Noble Lies and the Recurring Withdrawals of Neo-Shamans

The cycle of social compromises and of countercultural reforms

There’s a cycle in history, a dynamic between the mainstream conformists and the countercultural rebels.

Time and again we see this dynamic play out, as a tribe or society coheres around some sacred symbols and myths, while marginalized outliers are inclined to explain their disenchantment with those established cultural expressions, to justify themselves to their ostracizers or persecutors. Eventually, some of those criticisms are accepted, and the mainstream culture reforms itself, becoming the new establishment for later rebels to reject.

This cycle seems necessary once we understand its structure and its conditions.

Let’s chart some of the Western iterations, before turning to why we should expect this social dynamic to keep cropping up.

Jewish prophets

We can start with what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, the set of moral revolutions in India, China, Persia, Palestine, and Greece, in the mid first millennium BCE. In Judaism, this took the form of a moral critique of the religious norm of sacrificing to a deity without the proper existential inwardness, as Soren Kierkegaard would later put it.

Prophets like Elijah, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah chastised the corrupt elites and the disobedient Jewish masses who weren’t honest about God’s transcendent majesty. These prophets were uncompromising philosophers, poets, and satirists who posited a covenant between God and his chosen people, and a savior messiah who would announce the apocalyptic end of history.

This existential vision of history having a linear direction and a purpose struggled to emerge from the anthropocentric limits of Jewish morality, as the prophets were preoccupied with divine punishment, and thus with explaining away catastrophes in Jewish history. Jews struggled to incorporate this vision likely because the vision was alien to Judaism, borrowed as it was from Zoroastrianism.

Nevertheless, the Jewish revolutionaries were creative in syncretizing Jewish monotheism with Persian process theology and apocalypticism, resulting in an existential, pragmatic emphasis on the conscience which challenged the hypocritical devotion to idols.

The Gnostic’s torch in the darkness of Christendom

The Roman Empire coopted Jewish moralizing and the purity of monotheism, the result being Christianity. Jesus was effectively a Jewish prophet who was Hellenized, as Christianity combined Judaism with Greco-Roman Mystery cults, as well as monotheism and polytheism. Christian polytheism, for instance, is evident in the Trinity, the incarnation of God in human form, and the reverence for saints and angels. The result was a hodgepodge that unified the Empire by supplying something for those with varying religious tastes, which tastes were catholicized or reconciled in Disneyfying, infantilizing fashion.

Christendom proved successful as a long-lasting imperial culture, which necessarily disgusted genuine spiritualists throughout this religion’s history. From the very beginning, Gnostic Christians were excluded and persecuted for preserving the prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power based on a personal, neo-shamanic or creative vision.

Christians spoke of the “immortal spirit” but only in confused terms, due to their imperial preoccupation with managing the empire they inherited. Is each individual sacred, or have we been corrupted by “original sin”? Can we know the truth or are we blinded and destined for Hell? Orthodox Christians debated scholastically (academically) these and other subjects of systematic theology, all of which is antithetical to the Jewish existential perspective.

Gnostics, then, carried the torch in the darkness of Christendom (of Romanized Judaism), through the Middle Ages. The torch was almost snuffed out with the Albigensian Crusade, but the essence of that countercultural standpoint was picked up in elite, esoteric circles in Troubadour poetry, Hermeticism, and alchemy, resulting in Protestant individualism and in the secular humanism that burst forth in the Renaissance and in the Scientific Revolution.

Early modern individualism

Protestants pilloried the Church for its hypocrisy and decadence, much as the prophets had done. But in the bigger picture, Protestantism was an attempt by the Christian establishment to tamp down the purer revolution that proved to be secular and naturalistic. Christians like Martin Luther and John Calvin wanted a streamlined, less Rococo or Gothic theology, one that was less obviously contrived propaganda that rationalized Church power. But Protestants suppressed the implications of individualism by expressing their criticisms in tired Christian terms.

The deeper challenge, then, was from the scientists and the philosophical skeptics. These heretics took the naturalism from ancient Greek and Roman philosophies and combined it with the existential (Jewish and Socratic) perspective that the Church had laboured to assimilate. (That individualism is most boldly presented in Jainism, Buddhism, and the Upanishads, which mystically equate everyone with God, and Hindus, too, would assimilate this outlook by compromising with mundane social obligations.)

Science undermined the Church in countless ways, not just by casting doubt on literalistic interpretations of scripture, but by contrasting faith with reason, and by demolishing the fatalistic view of original sin with historic proof of human progress.

The early luminaries of science, such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton occupied the role of countercultural revolutionaries, speaking truth to power. Science was so revolutionary, in fact, that after undermining Christendom, it internalized the social dynamic, as the historian Thomas Kuhn explained. There would be “normal” and “paradigmatic” science, and conservative guardians of the mainstream conventions, on the one hand, and progressive revolutionaries, on the other. The scientific revolutionaries would call attention to anomalies that established theories glossed over, and build a new conceptual framework around those cornerstones, as it were.

Scientists were individualistic about knowledge, in that they bypassed dogmatists by insisting on checking the facts for themselves, using experiments to test even their pet suspicions. The political form of individualism is democracy, just as its economic form is capitalism. And the Industrial Revolution began to build what we call the modern world.

Fascism and social progress

If modernity were a utopia, the cycle in question would have ended, and there would have been no more need for visionary outsiders. But as we’ll soon see, utopias are impossible for a structural reason. Consequently, there have been numerous critiques of modernity, arising from fresh rounds of marginalized visionaries.

As Peter Watson shows in his book The German Genius, much of modernity was founded on German genius, on Renaissance men who excelled in both the sciences and the humanities. Like Confucians and Aristotelians, Germans such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe stressed Bildung, the cultivation of our potential as individuals.

For much of the nineteenth century, Germans were swept up in Romanticism, which was a backlash against industrialism that promoted intuition and emotion and that denigrated the soulless bean-counting of empiricists. Here again was the existential inwardness of the old prophets, the poetic vision that Adolf Hitler tried to recapture in his oratories.

The rise of fascist regimes in the early twentieth century began as a critique of liberalism, but these regimes were tainted by pseudoscientific racism. Although WWII ended the Romantic zeal for fascism, this countercultural upswelling lived on in populism and in artistic circles, as did socialist critiques of liberalism and consumerism. Nazi (and American) racism was discounted as horrific pseudoscience, but the Allies never refuted the Romantic discontent with liberal modernity.

Existential philosophers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre picked up on these themes of inwardness and on the call of personal creativity that democracy and capitalism ended up suppressing. The average person in the modern, “developed” world is far from Nietzsche’s Übermensch. We are, rather, the dehumanized “last” people, the cogs in the machine, the lemming consumers, hypocritically supporting progressive fads while selfishly participating in ecologically disastrous lifestyles.

Then again, in the Progressive Era, average workers and women would fight for their civil liberties, and in the 1960s African Americans would finally win their legal equality as citizens in the US. These outsiders, too, had rebelled against the status quo, seeking reform.

Fuelled by psychedelics, the Beat poets and especially the Hippies enacted what Terence Mckenna called an “archaic revival.” They dropped out of mainstream society in the 1960s and ’70s, sublimating their alienation with subversive art and protesting established hypocrisies, such as the Vietnam War.

Decades later, the Occupy Wall Street movement captured some of that revolutionary energy, but it went nowhere on the American political left. Right-wingers are much more effective at inflaming public imagination because their leaders’ flagrant sociopathy (hyper-masculinity) is shamelessly divorced from truth-telling — which is just what you want if you’re looking for escapist fantasies. Trumpism, then, siphons the populist spirit of protest, while functioning more like a Protestant diversion, like an old wineskin for new wine (as Jesus might have put it).

Civilization requires noble lies

That will serve as an outline of the Western cycle. I expect that similar outlines could be given for the evolution of cultures in other parts of the world. What, then, is at the root of these cycles? Why isn’t any culture sufficient for a whole population?

As far as I can tell, the reason there’s no such universal adequacy is that the cycle begins with the advent of civilization itself, and this type of larger, sedentary society is highly artificial, meaning that it’s unnatural for our species. We evolved to live as nomads in bands of around 25 people who periodically met in tribes consisting of perhaps 25 such bands. Managing thousands or hundreds of thousands of people required the invention of the noble collective lie, otherwise known as the myth.

In short, the cultures that developed to unite so many inherently dangerous (relatively powerful) people in a big city, kingdom, or empire were rife with fictions and compromises that skirted certain existential truths. That fictional essence of culture is what divides the adherents of the mainstream from the revolutionary outsiders. You either learn to live with the collective fictions, such as by ignoring them or by sacrificing your intellectual integrity, or you revolt against the outrage of such impositions.

The trade-off is plain: as part of the theoretical social contract, we exchange our right to maximize our individual liberties, including our right to the full truth, for the miracle of social harmony even within civilizations.

Think of what keeps a flock of birds together as the birds fly in formation. Birds evolve instincts to observe their neighbours in flight and to always veer to the right. We, too, have social instincts, but they’re adapted, as I said, to Stone Age life in much smaller groups. Suppose you took a flock of birds, and you combined it with thousands of other flocks, making for a civilization of millions of flying birds, blotting out the sky. What chaotic squawking and flapping of wings there would be, until the sub-flocks went their separate ways.

The social flexibility afforded by human intelligence and imagination enabled us eventually to live together in permanent, large settlements. The glue that binds us, though, is fiction, thanks to our ability to playfully suspend our disbelief or to enter trances. Western religions call this ability “faith.” Like children we pretend that some dubious conventional notion is true, and this pretense is our cultural equivalent to how birds observe and follow each other to keep their formation in flight.

Neo-shamanic outsiders

But is the trade-off worth it? Again, mainstream partisans affirm that it is, even if they do so only implicitly by their actions. But purists, skeptics, idealists, dreamers, artists, and troublemakers say otherwise. Perhaps these outsiders are resentful because they’ve personally lost out in society. As Nietzsche said, maybe they propagate “slave morality” to reshape culture in a way that favours the losers.

Or perhaps the outsiders have an inkling of the long-lost benefits of Stone Age life. Specifically, existential individualism, the honouring of inwardness that unites the Axial Age with the Hippies and with all the moral reformers in between looks like an echo of shamanism.

Whereas civilizations managed folks with mass fictions and trances, prehistoric clans of hunter-gatherers deferred to the shaman, scapegoating that individual as the lone existentialist of the group so that the other members could excel in their more mundane duties. The shaman alone confronted existential reality or the “spirit world,” using psychoactive drugs to fire his or her imagination and to dream up creative solutions to social problems. The shaman was the mythmaker and he or she learned to live with the need for fiction perhaps with the aid of an artist’s sensibility or a mental disorder.

The difference between prehistoric shamans and civilized outsiders has to do with authenticity. The shaman was an uncompromising psychonaut, whereas civilizations replaced shamans with priesthoods that served corrupt, distracted royals. Organized religion achieved a more artificial, political purpose, compared to the shaman’s humble offerings of personal therapy to members of the smaller group. Civilized religion was for faceless masses who accepted theology on abstract, impersonal grounds, with no need for inner transformations or existential confrontations.

This is what the reformers remind us of: the loss of existential depth in civilized settings. We perform our public routines and are alienated in our private life that seems to lack meaning. Whereas the prehistoric tribe would have sacrificed the shaman’s happiness for the group’s cohesion, the institutions of larger-scale societies sacrifice the masses’ existential fulfillment for abstractions that cover for the gross corruption of the dominant upper classes.

The reformers in this cycle — be they prophets, artists, philosophers, monks, or satirists — are essentially neo-shamans. It’s shamanism that has no authentic place in large societies that automate conformity. And it’s a fragment of the shaman’s terrifying, psychedelic, mind-expanding encounter with inhuman reality that counterculturalists bring to the fore.

More precisely, it’s the truth of the world’s absurdity that social conventions paper over, and it’s that collective falseness that’s offended oversensitive purists down through the ages. To get on with the business of managing largescale societies which could collapse into anarchy, killing millions in failed states, we can hardly afford to stew in angst over the madness of our anomalous status as persons in an impersonal cosmos. We must compartmentalize and pretend that our civilized purposes matter in the long run, that we’re not making fools of ourselves by committing to social games. We must ignore or dismiss these doubts as being merely “academic.”

This is why the neo-shamans have been mocked, ostracized, or persecuted. They upset the social order and embarrass us with what seem like farfetched worries. We accept the trade-off, benefitting from longer lives, greater security, and technological luxuries. Few civilized folks would prefer to live in the Stone Age.

But the moral purist’s criticisms aren’t academic. These purists are enthralled by a vision of the reality beyond the artifices of civilization. That reality of the wilderness hasn’t gone away, no matter how high we build our walls or how many shiny cultural distractions we welcome. The universe at large is a wilderness in the full sense that Stone Age people must have understood so well, living as they did mostly in the middle of nature. As powerful as our terrestrial empires may be, they’re infinitesimal blips in the cosmic panoply.

In existential or “spiritual” terms, the civil trade-off is shameful, but it may also be unwise, if civilization proves self-destructive. The neo-shamans ask us, in effect, to rethink our arrangement with nature, not to submit as slaves to terrestrial forces, but to fulfill our creative potential without such gross sacrifices of our dignity or of whole social classes and subjugated societies.