In this second part of our journey to dump dualism, we peek at the ancient worldview of animism. Why this additional detour before getting to dualism itself? Two answers come to mind. First, it’s valuable to know what pervaded long before dualism swept in. Second, some aspects of animism might provide an appealing alternative—and in so doing might stave off the sense of nihilism and lack of meaning that can accompany the contemplated abandonment of an entrenched worldview. In other words, it’s nice to have another lifeboat at the ready—especially one as time-tested as animism—before asking someone to step off their current, familiar platform.
Rather than being a religion, animism is a mindset that had common purchase around the globe prior to modern times. Not only is it important to appreciate how we used to be when the planet’s ecological relationships were more “normal,” but it offers a worthy alternative to dualism that has much overlap with an astrophysical perspective.
Animism is contrasted with the prevalent scala naturae, or Great Chain of Being, as fabricated by Greek philosophers during modernity’s early adolescence. This ladder-ranking schema places humans awkwardly straddling the domain of superior angels/gods and that of “lower” animals and plants. Note that this is an implicitly dualist framing, separating the heavenly from the earthly—humans of course having access to both at once: a foot in both camps.
A persuasive argument has it that this perceived separation from the earthly domain took root in agricultural practices, whereby cultures began to aggressively manipulate and control “lower” life, as its domesticating masters. Abrahamic (monotheistic) religions explicitly grant dominion of Earth and its lesser inhabitants to a culture of ordained human supremacists.
Eliminating Divisions
A white supremacist is a racist who believes “white” people to be superior to people of color. We might instantly think the opposite to be someone who is not racist at all. But in another sense, the opposite of a white supremacist might be a black (or other category) supremacist. I bring this up because I want to say that an animist is the opposite of a human supremacist. Yet the literal opposite might stack the asserted hierarchy the other way-around to put humans as the most inferior beings on Earth. Animists, however, are opposite human supremacists in the same sense as being the opposite to a racist: race (species) ceases to become a relevant factor or ranking criterion. To an animist, the imagined/asserted hierarchy is nonsense that needn’t be entertained.
Animists view the entire universe as an expression of Life, animated by spirits. Even entities that we deem to be “inanimate” acquire person-hood, like oceans, rivers, mountains, and rocks. While this practice drives the modernite mad, none of these entities are truly static objects, and all interact with Life in some way as integrated participants in the same great dance-of-the-whole.
In a very real sense, this blurring of the animate/inanimate distinction is backed up by physics. The entire universe is animated by the interactions shared between all matter: the same matter comprising rocks and bodies—in different proportions and arrangements, of course. Every particle in the universe senses to some degree every other particle that has existed in its past “light cone” (all particles that light-speed has had time to reach). Any division we attempt to make—like between animate and inanimate—is more an artificial mental construct rather than a real gap or boundary heeded by the actual universe.
Oneness: Not Dualness
The dissolution of artificial mental boundaries gives way to a “oneness” of the universe we are situated within. What does it take to constitute “you?” What goes into making you? Let’s start with gravity, which was necessary to collect gas into a star and ignite fusion. The energy from the sun is necessary not only for your biological heritage, but for your day-to-day metabolism—not to mention thermal comfort. Gravity is also responsible for accreting enough rock to hold an atmosphere for you to breathe. Every rock comprising Earth—molten or otherwise—plays a role in keeping you alive for more than a minute. You would not be you without previous stars cooking up elements heavier than lithium (all carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorous, iron, etc.) and then spewed by supernovae and other stellar death-throes. In fact, supernovae and neutron star mergers provide essential iodine. Obviously, you would not be you without atoms and their electromagnetic interactions, facilitating chemistry, proteins, DNA, etc.
As utterly dependent as your life is on a host of inanimate material, why even separate the two? You are inanimate material: atoms passing through in functional structures whose ancient blueprints emerged out of the inanimate muck by sheer persistence and feedback over unthinkable tracts of time. Outside of our mental models, it’s all one giant interconnected phenomenon that blithely ignores our notional partitions, allowing for all sorts of marvelous emergence. The sun is part of you, as a necessary “component.” Past supernovae are a part of you. The Big Bang is a part of you (and vice-versa for all these). Maybe think of yourself as one of many fruiting bodies of a spectacular, interconnected tree.
That our existence and experience might be viewed as one enormous (and enormously complicated) phenomenon gives an early clue as to how this perspective might differ from dualism. One and two are notably different. Dualism rests on the imposition of an ontological gap and a crisp line of division, while animism tends to seek unity.
Inheritance
You would also not be you without the first self-replicating molecules, or without the thousands of crucial mechanisms worked out in the ensuing billions of years by single-celled organisms. You are, in fact, a confederacy of single cells operating in cooperative alliance toward a shared goal. On a larger scale, you are a confederacy of organs that support each other in a systemic operation. At another scale, you are an organism whose species interacts with a greater ecology involving myriad undetected co-dependencies—cascading through the entire Community of Life. You are (part of) a phenomenon!
All of this relies on a convoluted path of inheritance. The human species (as an organism, let alone as an intellectual force) did not invent the heart, lungs, brain, limbs, muscles, eyes, or any other organ you care to identify. You yourself certainly didn’t work any of it out to make yourself. Before you ask, neither did your parents—lovely as they may be (or have been).
Not only is your physiological inheritance crucial to who you are, the experiences of all the organisms in your past lineage (and the experiences of those your lineage interacted with) inform the evolution of your lineage and why you do the things you do—based on what responses succeeded and fit well in relation to all the rest.
We are thus not only intimately connected to the entire world of the present, but to ancient history as well, for billions of years. While it it’s a piece of cake to imagine yourself as existing independent of this incomprehensible, interacting whole, that’s just the usual mental shortcut or simplification that has scant basis in reality. It’s the brain’s main trick, after all: constructing a manifestly partial and decontextualized model that tries to at least capture some semblance of reality, even if inherently incomplete or off-base. It’s the most we can ever expect brains to do, and it will never be enough. The question, then, becomes how to live gracefully within our limitations.
Kinship
The result of our deep inheritance is a sort of universality: all life on Earth is related in an enormous family tree. We recognize ourselves in others. Apes are a slam dunk, as are primates, mammals, and all vertebrates having relatable morphologies (e.g., head, eyes, mouth, limbs). Even all the way to the amoeba we can recognize equivalent cellular structures and functions—sharing a third of an amoeba’s 13,000 protein-coding genes, in fact.
Animists recognize and celebrate this pervasive kinship, extending to plants and beyond. We’re all in this together, all dependent on each other, all living by the same rules and experiencing the consequences of each others’ actions. We share many goals in common—all mutually benefiting from an ecologically-healthy home planet.
While some forms of Life are so alien as to make relating difficult, we still recognize a shared life-force. Animists are comfortable going beyond what modernists label as “life,” considering, for example, rivers to be alive as they are constantly changing, display moods, and form innumerable relationships and interdependencies with the rest of the Community of Life. The same goes for mountains and rocks, even if these change on much longer timescales. Anything that is integral to Life—having any relationship with it—is part of the animating force behind the phenomenon, and thus part of Life. It’s easy to exempt other entities out of ignorance, but that’s our stupid brain talking—not the broader universe, which is all one enormous, single phenomenon.
In this cosmology, it makes little sense to impose a hierarchy among species, when all domains, kingdoms, and phyla are necessary for the whole. Is your kidney better than your stomach or trachea? Does it make any sense to rank your vital organs? Animists therefore tend to view themselves and all others as humble participants in the great dance rather than masters or owners of the world.
Unimism?
Can we forge a modern animism that—at least temporarily for a few generations—accommodates the physical foundations we’ve learned about the universe, albeit by disastrous means? Well, by replacing a single leading vowel, unimism honors our universe and stresses oneness (explicitly not dualist). It applies a dyslexic phonetic twist to humanism, which is just as well, being that humanism is human-supremacist in constitution. At the risk of getting carried away with a neologism, one might say that every rock and tree is unimate (mated to the universe?); that all of us are unimated by the irrepressible vibrancy of matter in physical relationship; and might therefore call ourselves unimists.
Substantively, this outlook recognizes the interconnection and interdependence of the whole, the fallacy of mentally-imposed artificial divisions, and the pervasive kinship in constitution, heritage, and experience that binds everything together. The “spirits” of animism are still present but in different and more subtle guise—making ghostly appearances in physics texts.
Our Place in the Story
As indicated at the beginning of this post, the reason to explore animism is to establish where we were prior to the emergence of a dualistic mentality. Animism therefore serves as a landmark to which we might return, even if in modified form (unimism!). It’s at least one form of life raft ready to offer support should anyone decide to abandon the sinking dualism ship. Switching worldviews needn’t evoke a nihilistic (ni-jerk?) reaction. Plenty of meaning can be found from other perspectives if given half a chance. Next time, we’ll get to dualism more directly: its origins and expression.
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