Customer Reviews

Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality

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A paradigm addict's worst nightmare, "Wandering God" eschews everything from the intellectual dishonesty of Deconstructionism to the reassuring but ultimately flawed cross-cultural Comparativism of modern-day idols, Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung.

Third in his trilogy on Human Consciousness, W.G. is Berman's leanest and most densely packed argument so far. The book abounds with scintillating insights on diverse subjects, such as the role that child-rearing has on modern life, and boldly rejects the conventional thesis that Ludwig Wittgenstein's "lost years" were actually so. What on this good green Earth do these two subjects have in common? More than you think.

But this brief and quixotic description is putting the cart before the proverbial horse.

Berman's main focus is in articulating the difference between traditional hunter-gatherer and sedentary consciousnesses, how both are part of our common heritage, and how vestiges of the former (horizontal, paradoxical) collide with the dominant zeitgeist of the latter (vertical, power-driven).

Many have been attracted to this book by the Idries Shah-like cover, a desert caravan image, or lulled into thinking W.G. is another in the endless junkpile of New Age tomes with the word "spirituality" in its sub-title. Those of us who know Berman's work can already see beyond the lamentable dust-jacket design. "Wandering God" moves adroitly across precise, scientific vistas into uncharted terrain - the depths of the human mind and body. By the book's end, one has witnessed, and participated in, the eruption of an intellectual volcano.

Some reviewers have been put off by Berman's unwillingness to neatly package and tie off his theses, and stake his academical prize. But that just confirms what Berman claims about the vertical, ascent underpinnings of modern human life, which are driven by a need to conquer and achieve, be it political power or mental/spiritual proselytizing.

This book is highly recommended.

Morris Berman has had a profound effect on my thinking during the past decade. "Wandering God," I've concluded, after long deliberation, is my favorite of all of his books. I shied away from it at first because of my aversion to books with the word spirituality in the title. The term is used so often and in so many ways that I'm never certain what it means. I should have know better in Berman's case. This is a fascinating read, and it raises questions about the history of consciousness which should have been aired decades ago, were it not for the tendency of scholarship to converge into group-think. One thing for sure, Berman is always out in front, ahead of the group. His complete confidence and maturity of thought enables him to lay out paragraph after paragraph of serious thought and then wrap it up with a personal statement that shows he respects the reader more than the institutions that rein over serious subject matter. If you want to read something that will give you food for thought for years to come, read "Wandering God."

Morris Berman's masterful book, Wandering God, argues that humakind lost its way once agriculture and sedentary life styles set in. Even though humans have the same brains and bodies that characterized their prehistoric ancestors, they worship a vertical god (in the "heavens") and arrange their societies in vertical hierarchies. Berman touts the advantages of horizontal, egalitatarian relationships and spiritual practices, even though it necessitates living in the paradoxes that come with self-awareness. Although he depends too much on the Freudian notion of "infantile attachment" to make his case, Berman's message is provocative and visionary.

If you know Dr. Berman by way of The Twilight of American Culture, hit the reset button, for this is a far different animal. This book is his current masterpiece. The thesis here is far too complex for summary, but suffice to say that it is forcefully argued and thoroughly researched. I imagine that this work is less popular with academic philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists than it perhaps should be for several subjective reasons. Its central argument is based on Freud's concept of the self, which has become deeply unfashionable in recent years. Also, Berman offers an iconoclastic interpretation of Wittgenstein that steps on the toes of quite a few important philosophical thinkers. You'll also find elements of Camus' concept of absurdity and William James' pragmatism (i.e. truth, independent of empirical evidence, is what "works" rather than what "is"), though I don't believe the similarities are intentional. The author has a tendency to bend the evidence to his conclusions and can, at times, piece elements of others' works into a collage of quotations and statements that appears to offer little original thought, but those cases are exceptional rather than the rule.

Dr. Berman has written an enormously important history of human hierarchy that all subsequent writers have taken for granted.

All in all, it's difficult to come away from this book unconvinced. It's difficult to read it and not think that Dr. Berman has his fingers (and mind) on the truth.

A profound thinker brings another profound thinker's ideas into the new generation of scholarship. Berman uses seminal ecologist Paul Shepard's participatory consciousness to marshal an argument pointing to sedentism and growing our food instead of hunting and gathering, and the vertical societies and cosmologies that emerge from them, as the rupture point of the Great Divorce between humanity's dreamtime and the age of arduous labor. Swiss cultural philosopher Jean Gebser's cultural philosophy also can be fruitfully overlaid on Berman's ideas.

Now, academics will find much to pick at. With so broad a scope, it is inevitable that generalizations may be too broad, or examples not entirely apposite, and modern anthropoligical, psychological and cultural theories are found to be footless in the depth of history Berman surveys. But even a parsimonious reading, bearing those caveats in mind, is a great ride over the abyss between participatory consciousness and human alienation from the natural world.

Fascinating story, backed up by an incredible breadth of research. A non-fiction survey of nomad consciousness and how it is different from contemporary "vertical" consciousness. Very interesting opinions, solidly argued. Not only did it change my way of thinking about pre-historic art, mothering, and religion, it gave me a context for further reading. This is really an important aha! kind of book.

I've always been interested in how events and changes at the level of individual humans contribute to events and changes in society as a whole. Berman does an amazing job of linking together various spheres of human experience (economics, politics, food, psychology, child-rearing) in a coherent way to explain some of the most basic steps in the evolution of human society. This book's extremely thought-provoking and definitely a keeper.

I would call it life-changing, but that would contradict the spirit of the book. At the same time, depending on your state of mind and lifestyle, it may well change your thinking and way of life.

In "Through the Looking Glass", Alice meets Humpty Dumpty, who effortlessly explains to her his deep, amazing insights about "Jabberwocky"; gracefully allows her to shake his finger, something those in a superior social position in Victorian England would allow their inferiors; but when he has to calculate 365-1, he is lost, asking Alice to write it down on paper. Berman is a real-life Humpty Dumpty. He is certain of his own intellectual gifts and vast knowledge, but his actual "insights" are (like in his other books) either trite or wrong.

Berman's thesis is that the pre-civilization nomads had transcendental, community-based insights, a "third way" between the limiting scientific / logical certainties and rudderless postmodern relativism. Wrong. Hunter-gatherers lived, on average, to 30 or so and were in constant search of food. The they had some sort of deep transcendental insight into the way the world "really is" is just silly romanticism, similar to Berman's claims elsewhere that the Yaqui "Don Juan", can polymorph into an animal, or alchemists turn lead into gold, due to their pre-scientific "insights". Berman simply knows too little about the sciences, which he despises, to realize he's speaking nonsense.

That said, perhaps Berman has philosophical insights? No. He is just trite and condescending. For example, he claims that Wittgenstein has moved from the "vertical" world of objective logic in the Tractatus to the "horizontal" world of language communities in the philosophical investigations. True, so far as it goes -- but it's just a trite summary; compare his analysis of Wittgenstein to Wikipedia's and you'll see Wikipedia's is far more objective and detailed. What's infuriating is that while Wikipedia doesn't claim to be more than a general reference for amateurs, Berman vastly overrates the value of his pseudo-insights and claims everybody except him misunderstood Wittgenstein(!) -- much like Humpty Dumpty claims to give the one and only true interpretation of "Jabberwocky".

For all his mock humility, Berman thinks very highly of himself. In his "The Twilight of American Civilization", people just like him are supposed to literally save civilization. Here, only he REALLY understood Wittgenstein. Berman has no idea why someone as superior as himself is not more powerful and respected; it must be, his later books tell us, because society is at the point of collapse. But the real reason is, as Voltaire said, that he who falls in love with himself will have little competition.

...then I would highly recommend that you read "Maps of Meaning" by Jordan B Peterson.