href="#ub3a2c1f4-9c50-5807-a366-c946f9e12879">CHAPTER 6: Lost Worlds
CHAPTER 8: “If You Don’t Dance, You Die”
CHAPTER 10: The Outer Reaches of Inner Wilderness
CHAPTER 11: The Primal Polis: Socrates as Shaman
Part III — Where Should We Be Going?
APPENDIX: Future Primal Toolkit
Since the mid-1980s, a number of leading theorists across academic disciplines have been involved in the common endeavor of articulating the outlines of what might be called a planetary civilization. These physicists, economists, poets, cosmologists, sociologists, biologists, political scientists, engineers, city planners, farmers, religious scholars, philosophers, and ecologists all share the assumption that our human societies are undergoing what might prove to be the largest shift of structure since we first settled into villages at the start of the Neolithic era. The primary motivation for this revisioning is the realization that the ecological and social devastation taking place around the planet will only continue until some powerful new ideas take hold in human consciousness. The significance of Louis Herman’s Future Primal can best be appreciated in terms of this ongoing creative project.
My sense is that, in a number of fields, remarkable progress has been achieved. Some of the landmarks include: in economics, Herman Daly and his articulation of the theoretical foundations for economic sustainability; in technology, Janine Benyus and her recasting of industrial infrastructure as biological mimicry; in agriculture, Wes Jackson and his new paradigm of a perennial polyculture; in physics, Fritjof Capra and his deconstruction of scientism; in human-earth relations, Susan Griffin and her work leading beyond the oppressions of dualism; in religion, Thomas Berry and his vision of the ultimate sacred community as neither humanity nor a subgroup of humanity but the entire earth community itself.
I would place the work of Louis Herman in this company of geniuses. Regularly, at conferences, however satisfied we participants were with what had been accomplished in revising physics or biology or economics, the glaring omission was politics. For years, we have keenly felt this absence of a political philosophy that would support a planetary civilization.
No longer. In Future Primal we have a work that deeply resonates with the ideas from the other architects of this new earth era. Drawing from a very wide range of ideas and sources, including contemporary political scientists, the Kalahari Bushmen, and the Axial Greek philosophers, Louis Herman has created a vision of the human being as a microcosm of the entire evolving 13.7-billion-year-old universe itself. Perhaps the best way to describe this creative synthesis is to call it a work of political cosmology. For with this new vision of politics we can begin to imagine ourselves not just as consumers, and not just as political units of a nation-state, but as cosmological beings — cosmological beings whose foundations are that same creativity that brought forth a time-developmental universe, and whose struggles are those same ongoing struggles of life itself to give birth to new forms of beauty.
I am convinced that Louis Herman’s Future Primal provides a cornerstone for this emerging planetary civilization.
— BRIAN THOMAS SWIMME, professor of evolutionary cosmology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and coauthor with Thomas Berry of The Universe Story
The universe, at its most basic level, is not only matter, energy, and information. The universe is a story. Each creature is a story. Each human enters this world and awakens to a simple truth: “I must find my own story within this great epic of being.”
— BRIAN THOMAS SWIMME, The Resurgence of Cosmic Storytellers
My fellow-men are those who can listen to the stories
That come to them from far-off, floating through the air.
Even now they hear them come from places far away,
These stories like the wind, floating like the winds.
— //KABBO, one of the last of the now-extinct /Xam Bushmen, Return of the Moon
We are clearly involved in a dramatic race for time that has no precedent in the entire history of humanity. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of humanity and of life on this planet …humanity [is] at a critical crossroad facing either collective annihilation or an evolutionary jump in consciousness of unprecedented nature and dimension.
— STANISLAV GROF, 2012 and Human Destiny
In the Beginning…
Some fourteen billion years ago the entire cosmos, what would become the great wheeling galaxies with their trillions of blazing suns, burst into being from a single point, in an unimaginably violent, unfathomably immense explosion of light and energy. Since that “Great Flaring Forth” the universe has been expanding, cooling, and growing in complexity…and consciousness.*
This is the most astounding discovery of the last four hundred years of modern science and the foundation of our deepest understanding of reality. It is also the limiting case of credulity. If you can believe this, you can believe just about anything. Yet our best science tells us it is so: that the infinitely ordered complexities of the earth — the delicate beauty of birds, flowers, forests, and oceans; the glories and tragedies of self-conscious humanity — all of this grows out of that single, infinitely mysterious, explosive beginning. The cosmos is not so much a place as it is a continually unfolding event.
Scientific laws and theories generally deal with universal, repeatable, predictable regularities. In contrast, stories capture the meaning of unique events — novelties — transforming over time. Every individual human life is a unique story told in the living. We could say the evolving universe itself is a story “telling us into existence.” Narrative captures something fundamental about the nature of reality. The story becomes a primordial unit of meaning, connecting the present to the past and all things to one another as they emerge from an original unity. All past cultures and civilizations have had some intuitive