could no longer defer to the great minds of political science and wait for another John Locke to figure it all out for us. Somehow we now all have to be implicated in the business of thinking about how we should live together. We all have to wrestle with the big questions that were reserved for the geniuses of the past.*
I was further heartened by the fact that, as I went back to beginnings and confronted these questions, I could feel myself becoming whole and healthy. The deeper I went into wilderness, the faster the regeneration, and the more I could see the glories and flaws of civilization in sharp relief. I discovered I was also following a path that could be called shamanic and that was much more ancient than our written philosophical and religious traditions.
Shamanic practices seem to constitute the earliest form of religion and are central to the lives of hunter-gatherers the world over. Today, related practices can still be found in many religious and spiritual paths across cultures. Shamanic experiences seem to have a common structure in which the ego is overcome, opening awareness to a larger, transpersonal field of information in the service of healing and visioning. The variety of shamanic “psychotechnologies” is truly extraordinary, ranging from chanting, fasting, and self-mutilation to wilderness immersion, incessant dancing, and the ingesting of hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms. The loss of ego can be terrifying but is more typically ecstatic, providing an experience of reality that is often described as larger, deeper, and exquisitely beautiful. Scholar of comparative religion Mircea Eliade described shamanism simply as “archaic techniques of ecstasy.”4 The old shamans seemed to realize that in order to understand society and live more fully attuned to reality, we need periodically to go wild, to travel out of our normal minds to the invisible world of spirit, which underlies the visible. The uninitiated often dismiss such experiences as vague, misty, and emotional. The reality is that the visions are often so incredibly detailed and vivid that one is convinced of having looked through the veil of everyday life into an underlying, normally hidden order of immense complexity and beauty. But shamanic visions are also like mystical experiences in having a powerful, subtle salutary effect of great value in guiding and tuning our lives.*
So while I was developing my theories about politics, I would also regularly pry my rationality-indoctrinated, logic-trained ego from its civilized existence and open myself to the subtle prelinguistic knowledge from the body and the earth. Hawai‘i offered me a simple discipline for balancing the poles of civilization and wilderness. I could bookend a workday spent inside — reading, writing, arguing, and teaching — with an hour or two early and late in the day immersed in mauka and makai, mountain and ocean, the old Hawaiian daily prescription for healthy living. Neither beach nor mountain was more than fifteen minutes from my campus office. By late afternoon I could be alone running on empty mountain trails or swimming half a mile beyond the reef in open ocean. I loved the way I could almost magically exit one world and enter its opposite. Each world — hyperintellectual and urban on the one hand; physical, unfocused, and wild on the other — seemed an essential complement to the other.
After work, I would start running with my head filled with the arguments, encounters, and anxieties of the day. After twenty minutes of deep breathing and sweated exertion, my eyes saturated with greens and blues, my ears full of birdsong, the talk in my head would exhaust itself and slowly be replaced by a blissful sense of peace and boundlessness. I would only realize the absence of the voice in my head when it returned periodically. At certain points I would stop and look back down at Honolulu, shrunk into something I could cover with my outstretched hand, and remind myself that all of it — the stacked white and gray blocks of concrete high-rises fringing the ocean — only existed because of this richly forested, much-ignored upland, holding the rain clouds, filling the underground aquifers, replenishing oxygen, photosynthesizing carbon dioxide into our food. I bushwhacked up and down the steep slopes and streambeds and learned where the feral pigs lived and where the wild food grew. I learned the patterns of wind, sun, and rain and got to know the trails well enough to run in moonlight — just as I got to know the ocean well enough to swim beyond the reef at sunset, my senses sharpened knowing that tiger sharks swam the same waters and occasionally mistook humans for prey.
After a while I realized that my daily wilderness immersion was not simply a pleasant escape but a kind of meditation, one that literally brought my intellectual life down to earth and helped align mind, spirit, and body. Afterward I would feel more elevated, cleansed, and inspired than I ever did coming out of a synagogue or temple. The intellectual fog would lift, and the reason for my frustrations with academia would become absurdly obvious. Texts, interpretations of interpretations, and language games had been eclipsing all of “what was not text,” not-language. What I needed, what any politics needs, is direct experience of how the human being is ultimately connected to the natural world of creation as a whole. I started to think of running trails as part of my philosophical practice, helping restore the balance between opposites: experience and language, body and mind, wilderness and civilization. A huge truth had been so close it was invisible.
Then I discovered Eric Voegelin, the only major political philosopher to recognize the importance of understanding this in-between nature of the human condition for politics. During a lifetime immersed in the scholarship of world civilizations and the history of philosophy, he developed a philosophy of consciousness that was surprisingly congruent with an understanding of an evolving earth and shamanic states of consciousness. Voegelin stressed that we have to keep reminding ourselves that we are born into a drama not of our making. We wake up within the story of our civilization, which in turn emerges from the story of the earth, as the earth itself emerges from the unfolding universe. We have some freedom to write our own script, but like it or not, we are also playing a part in a script written by another hand. Politics involves tuning ourselves and our stories to the “story telling us.”*
This means we are always “looking out” from within our own field of awareness. This is the reason that I make a point to tell something of my own life story, in order to be self-conscious and explicit about my own lived perspective. For the same reason I also make a point of considering the lives and contexts of the scientists, researchers, and thinkers who developed the stories and theories on which modernity has been constructed. For instance, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, John Locke, and Adam Smith are primary architects of our current paradigm of the “good life,” but it is beyond naive to expect their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century answers to continue to work for us today. Understanding the context for their thinking helps us distinguish what remains vital and illuminating and what does not.
As this unusual mix of political philosophy, shamanism, self-knowledge, and science converged into what I came to identify as the archetypal truth quest, I saw with increasing clarity the failure of our current paradigm in education. I saw that political science was not primarily interested in the big questions of value and meaning; in fact, the very terms truth and wisdom, good and evil, were being purged from the curriculum. Even meaning had been eclipsed by almighty critique. This was strange and disappointing, since it was precisely questions of value and meaning that had led me to political philosophy and had defined it for its founders, Socrates and his pupil, Plato. On the face of it, the situation seemed bizarre. The university, the preeminent institution of higher learning, was ignoring the question of questions, the answer to which was required to justify its own existence. No more an ivory tower, the university has long been an integral part of the larger society. Its focus on specialization without generalization, critique without reconstruction, and its increasingly refined division of labor ultimately served the values and institutions of the ruling political philosophy of classical Liberalism: rationalism, competitive individualism, and efficient production in a global marketplace.
I saw that the primary function of higher education was to equip the individual to contribute to the common good by pursuing self-interest. Across disciplines, there was little consideration of what the “good of the whole” might mean, other than being the unintended outcome of competing self-interest in an ever-expanding free market. Instead of education for responsible participation in the life of a democracy, the focus was on mathematics, science, and literacy in the interests of job training and workforce development. The logic of the factory and the marketplace determined university disciplinary divisions as much as it did most research budgets and methodologies. The sciences thrived, and philosophy, history, and the humanities fragmented and declined, with only cosmetic attempts to address the search for the good through vague references to character, integrity, and ethics.
Reflecting on my dissatisfaction with the current state of the knowledge industry, I considered what distinguished wisdom from mere knowledge or information. First of all, wisdom has a moral concern; it brings all of human experience and knowledge to deal with questions of how we should live — questions of right and wrong, good and bad. I could imagine how, throughout most of human existence, when we lived as hunter-gatherers this sort of teaching was freely shared, as young and old sat around the same campfire every night, under the stars, surrounded by wilderness, talking, arguing, and telling the stories relating one life to another, the living to the dead, and the human community to the great, wide world of nature. Traditionally, wisdom was the special purview of elders, those who had experienced some of the great, archetypal transitions from infancy through adolescence to maturity, adulthood, and then old age; they were those who had tasted the great passions of life — love and hate, beauty and ugliness, the sweetness of victory and the bitterness of loss. Most importantly, elders were closer to the mystery of death, a fate as certain as the fact of our birth and just as crucial for grasping what “life” might mean.
Wisdom is built on self-knowledge — a recognition that our most valuable understanding is energized and shaped by our strongest emotions and deepest experiences. Ultimately, everything we learn and teach is framed and given meaning by the unique stories of individual lives. But the wise individual also knows how to live in society, something learned over years of face-to-face engagement with others — direct, honest, caring communication within a community of similarly seeking individuals sensitive to the great natural community of being. The search for wisdom needs to be the core of the “good life” that the classical political philosophers sought to understand and promote.
I became aware gradually that the threads of the truth quest were spun out of the basic ordering processes in the life of the hunting-gathering band. There was something in the push-pull of life in small, decentralized, democratic, and self-sufficient communities, living in a shamanic resonance with the natural world, that sustained and promoted the quest. My personal search in its own faltering and incomplete fashion had been following an archetypal dynamic embodied in a primal politics.
* Veldt is the old Dutch spelling for the more common Afrikaans word veld, derived from the word for “field.” It is pronounced with a soft v and a hard t as in “felt.” I follow the older spelling to help non–South Africans approximate the correct pronunciation. The word refers to the wide-open spaces of scrub- and grass-covered savanna reminiscent of the landscape on the North American prairie.
* Humanity’s oldest symbolic artifact, a piece of carved ochre seventy-seven thousand years old, was found a little farther down the coast in a rock shelter called Blombos near the small town of Stilbaai. More recently, a pair of hundred-thousand-year-old “painting kits” in abalone shells were found in the same shelter. See chapter 5 for more on this.
* Chapter 6, “Lost Worlds,” discusses the evidence for this. “Land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of Pasturage, Tillage, or Planting, is called, as indeed it is, wast[e]: and we shall find the benefit of it amounts to little more than nothing.”2 Locke didn’t have the slightest idea of the evolutionary continuity of species or the fact of mass extinction. His view was precisely the opposite of my own deepest experiences of wilderness: that the man-made is the realm of the mundane, and the natural world of creation is the domain of the sacred — God-made — exquisitely beautiful, supremely valuable, its very existence miraculous.
* I discuss this particular painting in more detail in chapter 8, “If You Don’t Dance, You Die.”
* Much credit goes to Dr. Ian Player for leading the efforts to create this wilderness reserve and initiating the “Save the Rhino” project. Rhinos are again critically endangered by poaching for the Asian market in rhino horn. In South Africa in 2011, over three hundred rhino were slaughtered by poachers.
** There is confusing variation in the spelling of Ju/twasi, ranging from Ju/wasi and Zhun/twasi to the scholarly Ju/hoansi, which follows phonetic convention. Elizabeth Marshall points out that Ju/hoansi reads to the average person like “Jew hone si” and has little resemblance to the actual pronunciation. The “/” is a dental palatal click made by withdrawing the tongue sharply from the back of the front teeth in a sucking sound, as in “tsk.” The spelling that comes closest to the actual pronunciation to my ear is the slightly unconventional Ju/twasi (singular: “Jul/twa”). For more on this name, see also chapter 6.
* In 1986 this become the Nyae Nyae Farmers Co-operative, a grassroots advocacy organization for the Ju/twasi.
* The film, a full-length high-definition feature, My Hunter’s Heart, has since been shown throughout South Africa.
* I return to Thomas Kuhn in the epilogue, where I consider the model of primal politics as a “metaparadigm.”
* Chapter 9, “Boundary Crossing,” discusses shamanism in more detail.
* I return to my expanded use of Voegelin’s “in-between” in chapter 4, “Recovery of the Quest, Part II.”
