“The Great Spirit is in all things. He is in the air we breathe. The Great Spirit is our Father, but the Earth is our Mother. She nourishes us…..That which we put into the ground she returns to us.”
—Big Thunder Wabanaki, Algonquin
The following is an extract of the second chapter from Hanzi Freinacht’s unpublished book ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: A Metamodern Guide to World History’. The book is not coming out anytime soon, but a webinar on the topic of metamodern history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2 – 25. More details about the course can be found here.
The introduction chapter can be accessed here. And the first chapter here.
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Hanzi Freinacht: There was no stone age. And there was no bronze age either.
The reason we’re still using these terms is simply because we’ve left it to the archeologists to define those epochs where none or very few written sources are available. And since archeologists often don’t seem very interested in social theory, they’ve simply named these epochs after the stuff they dig up.
This isn’t a problem when archaeologists talk about layers in the ground, of course, but things start to get silly when their terms are used as general measures of development. Allow me to mention a few examples:
In Sub-Saharan Africa they skipped the bronze age entirely and went directly from the stone age to the iron age. Does that mean they skipped a technological and social stage of development entirely? No, it just means that the Africans didn’t have access to tin and copper, the two metals needed to make bronze.
Or how about this one: To this day, you can find classifications of the Mayans or the Aztecs as “stone age civilizations”. Metallurgy in itself, however, wasn’t unknown since they knew how to craft objects out of gold (and bronze working was on its way). Sadly, gold isn’t very practical and can’t be turned into weapons to counter Spanish steel rapiers. It should be obvious that defining an agrarian civilization capable of building aqueducts, pyramids, and cities sustaining hundreds of thousand inhabitants as “stone age”—just because they had no bronze—completely collapses any sensible meaning-making that can be derived from the category. The Aztec empire was a Faustian civilization, comparable to ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia.
Or how about the Mayans? They used a material known as obsidian. Obsidian is a naturally occurring volcanic glass, and technically therefore a rock. This material, however, was used in similar ways as bronze in Eurasia, for decorations, weapons, tools etc. Another stone age civilization?
Then again, if we were to name an era after the most widely used material, the proper name should be the “wood age”. Why should we call it something else just because wood happens to occur less frequently in the archaeological records due to decomposition. Oh, and by the way, the wood age lasted roughly until the 20th century when synthetic materials finally took over. Ah, the wonders of the plastic age!
What I want to say with all of this is that we should define and name the way of life before the agrarian revolution not in terms of what kind of material we find in the ground, but rather in terms of what kind of society and culture we’re talking about. So instead of the stone age, my suggestion is that we start using terms that better describe the deepest patterns of social life itself: metamemes. As we have seen, this includes the prevalent “worldviewing” of a culture, but is not reducible to it.
What Is Animism?
Q: In chapter one you briefly introduced the animist metameme as one in which there’s no differentiation between body and soul, where totems and taboos determine the social dynamics of everyday life, and where people view the world through a lens of anthropomorphization and a nature enchanted with spirit. This is also what’s commonly understood as animism, the belief system that you’ve named this metameme after. Maybe you could say a little bit more about animism before we move on?
HF: I most certainly can. First of all I just need to mention that I agree with Yuval Harari that calling our ancestors animists is like saying that people in the pre-modern agrarian age were theists. Animism is a veeery broad category, and essentially an anthropological construct (as in, it was constructed by modern academics, anthropologists, not by the animist cultures themselves).
As such, it doesn’t say that much about a particular culture when applied to a group of humans. Anthropological and archaeological studies of tribal cultures show a staggering diversity that in many ways is much greater than that between contemporary world civilizations (Western, Chinese, Indian etc.). The idea of a world animated with spirit, from which the name is derived, is just one of many aspects of indigenous religions, and to most indigenous peoples their beliefs are so integral to daily life that they don’t even have a name for their specific mythology or any notion of “religion” itself. Unsurprisingly, the term has thus been criticized for being a colonial construct to define and categorize non-western peoples with little regard to what they themselves think about it, and for awkwardly lumping together a multitude of vastly diverse cultures into one neat category just to fit the Western mind. Yet, in recent times there have been activists and representatives of indigenous populations who’ve felt that the term does aptly describe their beliefs and who have thus self-identified as animists.
I’m thus painfully aware that “animism” isn’t a perfect term, but in lack of a better one I’ve decided to continue using it. In any case, the most basic definition of animism is that it’s a worldview where human as well as non-human entities, living and inert, are believed to possess some kind of spiritual essence, soul, or life force. The actions of animals are seen as intentional, planned, and purposive; and often, even inert objects or phenomena are believed to have intentions and a will of their own, too.
Animist thought is characterized by the idea that there’s no distinct separation between the spiritual and the physical world, that the whole world, both the subjective realms of the mind and the physical universe, is bound by webs of kinships. This is often accompanied by the idea that certain persons, families, or entire lineages are related to particular species of animals. This kind of thinking is also known as “totemic” and harbors a sense of belonging and close kinship with the natural world. Sometimes kinship even extends to plant life and weather phenomena, which are also considered to have magical capabilities and wills of their own. The supernatural world is seen as an accessible realm with beings one can interact with, almost like a separate tribal territory, and the means to access this world are believed to be various rituals and symbols.
By providing gifts to the spirits in the form of ritualized sacrifices one can improve relations with them, and it has even been observed that people have believed they could marry into the spirit world. In many ways it’s obvious that animists believe we can interact with the spirit world in similar ways as with other people; that humans and spirits are part of the same social reality and that the natural world has anthropoid, human, qualities. In addition to the supernatural animistic spirits, it’s also possible that our animist ancestors believed in the existence of some kind of single creator deity, like those observed among some modern-day animistic religions, and that ritual practices were imbued with apotropaic meaning (having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck) and perhaps involved sympathetic magic (using objects or actions resembling or symbolically associated with the event or person over which influence is sought).
Through the varieties of animist perspectives, we generally don’t see ourselves as “separate” from our environment (which, implicitly, the other metamemes tend to in different ways). We don’t perceive the natural world as something to be grasped intellectually as an object external to one self. There is a closeness and identification with the natural world that is primordial in the sense that it is what our minds naturally gravitate towards unless larger social structures upset this equilibrium and “force us” into the later metamemes—but, crucially, it also facilitates our interactions with the biotopes we are part of: we use the large expanse of our social minds to interact with the world more meaningfully. It has been argued, for instance, that this enables the hunter to become aware of him- or herself and what they’re doing while simultaneously taking in the viewpoint of the prey and feeling one with it. This helps the hunter to better predict the behavior of the animal. A life preoccupied with the spirits of the animals and the imitation of these through animistic rituals and dances are thus not purely what modernity would view as a “spiritual” matter, but embodied practices that enable us to survive, and thrive, together with the ecosystem we rely upon. Modernity needs at least nine years of semi-forced schooling to insert itself in our minds: animist culture takes hold so much more spontaneously. It is perhaps no coincidence that the neurological types we today know as ADHD are on average more successful within animist societies, as measured by survival metrics—usually as foragers, rather than hunters. Or, at least, a recent study published by The Royal Society argued as much. Perhaps this is because a wandering attention, always looking for the next quick reward, leads to more berries being picked, the environment more curiously scanned. In today’s world, in modern societies, people with ADHD instead, on average, live unhappier lives, with more broken relationships, and 13 years shorter expected life spans as compared to the general population. Needless to say, animist culture tends to be less alienating than modernity—and dramatically so for some groups whose neurology is better attuned to hunting and gathering, freely roaming around, rather than toiling in fields, factories and office cubicles.
Personhood is not locked up in human bodies or individuals. Winds, trees, non-human animals, ancestors, and spirits of vaguer shape and form are all persons with whom relationships are possible, and vital. This widened perception of personhood has been argued to make animism a “relational epistemology” where conceptions of self-identity are based on relationships with others rather than some essentialized individual self, anticipating the postmodern idea of the “dividual” where persons are seen as bundles of social relationships. In the animistic case that even includes relations with some that aren’t human.
The radicality of this extended personhood, and indeed its corresponding ethical embrace, can hardly be overstated. Animists ascribe personhood status to specific locations and innate natural objects like rivers or mountains. Before there were temples, the silent wonders of the natural world invited us to the sacred, to a sense of awe, of belonging, of wholeness. The process we today know by many names, of “alienation”, may exist in animist settings too, but almost certainly much less prevalently and saliently. Animism is not a perfect homestead for the human mind, but it is arguably still the closest we have come to feeling at home in the universe.
And perhaps it’s from this standpoint that the role of the shaman is best understood. Isn’t it baffling, if you think about it, that at different continents, in peoples separated by tens of thousands of years—say the San people in southern Africa (the world’s oldest and in that sense most successful culture, going on some 40 000 years) and the arctic Inuit and the Aboriginal Australians and the 250-person strong Tsaan of reindeer herders in Mongolia—you can always find one special category of person that can meaningfully be called “a shaman”? That is a truly stupefying finding, given how vastly different these cultures, languages, environmental life conditions, diets, and histories all are. And yet it’s arguably the most consistent finding of all of anthropology, right up there with the universality of marriage, burial, and dance. People can organize families differently, speak differently, fight differently—but they all have shamans, one way or another, even the smallest remnants of tribes. And the shaman fits in because they have to: when we live in nature, of nature, with nature, we must relate to, we must make contact with nature. The person who is a little less of the tribe, one of us, is a little more like one of the spirits of nature (a few parallels in modern life can come to mind; again, not least the neuroatypical among us). They become the bridge to nature and its worlds beyond. They jump head-first into the rituals, into the mysteries, into the unknown. As animists, we both exclude them and revere them. We are careful not to touch their most charged charms, as they are loaded with energy, with taboo.
It’s important to keep in mind that animist cosmologies in many ways are more specific and concrete, more particular, than worldviews reflecting later metamemes. It’s not so much the gods in general, some abstract life force, or divine principle, or concerns about universality and generality—as in organized religions and then in modern science—that are most central. It’s more a specific and proximate spirit, a particular magic force, or a certain geographical location, a certain ancestor. It’s common for indigenous populations around the world to have been strongly attached to sacred spaces (something that has been carried into many contemporary religions, for instance Mecca or Jerusalem). Accordingly, animist hearts and minds have suffered as modernity has defined ownership over or extracted resources from these sacred places—or simply removed them and built roads, pipelines, malls, and production plants on top.
Q: Thanks for the summary. So when did this kind of thinking emerge, approximately?
HF: Well, it’s difficult to say. Scholars talk about a “revolution of the Upper Paleolithic” starting around 50 000 years ago. However, excavations of ritualistic decorated burial sites dating back more than 100 000 years have led anthropologists and archeologists to believe that people had already begun believing in an afterlife at that time.
The first undisputed burial of a shaman is much younger though, c. 30 000 years ago, and happens to be a woman. This also coincides with the emergence of anthropomorphic figurines and images, for example the famous half-human, half-animal “lion-man” figurines which indicates that people may have begun to believe in some kind of pantheons of gods or supernatural beings, or at least sported shamanistic practices closely comparable to those known from contemporary foraging societies.
Q: If what we know about animism is primarily based on the lives of contemporary indigenous people, how can we be sure that this also applies to the way people lived twenty, thirty, and forty thousand years ago?
HF: You’re absolutely right that we should be careful about drawing too hasty conclusions about paleolithic society based on the lives of the last remaining hunter gatherers of today. First of all it can never be excluded that the mere presence of anthropologists and other observers has interfered with the studies. Secondly, all surviving foraging societies have evolved for a much longer time than the ones living 30 000 years ago, so it cannot be excluded that they have developed complex traits that simply weren’t present back then. And thirdly, all foraging societies modern anthropologists have studied have been the ones living in the most marginal lands no one else wanted; areas located in harsh climates ill-suited for agriculture. It’s fair to assume that life in pre-agrarian Europe or China must have been quite different from that of the Inuit in Greenland or the ǃKung in the Kalahari Desert.
But apart from a relatively limited number of preserved eye-witness accounts of native Americans, before European invaders took over their lands and greatly disrupted their social complexity, we have almost no direct knowledge about what hunter-gatherer life was like in more fertile areas of the world. We also don’t know what paleolithic societies were like back when most of the planet was virgin territory and there were still plenty of large game to hunt. It’s not impossible to imagine that certain cultural features were lost as population densities increased, mammoths and other large land animals were hunted to extinction, and people had to make due with less and cope with increased competition from other groups of humans. We can’t exclude that the foraging societies we know about today have been impoverished versions of the ones who used to inhabit the earth.
Lastly, and most importantly, today’s animist societies and their dynamics are affected by the presence of other, larger societies that function according to other metamemes—most notably modernity and its global system of power and exchange.
Q: So what you’re saying is that basically we don’t really have a clue?
HF: Yes and no. It’s true that apart from the most superficial material aspects we can only guess how our ancestors lived their lives and how they thought. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make well-informed guesses based on archaeological remains and by critically analyzing anthropological investigations and historical eye-witness accounts.
After all, since so many strands of knowledge add up towards one and the same pattern recognition, it’s more than possible to triangulate our way to a form of understanding that, certainly, does not exhaust the intimate and nuanced understanding of any one particular animist culture, but does in fact quite clearly grasp the wider property space within which this wild diversity of human experience plays out. If we know present-day anthropology and is intricate descriptions of animist cultures around the world (combined with a backlog of almost two centuries of serious anthropological work), and we have a veritable revolution of chemistry-supported paleoanthropology (you can now study the remnants of food in teeth and guts), and you have a clear grasp of developmental psychology (e.g. that humans all go through an anthropomorphic stage of reasoning, and we can see how reasoning evolves into complexity and abstraction), and we see the deeper structures of the psychology of religion (so, generalizable patterns of how spiritual technologies and practices function), and we have models from human ecology concerning how culture emerges as a function of the ecologies or biotopes upon which it relies, and we have a strong tradition of sociological theory that elucidates the general dynamics of human interaction, well, then we can start talking. We can begin to trace the pattern of patterns, i.e. the metameme of animist culture. We can trace the realm of possibility, of potential. It’s not exactly evidence, but it’s a structure of so many interconnected indices that correct for and/or corroborate one another.
This triangulation of sources makes it abundantly clear that such a pattern as “animism” does meaningfully exist, does meaningfully describe a range of interrelated cultural expressions, even if the final evidence must always be found in real meetings with actual cultures. Depending on how you define “uncontacted”, there are up to over 100 uncontacted indigenous tribes left on the planet (they can still have metal tools or even t-shirts via trade networks with other not-as-uncontacted tribes, etc.)—and these remain exceedingly vulnerable to the germs prevalent in the global network and the social dynamics of modernity’s juggernaut (not to mention the zeal of postfaustian missionaries seeking new converts, or even the curiosity of postmodern anthropologists). But even at a distance, given the generalized knowledge of animism as a metameme, we can posit strong working hypotheses about some of the recurring cultural properties of these tribes. And such hypotheses can generalize into the past, into our own past, thus rooting our understanding of culture’s evolution.
So even if most of our theories regarding our ancestors’ social structures, beliefs, and ways of thinking are based on the last remaining hunter gatherers of today, or historical accounts of such peoples before modern societies annihilated or changed them, and even if we consider that the cultural diversity among contemporary hunter gatherers is nothing short of staggering, even among tribes in close physical proximity to one another, there are still some overall similarities. Sexual division of labor tends to exist and follow some patterns, but there are always new findings complexifying the overall picture—for instance, more and more examples and arguments are being presented for a significant prevalence of women who have hunted in hunter-gatherer societies. With that said, let me still go over the wider and general consensus: In most observed cases, from Inuit to San, hunting is mostly the domain of males while women usually do most of the gathering of plants and small animals. Fishing is usually a shared endeavor between the sexes. Men usually manufacture the tools used for hunting, while women make the containers for gathering and cooking. Clothes and the tools used for that is also the domain of women. Social structures tend to be simple and more egalitarian than those in agricultural and industrial societies, and food is shared between all members of the group, by necessity that is. And finally, on a spiritual and philosophical level, there are so many similarities among contemporary hunter-gatherers, whether that’s in the arctic regions, the Amazonas, or the deserts of Southern Africa and Australia, that it feels safe enough to assume that they might have had a lot in common with foragers of the past.
As such, I think we should be brave enough to try and reconstruct what prehistoric times must have been like from the best knowledge currently available—all while remaining ready to revise everything we’ve constructed once new and better information becomes available. But to be clear, I don’t have a gender agenda here, just looking at some salient and recurring social structures, noting that the Animist metameme tends to overlap with them.
The Animist Mind
Q: All these descriptions are fine, if rather superficial, academic, and “Western”—reductive. What about the inner lives of animist cultures? Are not animists more spiritually endowed, given their relational cosmologies, closeness to nature, and direct experience of natural awe and connection? Is not the tribal community more meaningful than following orders, keeping a schedule, intellectualizing, and going to an office job? I still feel you’re missing the real depth here, the true relevance—and maybe not treating the wild variety of animists with sufficient regard.
HF: Indeed—across the tremendous range of human experiments that tens of thousands of years of animist cultures engendered, with a variety we can today only begin to comprehend, as evidenced by, amongst many other examples, the sheer hotpot of human cultural forms that is gathered only on Papua New Guinea (the favorite part of the world of so many anthropologists)—can one even speak meaningfully of such a thing as “the animist mind”? It’s a fair question, an important one.
Is the animist mind an entity that we could at least sketch the outline of and learn from, give its proper due, and even integrate into the farther reaches of modernity—without falling prey to wishful caricature, inappropriate cultural appropriation, and/or commercialization?
I believe and certainly hope we can; on the one hand it appears arrogant for us to claim access to a “general animism” when all animist cultures are precisely so localized and particular; on the other hand, it appears defeatist and as an insult to our joint and universal human experience to assume that the insights and connection to nature of animism are forever lost to all of the later metamemes. Again, the key difference between a “modern” and “metamodern” historiography, is that the latter takes all of the metamemes not as merely “objects of study” (“why are all these people so non-rational?” and so on), but as serious expressions of cultural life relevant and important to the development of one’s own culture, of one’s very sense of self. So I feel that we have to try, however provisionally. Otherwise, we are excluding this element of culture that is still inherent to all of us, still repressed and marginalized. I’m not interested in animism as a curiosity, but rather for what it can teach me, or teach us—for how it can help mend modernity itself.
With that in mind, let me try to take a kind of middle position on the issue of the “inherent spiritual experience” of animist life. More than one anthropologist has a soft spot for the mystical, the occult, the spiritual—at least since its overlap with Western counterculture in the 1960s and -70s. This is deeply reflected in the discipline’s way of perceiving and ethnographically participating in indigenous and particularly animist societies. Famous examples can be found in quotes like this one, by the wonderfully weird German researcher, Hans Peter Duerr, in Dreamtime (German original from 1978):
“The ‘dream place’ is everywhere and nowhere, just like the ‘dreamtime’ is always and never. You might say that the term ‘dream place’ does not refer to any particular place and the way to get to it is to get nowhere.”
Duerr argued that Western (Modern) science fails to take animist spirituality, or the occult in other pre-modern societies, anywhere near as seriously as they deserve: that there is real knowledge there, real explorations of the farther reaches of reality—not just whimsical or childish experience to be “explained” by a superior intellect—i.e. forms of knowing that “objectivity” is ill-suited to capture and comprehend. Dreamtime is about the borders of subjective experience, while the science we know today always stays firmly within the narrow confines of waking consciousness and its conceptual frameworks of self and reality. Animist spirituality, with its ready access to trance through rituals, to communion with nature, to shamanic intervention, and sometimes hallucinogenic drugs and practices, can and does break through boundaries unimaginable by the average doctor or engineer. And they may do so massively, and much more often than the rare glimpses of spiritual experience allotted to us in modern life—depending of course on the specifics of the animist culture.
In a similar vein, archeologists David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce have argued, in their 2005 book Inside the Neolithic Mind, that if you examine sites of Neolithic art in Europe and the Middle East, you see signs of altered states of consciousness pretty much everywhere.
Q: Well, at least it’s open to such interpretations.
HF: Yes, you’re right.
Indigenous mythologies speak a similar language: one that sounds decidedly psychedelic. Altered states, induced through shamanism, ritual, dance trance, and/or hallucinogenics, seem to have played a pivotal role in the evolution of the mind itself, of culture itself. Animist societies are arguably themselves psychedelically driven to a significant—and competent, and mature—degree that later societies are not. There may be deep wells of knowledge available to these societies that elude us today.
At the same time, this line of argument—taking on a more equal footing with the Animist metameme than did classical anthropology, viewing them as cultures that have knowledge that we lack—may also need to be tempered, to be balanced, in order to avoid unrealistic expectations upon animist life. We especially need to steer clear of a certain uncannily growing undercurrent of Western coveting of animist spirituality, with its consumerist, almost vampyric, Ayahuasca-tourism and so on. The high regard in which our hippie friends all hold Animist culture is not necessarily harmless: it arguably invites destructive forms of appropriation. Let me be clear to the point of sarcasm: rich, beautiful, hyper-feminine, sexy and athletic, “embodied” Burning Man ladies skillfully dancing by a virgin lake in the jungle, spreading their Goddess worship via YouTube, have nothing on the direct cultural expression of wrinkled faces of a simple and rhythmic clapping and singing taking place in the Kalahari desert. The !Kung people are not putting on a show; there is no connection in their rituals to Bali’s global elite party scene and Instagram. Such Western reenactments of animist spirituality certainly miss the mark, however universally human longings for connection that such reenactments may be stemming from.
So, from the other side of the argument, we may trace the classical sociological claim made by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality, that human life always returns to that mundane social construction that is “everyday life”. There is, indeed, no reason to believe anything is different in Animist cultures. Yes, they access spiritual states more readily; yes, their everyday life is less alienating and “stuck in the head”; yes, their holistic cosmologies are less weird to the human mind and thus facilitate a smoother sense of connection to the world… But no, the average member of animist societies does not consistently walk around in dreamtime, transfixed by elevated spiritual states during much of their waking lives. Let us be realistic about it: The animist mind is spiritually affluent, but its life does not entirely play out in the Garden of Eden.
It should further be qualified that while, yes, animist societies do tend to be spiritually richer than modern ones, the types of spirituality that emerge in hunter-gatherer societies do not correspond to the mind-transforming practices pertaining to the Postfaustian traditions, i.e. the mysticisms of the great religions. In small Animist societies with limited divisions of labor, there are no specialized monks or nuns, supported via larger communities of food donors, who refine practices of mind purification over centuries and millennia, through tens of thousands of intense practice hours per person, under the strictures of severe discipline and extremely incentivizing belief structures about the cosmic significance of their work. That stuff comes along primarily with the Axial Age (as we shall return to). In today’s neurological research into the brain states of spiritual experience, it is particularly the Tibetan Buddhist hermit Dzogchen practitioners that stand out. It is these people, uniquely, that can all but blow up the brain scanning equipment of modern researchers with strong, persistent Gamma waves (the fastest brainwaves, associated with peaceful bliss and compassion). But it is interesting to note that the Tibetan tradition—arguably the world’s most radical and tremendous in terms of measurable spiritual development—is one that has integrated many distinctly shamanic elements into its unique interpretation of Buddhism. So something can certainly be said in favor of the profound potential value to be found in integrating the animist mind within the frameworks of later metamemes. This is what the aim should be for our present situation.
Simply stated, I do believe in the animist mind as a useful category, from which true and relevant insight can be gleaned. It is something to rediscover, to revisit and critically reconstruct in the context of today’s larger societies, even if it is far from the only form of spiritual and cultural reconstruction necessary for metamodern cultures to thrive.
Q: What about magic? It’s not just spiritual experience, community building, and the embodiment of the natural world as non-verbal knowledge that constitute the animist mind: it is a deep relationship to magic, speaking to the world around us.
HF: Absolutely. Magical thinking is inherent to the Animist metameme. Here’s what I make of it.
Causality, as a form of reasoning to predict and interact with the world, is always under development. There isn’t one form of “rational mind” and one form that is magical. We’re all magicians, of different kinds, to different degrees. Causality is, viewed in this larger historical context, just another form of magic.
What the modern mind sees as “that’s just magic”, is the animist mind’s real reasoning. A big part of that has to do with the lack of differentiation into conceptual categories. In ethnomedicine, the study of medical practices of indigenous societies, there are many examples of how you can affect the healing processes of the mind and body by using the right words and objects (snake’s teeth and so forth). In the animist mind, language has not been separated out as something “exterior to” the world of objects. Objects have not been separated from subjects. So the world at large appears as something that can be talked to, as something in which each phenomenon has its own deep “essence”, and that such essences can be affected by conversation with the spiritual realm. You cannot “see” causes and effects, you have to infer them. Likewise, the animist mind infers the presence of spirits.
It’s here that spiritual states, in which one feels no separate self, and where “dreamtime” is experienced, play a special role: When the animist mind feels most connected to the world, this mind can enter into relationships with spirits that are believed to affect the course of real events. The name of one object sounds, linguistically speaking, like the name of something else, and by using that object and speaking the right words, you can affect the essence of another, seemingly related object or occurrence or phenomenon. It’s a form of causality, a form of reasoning—but one that meshes well with spiritual experience. And to a certain extent, such magic can do its magic, and truly work—through processes we would today perhaps describe as Placebo effects and the like.
Animist culture, through its very access to magic, was so superior to earlier forms of Archaic culture that it could spread across the planet over a comparatively short period of time: Animist cultures took hold on all continents and other species of homo were outcompeted. It is with this in mind that I named this chapter: Raindance did actually conquer the world. It’s not just cute; it’s that powerful. It is a form of reasoning that, in many ways, works. But note, again, that by inferring the presence of spirits, the animist mind has already removed some of the “essence” inherent to the phenomena themselves, and started to reason about invisible causal forces: it is, relatively speaking, a kind of secularization, of seeing wider causal patterns. Every metameme constitutes this kind of de-essentialization of the experienced reality from which it springs.
All of this does not mean that magical thinking of this kind is unproblematic in today’s world; it needs to be critically revisited and integrated with the realities today to serve us well. But that’s another story.
Q: Alright, so let’s talk more about the animist way of thinking.
In the past, it was common for scholars to subscribe to the, in my opinion, misled idea that indigenous people are somehow operating within a prelogical mentality and that they’re not fully capable of conscious, critical thinking. This mode of “primitive” thinking has, traditionally, been contrasted with the “rational” thinking of supposedly enlightened Westerners. Fortunately, this colonial way of thinking has largely been abandoned within academia.
And then “you guys” come along.
It’s not that I don’t acknowledge at least some of the findings within the field of adult development, or that I’m blind to the obvious fact that human beings can, under the right conditions, continue to develop cognitively throughout their adult lives. What I find really hard to believe is that entire cultures, that is, functional human societies that manage to survive in nature, were to function on a level of cognitive complexity akin to that of a child.
If we look at how indigenous people reason, and how they intelligently solve tricky problems—and how they over and over again have tricked westerners, I find that there’s little reason to conclude that they should be living in some kind of prelogical dreamworld.
HF: First of all there’s no one saying that animist societies don’t give birth to highly intelligent people, or that they aren’t able to have well-reasoned and rational conversations about how to solve problems. Cognitive complexity is, like intelligence, a highly hereditary property, and high-complexity individuals can be found in all societies (but in advanced ones they’re more likely to spend their days conducting high-complexity tasks defined within a stronger division of labor).
Secondly, since MHC Stage 8 Primary is the minimum requirement to properly understand animism, and since this is the first stage to enable simple logical deduction, I’m therefore not claiming that animist cultures operate according to a prelogical mode of thinking but rather the opposite.
Indigenous number systems can elucidate this point of “logical, yes, but not as abstracted” somewhat: while studies in so called ethnomathematics do tend to complicate the picture far beyond the proverbial “they could only count to one, two, many!”, it’s also true that larger number systems only emerged in larger societies, none of which were animist. We’re considering Mayans, India, China, Babylonia, and so on.
Now, whether animist cultures operate according to a rational mode of thought is a matter of how we choose to define the term “rational”. If we’re equating rational with MHC stage 11 formal, the ability to solve problems with one unknown using algebra, logic and empiricism, which is the minimum requirement to properly understand modernity, then this wouldn’t be the dominant mode of thinking in animist societies (but there would of course always be individuals capable at operating on this level of cognitive complexity). But if you simply equate rational with the capacity to critically evaluate evidence and make decisions based on experience and rough cost-benefit analysis, then animist societies, and their adult members, would certainly qualify. It should further be noted that human skills and faculties always develop in response to life conditions, and so the people who live most self-sufficiently in the natural world will also tend to be the most developed in terms of practical capacities. Throw a bunch of STEM Phds into the wild, cut them off from civilization, and see what happens—The Lord of the Flies probably doesn’t even begin to describe it. That also goes for animist cosmology: it’s more “rational”, in a deeper sense of the word, than mechanics and existentialism, because it imbues life in the wild with order, community, and meaning, while empowering and undergirding the practices that enable not only survival but thriving. It also doesn’t turn dogs and other animals into weird machines with no soul (looking at you, Descartes).
Given that animist culture is closest to how our minds and emotions spontaneously function (you don’t need to force feed it to people with twelve years of schooling for it to take hold), many (but not all) animist cultures are also more rational in the sense that they resonate more effortlessly with how human hearts and minds function, which means less cognitive dissonance, less alienation, and less decay of the mind and of social relations. Animism supports lifestyles for which we as a species, biologically speaking, are actually well-adapted (whereas pulling plows or maneuvering office life, tackling bureaucracy and digital security, not so much). Animism is rational because it tends to generate, for lack of a better term, relatively healthy expressions of the human condition.
All of this holds true until modernity comes along: When subsumed by the larger systems around them, animists tend to suffer from depression and other mental disorders to a degree comparable to other groups of equal status or vulnerability within these larger systems. As David Graeber and David Wengrow love to remind us, colonial history is full of people who were given the chance to live in both animist and modern cultures, and given the choice after having really tried both, most people will willingly escape from civilization and “go native” (as happens to the anthropologists themselves, every now and then). A slower and more rhythmic pace of life, less plotting and politicizing, less top-down control, more human contact, ongoing and non-repetitive movement of the body, fresh air and direct contact with plants and soil, lack of diseases derived from domesticated animals; it all adds up to make animist ways of life preferable.
The main project that “rationality” has to wrestle with under modernity is actually to one way or another reverse-engineer our way back to life conditions that approach the impossible ideals already present in many of the animist cultures. I’m not romanticizing here: hunter-gatherer life is not the Garden of Eden, the norms that regulate sharing and equality can be rather repressive and so on. But overall, yes, we have every reason to creatively reconstruct many elements of animist culture and integrate it. While leaving remaining animists alone, not least as indigenous land rights tend to mesh perfectly with environmental protection and bioregion preservation. I guess what I am saying is that “the savage” isn’t necessarily “noble”, but they are probably rational.
In response to this line of reasoning, modern observers have sometimes, almost gleefully, noted just how willingly indigenous peoples, animists included, have abandoned their ways of life to settle into the relative comforts of modernity, with handouts and modern jobs, once contact is established. But the fact that the rationality intrinsic to animist cultures can be thwarted by what are arguably slippery slopes of temptation, addiction, and quicker rewards hardly proves that members of animist cultures “given a choice” would make such choices. It is rather comparable to the way so many of us can slide into addictions of drugs or addictive digital apps, not least if we had no premonition where this leads us. These “collective choices” of animist cultures do after all show up under circumstances where the trauma of contact is already a fact (you get hit by multiple epidemics, are pressured into a subjugated position, and have your cosmological beliefs undermined). And then there is the active manipulation by members of modern societies who for different reasons may “need to manage” the indigenous populations.
Q: Alright got it: prelogical, no; rational, depends. Sometimes animist ways of life are “more rational”, I agree. But what about the notion that animists were supposed to live in some kind of dreamworld?
HF: Well, don’t we all?
I mean, the way in which modern people believe that there’s some kind of divine objective vantage point out there from where the true state of the world can be obtained. That’s a cute little dreamworld, don’t you think? Or, what about the way in which the postmodern folks believe that the world is inhabited by vicious spirits like the patriarchy, gender norms, and capitalism—that simply need to be deconstructed, or with another word, “exorcized”, in order to clean the world of their malicious presence. That’s a dreamworld at least in my book.
Or how about the fact that essentially, we only have access to the hallucinations that our nervous system and senses conjure up to represent the world around us, never the world in itself. Dreams, in a broad definition of the word, is all we’ll ever know.
Q: Get to the point.
HF: Alright. I assume you’re referring to the way some imagine indigenous people to be living in a haze of make-believe with no connection to the real world because of their spiritual beliefs and colorful mythologies. That’s obviously mistaken. It would be the same as assuming that modern Westerners went about their daily lives with nothing but Newtonian equations, Ricardian economic models, and legal textbooks to guide their behavior.
The cosmology of a culture is one thing. The practical day-to-day behavior of individuals is another. The first certainly affects the other, but the world would be a really weird place if people had to rely exclusively on the symbolic artifacts of their culture.
As such, people might live in a culture that’s full of sentient mountains, invisible daddies in the sky, or divine numbers with universal revelations, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t reason.
A Revolution of the Upper Paleolithic?
Q: You mention that the emergence of the animist metameme coincides with what researchers have called “the revolution of the Upper Paleolithic” approximately 50 000 years ago. However, in David Graeber and David Wengrowe’s latest book The Dawn of Everything they write that it’s largely a Eurocentric illusion derived from the fact that because Europe is rich, it’s also one of the places where a lot of money has been poured into archaeological excavations. Now, as non-european societies are starting to catch up, increasingly earlier evidence for advanced human behavior is popping up all over Asia and Africa. What’s your reply to that? And, has it forced you to change your theory?
HF: No, I still think it’s fair to use the word “revolution” for what began to happen in the middle of the first centum millennium BC.
Graeber and Wengrow claim that the occurrence of more advanced toolkits, the emergence of artworks, and the replacement of the Neanderthals with Homo sapiens in Europe around 40 000 years ago is nothing more than a regional development. Europe was late to the party, they argue, since older remains have been found in other parts of the world.
Well, the Davids certainly have a point about not letting European findings determine the overall level of global human development in the Upper Paleolithic, and that the rest of the world most likely has a lot of surprises still hiding in the ground. But I think they present the case for a Paleolithic revolution rather weakly just so they can easily shoot it down and give the impression that the establishment once again has been proven wrong. I empathize with this impulse, but on this one their argumentation is just not solid enough.
First of all there’s a bit of a disagreement among researchers about exactly when this alleged revolution began. Some set the start date as late as 40 000 years ago (the date Graeber and Wengrow choose to fixate on), others as early as 60 000. However, the most common dating among those who talk about a revolution is approximately 50 000 years ago, and they back their claim up with evidence from all over the world, not only Europe.
The examples Graeber and Wengrow use to disprove the Upper Paleolithic revolution thesis are the 60 000 year old shell beads and worked pigment that have been found in Kenya, and the cave art in Borneo and Sulawesi. Well, the paintings in the Chauvet Cave in France, the oldest in Europe, are around 30 000 – 35 000 years old, and the ones in the Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave on Borneo are between 40 000 – 50 000 years old. Europe is thus late to the party, but the Asian findings still fall well within the range of 50 000 BCE—give or take a decem millennium (10 000 years).
Scholars are of course also debating whether it was a sudden or a more gradual development. But all in all there’s broad agreement that something quite spectacular happened since the archaeological remains from this period and beyond—around 60 000 – 40 000 years ago—show a sudden burst of technological progress and a flowering of human culture evident in hitherto unseen cave paintings and richly crafted artworks that in comparison make the earlier period appear crude and rather primitive. We’re talking about things that simply didn’t exist before—and they start appearing all over Eurasia, and roughly around the same time. Graeber and Wengrow even mention the remarkable similarities in terms of tools, instruments, and artistic ornaments stretching from Mongolia to the Swiss Alps. This indicates a shared genesis and a following explosion. So when people talk about “the revolution of the Upper Paleolithic”, or “the Creative Explosion”, or “our Great Leap Forward”, as Jared Diamond chose to call it, I’d still argue that there are legitimate merits to their claims.
The reason for this explosion, I believe, is that somewhere, someone successfully transitioned to the Animist metameme, which gave them an unbeatable competitive advantage, similar to that of the modern, capitalistic and industrial revolution, which then had the effect that other groups of humans either made the transition to the Animist metameme, too, or got outcompeted along with the Neanderthals.
And from this period on, humans succeeded in crossing large tracts of ocean to colonize Australia, they settled in the freezing cold regions of Siberia that not even the sturdy Neanderthals managed to live in—and they replaced all other hominids. They even managed to colonize the virgin continents of the Americas, never before settled by any other hominids—and they did so remarkably fast. In addition to this expansion, our species also managed to change the face of the earth by altering a host of eco-systems for posterity.
Q: And what do you think was behind this sudden development?
HF: Well, as you can guess, I believe it was a result of the animist metameme coming online. But why, then, did the animist metameme emerge at this particular point in time you might ask?
Some scholars talk about a “cognitive revolution” between 70 000 and 30 000 ago, and others about a so-called “linguistic big bang” around 100 000 years ago. We don’t know when exactly complex human language emerged. Some scholars put it as recent as 100 000 years ago, claiming it to be a unique and recent property of Homo sapiens, while others believe it to have appeared as far back as two million years ago in our hominid ancestors. Some speculate that the emergence of language was a relatively sudden event, among them Noam Chomsky who argues that a single chance mutation occurred around 100 000 years ago providing one lucky individual with a language faculty in a “perfect” or “near-perfect” state—others claim that it was the result of million years of evolution, arguing that it evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our primate ancestors. At the end of the day we simply don’t know.
Most researchers into the topic on complex language and cognitive wiring for abstract thought all seem to operate within a timeframe of 150 000 – 50 000 BCE—the exact time leading up to the revolution of the Upper Paleolithic.
Q: Okay, so what exactly happened? And why did complex language give rise to a new metameme?
HF: I believe it has something to do with the unique feature that human language uses symbols. In other non-human species, representations of the external world rely on the detection of similarities and correlations between objects and events. Bacteria, as a crude example, can react to all manifestations of warmth and light in one way, and cold and darkness in another; that is, they detect similarities and react in a specific way to all occurrences of that sort. More advanced beings, such as mammals, evident by Pavlov’s dogs, can react to correlations, for example the sound of a bell, and connect that to certain events, such as the presence of food. However, both forms rely on “one-to-one” correspondences between internal and external events. Humans are capable of reacting to symbols which not only refer to things in the external world, but also whole collections of similarities and correlations so as to manufacture inner worlds of complex realities in their minds. This kind of symbolic thinking is a very advanced capability. It requires that one part of the mind keeps its representations, in the form of similarities and correlations, in the background, while other parts “distill their conceptual essence” into a symbolic form. This shift from the concrete to the abstract, “from separate indexical links between signs and objects to an organized set of relations between signs”, according to David Christian, is a very demanding task which requires a lot of cognitive processing power which explains why it only appears to have happened in our own species with our exceptionally large brains.
This very much correlates with Yuval Harari’s notion of a cognitive revolution 70 000 – 30 000 years ago, “the point when history declared its independence from biology”, as he frames it—a time in which memes, rather than genes, became the dominant factor of change on Earth. Up until this time, biological change, mutations in the genome that is, had been the predominant factor in determining the behavior of living beings. Homo erectus manufactured and used stone tools, but the design didn’t change for 2 million years until they went extinct. This suggests that their capacity to use stone tools was largely genetically determined; and without any substantial changes to their genome, their behavior wouldn’t change either. But Homo sapiens, on the other hand, hasn’t experienced any major genetic changes for the last 100 000 years, but our behavior has changed drastically. This means that we must have gained some cognitive abilities to transcend our genetic dispositions and move beyond into a mental space of memetic mutations instead.
Harari believes this made us capable of communicating with one another on a higher level of complexity and enabled us to tell myths and stories and develop social constructs, or imagined realities with another term. To properly grasp such imagined realities you need to be at least on MHC Stage 8 Primary, while MHC Stage 7 Preoperational gives you a flattened, but still somewhat functional, idea of such entities. And to come up with such mythical creations, you need to be at least at MHC Stage 9 Concrete.
Shared common myths also enable humans to collaborate in larger numbers above the magical limit of 150 persons our brains are biologically equipped to handle. This, I agree with Harari, is thus what enabled humanity to break the slow paced shackles of genetic evolution and venture onto the much faster highway of memetic evolution.
Q: Could you tell us why exactly it is that memetic evolution is faster? Is it always like that? I mean, cultures are often rather rigid and reluctant to change, and when it comes to changes in the environment, microbes and even insects have proven remarkable fast in their adaptations. Some species of animals actually appear to be much faster at adapting to climate change than humans.
HF: Sure, microbes (as we all know from the stubbornness of the common cold to bypass our immune system every season) can evolve remarkably fast. There’s also the famous evolutionary textbook example of the peppered moth that only took a century to change its color from white to black so as to adapt to the soot-covered environment of industrial Northern England. And it even appears that the animals in the Chernobyl area have evolved to have an increased tolerance towards radiation.
However, there can be little doubt that the evolution of human culture has been occurring at a pace that has no parallel in the natural world. The reason for this is that memetic evolution doesn’t need to wait for an advantageous mutation to appear in a lucky host and wait for everybody else to go extinct—instead, humans can simply change their behavior. Because memes are not transmitted through slow biochemical processes, but through signs and language, they can escape the biophysical constraints of genetics and spread much faster from one living person to another.
Memes, like genes, also do not always copy perfectly, but may change, or mutate with another term, through its host. They can also combine with other memes and create new memes over time. But memes don’t act as randomly as their biological equivalents either. New memes don’t emerge as random mutations from which only a few give its host an advantage, but emerge in the minds of human beings as conscious responses to their environment. This further explains why the speed of cultural development is so much faster than biological evolution: humans do not need to wait for nature to randomly come up with an advantageous meme, no, as active agents we can develop them ourselves by responding in a conscious way to problems we’re facing.
The last 50 000 years of history have been remarkable, not because of the biological evolution that took place, which is rather negligible, but because of the qualitatively very different things the human species did. And that, that’s what this book is about.
Art Comes First
Q: So, 50 000 years ago you say—give or take a few millennia. I agree there might have been a quickening of the pace of development beginning around that time, but more and more archaeological remains are being discovered from before this period which indicate that elements you consider animistic actually started emerging much earlier.
Containers believed to hold paint dating as far back as 100 000 years have been found in South Africa. And in the Blombos cave, also in South Africa, 75 000 year old drilled snail shells and ochre stones engraved with cross-hatch patterns have been discovered. I understand if you haven’t heard about this yet since it was discovered quite recently, back in September 2018 if I’m not mistaken, but it’s now officially considered the oldest drawing in the world. How does this fit into your model?
HF: It fits very well, actually. As I’ve stated many times already: art always comes first. As such, and as I’ll demonstrate throughout this book, we always find the earliest expressions of a new metameme in the arts, long before the metameme gathers momentum and starts making substantial changes to society.
Q: I know you would say that, which is why I saved the best for last:
Remains of pigment processing have been discovered dating back 250 000 years, which suggests that the capacity for symbolic thought was present from a very early age since such substances don’t have many practical applications. And then there are the Middle Paleolithic venus sculptures, the earliest representations of the human form, found in Morocco and the Golan Heights estimated at 500 000 – 300 000 BCE and 280 000 – 250 000 BCE respectively. This is right before the emergence of what’s conventionally considered the time of anatomically modern humans!
And it doesn’t stop there. In 1995, archaeologists in Slovenia unearthed the oldest known instrument, a flute estimated to be 50 000 – 60 000 years old. The surprise: It predates the arrival of Homo sapiens into Europe and must therefore have been made by Neanderthals. Recent discoveries of Neanderthal art include a 51 000 years old bone carving, a hand stencil and red-painted speleothems in a cave in Spain that’s more than 64 000 year old, and—hold on—a 130 000 year old Neanderthal eagle claw necklace found in Croatia. But all of these are quite recent compared with the earliest known geometric engravings, discovered in Java in the 1890s, which are—hold even more on—500 000 years old (!!!) and were created by Homo erectus—long before Homo sapiens even existed.
What’s your reply to that? That art is super duper first?
HF: I appreciate your persistence. A good Q should never settle for the pale words of a handsome old man without thoroughly scrutinizing their foundation first. But before we move on, I just need to mention that the Venus of Tan-Tan from Morocco, the oldest of the two so-called venuses, hasn’t been confirmed as evidently shaped by human hands. The rock’s shape might as well have been the result of natural weathering. The younger one from Berekhat Ram in the Golan Heights has probably been shaped by humans, but it’s unsure whether the purpose was artistic or utilitarian, (or whether it’s supposed to represent a human female at all. It might as well have been a penguin, or a penis, some have argued.) And experts still disagree on whether the 500 000 year old Homo erectus engravings should be classified as art since there could have been many reasons why someone would carve a few lines into some shells. I mean, I accidently made a few carvings into my kitchen table this morning, and despite the low requirements for something being considered art these days it would probably be a challenge to get my table accepted at an art gallery.
But alright, let’s give credit where credit is due and applaud the Neanderthals for having created the first instrument we know of. There might be other discoveries waiting for us out there, and whether the Neanderthals actually were the first to create instruments we’ll probably never know, but as of today the oldest flute in the world was made by one of them. It’s also clear now that they had many of the same capabilities as us and that it’s wrong to simply dismiss them as “mindless animals”. After all, we did bang some of them back in the days, as recent DNA research proves, so they must have had some alluring qualities to attract the attention of Homo sapiens (personally, I have an unusually high proportion of Neanderthal DNA, apparently). Or the other way around—”they” may have banged “us”.
Q: It thus appears that artists have existed for hundreds of thousands of years, and that Homo sapiens never had a monopoly on the arts. So does that change anything with your model?
HF: Not really. I know you don’t like me brushing off early occurrences by simply adding a proto prefix, so I’ll refrain from trying to get off the hook that easily here. Instead, I’ll ask you to see the metamemes as developmental potentials that, in some way, are always present, always available as long as the previous metameme exists in some form or the other. I also want you to keep in mind that memetic complexity isn’t exclusive to this species or the other. The metamemes don’t care about humans—we’re merely the best vessel for them at the moment.
Now, given that humans are born with the potentials for cognitive complexity ranging from stage 8 primary all the way up to a few unusual individuals reaching as high as stage 15 cross-paradigmatic, it’s highly plausible that in the 500 000 years the Neanderthals roamed this Earth there have been some individuals above stage 9 concrete (stage 10 abstract is the minimum stage to innovate the animist metameme). After all, we’re closely related to the Neanderthals and they actually had bigger brains than us. As such, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some of them began painting on the walls and making instruments.
What we don’t see, however, is evidence of larger complex societies, rapid improvements in tool use, lavishly decorated burials, or any of the other things we associate with the Animist metameme. For some reason, the Neanderthals weren’t capable of advancing to the same stage of social complexity as our own species. This might have something to do with the Neanderthals lacking the cognitive ability to handle as many social relationships as Homo sapiens, as argued by Harari, which would severely limit the cultural progress that could occur in their societies (since it requires the interconnection of numerous brains in order to both sustain, and advance to, higher complexity). It could also have something to do with their brains functioning on a lower level of average complexity, which would make the occurrence of high complexity individuals much rarer, and thus the emergence of memetic innovations that much rarer, too. But, again, we don’t really know.
At the end of the day, the fact remains that Homo sapiens were the only species to fully transition to the Animist metameme. In the same way that the Romans and the Han dynasty might have had many of the traits we associate with modern societies, they never made the full transition to a capitalist industrial society. They never became truly modern. Likewise, although a few gifted artists among the Neanderthals may have stumbled upon ways of expression beyond the archaic metameme, their societies never seem to have become fully animistic. The reason why I believe we can safely conclude that they never made this transition, is because they would most likely still be around if they had. (But again, here I am, part Neanderthal.)
Not as Cute as You Think
Q: Indigenous people are known for living in harmony with nature and for their intricate knowledge about the ecological boundaries of the ecosystems that sustain them. Is this wisdom inherent to the animist metameme? And why is it that we seem to have lost much of this knowledge with time?
HF: There’s no doubt a lot we can learn from indigenous cultures about our relationship with nature, and I’m certain that the animist notion of non-separation from nature could help us cultivate a more benign and productive relation with the natural world. Yet, I would claim that the sensitivity towards ecological sustainability that many indigenous societies exhibit is a later development, and one that has emerged by necessity. The forager societies that over time didn’t develop such an awareness simply didn’t survive to see the present day.
We should really think twice before concluding that our exploitative and destructive relationship with nature is a modern invention. If we look back, many of our animist ancestors definitely didn’t live in balance with mother nature. They repeatedly exhausted their natural environments and didn’t shy away from exterminating entire species.
As late as 50 000 years ago our planet was teeming with big land-based animals—but shortly after humans entered their habitats, most of them vanished. Only in Africa have some of the large animals such as elephants, rhinos, and hippos survived into our age, but before that even larger animals, such as the Wooly Mammoth, the Straight-tusked Elephant, and the South American Mega Sloth, walked the Earth alongside humans. Walking may not have been the best line of action however, since running away as fast as they could would’ve been a more sound strategy once humans came along.
It’s still being debated what the reasons for these extinctions could have been, but the only factor that always seems to correlate with these is the appearance of humans. Like clockwork, all mass extinctions around the world happened within a few thousand years after the arrival of humans. It wasn’t just the case in a few areas, it’s the same story everywhere humans migrated into: Australia, Northern Eurasia, the Americas, New Zealand, Madagascar, Cuba. All these places lost their megafauna shortly after the arrival of humans.
And, not only the world’s fauna suffered; entire ecosystems got transformed once humans arrived. The first Australians, for instance, used a technique known as “fire stick farming” to ignite the natural environment on a regular basis to create large areas of grassland (like those of the East African savannah that humans were evolutionarily adapted to) in order to attract more easily hunted game. By doing so, humans created new ecological niches for themselves, while destroying those of others. But humans also created new living conditions for other species. Since human-made fires were more frequent than naturally occurring wildfires, more ashes were produced and thus accelerated the circulation of nutrients across successive plant generations. This enlarged the scope of some plants while marginalizing that of others. One of the plants that benefited greatly from these activities was the eucalyptus tree. The typical Australian landscape dominated by eucalyptus trees, what many consider the “natural” landscape of Australia, is in fact a result of human activities. These trees were initially not very widely distributed, but since they’re more fire resistant than other trees they spread extensively as humans continued to burn off the environment—and as these trees spread across the continent, so did the cuddly Koala whose only source of food is eucalyptus leaves. But the Koala’s not so cuddly cousin the Giant Diprotodon, a wombat-like creature about 2 meters high, was not so lucky. Along with some 60 other species of animals, including meat eating Kangaroos and car-sized Tortoises, the Diprotodon disappeared shortly after humans arrived in Australia.
Similar tales can be told from the Americas, Asia, and Europe.
Q: Why did many of the big animals survive in Africa, but not in Australia and the Americas?
HF: One of the explanations why we don’t see the same scale of mass exterminations in Africa, and to some extent in Asia, is that these continents’ larger size provided animals with more areas to remain hidden from humans. Another explanation is that since these regions were the ones in which humans initially emerged, they would accordingly have had more time to adapt to the gradually improving hunting skills of humans. Many of the native African and Asian animals are inherently shy and usually run away at the first sign of human presence. But when humans entered Australia, the Americas, and other big islands with populations of large animals, the animals would suddenly be confronted with advanced hunting skills that none of them had encountered before. Consequently they wouldn’t have developed an inert fear of humans which would have increased their odds of survival significantly. The small frail looking hairless apes simply didn’t appear threatening to creatures often more than ten times their weight. As such, the physically unimpressive humans could just walk up to an unafraid animal and kill it with a well-crafted weapon. We have a striking example from the Galapagos Islands which remained uninhabited up until the modern era and thus were lucky enough to be exposed to successful attempts of animal preservation. Here, the giant tortoises, which were eliminated from other islands in the Pacific, don’t show any fear towards humans.
Australia and the Americas are believed to have lost about 70 to 80 percent of all mammals above the weight of 44 kg, and in Australia, all animals weighing more than 100 kg went extinct. In Europe, about 40 percent of the big animals disappeared, but in the native home of Homo sapiens, Africa, where humans initially developed their hunting skills, only about 14 percent vanished up until the modern era. Within perhaps as little as 2000 years after humans arrived, North America lost 34 out of 47 large land animals, and in South America it was 50 out of 60. The only areas where many of these species survived for a longer period was in Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean, but again, also here they vanished shortly after the first humans arrived. Madagascar followed a similar pattern. This island had due to millions of years of isolation evolved a unique collection of animals, however, within a mere 1500 years after humans arrived at about 2000 BCE, both the giant elephant birds, the largest in the world, and the giant lemurs died out along with most of the other large animals. And a similar fate was shared by a long list of birds, insects, and snails that had survived for millions of years, but suddenly vanished due to environmental changes to their habitat brought about by the disruptive activities of human settlers. In some cases, overhunting may have been the culprit, in other cases the transformation of the land by human hand can have been decisive, and others may have been the result of these two in combination when the disruption of entire ecosystems caused the disappearance of a single species to collapse a food chain.
Now, animals weren’t the only species to go extinct following the sudden expansion of Homo sapiens after 50 000 BCE. All other hominids would also suddenly vanish after having survived in Asia and Europe for hundreds of thousand years.
Q: How do we know with certainty that Homo sapiens were the culprit? Couldn’t it have been due to other factors, such as climate change?
HF: Well, evidence reveals that modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe for approximately 5 000 years until the Neanderthals eventually died out between 41 000 and 39 000 years ago. This coincides with the beginning of a cold period, but as with the aforementioned mass extinctions, climate had in fact changed several times prior to this event without leading to extinction. What was new this time was yet again the appearance of Homo sapiens. There are, in my opinion, simply no other sound explanations.
Q: Yet, the Neanderthals were so similar to us. They used fire, constructed shelters, and skinned animals to wear their hides as clothes. They made tools and were adept hunters just like their human cousins. Whether they spoke is debated, but they most likely had some way of communicating either with gestures and/or sounds. They lived in complex social groups, cared for their sick, and even buried their dead. So with all these seemingly human traits, why couldn’t they compete with Homo sapiens? What was the decisive factor that made our species prevail over our hominid relatives?
HF: You see, even the slightest competitive advantage could lead to complete genocidal replacement in the long run. This has repeatedly been observed throughout human history whenever one group with more advanced technology has invaded the territory of another. It has even been argued that minor physical differences between groups of humans can be decisive over time. The gradual replacement of Celtic peoples in eastern England by the invading Anglo-Saxons has, among other things, been ascribed to the latter being taller and more muscular than the former. This would be critical in a time where fates were decided in hand-to-hand combat. (The way in which the slightly bigger grey squirrel, originating from North America, has almost completely replaced the native smaller red squirrel in Britain thus echoes the Anglo-Saxon invasion 1500 years ago.)
Q: So, what do you think were the biological features that enabled Homo sapiens to outcompete the Neanderthals?
HF: Well, it’s not that the Neanderthals were physically smaller, or that they had smaller brains. They were sturdier and larger, although a bit shorter, than anatomically modern humans, and their brains were notably larger than ours. They would thus have needed more calories than modern humans, which could have been a factor when food was scarce and the two species had to compete for the same resources. So just like many of the big animals that disappeared, the Neanderthals may have been more vulnerable due to their greater calorie demands. That, on the other hand, could have been compensated by being stronger, and possibly also smarter.
What they most importantly lacked is the technical creativity and complex social coordination of Homo sapiens. While the tools of Neanderthals didn’t change much for hundreds of thousand years, the tools of Homo sapiens improved rapidly after 50 000 BCE. Prior to this period, the two species used similar tools, but the frequency and the way they used them differed considerably. The Neanderthals may have used projectile weapons for hunting, but that, if ever (the question is disputed), occurred very rarely. Instead, they mainly relied on ambushing animals and attacking them with melee weapons such as spears. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, increasingly used evermore sophisticated projectile weapons to more efficiently attack animals from a distance. Towards the end there’s evidence that the Neanderthals may have attempted to use the superior techniques of their neighbors, but their efforts seem to have been too little too late.
While remains from Neanderthals show that animals were hunted throughout the year, Homo sapiens tended to hunt either in the summer or the winter. This reveals that the latter probably moved more around, taking prey more selectively, while the former preferred to stay in a single location. The higher mobility of Homo sapiens most likely also made contacts between different groups more frequent, and thus made information more widely shared than among the Neanderthals who remained more isolated from one another. This would have made the Neanderthals less innovative, while also having made them more vulnerable to ecological changes in their environment. Along with the limited contact with other groups, Neanderthal groups were also much smaller than those of Homo sapiens. According to some estimates, the latter outnumbered the former by a factor of nine which may have been decisive when the two species met or had to compete for scarce resources in the same area.
The lack of a division of labor between the sexes in Neanderthal societies would also have made them less competitive. The division of labor among humans, which initially was gender based, is widely considered one of the most crucial features of our success and a prerequisite for any higher forms of social complexity. It has been proposed that both male and female Neanderthals participated in hunting as their main occupation and that this caused a poorer extraction of resources from the environment than what would have been the case if females had specialized in other tasks. Without the initial division of labor between men and women, it’s also unlikely that any further forms of specialized tasks would have emerged among Neanderthals.
However, the overall most decisive factor that caused the Neanderthals to lose the competition was probably their lack of advanced symbolic language. Even if they did have some form of language, it most likely wasn’t as advanced as that of Homo sapiens. With advanced language, information could more efficiently be conveyed from one individual to another and between different groups, making it possible to coordinate larger groups of individuals and facilitate a more effective division of labor. That’s what happened after 50 000 BCE, and that’s what enabled the Animist metameme to take off.
Archaeological remains show that the Neanderthals met a grim destiny towards the end: malnutrition, cannibalism, and increased interpersonal violence among the last remaining survivors seems to have been widespread. A few individuals took refuge among the prevailing Homo sapiens (hey grandma!), but as a marginal phenomenon this doesn’t account for a merger of the two species. A similar fate seems to have been shared by other hominid species in Asia who disappeared between 50 000 and 27 000 years ago. At the end of the Upper Paleolithic, only one species remained on the surface of the planet, and that was, with little surprise, our own.
***
Q: So, what you’re saying is that a soft metameme killed the Mammoth and the Neanderthals? How does that fit in with the other soft metamemes, the Postfaustian and the Postmodern? You had somehow given me the impression that the soft metamemes were the “good guys”; the necessary counter reactions to clean up the mess left by the ruthless hard metamemes. After all, with the Postfaustian metameme we got the moral teachings of Buddha and Christ. And with postmodernism, we suddenly got the means to seriously challenge sexism, racism, and the destruction of the environment. Animism, then, gave us rain dance and cave art—and off we went to conquer the globe and exterminate anything bigger than a Ford Fiesta!?
HF: I’m sorry if I’ve given you the impression that there are any good guys in this story. They’re all delicious bad boys in my book.
The thing is that the soft metamemes eventually take over, not because they’re nicer, but because they make their carriers more powerful. Might makes right, the saying goes, but the opposite is equally true. Right makes might because the truth is a mighty ally. Because the Postfaustian and Postmodern metamemes are aligned with more universal principles than the Faustian and Modern respectively, they’ll also create more coherent and well-functioning societies, which in turn makes them more powerful. And with that comes the capacity to take over the world.
Rain dance, spirit beliefs, and ancestor cults helped increase social coherence, defused social tensions, brought meaning to an otherwise bewildering world, improved social coordination, and made it possible for larger groups of human beings to cooperate in increasingly tighter networks of exchange. And yes, that also means larger groups of fighters, as Yuval Harari has famously argued in the opening to his book, Sapiens. Animism thus made societies stronger, larger, and more resilient—smarter, even—and with that they gained a competitive edge that enabled them to outcompete other groups of humans and hominids alike and expand across the world into climates where survival relied on increasingly demanding levels of social coordination.
The Postfaustian metameme is not different in this regard. The way in which Christianity and Islam spread across the globe, homogenizing and exterminating native cultures in their wake, speaks to the social power of such universalist religions. And when it comes to postmodernism, the conquest might not be visible on a world map, but it’s certainly visible who’s boss in today’s symbolic space of social discourses. The mainstream media is always disproportionately influenced by postmodern values, ideas, and sentiments.
Rain dance is a bad boy who conquered the world by starving out everyone who couldn’t dance; Jesus and Muhammad fired up a zeal that beat the crap out of anyone possessed by lesser spirits; and the #MeToo movement is currently making sure that no predatory patriarchs will survive the Darwinian struggle for the future. The meek shall inherit the earth, not because they’re meek, but because being meek makes more efficient levels of social coordination possible.
The Original Affluent Society?
Q: I don’t think it’s fair to compare the #MeToo movement and other important postmodern social movements with the crazy-eyed onslaught of the Abrahamic religions and the happenstance that animism empowered our foraging ancestors to such a degree that a lot of species went extinct. But alright, I get it. Our ancestors weren’t the cuddly saints we like to imagine them as. They, like any other invasive species, disrupted ecosystems and occasionally exhausted their natural environments.
However, the free roaming life of hunters and gatherers still seems preferable to that of the later stages. What’s your response to the idea of The Original Affluent Society, the idea proposed by Marshall Sahlins that we’d never had it as good as when we were living as foragers?
HF: Well, we have this stunning tendency to imagine the past and the future as extraordinarily less complex than the present: The past was like this one thing, the future is going to be like this one other thing—all while the present is like a lot of different things all at once.
Were people really better off back in the days of hunting and gathering? The obvious answer to that is: sometimes yes, sometimes no. I mean, in a span of more than 100 000 years, spanning most of the globe, with countless climatic ups and downs, is it really that inconceivable to imagine that there were good times, and bad times, for different groups of people, during different periods?
It’s not hard to understand where the idea of an original affluent society comes from when imagining what it must have been like for a band of hunter gatherers when migrating into a fertile virgin territory at a time when the climate was benign. No doubt things must have been swell when temperatures were between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius, lobsters and salmon could be pulled out of rivers, fruits were plentiful in the forest—and no other human competitors were present in the vicinity.
On the other hand, when climates suddenly changed for the worse, when temperatures dropped, or in times of drought, when there were suddenly too many humans in an environment that couldn’t sustain them, and there weren’t any obvious places to migrate to where things were better… Well, not so affluent anymore.
Advocates of Sahlin’s thesis would probably argue that despite the occasionally difficult times, society still remained more harmonious overall. Unsurprisingly, however, there are those who claim the exact opposite. In Sick Societies: Challenging the myth of primitive harmony, Robert Edgerton questions Sahlin’s notion that pre-colonial indigenous societies tended to be happy, healthy, and harmonious. Instead, he argues, by reference to a range of ethnographic writings, that many of these so-called original affluent societies were ripe with violence, misogyny, and social malaise.
Again, the obvious answer is that animist societies were both of these things. It’s the same when we ponder the eternally stupid question whether our animist ancestors were peaceful or violent. Graeber and Wengrow write that some tribes were as peaceful as hippies while others were as violent as a gang of bikers. I would even expand the analogy and claim that the very same hippie tribes could evolve into aggressive bikers in times of adversity, and evolve back into peaceful coexistence with others in times of plenty. Compared to both Sahlins and Edgerton I know too little about prehistoric times to back up my claim, but as a sociologist I know enough about human nature to be certain that that must have been the case.
So, is modern life worse or better? Well, one moment you’re eating oysters in a decadent Weimar Republic gay club—a few moments later Soviet artillery fire is forcing you to run for cover in what’s left of an underground Berlin train station. Or, one moment you’re living a happy family life in the suburbs—the next moment a financial crisis hits and you have to move into your car, all while your daughter is cutting herself and your son is addicted to opioids after a sports injury. You be the judge what’s better.
My observation is that the span of misery and bliss seems to increase at every stage of development. The worst that could happen to a hunter gatherer is arguably starvation, severe accidents, losing a fist fight to someone, and so on; and the best, a delicious meal, a cozy community gathering around a bonfire, and banging a hot stranger (maybe a sexy Neanderthal!). Compare that with the horrors of modern warfare, nazi death camps, scientifically informed methods of torture, and spending twenty years as a brainwashed pawn in a BDSM doomsdays cult that forcefeeds you psychedelics and rapes you until you’ve lost all sense of reality and self—vs.—blissing-out for hours from transcendental meditation, breaking all limits of physical pleasure at an MDMA-induced tantric sex orgy with a group of affectionate and well-attuned lovers, and being a metamodern aristocrat living completely unleashed while rewriting the very fabric of social reality. Again, you be the judge what’s better.
So not only is our current society causing new and deeper levels of suffering, it’s also generating evermore mind-boggling amounts of misery given that there are 8 billion of us to suffer (and 60 or so billion farm animals living under torture-like conditions)—while at the same time generating equally mind-blowing amounts and levels of happiness and pleasure. Dickens’ famous “it was the best of times it was the worst of times” holds true every time we pass a new developmental threshold.
I understand that it’s not everyone who’s willing to accept the risk of paying a visit to the ever deeper lows that every new metameme brings about; that the prospect of maybe, maybe not reaching ever greater heights simply isn’t worth it. However, the question whether reaching these ever greater heights are worth the ever deeper lows remains a matter of temperament. Dreams of going back, back to simpler times, is an entirely legitimate position—and one that beyond the typical romantic nostalgia actually has some merits. For every stage, the span of misery and bliss expands, but there are also unique beauties that are lost and worth reexamining.
Beauties Lost
Q: Ahh, you’re referring to the concept of “beauties lost”. This is something I’ve been looking forward to discussing with you. In Nordic Ideology you write that a number of good things from pre-modern society were lost in the modernization process, such as the warmth and security of a close-knit rural community, a strong sense of belonging to a certain faith, the connection to the soil (or other ecological belonging), and so on. As a consequence, modern societies are chronically struggling with social problems, loneliness and alienation, and a low awareness of the natural world that’s keeping us alive—all issues that postmodernism is trying to address, but according to you, only metamodernism is capable of truly solving.
Now, in your earlier works you mostly talk about the beauties that we lost when we transitioned to modernity, but I hear you’re implying that the transition to every stage, every metameme, entails the loss of something dear to us. Is this correct, and if so, what are, in your opinion, the beauties lost from animism?
HF: Yes, it’s absolutely correct that every stage entails a loss of beautiful things. I will list these things for every metameme in the following chapters. When it comes to animism, however, we’ve paid particularly dearly for the things we left in order to progress to the next stage.
First of all there’s the free-roaming life of hunting and gathering. In a way, this is the life we’re evolutionarily adapted to be living. Toiling in the field or at a factory or sitting in front of a computer in an office cubicle all day long aren’t “natural” activities to human beings. It can literally make us sick. Accordingly, when given the choice, humans mostly choose to do something else. We like to travel and see new places, be out in nature, and many of us are quite fond of hunting, fishing, and picking mushrooms and berries in the forest—all typical forager activities. Look at elites in any society—they tend to look suspiciously a lot like animists: the rich not only hunt and wander; they do so in small groups; they create initiation rituals and ecstatic parties where they dress up and paint their faces for Burning Man; they even start believing in spirits, healings, and tarot cards. Go to the court of a rich Silicon Valley magnet and within minutes you’ll have mingled with a shaman. Indeed, the princess of Norway just married one.
Then there’s of course the close-knit community that very few of us today get to truly experience. Many of us may have lots of friends and acquaintances, but the closeness and feeling of belonging one can experience from living in a small group where everyone’s survival depends on each other, and where the other members of the group are considered one’s extended family, is something many of us don’t even experience in our own families. The closest many of us get to experience this is, sadly, in the army, especially during wartime.
Closely connected to the above is the relative egalitarianism inherent to animist expressions of human relationships. Yes, it’s tricky to address the issue, as people will very likely attack from both sides: some claim that I’m idealizing animist cultures and subscribing to Rousseauian “noble savage” assumptions, others that I am infantilizing people and legitimating Western colonial supremacy. But if we understand that concepts such as “egalitarian” are not simple variables to measure, but rather deep patterns of rich fabrics of interaction, we can make more qualified claims that, yes, small and tribal societies do tend to have more egalitarian structures and relationships, and yes, there is a beauty lost right there. One part of this is the simple anthropological fact that slavery is not viable under conditions of nomadic foraging; another part of it is the closeness that grows from a society small enough for “everyone to know everyone”, where steep hierarchies become too absurd to maintain. But most of all, imagine if you had to live out your life within the bounds of your family and high school class, with no access to other means of recognition by larger groups—of course people would tend to want to keep you in your place, socially speaking. If you shone too much with your work results, or grabbed a too big part of the pie, people would gang up on you and mock you within seconds. Your actions would self-regulate towards egalitarianism, and you would in turn feel that nobody else should rise above the crowd either, now that you couldn’t. This is exactly the pattern that is most commonly observed in tribal communities; there is a dogged pressure to share everything equally all the time! But if we under such conditions find a piece of food out of sight of the others, we are actually less likely to share it than are members of non-animist societies. So egalitarianism is there, and it’s beautiful, and it’s lost—but it’s not utopian or without its own all-too-human dynamics and frustrations. Which is, I suppose, why there were so many seeds growing out of Animist egalitarianism and into Faustian hierarchies, as we shall see.
Then there’s the connection to nature and the sense of being part of a natural world that’s greater than one self. Such things are mostly lost on us individualized modern urban dwellers. The alienation many modern people feel is not only derived from this lack of connection to other humans, but also from the disconnection to the natural world. It’s scientifically proven that simply being in nature is good for our health, and people often report feeling more alive and connected to the world when they’re out in nature. Sadly, many urban dwellers don’t have that possibility in their busy daily lives, and underprivileged groups often never get the opportunity at all.
I understand that this “beauty lost” sounds like another cutie, but it really is not. Consider the fact that these connections to nature, weaved into culture through totem and taboo, build on vast time frames of feedback cycle from environment: best not kill all the buffalo, don’t burn down the jungle, protect the sacred headwaters, and so forth. Over millennia of trial and error, or punishments by nature, of learning the hard way, animist cultures have been environmentally wiser and more subtly in tune with the environment than any others. Modernity is not 40 000 years old, nor can it grow that old; it has to mutate faster and faster to even survive. San culture is that old and could very well live on for as much longer if it weren’t from disruptions by modernity.
And finally there’s the loss of a world enchanted with spirit. One of the greatest sacrifices that we had to make in order to obtain the powers of a scientific worldview is that we not only had to kill God, but also the holy spirit. What I’m referring to here is of course what Max Weber called “disenchantment”, or “Entzauberung” in German which directly translates into “de-magic-ation”. Disenchantment is the way in which the modern rationalization project demystifies the world and renders it increasingly transparent. Of course, Max Weber addressed how science eroded the traditional postfaustian religion, but the disenchantment process didn’t begin with the Enlightenment, it began all the way back when we left the Animist metameme. At every stage, the world becomes a little more demystified and transparent, and thereby a little more disenchanted.
Q: Are you saying that the Postfaustian metameme is more disenchanting than the Faustian one? And that the Postmodern metameme is more disenchanting than the Modern one? Aren’t the soft metamemes the more spiritual ones?
HF: The soft metamemes are about culture and ethics, but that doesn’t necessarily make them more spiritual in the magical sense of the word. Just think about it, the Faustians took the gods out of the rivers and mountains and handed them over to the domain of experts; and then the Postfaustians purged all those gods for all their perceived incoherences, rationalized them and reduced them to abstract ideas, and took them off the free marketplace and handed them over to the religious authority of the state. Then the Modern project came along and killed God entirely—and finally the Postmoderns drop-kicked the divine vantage point of God out of existence!
Q: Uhm, I’m not sure I’m following you there!?
HF: Don’t worry, I’ll elaborate as we proceed with the story. For now, just keep in mind that the disenchantment process has been underway for millenia, and that this is, perhaps, one of the greatest sacrifices the human soul has made in exchange for civilization.
But let’s return to the Animist metameme. In a way, this is the home we never left. It is, as I mentioned earlier, the only metameme we’re evolutionarily adapted to. We’ve had millions of years to adapt to a life of hunting and gathering, and then we’ve had around 50 000 years to develop a spiritual and cultural superstructure (I actually don’t like using the term “purification generator” for this one) to refine, enrich, and enhance this way of life. Animism is thus our first culture, a way of thinking and being that’s intuitive to our minds if we’re not taught otherwise, or not “corrupted” by civilization. Children, for example, will on their own develop ideas about an animated world and usually ascribe intentions and wills to inanimate objects. The thing is, our minds are simply wired for an animist worldview, and our bodies are adapted to the hunter gatherer way of life.
Consequently, one of the goals of metamodernism must be to find ways to reincorporate many of the social and cultural qualities of animism in order to increase our physical and emotional well-being, and to give us a greater sense of wholeness.
There’s a lot we can learn from indigenous cultures, and I’m not just talking about their knowledge about which plants have healing properties, and which ones can make you high. Indigenous societies have social design solutions that are, in terms of resource footprint, extraordinarily efficient. Indigenous societies can generate happy and healthy human beings with a fraction of the resources compared to modern industrialized societies. In a world that’s on a crash course towards a future where material resources will become scarcer and life will be even more chaotic and precarious than before, learning to make due with less, and still feel happy and resilient, will be vital if we are to survive as a species.
Nature preservation is another field where indigenous wisdom can help us, well, save the world basically. Indigenous cultures often have an abundance of vital knowledge about the ecosystems they inhabit and how to live in a sustainable balance with the land. This is of course something we should learn from. But extracting knowledge from indigenous people to help do something modern people remain notoriously lousy at can only take us that far. What I’m advocating is that we reinforce indigenous land rights so that the people who truly master the craft of nature preservation can function as custodians of the lands. It would probably be more efficient to have people with a deep connection to the land, rather than some faceless government organization, tend the health of the lands not used for agriculture. In addition, once people have a strong legal claim to a certain area, and the necessary protection to remain there, and have lived there for a longer time, they will also be much harder to get rid off in case the political winds change in favor of someone wanting to go full Bolsonaro on mother nature.
That more and more people are opening their eyes to indigenous wisdom is no mystery. As the multidimensional crisis of our modern civilization worsens, it will become increasingly evident that some of the keys to solving our problems are to be found within indigenous cultures.
Q: Alright Hanzi, nice try. I see you’re trying to give the Animist metameme as much cred as possible so as to prevent a shitstorm when the book comes out, well knowing that indigenous wisdom currently is the hottest hot and that people would come after you and kick your ass if you were to say that indigenous cultures were uncivilized or under-developed.
But at the end of the day, that’s still what you’re saying, right? I mean, the Animist metameme is, according to your model, on a lower stage of development, and the Modern one is on a higher stage. Sure, I get it, you’re no fan of modernity, you want for us to evolve to the metamodern stage, but that still implies that development is good and that indigenous cultures ought to evolve.
What’s your reply to that?
HF: First of all, and I reckon I’ll have to repeat this again and again, the metamemes model is not a normative model. A modern society is not necessarily better than an animist one, or a postfaustian one for that matter. It all depends. Modern societies can, as we all know, be severely pathologic. But so can animist ones. And there ought to be no doubt that certain modern societies manage to generate a lot of healthy and happy citizens and that everyone else would have a lot to learn from these, just like we evidently have a lot to learn from indigenous cultures, the great world religions, and so on.
Try to think of it in terms of complexity and maturity. The later metamemes are on a higher level of complexity. I think there can be no doubt that our modern global civilization is much more complex than a band of hunter gatherers. Yet, the later metamemes are also more immature. Our modern civilization has only been around for about 200 years, it’s super complex, but also super immature. Compare that with the aboriginal culture in Australia. They have been around for 40 000 years. Their way of life is relatively simple, but the wisdom that has accumulated over four millennia of surviving in the harsh environment of Australia is nothing short of astounding.
The reason for the apparent paradox that so-called “primitive” societies can offer us supposedly “advanced” moderns so much wisdom, is derived from the fact that our modern industrialized civilization is so young, barely an adolescent, while many of the indigenous cultures out there are aging sages with all the wisdom that comes with old age. But remember, there was a time when the aboriginals of Australia and the natives of North America were just as ignorant and reckless as us. They too caused mass extinctions and exhausted their natural environments. The reason that we today find such a refined awareness about the balance of nature among indigenous people is probably not because they concluded through deduction that nature would have certain breaking points. No, that’s not how humans usually work. Nature is a hard and unforgiving mistress, and through tens of thousand years there have inevitably been numerous cataclysms and collapses to grow wiser from.
Similarly, indigenous cultures have had tens of thousands of years to adapt and refine their social systems to the life of hunting and gathering. We, on the other hand, have only had a few generations to adapt to industrialization, and now even that’s over in many parts of the world and we have to adapt our social systems, gender roles, way of parenting, work life, and so on, to an entirely new digitized life style. It’s no wonder that we’re a bit lost.
So, my reply is that yes, the Animist metameme is a less complex metameme than the Modern one. But, that doesn’t make it better or worse, yet given the time it’s been around it certainly makes it considerably wiser than the later ones. As such, I’m not just paying lip service to all those hippies who think we should learn from indigenous cultures, I sincerely believe that there’s profound wisdom to be found that we won’t find anywhere else. Plus, the beauties lost from all metamemes are to be rediscovered if we want to reach a higher synthesis in a metamodern future.
The Animist Metameme Today
Q: You began the first chapter of this book with a quote from Theodor Adorno, stating that “modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological category”. I assume that applies to all the metamemes, including the animistic one. Now, this chapter has mainly been preoccupied with the past; and when taking up examples from the present, then merely as a means to help us understand history. As such, I’m curious if you couldn’t say something about the Animist metameme in today’s world? Where do we find the animist metameme today? And how does it look in the modern world?
HF: As you imply, all metamemes have a beginning, but never an ending; some residuals from earlier metamemes always remain present, while others have a stubborn habit of reappearing in new forms and new contexts.
Such residuals can broadly be divided into three main categories:
- Survivors: These are the people who still live, either fully or partly, in accordance with an earlier metameme.
- Reenactments: Those who’ve already made the transition to a later metameme, but still keep some of the symbols and rituals from an earlier one as a means of identity and culture; or, have recreated or appropriated such elements and incorporated them into contemporary contexts for purposes of art and spirituality, or sher entertainment and aesthetics.
- Regressions: Are those from later stage societies who’ve either adopted the ways of an earlier metameme, or subscribe to newly emerged ways of thinking that follow the logic of an earlier stage.
The survivor category obviously applies to the ever dwindling number of contemporary hunter gatherers who haven’t been incorporated into the modern world-system. Not all who consider themselves indigenous fully belong to this category, only the few remaining groups of people who live isolated enough from modern civilization to keep their traditional way of life and way of thinking more or less intact. Most of today’s indigenous populations have been influenced by modern peoples to such an extent that they do not fully qualify for this category. Many sustain themselves from farming, and in some cases even tourism or trade, and many have been exposed to Christian and Islamic missionaries which, even in cases where full-scale conversion hasn’t occurred, has changed their spiritual lives to such an extent that they’ve become more similar to faustian and postfaustian religions than typical animist ones. (Animists typically don’t worship their gods, and they certainly don’t have any notions of punishment and rewards in the afterlife. Their belief systems don’t include a moral dimension, and they usually don’t have a preeminent deity either. When we find such elements in animist religions, it’s a sound indication that they’ve been influenced by Christians or Muslims.)
The cargo cults in the Pacific is a good example of how sensitive animist cultures can be to outside influence. During the Second World War, the US military’s presence in Melanesia, and above all their precious cargo of various goods, made such a strong and lasting impact on the local population that they after the war began performing various sympathetic magic rituals that drew direct inspiration from the daily activities of the army personnel they had observed. Rituals mimicking parade ground drills with wooden rifles, the construction of life-size replicas of airplanes from straw, and carving headphones out of wood to wear them while sitting in fabricated control towers, all in the hope that the soldiers would come back and cargo once more would drop from the skies, are performed on a regular basis to this day. In a similar fashion, a royal visit to the island of Vanuatu in 1974 convinced some of the locals that the husband of Queen Elizabeth II was the son of a mountain spirit referred to in their legends. In the following years this belief spread and gave rise to a religious sect believing in the divinity of Prince Philip.
Okay, that was a bit of a sidetrack, but you get the idea, the “pure” animist survivors are few and far between, and even where they exist we can’t always be sure they haven’t been influenced by the outside. It’s therefore far more common to find communities that have remained partially animist, especially in those parts of Africa that haven’t adopted Christianity or Islam. Traditional African religions contain many animist elements such as totemism, shamanism, nature worship, and ancestor worship, and many of these elements have made their way into the Voodoo tradition of the Caribbean. Lately, voodoo has even been declared the national religion of Haiti. This idea is however a very modern conception and is more an expression of national pride and identity than an indication of an animist worldview. Most people in Haiti remain Christian. As such, this is more an expression of the second type of residuals: reenactments.
“Reenactments” are common in indigenous societies who’ve made the transition to modernity but have kept many animistic symbols, practices, and artifacts as part of their identity and culture. These people often explicitly have an animistic “culture”, but are for the most part modern. A good example is the Inuit in Greenland. The Greenlanders are essentially a modern people: they have a strong sense of nationhood, with their own flag, a standardized national language, and a 100% literacy rate. Most people are secular, but are still members of the national Lutheran state church. They have a well-developed welfare state, are well-integrated into the capitalist world economy, and have a GDP pr. capita close to the European average. And, although the country is formally part of Denmark, Greenland has home rule and is a parliamentary democracy with a multiparty system. But despite all of these modern characteristics, the Greenlanders still keep their animist roots in high regard. Greenlandic folklore, which consists of myths and legends that are unmistakable animist, is considered central to the country’s culture, and the famous carved tupilak figurines, originally thought to protect its owner against enemy attacks, are likewise integrative to Greenlandic culture—and is also a popular souvenir. The mask dance was brought back and re-invented in the 1970s, and recently, young Greenlanders have started getting traditional facial tattoos. Both of these traditions originally had spiritual connotations, which explains why Christian missionaries were so keen to get rid of them; today however, their reenactments are more an expression of national identity and a way of dealing with the colonization of the past. Similar expressions can be found among indigenous populations in the US and Canada who, like the Greenlanders, are modern citizens in some of the most advanced societies on Earth while also identifying strongly with their animist past.
Another animist reenactment in the modern world is the World Indigenous Games, a kind of Indigenous Olympics, in which indigenous athletes from all over the world come together to compete in both modern disciplines such as football, and more traditional ones such as spear throwing and canoeing. The event is structured in a similar way to the Olympics, and is as such an inherently modern contraption.
Animist reenactments are of course also prevalent in arts and entertainment. The Copenhagen-based experimental folk music band Heilung is a good example of modern musicians attempting to reenact not only the music of the past, but more importantly its spiritual essence and feeling. The band mainly draws inspiration from Northern European bronze age and early iron age (Faustian), but their performances have many animist elements revolving around oneness with nature and dealing with various spirits.
Reenactments of the Animist metameme are very common in postmodern New Age and hippie contexts where people seek to reconnect with nature and a more spiritual life free of religious dogmatism. Everything from tribal tattoos, over dream catchers, to ayahuasca ceremonies, and spirit animals, have been appropriated from animist cultures by postmodern Westerners who’ve used them for spiritual, cultural, and often merely decorative purposes. Here, however, the line between playful (or exploitative) appropriation of animist symbols and rituals, reenactments with another word, and outright regressions can be razor thin. One easily spills over to the next.
On one hand we might encounter privileged members of the “yoga bourgeoisie” (upper middle class folks who’re into spiritual stuff) who’ve taken it a bit too far by suddenly adopting all kinds of magical ideas after a great too many ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon rainforest. On the other hand we have the less fortunate, what I in my earlier books have called the “astrology proletariat”. These are people with few resources and troubled souls who’re lured into believing all kinds of nonsense by scrupulous quacks who just want their money and attention.
Those belonging to the first group are usually highly educated, well-functioning human beings who’ve enjoyed great success in their careers—which is where they got all that money from for those pricey yoga retreats in Bali and psychedelic expeditions to the rainforest. They rarely replace their fundamental modern or postmodern worldview with an animist one outright, but merely sprinkle a few animist ideas here and there. When you confront them with their magical thinking they’ll often snap out of it without much resistance. Those less fortunate souls belonging to the second group, however, tend to be more “true believers” who’ll defend their magical worldview more fiercely. This is often because they’re in a more desperate life situation that really calls for a miracle! These are the people who for one reason or the other, whether that’s an insufficient level of cognitive complexity, depth, code or just a very difficult low-state life, haven’t made a successful transition to the Modern metameme. They tend to have never felt comfortable with the modern worldview that surrounds them, nor the postfaustian or faustian ones for that matter, while the postmodern one is too advanced for them to wrap their heads around; so when exposed to animist ideas they feel right at home. This makes them vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation, for example modern-day shamans who’ve wrapped up the old indigenous tradition in new clothing and are selling their services as therapy. Yet, many of these folks don’t necessarily start appropriating existing indigenous cultures, or those of the past, but are more likely to gravitate towards newer and more contemporary ideas that in some way or the other follow an animist logic. This can be about the healing qualities of crystals, or the way they can defend you against evil spirits, which in today’s world has given rise to a multibillion industry. You see the same phenomenon in the supplement business where people who ascribe magical abilities to vitamins are being exploited by scrupulous companies who sell them normal supplements at overprice claiming that their brand is particularly miraculous. Another good example is the Flat Earth Society (fyi.: Faustian civilization discovered that the Earth is round) which is basically a club for people on a lower level of cognitive complexity. If you’re on concrete or below, the abstract idea that there’s a difference between how one perceives the world (flat) and how the world really is (spherical), is so contradictory that it leads to cognitive dissonance, which will make you inclined to gravitate towards someone telling you that your personal intuition is right at that you’ve been lied to all along. And then there’s the QAnon conspiracy movement. And various cults of all such. And so on, and so on. It’s really sad.
As I said, the difference between reenactment and regression can be razor thin, but a good rule of thumb is that when people start believing all kinds of nonsense, when it has become obviously pathological, then we’re dealing with a clear-cut example of a regression and not just a reenactment.
Q: That’s very interesting, but what about the archaic metameme, are there any examples of the pre-animist metamemes residuals popping up on later metamemes?
HF: It’s funny you should ask. As I said, all metamemes have a beginning, but never an ending. Within animist cultures, it’s common to dress up like animals and mimic their behavior in various rituals. In a way, although it’s part and parcel of the Animist metameme, it’s a reenactment of pre-animist, or pre-metamemetic, conditions.
We could talk of a fourth category, something we could call morphed residuals. At every metameme, we see that people cultivate praxises that are reminiscent of earlier metamemes despite being wrapped up in the culture of the present dominant metameme. In catholicism, despite the scriptures strict adherence to monotheism, we have all the saints which in practice is so similar to the previous metameme’s pantheon of gods. And in Islam, we have the ecstatic dance of the Suffi, which is inherently the adaptation of an animist technology. Modern people often view science as some kind of god, and scientific institutions as a replacement for religious authority, and among postmodern believers, the writings of various kinds of critical theory as a replacement for scientific truths.
It’s difficult to escape the past, and for many of us it can be close to impossible to fully adopt the presently dominant metameme. As a result, common people often attest to adhere to the metameme of the day, but in practice they do so in a way that has many similarities with earlier and less complex metamemes.
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HF: With the emergence of the Animist metameme, the memes themselves started to take over our bodies and began to organize life according to their own, cultural, logic. A strange ghost had entered the biological machine as if the human body had gotten infected with an abstract alien life form. An emergent pattern started to take form in the collective of human behaviors. Memes became the rulers of genes. But it was a Faustian deal.
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A webinar on the topic of world history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2 – 25. More details about the course can be found here.
Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.
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