The Primitive is Not the Primordial

In one of the very few items of writing by the darling of heroic capitalism, Ayn Rand, that the present writer has ever bothered to read – let us stress here that he has not usually the slightest affinity with Mrs Rand and her philosophy – she makes a useful distinction between two dominant cultural tendencies in contemporary Western civilization. She cites the year 1969 as a watershed, and points to two great defining moments in Western culture in the summer of that year: the moonlanding of Apollo 11 in June and the Woodstock Music Festival in August. The moonlanding, she says, was a great moment of cultural optimism and was celebrated by those who look to science, technology and reason as the path forward for humanity. Woodstock, however, was the inverse of this: the hairy hippies who assembled there and wallowed in the mud were, she says, representatives of cultural decline who embraced a regressive, anti-modern, anti-science ideology that celebrates the primitive and the irrational, cowers from the future and retreats into the poverty of the past. In her essay, if not elsewhere, she proposes that the contemporary West is a battleground between these two opposing visions, one characterized by triumphant science and other by a backward-looking back-to-nature flight from reason.

In itself, it seems to this present writer, this is not an inaccurate analysis. Mrs Rand has successfully identified an important cultural polarity, a key tension, that remains to this day in occidental culture – there is, on the one hand, a strong drag towards scientific optimism and the ideology of progress, and against this there is also a strong drift towards what we might characterize as a modern primitivism typical of but not isolated in the so-called ‘counter-culture’. Both tendencies can be observed all about us. They pervade our culture. They are like counter-weights to each other. The present writer, in any case, has always been acutely aware of this polarity because it has appeared to him as an unhappy dilemma, a Scylla and Charybdis, a dichotomy of evils through which one must navigate as best one can.

Mrs Rand, the atheist ‘Objectivist’, of course, was a dedicated, wholehearted proponent of the merits of blind scientism. She was a self-appointed high priestess in the religion of materialist progress. It is not a religion to which the present writer has ever subscribed. At the same time, however, Rand’s critique of the Woodstock generation was certainly not unfounded. There are those who, rejecting scientific optimism and the progress narrative, would rather wallow in mud instead. This takes many forms but always involves an attraction to those phases of history, and pre-history, most remote from modernity. One of the paradoxes of modernity is that it includes a revival of the primitive. At Woodstock we saw a new tribalism. Its personal emblems - nudity, barefootedness, uncut hair - are all a rejection of the marks of civilization. In Australian sociology those that populate this tribalism, which has developed and mutated in several directions since Woodstock, are called “ferals”. They display a comprehensive rejection of civilization and its norms – which they denounce as a mistake from the outset - and typically embrace forms of neo-primitivism instead. It is, indeed, a powerful and widespread movement with many manifestations in fashion, politics, art, music and social relationships. We today find it in diverse forms and fads – the paleolithic diet, the tattoo craze, New Age shamanism, Ayahuasca retreats in the Andes. But it is, as Mrs Rand rightly says, pathological: regressive, defeatist, irrational, self-destructive, decadent, deviant, escapist, vandalistic. 

The problem for this writer, anyway – a problem that has occupied much of his life – has been to escape from this choice of evils and to find another way. In part, this quest was answered by so-called ‘perennialist’ perspectives (or, as he prefers, and more accurately, ‘primordialism’.) In such perspectives the heroic capitalism championed by Mrs Rand, along with its godless Prometheanism, is also deviationist and, finally, luciferic. Modern man has, at his own peril, turned away from a perennial and indeed primordial heritage of wisdom and is drunk on his own pride. Modernity, in this perspective, is recklessly anti-traditional. The great truths of human civilization embodied in traditional orders east and west are being cast aside. Man himself is threatened by his own machines. But the perennialist/primordialist perspective is not, for all of that, a retreat into the irrational, the unintelligent and the primitive. Instead, it is a recapitulation, a re-statement, a re-visiting of, a re-attunement to a metaphysics and wisdom found in such pre-eminent thinkers as Plato, Shankara, Ibn Arabi, Lao Tze, of a spirituality found in the great religious traditions, and patterns of life and cosmology typical of the great, mature, historical (grain-based) civilizations of the world – a mode of civilization shattered by industrialism. It proposes not retreat but continuity, while seeing modernity as a rupture and a betrayal.

Unfortunately, many of those who have identified with or been influenced by perennialist/primordialist perspectives have not always navigated clear of the pitfalls of primitivism in their aversion for modernity. There are those who, turning away from Scylla, have fallen into the embrace of Charbydis. The present writer has witnessed, over his lifetime, the increasing confusion of the primitive with the primordial. It is a confusion and a conflation which is today quite advanced. Largely, if not wholly, it is the product of the life and teachings of the French-Swiss perennialist Frithjof Schuon. Monsieur Schuon began his spiritual career as a student and follower of Rene Guenon and like Guenon found a home in Mohammedan Soofism. In large measure Schuon’s core doctrines are a reworking of the Saracen sage Ibn Arabi. But at a certain point in the 1980s he relocated to the mid-west United States and, pursuing a childhood obsession, engineered a syncretic amalgam of Soofism with the lore of the American Plains Indians. More and more his teachings became imbued with the naturalist pagan perspectives of the Indians until the Soofism gave way to so-called ‘primordial gatherings’ in which his followers would sit sky-clad (naked), or dress in quasi-Indian outfits, participating in quasi-Indian rituals. In his writings Schuon proposed that the pre-literate red man was just as much a spokesman for the ‘sophia perennis’ as Plato or Thomas Aquinas.

Thus did Schuon fuse together the primitive with the traditional. It was a fusion that would never have been entertained by Guenon, and indeed it was not long before many of Monsieur Guenon’s associates and students cut their links with Schuon entirely. Guenon was, arguably, the most astute and vicious critic of modernity in the XXth century. His Reign of Quantity is a devastating account of the ways in which the modern order violates the traditional world-view. But at the same time he was not in any sense an advocate of the primitive. The Guenonian view is starkly different to the Schuonian. Guenon once wrote, for instance:

The sociologists pretend to assimilate [the ancient mentality] to that of the savages, whom they call “primitives” when on the contrary we regard them as degenerates. If the savages had been always in this inferior state that we witness, it would be impossible to explain the multitude of customs they possess (without comprehending them anymore), which cannot be but vestiges of lost civilizations…

For Guenon, here and elsewhere, “savages” and their cultures are “degenerate” forms – he hesitates to call them “primitive” because he does not regard them as “prime” - and it is from “lost civilizations” that they have degenerated. He admits that there is a “multitude of customs” that they possess, which amounts to a residual body of tradition, but they do not comprehend such customs anymore. For Guenon, then, the primitive is residual, not integral. To explain this he invokes the idea of “lost civilizations” such as, say, the traditions of the lost civilization of Atlantis.

We must hasten to add at this point that it is doubtful if the luminous Monsieur Guenon believed in “lost civilizations” in a crude literal sense; his view of history and historical processes – more a heiro-history - is no way literalist and mechanical at any point. But he did subscribe to the traditional view – it is even a Biblical view – that the “primordial” has its roots in an antediluvean order (literal or symbolic) of which tribal groups, ‘primitives’ and ‘savages’, the uncivilized, are “vestiges” or, as Guenon elsewhere puts it, “debris.” What we find in the primitive, then, is the mere traces, the ruins, the dregs, of something once great and vast that came before. This is not a matter for anthropological or archaeological objections either. The point is that this is, indeed, the traditional narrative. It is a view found again and again in traditional sources. Let us be clear about this. The traditional trajectory of history (not a profane history, to be sure, but a sacred history) is this:

1. The world comes into being.
2. Great civilizations come into being.
3. Cataclysm: [Flood] Great civilizations are destroyed.
4. New civilizations emerge.
5. Primitives etc. are the remaining degenerations from the civilizations prior to the cataclysms.

Again: it makes no difference to us if this is or is not a narrative that can be sustained by anthropological or archaeological evidence. It is not a point of science. The question is: what is the traditional view of the lore and customs of primitive peoples? The answer is: it is (or is as if it is) a residue of something that was once whole and integral. 

"Primordial gatherings"

This, assuredly, is very different to the more Rousseaean view propounded in the work of Frithjof Schuon. He elevates the primitive – specifically the red man, but by extension indigenous, tribal and ‘First Nation’ traditions generally – to the first rank of Tradition with an upper-case T. It is among these tribal peoples, he says, that we find the primordial and he accords these traditions with an integrity lost in later traditions. In Islam, to cite the example relevant to Schuon’s own life, there was but one Prophet, Mohammed, but among the Plains Indians, he says – before the arrival of the white man – every man was, as it were, a prophet, such was their dignity. Schuonianism makes much of the ‘Feminine’ and of ‘Nature’ and he regards the primitive man to be nearer to these ideals than not only modern man but civilized man per se. The primitive is elevated in Schuon. In Guenon, and other ‘perennialists’, we find the repositories of Tradition to be rather the great religions and the great civilizations prior to the modern deviation. 

Among Schuonians, the 'feathered sun' of the Plains Indians - not the Aum symbol of the Vedas or any other established symbol of Tradition - became the symbol of "perennialism". 

This innovation in Schuon’s thinking is, in some respects, a perverse outcome of the perennialist critique of evolutionism and its reassertion of the more traditional doctrine of de-evolution. Guenon, Schuon and many of their followers offered a strident attack upon the theory of evolution, both in its biological and social forms. Instead, they drew attention to the fact that in the traditional world-view – such as in the Yuga doctrine of the Hindoos - the qualities of man and the cosmos decline over the ages, the world winds down, it does not get progressively better. The traditional mind-set, found throughout and across the great civilizations, is fundamentally conservative: it cannot conceive of the son being greater than the father. But does this then mean that a headhunter in the New Guinea highlands is spiritually superior to St Francis of Assisi? Some perennialists – convinced that we are in the grip of the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age at the end of a cosmic cycle – have sought the mythic Golden Age in the jungles of the Amazon, the deserts of Australia and the bushlands of Africa. Such identifications are usually guided and informed by the profane ideologies of Marxist anthropology, romantic ecology, feminism and similar, which have all sought to valorize and idealize the primitive for strategic reasons of their own and which form the intellectual edifice of modern neo-primitivism.

What then is the primordial if it is not to be found among “savages”? In large measure the error is a mistake in categories and labels. The pedantic Guenon was perfectly right to insist on a more careful use of the term “primitive”, for it should only be applied to what is truly primary. Let us recall that in the Biblical narrative what comes first is the Garden of Eden. What is primary is Edenic. And this is a cultured garden, an order, and should not in any sense be confused with “wild nature”. The Biblical narrative is very clear on this. Wilderness, like the “savages” that populate it, is a falling away from the pristine and original order. What is primordial, properly speaking, is Edenic, and it is only by confusion of Rousseaean proportions that we can mistake the primitive tribesman to be living in Eden. Tradition, properly speaking, is a golden thread that goes back to the Garden of Eden, not to a group of aborigines in Arnhem Land. Such people may well be “nearer to nature” than modern man, but the primordial, properly speaking, is not concerned with “nature” but with a transcendent Source, and this is a very different thing. Eden bears the imprint of Heaven. Nature, however pristine, is nevertheless a falling away.  It is a crucial distinction.

The New Age is characterized by combinations of eastern spirituality plus either scientism or primitivism (or both). That is, typically, one or both of the two tendencies identified by Ayn Rand are mixed with oriental religion.

Recently, the present author was reading the commentaries on the I Ching by the XVIIIth century Taoist master Liu Yiming. The Master refers to the “primordial” throughout, and in exactly the Edenic sense. The Tao is primordial, and it would be a grotesque miscalculation to suppose that the Tao is nature.

The quality of strength in people is original innate knowledge, the sane primal energy. This is called true yang… This energy is rooted in the primordial, concealed in the temporal. It is not more in sages, not less in ordinary people. At the time of birth, it is neither defiled nor pure, neither born nor extinct, neither material nor void . It is tranquil and unstirring, yet sensitive and effective. In the midst of myriad things, it is not restricted or constrained by myriad things. Fundamentally it creates, develops, and brings about fruition and consummation spontaneously, all this taking place in unminding action, not needing force.

The I Ching, in its primordiality, looks back to a mythic China, not to the primitive China of the anthropologists and archaeologists. The primordial is the Original, the Source, the Beginning, the Root, what is innate from the outset. It is lost and found and lost again and again, as TS Eliot wrote. But it is certainly not the same as the primitive. Who would ever had guessed that the primordialism of which Rene Guenon was such a lucid and sober representative would one day degenerate into middle-class children of Woodstock sitting around naked in “primordial gatherings” – the sorry spectacle of perennialist hippies?

The path through the era in which we live – whether it is the Kali Yuga or not – is assuredly narrow. On the one side is the dehumanizing pitfalls of technology. Millions fall into that pit every day. But on the other side, awaiting those who flee from that, are the degradations of the new primitivism where people think that imitating the imagined lifestyle of the Noble Savage brings them nearer to the primordial and the Real and the True. It is as false a dream as the pursuit of the exotic under the same delusion. Primitivism is not a legitimate response to modernity. It is part of the same disease. Of the two opposing visions identified by Ayn Rand - triumphant science or the flight from reason - which is akin to the perennialist or primordialist perspective? Neither. The real quest is to escape from this false dichotomy altogether. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black