path: root/glb-notes.txt

https://www.ecosophia.net/america-and-russia-tamanous-and-sobornost/


The first stirrings of the American great culture are fainter at this point—not surprising, as its flowering will likely be quite a bit further in the future, and we have a second pseudomorphosis to get through first. One measure of that faintness is that there isn’t yet a good clear English word for the theme that already differentiates American culture from those of other societies. Since the land keeps radiating its basic influence while peoples come and go, I’ll borrow a term from Chinook jargon—the old trade language of the northwest quarter or so of native North America, which was once spoken from northern California to Alaska and from the Pacific Ocean to the eastern slopes of the Rockies—and speak of tamanous.

Tamanous—that’s pronounced “tah-MAN-oh-oose,” by the way—is the guardian spirit of the individual, and also his luck and his destiny. In a great many Native American cultures, finding and establishing a sacred relationship with one’s tamanous, via various traditional practices, is the primary religious act a person can engage in, an essential part of achieving adulthood and thus something that most people do as a matter of course. The result is a religious vision unlike any other, in which the personal relationship between the individual and an equally unique and individualized spiritual power takes center stage.

I once had the privilege of attending a religious ceremony at a Native American reservation north of Everett in Washington State. To the rolling thunder of drums, the participants—men and women of several related Coast Salish tribes—danced the dances of their tamanous. No two danced the same steps or made the same gestures; each, caught up by the power of the drums, expressed the nature of his or her own unique spiritual protector and the gifts it brought. That’s the traditional religion of the Salish—not a collective relationship with a single overarching power or a well-organized pantheon, but a dazzling flurry of individual relationships with spiritual beings, no one of which has any necessary relevance to anyone but the human and the spirit who share in it. Similar patterns can be found in many other Native American cultures.

Look at the history of American religion and you can see this same pattern taking shape out of the last scraps of the Magian pseudomorphosis. In traditional Christianity, the individual is a part of the universal Body of Christ that is the church, united by a shared doctrine and praxis. In America, even in Colonial times, that began to break down, to be replaced by a focus on the individual relationship with Jesus and personal insight into the meaning of Scripture. It’s the homegrown American versions of Christianity that call believers to take Jesus as their personal savior, through a process of personal transformation that, generation after generation, comes more and more to resemble a Christian vision quest—and is there really that much difference between a personal savior and a tamanous?

More generally, the fault lines that divide the first stirrings of a distinctively American culture from the Faustian culture of the West all involve conflicts between individual liberty and the will to power that pervades the Faustian mind. The mythic narratives of Faustian culture all revolve around the conflict between the visionary individual who knows the truth, and the ignorant and superstitious masses who must be forced to accept it. Where Faustian pseudomorphoses hold sway, as in Russia and America, that inevitably takes the form of an elite caste of educated intellectuals trying to bully and browbeat the recalcitrant populace into accepting whatever the latest fashionable ideology happens to be preaching this week.

In Russia for centuries now, such projects have run face first into the brick wall of sobornost, the patient and maddeningly irrefutable collective identity that shrugs off alien ideas in order to return to its own enduring patterns. If Spengler and the Russian thinkers mentioned earlier are correct, the time of the Faustian pseudomorphosis there is nearly over, and the next few centuries will see a newborn Russian great culture shake off or radically repurpose the inheritance of Europe in the service of a wholly different vision of humanity and the cosmos, in which sobornost will emerge as a central theme.

And America? We’ve got longer to go, and another pseudomorphosis to get through. Even so, the stirrings of the future American great culture can be tracked in our own time, as an intelligentsia with its head full of Faustian notions collides with a vision of humanity and the cosmos that’s just as frustratingly different as anything to be found on Russian soil. To those who want to claim the role of visionary individual revealing the truth to the benighted masses, the masses increasingly often are saying, “If that’s your truth, hey, by all means follow it. It’s not ours”—and “ours,” in turn, breaks up on closer examination into a crowd of dancing figures, no two of whom are taking the same steps or making the same gestures.

There is no one right way for everyone. That’s the message, or one part of the message, that the American land has been whispering to its human residents for a very long time. It’s not a message for everyone—again, each great culture has its own theme, and the core theme of the future American great culture is no more universal than any other. I suspect that a thousand years from now, the incommensurability between sobornost and tamanous will become the same kind of massive political fact that the irreconcilable conflict of basic themes between Magian and Faustian cultures was in 1600 or so. In the meantime, though, that message deserves attention here.

Between the lingering nostalgia for the one true faith of the Magian inheritance, and the Faustian insistence that any truth once discovered must extend its sway to the outer limits of the cosmos, it’s a very difficult message for many Americans to hear, but they’ve been hearing it more and more often for the last three centuries. As the Faustian pseudomorphosis in America breaks and rolls back out to sea—a process that seems to be reaching a critical stage just now—it seems to be sinking in that you can follow the promptings of your tamanous, I can follow the promptings of mine, and the fact that we’re not doing the same dance is of concern to neither of us.

That realization has immense political and cultural implications. I hope to sketch some of them out in the weeks ahead.