It might seem that animistic beliefs—which prevailed prior to agriculture—would be about as far away from modern physics as possible. Yet, I find them to be rather compatible in a number of foundational ways. Allow me to elaborate. And don’t worry: it’s not about quantum mumbo-jumbo.
What is animism? While not a formal belief system, animists tend to view nearly everything in the world as being animated by spirits or forces beyond our capacity to fully comprehend. We can call these animating agents spirits or “the gods.” Animists live in the hands of the gods along with all other Life: not particularly special. These spirits not only move animals and plants, but also weather, landscapes, oceans, rivers, mountains, rocks, and soil.
Modern languages (reflecting a non-animistic worldview) objectify the world by being noun-dominated—which deeply affects how we think about the world. Animist languages, by contrast, are often verb-dominated (verbal people!), so that verbs are used to connote mountains, rivers, bays, trees, etc.—reflecting the sense that such beings are always in a state of motion and change. What we call a sand bar is “verbalized” as “to be a sand bar”—it is acting as a living, changing, life-interacting entity, or being. Note that the noun “being” itself carries an echo of animism, embodying this state of verbiness, as a variant of “be.” It’s a nounified verb.
An important tip-off as to how animism relates to physics is provided by Daniel Quinn in The Story of B, on page 136.
Animism looks for truth in the universe, not in books, revelations, and authorities. Science is the same. Though animism and science read the universe in different ways, both have complete confidence in its truthfulness.
Below, I outline five (connected) ways that animism meshes well with physics, mirroring a conversation I had with Derrick Jensen that you can listen to here. While very few scientists would volunteer that they have animistic leanings, these connections might make it easier to identify as such.
As an aside, I “privilege” physics here not only because that’s my own background, but because all other sciences appear to rest on (abide by) a physics foundation, often characterized by complexity that eludes first-principles formulations in the style of physics. One might say that chemistry is applied physics, biology is applied chemistry, etc. The word “science” may easily be substituted for “physics” in what follows.
1. The Actual Universe
As the Quinn quote above conveys, both science and animism look to the outside for answers—rather than what spews out of our brains. Both require an openness free of pre-judgment and expectation: let the universe tell us what it might.
Students often asked me who invented this or that feature of physics. Besides the fact that I was generally ignorant of the history and associated names, the more fundamental truth is: no one did. Maybe someone was the first to notice and put an aspect of the universe into words or equations we might grasp, but those features were present and operative long before humans appeared. The students were in some sense exhibiting a culturally-instilled fascination with prophets, whether they would put it in such terms or not. The point is that those features of the universe would be stumbled upon by somebody in due time. It seems pretty clear that by now we would still have the exact same expression of electromagnetism, relativity, atoms, and quantum mechanics even if Maxwell, Einstein, Bohr, and Schrödinger had never been born. The individuals are incidental actors in the flow, created and carried by greater forces. The result must look the same no matter the culture of origin—even an extraterrestrial one—because it’s the same universe obeying the same rules. A rose by any other name, and all that.
Animism reads the Community of Life for answers. The exact same behaviors will not work for all species, but relevant lessons can be learned about hunting, child-rearing, foraging (edibility), winter survival, sharing, and any number of other practices by watching what various successful beings do. Wild species express a deep truth in their very success, vetted by evolution in relation to the broader context over vast tracts of time. That’s huge, and not something our brain drivels are likely to improve upon. Truth is discovered by Life, not created by it.
2. Relationships and Interactions
Animism concerns itself with the rich set of relationships between and among members of the Community of Life. Ecology is hella-complex, and animists take great interest in observing how each member relates to others.
Grab a fat physics book and count up how many pages dwell on the particles vs. how many are concerned with interactions between particles. It’s no contest. I would guess the ratio to be something like 100:1 in terms of relationships vs. actors. That’s where the richness lies—and the relevance. Equations express relationships. They’re all over the place in a physics text! Feynman diagrams are likewise centered on interactions.
Based on the imperfect label, it is perfectly understandable that one might naively misinterpret a materialist worldview as being about matter, when almost the entire “meat” of the subject is in complex interactions. The Game of Life might offer an example. Survey the internet on the topic and very few bytes are allocated to describing pixels and how they can be white or black (the matter and its properties). The rules of interaction garner more descriptive text, but by far most of the content expands on emergent behaviors and how structures interact. Physics is the same: it doesn’t take many words to describe an electron’s properties of mass, charge, and spin. But the relationships it forms are innumerable and richly complex—far more varied, in fact, than can be accommodated in textbooks.
Ecology is very similar, except it operates on many layers. Each “actor” in the Community of Life (e.g., a newt) forms a ton of relationships with other species and among its own, as well as the surrounding environment. But each organism is also itself a nested morass of relationships between organs, microbes, cells, organelles, proteins, molecules, atoms, down to fundamental particles. It’s practically all relationships…attached to matter.
Relationships are also manifestly bi-directional-affairs, dissolving the artificial construct of subject and object as being dependent on perspective—like left or right. The same relationship connects both entities so that either one might be described as the object or the subject of the action. Physics codifies this explicitly in Newton’s Third Law via equal/opposite actions/reactions.
3. Humility
This one is really important. Animism de-centers humans, as one of many interdependent forms of Life riding together in the flow. Some Indigenous traditions speak of plants and animals as our older brothers and sisters who have much to teach us about how to live on this planet. An animist carries appropriate reverence for the time-tested “spirits” moving the Community of Life, purposefully avoiding the conceit of mastery.
Likewise, physicists (while sometimes insufferably arrogant as individuals) must bow to the universe, in the end. They are not at liberty to conjure a counterfactual reality, concoct notional elements or forces, or deny hard experimental evidence. We do not accept quantum mechanics or relativity because we are enamored of these gnarly notions. The ideas were initially met with protest, but eventually were crammed down our throats on account of experimental phenomenology. We don’t get to decide. We must abide by nature as it speaks to us, and report its odd ways as best we can.
As in the first point, both animists and physicists listen to an external reality, powerless against its rule.
Both physicists and animists are accustomed to not getting what we want. The universe is not about “me” (though you’d never know it in the metaverse of social me-me-media). Witness the fact that life for many people is a long series of shedding attractive fictions. In my case, this includes the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Bigfoot, a Sky God, human supremacy, modernity-worship, brain-worship, free-will, “I”-ness, and likely more to come. Indeed, the ethos of physics—not having our wishes validated by the universe for how we might want things to be—is likely part of why I can shed the convincing illusions of self (as real “apartness”) and free will, accepting a type of determinism that is wholly unpredictable and counter to how my neural post-constructionism makes it feel (quite convincingly/strongly: bravo!). I get it that few have swallowed many of these jagged pills, or are willing to try. It makes me wonder if animists would have an easier time, already steeped in non-aggrandizing attitudes of humility.
4. Authority
Many fields of study are concerned about identifying, attributing, and debating authority. Philosophy, for instance, reveres many bearded dudes whose names and writings carry great weight. Connected to the earlier point that we’d have the same physics without any of the incidental individuals because an “external” reality prevails, physics recognizes only the universe itself as an authority: the sole arbiter of truth via experiment (or simply its expression whose complexity eludes our cognitive tracking or testing capability).
Also closely connected to the previous point on humility is that we are not ultimately in control. The directionality is that the universe invites us to live for a time: we do not invite the universe. We don’t create ourselves or our genetic makeup, and are moved by forces far greater and much older than ourselves. Many conditions beyond our control and beyond count conspire to make our lives possible. We live at the mercy of these conditions.
Animists might put it that we live in the hands of the gods. A wisdom far greater than our own decides who lives and who dies. Another label for such wisdom might be: “evolution in the context of ecology and deep time.” Only time will tell what works and what doesn’t in full relationship to the Community of Life. We have zero basis to expect our recent brain-farts (agriculture, written language, money) to pass muster. These novel, untested—and manifestly damaging—conventions give us a temporary sense of control that I believe will prove illusory on relevant timescales (a sixth mass extinction represents a powerful—albeit delayed—”NO!”)
No amount of denial will undo the fact that we all die; we all must breathe, drink, and eat; we all poop and pee; we all sleep; we all possess limited meat-brains, and all the rest. We are biological creatures contextualized to an ecological role—whose temporary violation has dire consequences. Just as gravity authoritatively speaks without exception to someone stepping off a cliff, the gods of ecology will speak with ultimate authority, and humans will not get to decide what they proclaim.
5. Oneness
As presented in the penultimate installment of the Metastatic Modernity series, a physics-based case can be made for our inextricable connectedness to all matter and all Life. Any sense of separateness is a logical flaw arising from our limited brains (see also posts on Rivulets and Life blurring the line between animate and inanimate).
You as an individual could not exist without the sun, hydrogen fusing to helium, thermal transport, radiation. You could not exist without rock. Not only are the minerals important in our physiology and stone tools crucial to our species’ success, but the simple fact that we need to breathe requires enough rock to hold onto enough atmosphere (through gravity) that we might acquire oxygen. We could not exist without the water molecule, and any number of other atoms and molecules shared and circulated among living and non-living matter. We could not live without microbes in our guts or in the wild; without plants photosynthesizing; without fungi distributing nutrients; without insects pollinating and feeding Life; without trees providing shade, shelter, nutrients, habitat, fruits, etc.
In our characteristic way, we partition Life into distinct species—for which there is some (partial) basis—but the lines we assert are blurrier than we imagine (e.g., hybridizing), and contextually-dependent. Given the common origin and the extensive hereditary sharing of genes, Life may be more accurately viewed as a single complex phenomenon without any sharp gaps or boundaries. Little snippets of (largely shared/copied) DNA find themselves in a number of organisms, all subject to mutation and novel combination, all in constant interaction/relationship with each other, and thus all co-evolving as a tangled set. Isolation is a grossly-simplifying trick of the limited brain.
Likewise, Life is inextricably tied to “non-living” matter, and can’t exist without a tangled web of connections to it. The sun and rocks and soil and clouds and wind and lots more “inanimate” stuff is deeply integrated into (inseparable from) what we call the animate. It’s all ONE phenomenon, and it’s all animated, as a whole. It makes no sense to speak of any one component without respecting the uncountable relationships to everything else. Every particle in the universe is connected (by fundamental forces) to every other particle in its past “light cone“—however tiny those interactions might be. That it’s all ONE single phenomenon is just physics. We even call it the universe (“uni” meaning one). Physics animates it all, as basically another name for animism.
Animism holds a similar view of kinship to all animals, plants, and even rocks, rivers, mountains, the sky, etc. It’s not wrong. Physics is actually in complete agreement, even if the focus of the past few centuries has been on dissection.
A Tortured Path
One could easily make the argument that humans would have been better off never knowing physics to the degree we do. Early (animist) humans did alright—in many ways, better—without it.
But, what’s done is done. We know too much. Maybe we could deliberately shed this stuff and pretend we never knew electrons existed. Yet, we may not need to in order to find our way back to a less tortured existence. I feel that, personally, I have found a satisfying path “back” to our animist roots despite all the perils generated by our journey.
A number of deep and fundamental compatibilities connect science to animism, possibly illuminating a route from where we now find ourselves to a better-integrated existence on Earth—without having to abandon what we learned to our great collective misfortune. After a prolonged frenzy of smashing the world into pieces in a fit of separation and categorization, we can begin working on putting it all back together again, recognizing our categories as artificial divides that neglect and oversimplify the full story.
A child begins life possessing unbridled wonder for the world, naturally imbuing animals, plants, and “inanimate” entities with animate personhood. This gets stomped out by our culture, but need not be a permanent excision. Relatedly, a musician first hears a piece of music as a whole, moving structure before dissecting it to master the technical aspects and then returning to a whole appreciation in order to generate a moving version of the piece in a non-mechanistic way. Similarly, a physicist might start with awe, gain enough proficiency to see everything in technical, mechanistic terms, before returning to a sense of awe that the whole shebang works—even if we’ll never piece together all its mechanistic contributions.
Maybe we can salvage some good from our tortured experience after all. The connections spelled out here offer a bridge that is made necessary only by having gotten so far off track—crossing the Rubicon, as it were. I think of it as part of an off-ramp, to take people from where we are to a better place. Once we have forgotten the physics, we won’t need this bridge any more, but for now please feel free to use it!
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Yes, animism has a lot going for it, as noted in the article.
But, though you say "Physics animates it all [the universe], as basically another name for animism", and free will gets lumped in alongside those ridiculous (and sometimes, hated) items on your list, the opening sentences on Wikipedia's page on animism read as follows:
"Animism (from Latin: anima meaning 'breath, spirit, life') is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. Animism perceives all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork, and in some cases words—as being animated, having agency and free will. Animism is used in anthropology of religion as a term for the belief system of many indigenous peoples in contrast to the relatively more recent development of organized religions. Animism is a metaphysical belief which focuses on the supernatural universe: specifically, on the concept of the immaterial soul."
So, according to animism, all things have a "spiritual essence" and "free will", and it focuses on the "supernatural universe" and the concept of the "immaterial soul" – that doesn't sound too much like your materialist, deterministic universe to me.
(Ok, Wikipedia is not the final word on anything – but can it really be *that* inaccurate here?)
The main goal is to illustrate the many compatibilities. Terms like free will are obviously fraught and lack universal agreement on meaning. Its casual use in this introduction need not be taken definitively or literally. An amoeba has agency (degrees of freedom) in terms of sensing and mobility (stimulus/response) without the need to override/violate materialistic physics (need not be free of determinism to operate successfully as Life performing unpredictable—but generally adaptive—acts). Importantly, physics and animism need not be fundamentally incompatible—even if words chosen to represent the ideas impose superficial limitations. In other words, it is possible to see a path to animistic attitudes while not buying into the illusion of free will. That seems like a good thing: opening the doors to greater appreciation for animism.
Our back-and-forth on free will can be found in many other forums, so I'll leave it here, this time.
One additional point: It is my impression that animists believe themselves and the entire Community of Life to be animated by the spirits: moved along paths of the gods' choosing—living in the hands of the gods. That sounds a lot like following the paths determined by physics. Free will, on the other hand, can be seen as an act of defiance against the gods, no longer subscribing to the animist principle. Worth considering, anyway.
Yes, words are limited, as they can only ever give an approximate description of complex reality.
Certain terms (free will, God etc) are indeed contentious – but can one say, definitively, that they are illusions? We may not know all there is to know about such things. That doesn't mean they aren't real (or that they are, for that matter).
Maybe free will *does* permit acts of defiance against the gods (eg destroying a sacred tree etc), but such action would be considered 'bad' and not without consequence (visible or not).
True, physics and animism need not be incompatible. The former might be thought of as a subset of the latter.
Life and the universe can be broken down into mechanisms, but not built up from them – the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
"a prolonged frenzy of smashing the world into pieces in a fit of separation and categorization" neatly describes science since the 'Enlightenment'. It was science that created "categories as artificial divides that neglect and oversimplify the full story."
As modernity multiplied, so did specialization in science, to the extent that it's become increasingly difficult to apprehend the "full story". Not many even attempt to do so, nowadays – so credit to you for trying.
Mostly agreed, but the main sticking point, briefly, is: "Life and the universe can be broken down into mechanisms, but not built up from them – the whole is greater than the sum of the parts." Nobody can know this. It's an assertion/belief. What's to stop it (besides our inability to conceive it)? Physics absolutely allows the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts—whole new properties emerging out of configuration, for instance.
As a simple example, look at isomers: groups of the exact same parts, but in different configurations, leading to vastly different properties and behaviors. Arrangement matters a LOT (to physics, and thus to the universe, and thus to Life), which is why something acts differently before and after smashing, even if the parts are unchanged. Electromagnetism gets up to some complicated stuff! Just because it's too big for our heads doesn't mean it isn't so.
[Addendum: physics/materialism not at "all lego" as you've characterized it before, because E&M is hella-more complex: stupendously more interactive and relational. Lego is a very impoverished (dead) mental analog, missing most of the magic. I can certainly see why materialism would be rejected as a basis for Life if that's the picture. Real atoms/molecules reach out to and interact with surroundings (like wiggly, selectively-grabby fingers), animating the scene in a way legos can't do at all.]
What actually is a “part” of something?
This might sound dumb, but for me, truly acknowledging that all the “parts” of the universe are inseparably interconnected essentially equates to saying all of the other “parts” of the universe form part of any single “part” of the universe we choose to single out in our head.
This means I am then happy to say that in some sense “the whole is the actually the sum of its parts”!
The universe is the sum of its interacting fundamental particles.
To understand any single “thing” in the universe at the deepest level would amount to possessing a complete knowledge of all the interacting fundamental particles in the universe.
I can go along with this. Every "part" is hopelessly entangled in interaction with others, constituting a whole. Isolation and separation is a mental game but not the reality. That said, it is possible to identify constituents and interactions (e.g., physics), so that the whole can express these foundations in myriad ways that quickly surpass our tracking abilities. Only the whole universe can express itself adequately, even if we *can* make out the vocabulary and syntax employed in that expression.
Interesting, nourishing thoughts here. Thank you. You write, "Truth is discovered by life, not created by it." Hmm.
Does "truth" exist outside of the mind that considers it such? To express it in the terms you use in the essay, is it "true" that rocks are conglomerations of physical matter accumulated and compressed over millennia — or are rocks living things imbued with ancient spirits? Are pigs Cartesian automatons living in a dream state that we, as more conscious beings, are justified in torturing for our needs? Or is the truth that they are animated by the same spirits we are, and thus killing a pig is equally despicable as killing a child? Isn't "truth" subject to the same interpretive, distorting lenses you point out concerning language and culture?
Or are you referring only to mathematical, provable truth?
Wow—big questions! Mentally-constructed truth is not constrained to align to shared reality. A person universally agreed to be off their rocker might consider themselves to be perfectly sane in their scrambled heads. As such I don't consider brains to be the arbiters of reality (only their own, which isn't shared by the universe as a whole). A person may say or truly think that 2 + 2 = 5, but we would not say it's therefore true.
Like pigs and microbes, we are indeed made from atoms, animated by the physical phenomenon of Life in evolutionary feedback (in my view).
As for moral considerations, my first instinct is not to try to make sense of morals in the context of modernity, since it's a whacked (un-ecological, temporary) form of existence. Outside of this, microbes and pigs and humans may each kill the other as part of their life cycle—for food, reproduction, defense, or whatever—and that's all fair game according to ecological wisdom developed over deep time. Cultures that work long-term in an ecological context will have their own moral codes that are proven to be compatible with the Community of Life (animistic, often), and torture likely doesn't fit well into that code. Aside from "playing with one's food" (which may have purpose we're not privy to), torture does not appear to be a common feature of Life.
I agree that torture is not a common feature of Life. Some organisms may cause pain to other organisms, but generally this is an incidental feature and not the main objective.
Cholera or some other infectious disease may cause pain to its host, but the main goal of the disease is to propagate itself successfully, the pain is an incidental by-product. Similarly, bullet ants don't have painful stings because they're little sadists, but have developed chemical defenses that interact with pain receptors in other organisms to protect themselves. Many plants in the desert have thorns to protect their precious water.
Humans are a bit unique in the extent to which we can understand the concept of pain, and thus can behave with more intention than most other species, which primarily just want to survive and do their thing. A lion probably isn't concerned about whether a gazelle is in pain while it chews on its thigh while it is still alive and struggling. A human, understanding pain, could feel inclined to put the gazelle out of its misery. It's a double edged sword, we can choose to be compassionate or cruel in a way that other animals don't or can't with respect to the experience of pain.
But then, isn't pain mostly just subjective brain-noise that serves primarily as a successful adaptation to avoid damaging stimuli? Whether we're in pain can feel important to us, but isn't a nothing-burger to the universe?
In any case, causing pain intentionally to living things implies destructive behavior, which is not what we need more of. I do sometimes wonder about the cruelty of the benign, people living 'normal' lives without appreciating or acknowledging the violence and destruction that underpins their experience.
As an addendum, I'll mention that the largest religion in the world has a crucified guy as its mascot. And of course Catholicism has the tradition of making 'saints' out of martyrs, such as those trampled by bulls or some other spectacle in the Roman arena. There seems to be a vein of belief that suffering makes us important or transcendental. It must mean something or serve some higher purpose. Maybe there's a bit of sunk cost fallacy, expecting a payoff after a struggle with an experience perhaps worse than many forms of death.
But why should human suffering matter more than some other being's suffering? How do we know what their experience of suffering is like? Maybe it's worse than ours. But does suffering really mean anything? Isn't it just evolutionary heritage? Something useful that can work against you under the wrong circumstances.
Is the idea that our pain is important, and so therefore so are we, just another vector for human supremacy?
Truth itself is not “versioned” or relative. In Sanskrit..we call Itihās what has actually happened – in that sense..truth is a reflection of reality as it unfolds, and also a precursor to what is yet to come. The distorting lenses you mention apply primarily to self-aware 'meat brains' – beings capable of reflecting on themselves and their perceptions. Most other living creatures perceive only a simplified form of truth, guided by practical realities — an instinctive, Occam’s-razor version — and act accordingly, without overthinking or interpretation.
There was an archaea that was infected by a giant bacteriophage that conquered it, turning into a nucleus, later the archaea acquired a bacterium that became a mitochondria, and so eukaryotes appeared – our ancestors. But the new eukaryote went further and acquired a cyanobacterium into coexistence, which became a chloroplast, good day, plants. Yes, these are plants that are evolutionarily more "rich", although they look primitive. Many plants are quite successful even in a single-celled form.
This is not even hybridization! This is the highest manifestation of mutualistic coexistence, which has grown into an indissoluble unity – a new integral structure, a new type of organism. Think about it…
P.S. Recently, it was fully confirmed that nimble single-celled plants (algae) have an asset in the form of a nitrogen-fixing bacterium that became a nitroplast. Finally, the dream has become a reality, and the nitrogen bottleneck is no longer a problem, unfortunately, with phosphorus such a trick will not work. Who knows what life will be like in a million years. Maybe trees will finally get wings? 😉
I have some amateur knowledge of linguistics. The situation with noun and verb based languages is a bit more nuanced (like everything in the universe) and it would probably require a post as long as a PhD thesis to do it full justice.
"They [physicists] are not at liberty to conjure a counterfactual reality, concoct notional elements or forces, or deny hard experimental evidence." If only the same were true for politicians.
Politicians are good at being popular and getting elected, they may not be good at much else.
A hundred years ago Arrhenius noted: "Only in exceptional cases are statesmen interested in nature and science, confining their minds to politics, lightly leavened with a veneer of law and literature."
Lately, I keep thinking of Asimov's: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." And, "When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent."
A side note based on the photo titled Murmuration by Mostafameraji at the top of your article. Murmuration is actually the sound of the wings while the starlings are flocking in this manner. However, the photo is a graphic visualization of distributed intelligence. Distributed intelligence is local and decentralized. AI is global and centralized. Distributed intelligence is based on a few simple rules, such as "Keep close to your neighbors but don't bump into them." This allows an infinite variation and controls error. The result is what appears to be an intelligence acting as one, or a consciousness if you prefer, but the intelligence is housed in the network, not the organism. Michael Crichton wrote a wonderful novel in 2002 titled Prey, which uses this concept to consider the interlocking concepts of genetic engineering, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. It also uses the concept of mimicry to explain why a random behavior can be replicated. This is all good stuff BUT it is completely different from the large language models which make up the crux of the development of AI. Oops.
Your discussion about animism is on point. An added note is to consider the time and space element of shamanism. As Mircea Eliade pointed out in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951), the shamanistic religions are limited in time and space. A classic example is the spirits that live in old snags up on the vidda in Samiland (northern Norway, Sweden and Finland). Once you get back to Oslo, they have no influence on you. This is decentralized and just the opposite of the centralized Abrahamic religions, where the god is global and has existed for all time. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I keep my hair long because it gives me a better connection to the spirit world. I would be a fool to cut it just so I might look more professional.
How does having long hair give one a better connection to the spirit world? Many monks (eg in China) have shaved heads – that seems to contradict the idea that long hair = better connection.
Regarding animism and other religious expressions, we are dealing with yet again somewhat uniquely human behavior, suggesting that we are once more playing with our mental abstractions. As pattern recognition animals, we see patterns in the stars, in the clouds, in nature, and assign mystical meanings to them. But we don't see squirrels attending church, worshipping gods and deities, or attempting to exorcise demons. They have simpler concerns, collecting nuts, hiding nuts, making babies, and so forth.
Does religion represent a human need to connect to the 'sacred', or is it a need to believe that our human constructs are of supreme importance? Religion seems be an extension of underlying culture represented in mystical terms. Animism in a hunter-gatherer setting makes sense when one must learn all about a wild animal and its habits in order to successfully hunt it, and then the direct experience of the death of that animal, a sacrifice producing sustenance incentivizes an appreciation of the value and importance of the animal. Understanding the nature of rivers and plants and other natural interactions serves various practical uses as well.
There's something of a 'follow the belly' aspect to religions as well. When women were using digging sticks and producing the majority of the calories via horticulture, there were many more female gods. When the heavy plow took off in Sumer, men ran the plow and thus produced the bulk of the calories, patriarchy was upregulated and female gods mostly disappeared, replaced with masculine. (See Peggy Sanday's anthropological work on this.)
To the extent that modern animism encourages better ecological behavior compared to other religious expressions, it's a net good. Though we find ourselves far divorced in the modern world from the underlying cultures that gave rise to it.
Einstein talked about the need for some new cosmic religion. Perhaps marrying some modern understanding of science with religion could be useful, with life or the biosphere as the central 'sacred'. Including something about the dangers of exponential growth and the immutability of the laws of physics might be good ideas to get across if they could be presented in some religious or spiritual context. – Certainly a step up from Jesus walking on water or Jehovah proving his 'power' by breaking the laws of physics throughout the bible.
Ancestor worship is another honorable mention which could make sense when a culture has been around for thousands of years and one generation's experience is largely similar to that of previous generations. Whatever culture was landed on, whatever the ancestors were doing, it worked, and therefore it was important to continue practicing that culture and attendant beliefs, however esoteric. Many have the same inclination now, perhaps it's in our DNA to some extent to defend culture and belief systems, whatever they are. Though the misguided nature of our modern culture and recent ancestors has left us adrift in this respect. When Europeans started showing up at Easter Island and killing and enslaving the natives, the Rapa Nui lost faith in the protection of their ancestors and began knocking over the Moai all around the island. When the majority of people finally lose their faith in modernity, how will their beliefs change? What modern monuments of our culture will be toppled over?
Living within the Human Reich, most things we deal with are then bound to be uniquely human behaviour. "playing with our mental abstractions" means taking orders from the emissary, rather than from the master. In its least-codified sense, religion might be thought of as 'listening' to the master.
And religion is uniquely human – so what? For better or for worse, humans have the ability to conceive of things not immediately discernable. 'Making stuff up' – aka creativity – can lead anywhere. Music, poetry… religion… machines, war…… et cetera.
Good and bad exist everywhere at all times. Saying religion is all bad is like saying music is all bad – take what you need and leave the rest.
I am not saying religion is necessarily 'all bad', in fact, it could be good if it is encouraging actually good behavior (not just being nice to other humans behavior).
A few problems that I see with modern religions:
They tend to be anthropocentric, something like animism pushes back against that, good.
They over-exaggerate the importance or correctness of human ideas. All of the sudden, it isn't just some guy who said something or put down a particular law, it was an omniscient God, divine, immune from flaws and errors.
Religions keep their ideas behind the museum glass, unavailable to critical scrutiny and revisions. I remember a story about someone in the Jewish faith asking their Rabbi why certain parts of the Torah advised to kill non-believers (also true in Christianity and Islam), the Rabbi's response was "That code doesn't run anymore." – As if it was commented out computer programming script. Of course, it begs the question: What if somebody doesn't get that memo? The propositions to violence remain codified in the books.
Religions become another line of demarcation for fighting between humans. Often used as an excuse or justification. Think of how many innocent people were burned alive because "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." And the church found the shedding of blood abhorrent. To quote William Blackstone "To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God in various passages of both the Old and New Testament." – Legions of (mostly women) were burned at the stake because of these beliefs, I don't know of any art or music responsible for similar calamities. People take religions very seriously, as a life philosophy, often core to their identity, and when eternal hellfire awaits, atrocities in this realm become more benign in that framing, when the fate of eternal souls are on the line.
Finally, the scale of religions causes concern. Is it possible for any religion to safely have a billion or more adherents? Whatever the religion is, I suspect that flawed human thinking will be involved, thinking not tethered to reality, and those flaws become significant and pronounced when there are throngs of the devoted.
I agree that much (probably most) religion is bad, but still… Many conceptual breakthroughs were achieved by religious people – Mendel, Cantor (Newton even thought his religious writings more important than his scientific ones). None of them were simpletons.
Also, in the context of mass-governance, atheistic regimes (Stalin, Pol Pot etc) haven't done much better than religious ones, in terms of widespread persecution and suffering.
'Governing' large populations of 'civilized' people seems to be not a good idea, irrespective of religion.
Freedom (from government) and animism win hands down.
Not sure this ties in with the animism theme, but I quite enjoyed listening to it.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4ylkEQWlAbGIG1dXWE4XuH?si=DBLCzYoEQMW9k2fkUAs0hQ
People can arrive at the same conclusions from different places. Perhaps the physics-based egalitarian perspective can appeal to those who can’t or won’t ally with anything that has an air of spiritual or religious (I’m gonna test it out on an atheist friend and see!). I know I’m guilty of ignoring a message due to holier-than-thou messenger/s (though if the main goal of acknowledging universal intelligence is to “manifest wealth” or indulge in the heaven fantasy, it’s maybe for the better?), and my reflexive cringing at “oneness” has way more to do with being turned off by those specific humans – but at least I can recognize that now, and I embrace being on the level with rocks and streams and snakes!
You mention the practical – I wonder if animism developed in response to a need for limits and regulate ecologically harmful behavior, and citing “anger of the gods” would make more sense in a non-hierarchal society where telling others what to do isn’t how they roll. Like, maybe early humans learned from those megafauna extinctions. Both physics and animism can certainly tell us the same thing now with regards to exponential growth!