Jackson Lears takes us where few historians have dared—or even seen
Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street by Jackson Lears. Picador, 2024. 480 pp.; $23 (paperback).
Believe it or not, it wasn’t so long ago that Americans were more likely to drop the phrase “animal spirits” than to refer to their “spirit animal.” But I suspect Jackson Lears would nod knowingly and favorably at our inversion—or, as he might say, our “vernacular” construing of human identity in relation to the broader animal realm. Lears, who holds an endowed chair at Rutgers University and is one of the leading historians of his generation, believes that we live in an “interdependent, animated universe.” His achievement is to move readers toward not only a “recovery of a grammar of animacy” but a story that can help inspire and sustain that language. However you judge his vision and hope, his book rewards engagement—especially in the context of his long, distinguished pursuit of vital historical scholarship.
What were “animal spirits”? In 1826 The New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery tried, with nascent scientific precision, to nail it down: “The animal spirit is to be regarded as a general term for the vital principle, as it is diffused throughout the body, and as originating from the blood, and as giving, in connexion with organic structure, a general propensity to motion.” Just before the turn of the twentieth century the psychologist G. Stanley Hall struck closer to vernacular usage when he noted that “It is one thing to be well, and a very different thing to be always overflowing with animal spirits and good feeling.”
But such academic parsing was at best a strained effort to articulate what human beings for millennia have simply known—“that the world is alive,” Lears writes, that “mysterious currents” join human life to “a wider, throbbing cosmos.” The notion of animal spirits survives as one historically particular way to preserve the intuition that “matter and spirit, body and soul” are “pliable and permeable”—and forever mysterious, whatever claims enlightened minds may make.
Lears’s argument is a challenge aimed precisely at the (now) deeply rooted tradition of mechanistic, scientistic thought. As such, it is also directed at the doctrinally driven, dualistic forms of Protestantism that stand awkwardly in this lineage. Lears contends that Christians separated what mana had long kept together—matter and spirit—and then positivists knocked spirit out altogether: a one-two punch for the ages, arcing from monotheism’s deadening effects on animistic perception to scientism’s mighty attempt at a coup de grâce.
Animal Spirits is testament that the coup de grâce failed. And the book exists, of course, among countless other testaments of that failure—including some specimens of the Christianity Lears is intent on deconstructing. While Christianity has certainly featured its share of variants that have degraded matter in destructive ways, Lears’s criticism of the broadest and deepest currents of the Christian faith falls short. Did, for instance, the same ancient theologians and philosophers who profoundly and persistently criticized matter-opposing Gnosticism, and who argued instead for what became known as the “hypostatic union” of Christ’s humanity and divinity, really posit, as Lears claims, “the separation between the physical human and spiritual divine in Jesus”? Christian theology is premised on the opposite. And even those forms of Protestantism tending toward dualism have been challenged and in some cases reshaped in recent decades by strongly sacramental theological currents—as the corpus of the widely read theologian and pastor Eugene H. Peterson, to cite one example, shows. (I commend especially his 2005 Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology.)
Still, the broad sweep of Lears’s narrative is a compelling, at times enchanting response to the modern circumstance itself. His retelling of the American story by foregrounding the question of “how animistic thinking survived in the modern world” will require readers to rethink key moments, figures, movements, and possibilities. As he traces the ongoing popular usage of the term animal spirits (1936: Sailor, Beware! “is acted with robust animal spirits”), he develops in tandem an argument about the fortunes of the intellectual tradition of “vitalism”—what he calls a “metaphysical worldview,” the “philosophical successor of animism.”
It’s a taut tale in the romantic vein, featuring deep conflict over the nature of reality itself and the forces threatening what Lears insists on calling simply life. “In the battle between Carnival and Lent,” he writes in the opening chapter, “Puritans sought a permanent victory for Lent—and ultimately achieved it, at least as far as the traditional celebration of fleshly excess was concerned.” Even so, gifted, conflicted souls like John Donne and Samuel Taylor Coleridge worked out with lasting effect the rhythms and forms of vitality in their writing, resisting “orthodox formulas” in search of contact and communion with the “vital force at the heart of the universe.” Some Protestants, avatars of “evangelical vitalism,” also turned against conformity and, with revivalist energies, imagined God to be “an immanent power that animated, directed, and gave meaning to everything in the universe.”
If such movements and figures added up to “a minority tradition,” it was in part because the majority traditions—Christian dualism and enlightened materialism—were linked to major forms of institutional power—denominational, educational, and governmental. But these titans faced a severe challenge: actual, lived reality itself, utterly beyond their (final) control, utterly suffused with a life force that defied both emaciated forms of metaphysics and emergent versions of antimetaphysics.
Lears riffs on the work of one of his former students, Eugene McCarraher, in declaring the new world of industrial capitalism to be reflective not of “disenchantment” but “misenchantment,” a social order “in the service of a new deity, money” that cunningly dangled its own promise of self-transformation, unwittingly creating psychic space for the spirit to roam. In fact, one of Lears’s leading lights turns out to be the great theorist of capitalism John Maynard Keynes, whose transformative work in public policy was the yield of his conviction that only tragedy will come from reducing a human being either to body or spirit. Keynes helped foster the critical movement “from utilitarian faith in rational choice toward recognition of the irrational springs of human conduct”: the kind of realism with which any efforts at the fraught work of policy must begin.
Still, the power of mechanistic reductionism only increased, decade by decade. The modernist reaction to it, reaching deep into the twentieth century, testified of the scientistic hegemon’s gathering strength. “The ontological stakes were higher than they had been in the early nineteenth century,” Lears writes of the turn toward modernist art and ideas, “the looming core of emptiness was nearer, the need to flee nothingness stronger.” In this light, we shouldn’t see the twenty-first century shifts in this story as anything but instances of historical continuity. “Our days became numbered long before the rise of Big Data and algorithmic governance,” Lears wryly notes.
But if we are now experiencing “the capitalization of the self” amid positivism resurgent, we’re also, Lears underscores, witnessing breakthroughs in scientific understanding that may well loosen the hold of materialist scientism: epigenetic research that reveals, for instance, a more fluid and responsive universe, alive in ways we had not quite imagined. Lears hopes that from this turn “a politically effective ecological consciousness” might be within reach, “a recognition that humans share the earth with other inspirited species, which depend on one another and on a habitable, living earth.”
These are stout claims and difficult hopes. That Jackson Lears has written a narrative that at its core challenges the positivist foundations of academic historiography itself—and much academic orthodoxy more broadly—gives his hope warrant. That he construes his project as centering on a generic construct like “animacy,” on the other hand, reveals the extent to which his vision yet stems from the modernists he so admires. If Lears’s Jamesian pragmatism is a promising gateway, it is limiting as an end.
To take one example of these limits, one crucial question the book leaves unanswered has to do with the distinctive meaning of humanity itself. Is knowing ourselves as communally formed, inspirited beings enough to hold back our manifest tendencies toward destruction and desecration? Is there historical evidence that animism of the kind Lears envisions can move us toward commonwealth, toward the beloved community? In view of the warring animal spirits of our day, our common need of a harmonic, orienting Spirit is not an implausible claim.
In his searching book Modern Faith and Thought, Helmut Thielicke makes an arresting observation. “Inevitably in every interpretation of human existence another reality shines through the human reality, an alien factor which decisively characterizes humanity.” “We can describe ourselves,” Thielicke notes, “only as beings in relation, as being that stretch out, that are in relation to something, and that transcend themselves.” We, that is, seem incapable of living as self-sustaining creatures at any level—spiritual, mental, physical. We fill ourselves with meaning by looking beyond ourselves. With this, I think Lears might agree. It matters which way, and to whom, we look—and especially whether there is a who to whom to look. About this—the meaning of personality—Lears seems to have little to say.
But make no mistake: Lears’s basic affirmation that spirit is real, and that it must be decisive in the stories we tell, only enlarges our vista. To our enormous gain, he has opened the gateway for more stories that flow in the current of life.
Eric Miller is Professor of History and the Humanities at Geneva College, where he directs the honors program. His books include Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch, and Brazilian Evangelicalism in the Twenty-First Century: An Inside and Outside Look (co-edited with Ronald J. Morgan). He is the Editor of Current.