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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