This turning around of the soul toward the quest inverts the current Liberal assumption that self-interest — and private profit — should be the main driver of every economic calculation and replaces it with a consideration of the whole. When individuals try to balance self-interest with a consideration of the bigger picture, they discover, as Socrates did, that deep self-interest actually includes concern for of the good of the whole.
As we slowly come to terms with the larger narrative of our runaway global economy, we are realizing that our two-hundred-year-old moral holiday in the interests of economic growth is an indulgence we can no longer afford. It was difficult to create a form of consciousness that would set about destroying the living biosphere that created us. We strain against our deepest nature to maintain this destructive one-sidedness, while we secretly crave wholeness and good health. Yet we can be encouraged by the fact that some of the more thoughtful of our founding fathers recognized that love of truth would inevitably require us periodically to rethink the foundations of government. Here are the words of Thomas Jefferson on this subject:
But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinion change with change of circumstance, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regime of their barbarous ancestors.59
We need to remember that Jefferson owned slaves and that the Constitution implicitly endorsed slavery as part of its political vision. Today we have a radically expanded understanding of the human condition. Jefferson himself recognized that as our understanding changed, so our institutions needed to follow. This is our political challenge today, to clarify a reliable method for understanding the human condition and its possibilities for improvement, so we can rethink government and economics.
This recovery of the truth quest proceeds as it has always done, on two levels, following the simple ancient wisdom of the alchemists: “as above so below; as within so without.” To know the world, one must know oneself; to know oneself, one must know the world. We are reminded that the search for the grail of the good life begins and ends with self-exploration — reflecting on anamnesis and discovering and telling one’s story.
The next chapter tells something of my individual story of opening to the wisdom quest. Then chapter 4 overviews the “big” story of self-reflective humanity’s emergence from nature and of how the core structure of the quest emerges from the paradoxical nature of consciousness. In the process of weaving together our personal and our collective stories, guided by a concern with the common good, we make a surprising discovery: we find ourselves already on a path with a heart, engaged in the practice of a new ethics and a new politics.
* In this sense both modern-day conservatives and liberals with a small l are classical Liberals with a capital L. Both are committed to the institutional package of individual rights, minimal government, and free-market capitalism. Modern conservatives tend to be ideological purists who resist reforming the established institutions of classical Liberalism (in particular ideas of minimal government in conjunction with free-market forces) and tend to favor cultural norms associated with the eighteenth-century founders. Modern “liberals” are more open to reforming ruling institutions in the light of new knowledge, but in the service of the core mission of the Liberal revolution: the liberation of the individual from internal and external oppression and the promotion of a fuller flowering of what it means to be human. Typically, neither seriously questions the founding assumptions of Liberalism by expanding the metanarrative to include “big history.”
RECOVERY OF THE QUEST, PART I — ANAMNESIS: SEARCHING WITH MY LIFE
I have no Ideology. My life is my Message.
—MOHANDAS GANDHI
A philosopher, it appeared, had to engage in an anamnetic exploration of his own consciousness in order to discover its constitution by his own experience of reality, if he wanted to be critically aware of what he was doing. This exploration, further, could not stop short at the more recent events in political and personal life, but had to go as far back as his or her remembrance of things past would allow in order to reach the strata of reality-consciousness that were least overlaid by later accretions. The anamnesis had to recapture the childhood experiences that let themselves be recaptured because they were living forces in the present constitution of his consciousness.
— ERIC VOEGELIN, Anamnesis
In myths the hero is the one who conquers the dragon not the one who is devoured by it. And yet both have to deal with the same dragon. Also, he is no hero who never met the dragon, or who, if he once saw it, declared afterwards that he saw nothing. Equally, only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard, the “treasure hard to attain.” He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself.… He has arrived at an inner certainty which makes him capable of self-reliance, and attained what the alchemists called the unio mentalis. As a rule this state is represented pictorially by a mandala.
— C. G. JUNG, Mysterium Conjunctionis #756
Home
I have a mother in Africa who used to send me packages of kudu biltong. Biltong is Afrikaans for the strips of sun-dried venison the Boer trekkers took on their ox-wagon journeys into the wilderness interior of southern Africa. The kudu is one of the most regal of the African antelopes; the male, with its long spiraling horns, is well chosen as the emblem of the South African National Parks. Biltong is enjoyed as a delicacy by most native-born South Africans, perhaps most of all by the Bushmen. It is all lean muscle and sometimes so dry it can be snapped like a twig or peeled off in long thin strips. It tastes like no other food and has little resemblance to the fatty, marbled steaks of our corn- and antibiotic-fed cattle. Kudu biltong smells wild, gamey, infused with the herbs and shrubs of the antelope’s diet — the flavor of the veldt. At times of “meat-hunger,” a Bushman hunter has been known to run most of the day in the summer heat of the Kalahari Desert chasing down an adult kudu. I share some Bushman tastes. I loved long-distance running, and kudu biltong is my soul food — the taste of home. Savoring the tough